The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (139 page)

What if the Core wanted to kidnap her? Or kill her?

Meina Gladstone suddenly realized that the Core had the power of life and death over every farcaster-traveling citizen in the Web … which was every citizen with power. Leigh and the Severn cybrid did not have to be kidnapped, translated somewhere … only the persistent habit of thinking of farcasters as foolproof transportation created the
subconscious conviction that they had
gone somewhere
. Her aide and the enigmatic cybrid could easily have been translated to … to nothing. To scattered atoms stretched through a singularity. Farcasters did not “teleport” people and things—such a concept was silly—but how much less silly was it to trust a device that punched holes in the fabric of space-time and allowed one to step through black hole “trapdoors”? How silly was it for her to trust the Core to transport her to the infirmary?

Gladstone thought of the War Room … three giant rooms connected by permanently activated, vision-clear farcaster portals … but three rooms nonetheless, separated by at least a thousand light-years of real space, decades of real time even under Hawking drive. Every time Morpurgo or Singh or one of the others moved from a map holo to the plotting board, he or she stepped across great gulfs of space and time. All the Core had to do to destroy the Hegemony or anyone in it was to tamper with the farcasters, allow a slight “mistake” in targeting.

To hell with this
, thought Meina Gladstone and stepped through to see Paul Duré in the Government House infirmary.

THIRTY-NINE

The two rooms on the second floor of the house on the Piazza di Spagna are small, narrow, high ceilinged, and—except for a single dim lamp burning in each room as if lighted by ghosts in expectation of a visit by other ghosts—quite dark. My bed is in the smaller of the two rooms: the one facing the Piazza, although all one can see from the high windows this night is darkness creased by deeper shadows and accented by the ceaseless burbling of Bernini’s unseen fountain.

Bells ring on the hour from one of the twin towers of Santa Trinità dei Monti, the church that crouches in the dark like a massive, tawny cat at the head of the stairs outside, and each time I hear the bells toll the brief notes of the early hours of the morn, I imagine ghostly hands pulling rotting bell ropes. Or perhaps rotting hands pulling ghostly bell ropes; I don’t know which image suits my macabre fancies this endless night.

Fever lies upon me this night, as dank and heavy and stifling as a thick, water-soaked blanket. My skin alternately burns and then is clammy to the touch. Twice I have been seized with coughing spasms; the first brought Hunt running in from his couch in the other room, and I watched his eyes widen at the sight of the blood I had vomited on the damask sheets; the second spasm I stifled as best I could, staggering to the basin on the bureau to spit up smaller quantities of black blood and dark phlegm. Hunt did not wake the second time.

To be back here. To come all this way to these dark rooms, this grim bed. I half remember awakening here, miraculously cured, the “real” Severn and Dr. Clark and even little Signora Angeletti hovering in the outer room. That period of convalescence from death; that period of
realization that I was not Keats, was not on the true Earth, that this was not in the century I had closed my eyes in that last night … that I was not human.

Sometime after two, I sleep, and as I sleep, I dream. The dream is one I have never suffered before. I dream that I rise slowly through the datumplane, through the datasphere, into and through the megasphere, and finally into a place I do not know, have never dreamt of … a place of infinite spaces, unhurried, indescribable colors, a place with no horizons, no ceilings, no floors or solid areas one might call the ground. I think of it as the metasphere, for I sense immediately that this level of consensual reality includes all of the varieties and vagaries of sensation which I have experienced on Earth, all of the binary analyses and intellectual pleasures I have felt flowing from the TechnoCore through the datasphere, and, above all, a sense of … of what? Expansiveness? Freedom?—
potential
might be the word I am hunting for.

I am alone in this metasphere. Colors flow above me, under me,
through
me … sometimes dissolving into vague pastels, sometimes coalescing into cloudlike fantasies, and at other times, rarely, appearing to form into more solid objects, shapes, distinct forms which may or may not be humanoid in appearance—I watch them the way a child might watch clouds and imagine elephants, crocodiles from the Nile, and great gunboats marching from west to east on a spring day in the Lake District.

After a while I hear sounds: the maddening trickle of the Bernini fountain in the Piazza outside; doves rustling and cooing on the ledges above my window; Leigh Hunt moaning softly in his sleep. But above and beneath these noises, I hear something more stealthy, less
real
, but infinitely more threatening.

Something large this way comes. I strain to see through the pastel gloom; something is moving just beyond the horizon of sight. I know that it knows my name. I know that it holds my life in one palm and death in its other fist.

There is no place to hide in this space beyond space. I cannot run. The siren song of pain continues to rise and fall from the world I left behind—the everyday pain of each person everywhere, the pain of those suffering from the war just begun, the specific, focused pain of those on the Shrike’s terrible tree, and, worst of all, the pain I feel for and
from the pilgrims and those others whose lives and thoughts I now share.

It would be worth rushing to greet this approaching shadow of doom if it would grant me freedom from that song of pain.

“Severn! Severn!”

For a second I think that I am the one calling, just as I had before in these rooms, calling Joseph Severn in the night when my pain and fever ranged beyond my ability to contain it. And he was always there: Severn with his hulking, well-meaning slowness and that gentle smile which I often wanted to wipe from his face with some small meanness or comment. It is hard to be good-natured when one is dying; I had led a life of some generosity … why then was it my fate to continue that role when
I
was the one suffering, when
I
was the one coughing the ragged remnants of my lungs into stained handkerchiefs?

“Severn!”

It is not my voice. Hunt is shaking me by the shoulders, calling Severn’s name. I realize that he thinks he is calling
my
name. I brush away his hands and sink back into the pillows. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“You were moaning,” says Gladstone’s aide. “Crying out.”

“A nightmare. Nothing more.”

“Your dreams are usually more than dreams,” says Hunt. He glances around the narrow room, illuminated now by the single lamp he has carried in. “What a terrible place, Severn.”

I try to smile. “It cost me twenty-eight shillings a month. Seven scudi. Highway robbery.”

Hunt frowns at me. The stark light makes his wrinkles seem deeper than usual. “Listen, Severn, I know you’re a cybrid. Gladstone told me that you were the retrieval persona of a poet named Keats. Now obviously all this …”—he gestured helplessly toward the room, shadows, tall rectangle of windows, and high bed—“all this has something to do with that. But how? What game is the Core playing here?”

“I’m not sure,” I say truthfully.

“But you know this place?”

“Oh yes,” I say with feeling.

“Tell me,” pleads Hunt, and it is his restraint to this point in
not
asking as much as the earnestness of that plea now which decides me to tell him.

I tell him about the poet John Keats, about his birth in 1795, his short and frequently unhappy life, and about his death from “consumption” in 1821, in Rome, far from his friends and only love. I tell him about my staged “recovery” in this very room, about my decision to take the name of Joseph Severn—the artist acquaintance who stayed with Keats until his death—and, finally, I tell him about my short time in the Web, listening, watching, condemned to dream the lives of the Shrike Pilgrims on Hyperion and the others.

“Dreams?” says Hunt. “You mean even now you’re dreaming about what’s occurring in the Web?”

“Yes.” I tell him of the dreams about Gladstone, the destruction of Heaven’s Gate and God’s Grove, and the confused images from Hyperion.

Hunt is pacing back and forth in the narrow room, his shadow thrown high on the rough walls. “Can
you
contact
them
?”

“The ones I dream of? Gladstone?” I think a second. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

I try to explain. “I’m not even in these dreams, Hunt. I have no … no voice, no presence … there’s no way I can contact those I dream about.”

“But sometimes you dream what they’re thinking?”

I realize that this is true. Close to the truth. “I sense what they are
feeling
 …”

“Then can’t you leave some trace in their mind … in their memory? Let them know where we are?”

“No.”

Hunt collapses into the chair at the foot of my bed. He suddenly seems very old.

“Leigh,” I say, “even if I could communicate with Gladstone or the others—which I can’t—what good would it do? I’ve told you that this replica of Old Earth is in the Magellanic Cloud. Even at quantum-leap Hawking velocities it would take centuries for anyone to reach us.”

“We could warn them,” says Hunt, his voice so tired that it sounds almost sullen.

“Warn them of what? All of Gladstone’s worst nightmares are coming true around her. Do you think she trusts the Core now? That’s why the Core could kidnap us so blatantly. Events are proceeding too quickly for Gladstone or anyone in the Hegemony to deal with.”

Hunt rubs his eyes, then steeples his fingers under his nose. His stare
is not overly friendly. “Are you really the retrieved personality of a poet?”

I say nothing.

“Recite some poetry. Make something up.”

I shake my head. It is late, we’re both tired and frightened, and my heart has not yet quit pounding from the nightmare which was more than a nightmare. I won’t let Hunt make me angry.

“Come on,” he says. “Show me that you’re the new, improved version of Bill Keats.”

“John Keats,” I say softly.

“Whatever. Come on, Severn. Or John. Or whatever I should call you. Recite some poesy.”

“All right,” I say, returning his stare. “Listen.”

“I don’t know,” says Hunt. “That doesn’t sound like something a poet whose reputation has lasted a thousand years would have written.”

I shrug.

“Were you dreaming about Gladstone tonight? Did something happen that caused those moans?”

“No. It wasn’t about Gladstone. It was a … real nightmare for a change.”

Hunt stands, lifts his lamp, and prepares to take the only light from the room. I can hear the fountain in the Piazza, the doves on the windowsills. “Tomorrow,” he says, “we’ll make sense of all this and figure out a way to get back. If they can farcast us here, there must be a way to farcast home.”