The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (106 page)

Sol touched the Consul’s shoulder. “We’ve discussed it. You should go.”

The Consul shook his head and idly stroked the ancient hawking mat. “It may be able to carry two. You and Duré could make it to where the
Benares
is tied up.”

Sol held his daughter’s small head in the cusp of his hand as he gently rocked her. “Rachel is two days old. Besides, this is where we must be.”

The Consul looked around. His eyes showed his pain. “This is where
I
should be. The Shrike …”

Duré leaned forward. The luminescence from the tomb behind them painted his high forehead and sharp cheeks with light. “My son, if you stay here, it is for no other reason than suicide. If you attempt to bring the ship back for M. Lamia and the Templar, you will be helping others.”

The Consul rubbed his cheek. He was very tired. “There’s room for you on the mat, Father.”

Duré smiled. “Whatever my fate may be, I feel that I am meant to meet it here. I will wait for your return.”

The Consul shook his head again but moved to sit cross-legged on the mat, pulling the heavy duffel bag toward him. He counted the
ration paks and water bottles Sol had packed for him. “There are too many. You’ll need more for yourself.”

Duré chuckled. “We have enough food and water for four days, thanks to M. Lamia. After that, if we have to fast, it will not be the first time for me.”

“But what if Silenus and Kassad return?”

“They can share our water,” said Sol. “We can make another trip to the Keep for food if the others return.”

The Consul sighed. “All right.” He touched the appropriate flight thread designs, and the two meters of carpet stiffened and rose ten centimeters above the stone. If there was a wobble in the uncertain magnetic fields, it was not discernible.

“You’ll need oxygen for the mountain crossing,” said Sol.

The Consul lifted the osmosis mask from the pack.

Sol handed him Lamia’s automatic pistol.

“I can’t …”

“It won’t help us with the Shrike,” said Sol. “And it might make the difference of whether you get to Keats or not.”

The Consul nodded and set the weapon in his bag. He shook hands with the priest, then with the old scholar. Rachel’s tiny fingers brushed his forearm.

“Good luck,” said Duré. “May God be with you.”

The Consul nodded, tapped the flight designs, and leaned forward as the hawking mat lifted five meters, wobbled ever so slightly, and then slid forward and up as if riding invisible rails in the air.

The Consul banked right toward the entrance to the valley, passed ten meters above the dunes there, and then banked left toward the barrens. He looked back only once. The four figures on the top step of the Sphinx, two men standing, two shapes reclining, looked very small indeed. He could not make out the baby in Sol’s arms.

As they had agreed, the Consul aimed the hawking mat toward the west to overfly the City of Poets in hopes of finding Martin Silenus. Intuition told him that the irascible poet might have detoured there. The skies were relatively free of the light of battle, and the Consul had to search shadows unbroken by starlight as he passed twenty meters above the broken spires and domes of the city. There was no sign of the poet. If Brawne and Silenus had come this way, even their footprints
in the sand had been erased by the night winds which now moved the Consul’s thinning hair and flapped his clothing.

It was cold on the mat at this altitude. The Consul could feel the shudders and vibrations as the hawking mat felt its way along unsteady lines of force. Between Hyperion’s treacherous magnetic field and the age of the EM flight threads, he knew that there was a real chance the mat would tumble out of the sky long before he reached the capital of Keats.

The Consul shouted Martin Silenus’s name several times, but there was no response except for an explosion of doves from their nesting place in the shattered dome of one of the gallerias. He shook his head and banked south toward the Bridle Range.

Through his grandfather Merin, the Consul knew the history of this hawking mat. It had been one of the first such playthings handcrafted by Vladimir Sholokov, Web-famous lepidopterist and EM systems engineer, and it may well have been the one he gave to his teenaged niece. Sholokov’s love for the young girl had become legend, as had the fact that she spurned the gift of the flying carpet.

But others had loved the idea, and while hawking mats were soon outlawed on worlds with sensible traffic control, they continued to show up on colonial planets. This one had allowed the Consul’s grandfather to meet his grandmother Siri on Maui-Covenant.

The Consul looked up as the mountain range approached. Ten minutes of flying had covered the two hour hike across the barrens. The others had urged him not to stop at Chronos Keep to look for Silenus; whatever fate might have befallen the poet there might well claim the Consul too, before his journey had really begun. He contented himself with hovering just beyond the windows two hundred meters up the cliff wall, an arm’s length from the terrace where they had looked out at the valley three days before, and shouting for the poet.

Only echoes answered him from the dark banquet halls and corridors of the Keep. The Consul held on tightly to the edges of the hawking mat, feeling the sense of height and exposure this close to the vertical stone walls. He was relieved when he banked the mat away from the Keep, gained altitude, and climbed toward the mountain passes where snow gleamed in the starlight.

He followed the cables of the tramway as they climbed the pass and connected one nine-thousand-meter peak to the next across the wide span of the mountain range. It was very cold at this altitude, and the
Consul was glad for Kassad’s extra thermal cape as he huddled under it, taking care not to expose the flesh of his hands or cheeks, The gel of the osmosis mask stretched across his face like some hungry symbiote, gobbling oxygen where little was to be found.

It was enough. The Consul took slow, deep breaths as he flew ten meters above the ice-caked cables. None of the pressurized tramcars were running, and the isolation above the glaciers, sheer peaks, and shadow-shrouded valleys was heart-stopping. The Consul was glad that he was attempting this trip if for no other reason than to see Hyperion’s beauty one last time, unspoiled by the terrible threat of the Shrike or Ouster invasion.

It had taken the tramcar twelve hours to ferry them from south to north. Despite the hawking mat’s slow twenty-klick-per-hour airspeed, the Consul made the crossing in six hours. Sunrise caught him still above the high peaks. He startled awake, realized with a shock that he had been dreaming while the hawking mat flew on toward a peak rising another five meters above his altitude. The Consul could see boulders and snowfields fifty meters ahead. A black bird with a three-meter wingspan—one of those the locals called a harbinger—pushed off from its icy eyrie and floated in the thin air, looking back at the Consul with black and beady eyes while he banked steeply to the left, felt something give way in the hawking mat’s flight gear, and fell thirty meters before the flight threads found purchase and leveled the carpet off.

The Consul gripped the edges of the mat with fingers gone white. He had tied the strap of his duffel bag around his belt, otherwise the bag would have tumbled off to a glacier far below.

There was no sign of the tramway. Somehow the Consul had slept long enough to allow the hawking mat to drift off course. For a second, he panicked, jinking the mat this way and then that, desperate for a path between the peaks surrounding him like teeth. Then he saw the morning sunlight golden on the slopes ahead of him and to his right, the shadows leaping across glaciers and high tundra behind him and to his left, and he knew that he was still on the right track. Beyond this final spine of high peaks lay the southern foothills. And beyond that …

The hawking mat seemed to hesitate as the Consul tapped flight designs and urged it higher, but it rose in reluctant steps until it cleared the final nine-thousand-meter peak and he could see the lower mountains beyond, dwindling to foothills a mere three thousand meters above sea level. The Consul descended with gratitude.

He found the tramline gleaming in sunlight, eight klicks south of where he left the Bridle Range. Tramcars hung silently around the west terminal station. Below, the sparse buildings of the village of Pilgrims’ Rest appeared as abandoned as they had several days earlier. There was no sign of the windwagon where it had been left at the low pier leading out over the shallows of the Sea of Grass.

The Consul let down near the pier, deactivated the hawking mat, stretched his legs with some pain before rolling up the mat for safekeeping, and found a toilet in one of the abandoned buildings near the wharf. When he emerged, the morning sun was creeping down the foothills and erasing the last shadows there. As far as he could see to the south and west stretched the Sea of Grass, its tabletop smoothness belied by occasional breezes which sent ripples across the verdant surface, briefly revealing the russet and ultramarine stalks beneath in a movement so wavelike that one expected to see whitecaps and fish leaping.

There were no fish in the Sea of Grass, but there were grass serpents twenty meters long, and if the Consul’s hawking mat failed him out there, even a safe landing would not keep him alive for long.

The Consul unrolled the mat, set his bag behind him, and activated the carpet. He stayed relatively low, twenty-five meters above the surface, but not so low that a grass serpent might mistake him for a low-flying morsel. It had taken the windwagon less than a full Hyperion day to ferry them across the Sea, but with the winds frequently from the northeast, that had involved quite a bit of tacking to and fro. The Consul bet that he could fly across this narrowest part of the Sea in less than fifteen hours. He tapped the forward control designs, and the hawking mat sped faster.

Within twenty minutes, the mountains had fallen behind until the foothills were lost in the haze of distance. Within an hour, the peaks began to shrink as the curve of the world hid their base. Two hours out, and the Consul could see only the highest of the peaks as an indistinct, serrated shadow rising from the haze.

Then the Sea of Grass spread to all horizons, unchanging except for the sensuous ripples and furrows caused by the occasional breeze. It was much warmer here than on the high plateau north of the Bridle Range. The Consul shed his thermal cape, then his coat, then his sweater. The sun beat down with surprising intensity for such high latitudes. The Consul fumbled in his bag, found the wrinkled and battered tricome cap he had worn with such aplomb just two days
earlier, and wedged it on his head to give some shade. His forehead and balding skull were already sunburned.

About four hours out, he ate his first meal of the trip, chewing on the tasteless strips of ration-pak protein as if they were filet mignon. The water was the most delicious part of the meal, and the Consul had to fight his urge to empty all the bottles in a single orgy of drinking.

The Sea of Grass stretched below, behind, and ahead. The Consul dozed, snapping awake each time with a sense of falling, hands gripping the edge of the rigid hawking mat. He realized that he should have tied himself in with the single rope he had brought in his bag, but he didn’t want to land—the grass was sharp and higher than his head. Although he had seen none of the telltale V-shaped wakes of the grass serpents, he could not be sure they were not resting in wait below.

He wondered idly where the windwagon had gone. The thing had been fully automated and presumably programmed by the Church of the Shrike, since they had sponsored the pilgrimage. What other duties might the thing have had? The Consul shook his head, sat upright, and pinched his cheeks. He had been drifting in and out of dreams even as he thought about the windwagon. Fifteen hours had seemed a short enough time as he stood talking about it in the Valley of the Time Tombs. He glanced at his comlog; five hours had passed.

The Consul lifted the mat to two hundred meters, looked carefully for any sign of a serpent, and then brought the mat down to a hover five meters above the grass. Carefully he extracted the rope, made a loop, moved to the front of the carpet, and wound several lengths around the carpet, leaving enough slack to slide his body in before tightening the knot.

If the mat fell, the tether would be worse than useless, but the snug bands of rope against his back gave a sense of security as he leaned forward to tap the flight designs again, leveled the carpet out at forty meters, and laid his cheek against the warm fabric. Sunlight filtered through his fingers, and he realized that his bare forearms were getting a terrible sunburn.

He was too tired to sit up and roll down his sleeves.

A breeze came up. The Consul could hear a rustling and sliding below as either the grasses blew or something large slithered past.

He was too tired to care. The Consul closed his eyes and was asleep in less than thirty seconds.

·   ·   ·

The Consul dreamed of his home—his true home—on Maui-Covenant and the dream was filled with color: the bottomless blue sky, the wide expanse of the South Sea, ultramarine fading to green where the Equatorial Shallows began, the startling greens and yellows and orchid reds of the motile isles as they were herded north by the dolphins … extinct now since the Hegemony invasion in the Consul’s childhood, but quite alive in his dream, breaking the water in great leaps that sent a thousand prisms of light dancing in the pure air.

In his dream, the Consul was a child again, and he stood on the highest level of a treehouse on their First Family Isle. Grandmother Siri was next to him—not the regal grande dame he had known but the beautiful young woman his grandfather had met and fallen in love with. The treesails were flapping as the southerlies came up, moving the herd of motile isles in precise formation through the blue channels through the Shallows. Just on the northern horizon, he could see the first of the Equatorial archipelago islands rising green and permanent against an evening sky.