The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (154 page)

Then they were through the containment field, out of the atmosphere, and their velocity increased as they followed the twisting ribbon of water. There was a tube of containment sphere around them—logic and the absence of their immediate and dramatic death dictated that there
had
to be—but it lacked the usual shimmer and optic texture that was
so
reassuring on Templar treeships or the occasional tourist habitat open to space. Here there were only the river, the boat, the people, and the immensity of space.

“They can’t possibly use this as their form of transportation between Swarm units,” Dr. Melio Arundez had said in a shaky voice. Theo had noted that Arundez also was gripping the gunwales with white fingers. Neither the Ouster in the stern nor the two seated in the bow had communicated with anything more than a nod of confirmation when the Consul had asked if this then was their promised transportation.

“They’re showing off with the river,” the Consul had said softly. “It’s used when the Swarm is at rest, but for ceremonial purposes. Deploying it while the Swarm is moving is for effect.”

“To impress us with their superior technology?” asked Theo,
sotto voce
.

The Consul nodded.

The river had wound and twisted through space, sometimes almost doubling back on itself in huge, illogical loops, sometimes wrapping itself in tight spirals like a fiberplastic cord, always gleaming in sunlight from Hyperion’s star and receding to infinity ahead of them. At times the river occluded the sun, and the colors then were magnificent; Theo gasped as he looked at the river loop a hundred meters above them and saw fish silhouetted against the solar disk.

But always the bottom of the boat was
down
, and they hurtled along at what must have been near cislunar transfer speeds on a river unbroken by rocks or rapids. It was, as Arundez noted some minutes into their voyage, like driving one’s canoe over the edge of an immense waterfall and trying to enjoy the ride on the way down.

The river passed some of the elements of the Swarm, which filled the sky like false stars: massive comet farms, their dusty surfaces broken by the geometries of hard vacuum crops; zero-g globe cities, great irregular spheres of transparent membrane looking like improbable amoebae filled with busy flora and fauna; ten-klick-long thrust clusters, accreted over centuries, their innermost modules and lifecans and ’cologies looking like something stolen from O’Neill’s Boondoggle and the dawn of the space age; wandering forests covering hundreds of kilometers like immense, floating kelp beds, connected to their thrust clusters and command nodes by containment fields and tangled skeins of roots and runners—the spherical tree-forms weaving to gravity breezes and burning bright green and deep orange and the hundred shades of Old Earth autumn when ignited by direct sunlight; hollowed-out asteroids long-since abandoned by their residents, now given over to automated manufacturing and heavy-metal reprocessing, every centimeter of surface rock covered by prerusted structures, chimneys, and skeletal cooling
towers, the glow of their internal fusion fires making each cinderish world look like Vulcan’s forge; immense spherical docking globes, given scale only by the torchship- and cruiser-size warcraft flitting around their surfaces like spermatazoa attacking an egg; and, most indelible, organisms which the river came near or which flew near the river … organisms which might have been manufactured or born but probably were both, great butterfly shapes, opening wings of energy to the sun, insects which were spacecraft or vice versa, their antennae turning toward the river and gondola and its passengers as they passed, multi-faceted eyes gleaming in starlight, smaller winged shapes—humans—entering and exiting an opening in a belly the size of a FORCE attack carrier’s dropship bay.

And finally had come the mountain—an entire range of mountains, actually: some blistered with a hundred environment bubbles, some open to space but still heavily populated, some connected to others by suspension bridges thirty klicks long or tributary rivers, others regal in their solitude, many as empty and formal as a Zen garden. Then the final mountain, rising higher than Mons Olympus or Asquith’s Mount Hillary, and the river’s penultimate plunge toward its summit, Theo and the Consul and Arundez, pale and silent, gripping the thwarts with quiet intensity as they plunged the final few kilometers with a suddenly perceptible and terrifying velocity. Finally, in the impossible last hundred meters as the river shed energy without deceleration, wider atmosphere surrounded them once again, and the boat floated to a halt in a grassy meadow where the Ouster Clan Tribunal stood waiting, and stones rose in their circle of Stonehenge silence.

“If they did this to impress me,” Theo had whispered as the boat bumped the grassy shore, “they succeeded.”

“Why did you return to the Swarm?” asked Freeman Ghenga. The woman paced, moving in the minuscule gravity with the grace common only to those born in space.

“CEO Gladstone asked me to,” said the Consul.

“And you came knowing that your own life would be forfeit?”

The Consul was too much the gentleman and diplomat to shrug, but his expression conveyed the same sentiment.

“What does Gladstone want?” asked another Ouster, the man who had been introduced by Ghenga as Spokesman of the Eligible Citizens Coredwell Minmun.

The Consul repeated the CEO’s five points.

Spokesman Minmun folded his arms and looked at Freeman Ghenga.

“I will answer now,” said Ghenga. She looked at Arundez and Theo. “You two will listen carefully in the event that the man who brought these questions does not return to your ship with you.”

“Just a minute,” said Theo, stepping forward to face the taller Ouster, “before passing judgment here, you have to take into account the fact that—”

“Silence,” commanded Spokesman Freeman Ghenga, but Theo had already been silenced by the Consul’s hand on his shoulder.

“I will answer these questions now,” repeated Ghenga. Far above her, a score of the small warships which FORCE had called lancers flashed silently past, darting like a school of fish in three-hundred-g zigs and zags.

“Firstly,” said Ghenga, “Gladstone asks why we are attacking the Web.” She paused, looked at the other sixteen Ousters assembled there, and continued. “We are not. Except for this Swarm, attempting to occupy Hyperion before the Time Tombs opened, there are no Swarms attacking the Web.”

All three of the Hegemony men had stepped forward. Even the Consul had lost his veneer of bemused calm and was all but stuttering in excitement.

“But that’s not true! We saw the …”

“I saw the fatlined images from the …”

“Heaven’s Gate is destroyed! God’s Grove burned!”

“
Silence
,” commanded Freeman Ghenga. Into that silence she said, “Only this Swarm is doing battle with the Hegemony. Our Sister Swarms are where the long-range Web detectors had first placed them … moving
away
from the Web, fleeing from further provocations such as Bressia’s attacks.”

The Consul rubbed his face like a man awakening. “But then who …?”

“Precisely,” said Freeman Ghenga. “Who would have the ability to carry out such a charade? And the motive to slaughter humans by the billion?”

“The Core?” breathed the Consul.

The mountain was slowly rotating, and at this moment they turned into night. A convection breeze moved across the mountain terrace, rustling the Ousters’ robes and the Consul’s cape. Overhead, the stars
seemed to explode into brilliance. The great rocks of the Stonehenge circle seemed to glow from some internal warmth.

Theo Lane stood next to the Consul, fearing that the man might collapse. “We have only your word on this,” Theo said to the Ouster spokesman. “It makes no sense.”

Ghenga did not blink. “We will show you proof. Void-Which-Binds transmission locators. Real-time starfield images from our sister Swarms.”

“Void Which Binds?” said Arundez. His usually calm voice showed agitation.

“What you call the fatline.” Spokesman Freeman Ghenga paced to the nearest stone and ran her hand across its rough surface as if taking warmth from the heat within. Starfields pirouetted above.

“To answer Gladstone’s second question,” she said, “we do not know where the Core resides. We have fled it and fought it and sought it and feared it for centuries, but we have not found it.
You
must tell us the answer to that question!
We
have declared war on this parasite entity you call the TechnoCore.”

The Consul seemed to sag. “We have no idea. Authorities in the Web have sought the Core since before the Hegira, but it is as elusive as El Dorado. We’ve found no hidden worlds, no massive asteroids crammed with hardware, and no hint of it on Web worlds.” He gestured tiredly with his left hand. “For all we know, you are hiding the Core in one of your Swarms.”

“We are not,” said Spokesman Coredwell Minmun.

The Consul did shrug at last. “The Hegira bypassed thousands of worlds in the Grand Survey. Anything that didn’t score at least nine point seven on their ten-point terrabase scale was ignored. The Core could be anywhere along those early lines of flight and exploration. We’ll never find it … and if we do, it will be years after the Web is destroyed. You were our last hope for locating it.”

Ghenga shook her head. Far above them, the summit caught the light of sunrise while the terminator moved down the icefields toward them with almost alarming rapidity. “Thirdly, Gladstone asked for our demands for a cease-fire. Except for this Swarm, in this system, we are not the ones attacking. We will accept a cease-fire as soon as Hyperion is under our control … which should be momentarily. We have just been informed that our expeditionary forces now have control of the capital and its spaceport.”

“The hell you say,” said Theo, hands curling into fists despite himself.

“The hell we do say,” agreed Freeman Ghenga. “Tell Gladstone that we will now join you in a common fight against the TechnoCore.” She glanced toward the silent members of the Tribunal. “Since we are many years’ travel from the Web, however, and we do not trust your Core-controlled farcasters, our help must necessarily come in the form of retaliating for the destruction of your Hegemony. You will be avenged.”

“That’s reassuring,” said the Consul drily.

“Fourthly, Gladstone asks if we will meet with her. The answer is yes … if she is, as she says she is, willing to come to Hyperion system. We have preserved the FORCE farcaster for just that eventuality.
We
will not travel by farcaster.”

“Why not?” asked Arundez.

A third Ouster, not introduced, one of the furred and beautifully altered type, spoke. “The device you call a farcaster is an abomination … a defilement of the Void Which Binds.”

“Ah, religious reasons,” said the Consul, nodding in understanding.

The exotically striped and furred Ouster shook his head adamantly. “No! The farcaster web is the yoke on humankind’s neck, the contract of subservience which has bound you to stagnation. We will have none of it.”

“Fifthly,” said Freeman Ghenga, “Gladstone’s mention of the death-wand explosive device is nothing but a crude ultimatum. But as we have said, it is aimed at the wrong opponent. The forces sweeping into your frail and failing Web are not of the Clans of the Twelve Sister Swarms.”

“We have only your word on that,” said the Consul. His gaze, now locked with Ghenga’s, was firm and defiant.

“You have my word on nothing,” said Spokesman Ghenga. “Clan elders do not give their word to Core slaves. But this is the truth.”

The Consul seemed distracted as he half-turned toward Theo. “We have to get this word to Gladstone immediately.” He turned back to Ghenga. “May my friends return to the ship to communicate your response, Spokesman?”

Ghenga nodded and gestured for the gondola to be made ready.

“We’re not going back without you,” Theo said to the Consul, stepping between him and the closest Ousters as if to protect the older man with his own body.

“Yes,” said the Consul, touching Theo’s upper arm again, “you are. You must.”

“He’s right,” said Arundez, pulling Theo away before the young Governor-General can speak again. “This is too important to risk not communicating. You go. I’ll stay with him.”

Ghenga gestured toward two of the more massive exotic Ousters. “You will both return to the ship. The Consul will remain. The Tribunal has not yet decided his fate.”

Arundez and Theo both wheeled with fists raised, but the furred Ousters seized them and moved them away with the restrained effort of adults handling small but unruly children.

The Consul watched them set in place in the gondola, and he stifled the urge to wave as the boat moved twenty meters down the placid stream, dipped out of sight beyond the curve of the terrace, and then reappeared climbing the waterfall toward black space. It was lost to sight within minutes in the glare of the sun. He turned slowly in a full circle, making eye contact with each of the seventeen Ousters.

“Let’s get it over with,” said the Consul. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”

Sol Weintraub sat between the great paws of the Sphinx and watched the storm abate, wind dying from scream to sigh to whisper, curtains of dust diminishing and then parting to show the stars, and finally the long night settling into a dreadful calm. The Tombs glowed more brightly than before, but nothing came out of the blazing doorway of the Sphinx, and Sol could not enter; the push of blinding light was like a thousand irresistible fingers against his chest, and lean and strain as he might, Sol could get no closer than three meters from the doorway. Whatever stood or moved or waited inside was lost to sight in the glare of light.

Sol sat and held onto the stone stair as time tides pulled at him, tugged at him, and made him weep in the false shock of
déjà vu
. The entire Sphinx seemed to rock and pitch in the violent storm of expanding and contracting anti-entropic fields.

Rachel
.

Sol would not leave while there was any chance his daughter might be alive. Lying on cold stone, listening to the wind scream die, Sol saw the cold stars appear, saw the meteor trail and laser-lance thrust and counterthrust of orbital war, knew in his heart that the war was lost, that the Web was in danger, that great empires were falling as he
watched, the human race might be hanging in the balance this endless night … and he did not care.