The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (163 page)

Sol waited.

It had been hours since he had handed his only child to the Shrike. It had been days since he had eaten or slept. Around him the storm had raged and abated, the Tombs had glowed and rumbled like runaway reactors, and the time tides had whipped him with tsunami force. But Sol had clung to the stone steps of the Sphinx and waited through it all. He waited now.

Half conscious, pummeled by fatigue and fear for his daughter, Sol found that his scholar’s mind was working at a rapid pace.

For most of his life and for all of his career, Sol Weintraub the historian-cum-classicist-cum-philosopher had dealt with the ethics of human religious behavior. Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. Sol’s most famous book, finally titled
Abraham’s Dilemma
when it was brought out in a mass-market edition in numbers he had never dreamed of while producing volumes for academic presses, had been written when Rachel was dying of Merlin’s sickness and dealt, obviously enough, with Abraham’s hard choice of obeying or disobeying God’s direct command for him to sacrifice his son.

Sol had written that primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice—as in the dark nights of the ovens which pocked Old Earth history—and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever form God now took in human
consciousness—whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution—humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God’s name. Sacrifice and the
agreement
to sacrifice had written human history in blood.

Yet hours ago, ages ago, Sol Weintraub had handed his only child to a creature of death.

For years the voice in his dreams had commanded him to do so. For years Sol had refused. He had agreed, finally, only when time was gone, when any other hope was gone, and when he had realized that the voice in his and Sarai’s dreams all those years had not been the voice of God, nor of some dark force allied with the Shrike.

It had been the voice of their daughter.

With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so.

It was not obedience.

It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son.

Abraham was testing God
.

By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.

Sol shuddered as he thought of how no posturing on Abraham’s part, no shamming of his willingness to sacrifice the boy, could have served to forge that bond between greater power and humankind. Abraham had to know in his own heart that he would kill his son. The Deity, whatever form it then took, had to know Abraham’s determination, had to
feel
that sorrow and commitment to destroy what was to Abraham the most precious thing in the universe.

Abraham came not to sacrifice, but to know once and for all whether this God was a god to be trusted and obeyed. No other test would do.

Why then, thought Sol, clinging to the stone stair as the Sphinx seemed to rise and fall on the storm seas of time, why was this test being repeated? What terrible new revelations lay at hand for humankind?

Sol understood then—from what little Brawne had told him, from the stories shared on the pilgrimage, from his own personal revelations of the past few weeks—that the effort of the machine Ultimate Intelligence, whatever the hell it was, to flush out the missing Empathy
entity of the human Godhead was useless. Sol no longer saw the tree of thorns on its cliff top, its metal branches and suffering multitudes, but he did see clearly now that the thing was as much an organic machine as the Shrike—an instrument to broadcast suffering through the universe so the human God-part would be forced to respond, to show itself.

If God evolved, and Sol was sure that God must, then that evolution was toward empathy—toward a shared sense of suffering rather than power and dominion. But the obscene tree which the pilgrims had glimpsed—which poor Martin Silenus had been a victim of—was not the way to evoke the missing power.

Sol realized now that the machine god, whatever its form, was insightful enough to see that empathy was a response to others’ pain, but the same UI was too stupid to realize that empathy—in both human terms and the terms of humankind’s UI—was far more than that. Empathy and love were inseparable and inexplicable. The machine UI would never understand it—not even enough to use it as a lure for the part of the human UI who had tired of warfare in the distant future.

Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love
was
these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love.

But could love—simple, banal
love
—explain the so-called anthropic principle which scientists had shaken their collective heads over for seven centuries and more—that almost infinite string of coincidences which had led to a universe that had just the proper number of dimensions, just the correct values on electron, just the precise rules for gravity, just the proper age to stars, just the right prebiologies to create just the perfect viruses to become just the proper DNAs—in short, a series of coincidences so absurd in their precision and
correctness
that they defied logic, defied understanding, and even defied religious interpretation.
Love?

For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The
modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact,
allowed
no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.

It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom.

It seemed that Sol had brought his dying daughter through hundreds of light-years and innumerable hardships in response to nothing.

But now, as the Sphinx loomed above him and the first hint of sunrise paled Hyperion’s sky, Sol realized that he had responded to a force more basic and persuasive than the Shrike’s terror or pain’s dominion. If he was right—and he did not know but felt—then love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter/antimatter. There was room for some sort of God not in the web between the walls, nor in the singularity cracks in the pavement, nor somewhere out before and beyond the sphere of things … but in the very warp and woof of things. Evolving as the universe evolved. Learning as the learning-able parts of the universe learned. Loving as humankind loved.

Sol got to his knees and then to his feet. The time tide storm seemed to have abated a bit, and he thought he could try for the hundredth time to gain access to the tomb.

Bright light still emanated from where the Shrike had emerged, taken Sol’s daughter, and vanished. But now the stars were disappearing as the sky itself lightened toward morning.

Sol climbed the stairs.

He remembered the time at home on Barnard’s World when Rachel—she was ten—had tried to climb the town’s tallest elm and had fallen when she was five meters from the top. Sol had rushed to the med center to find his child floating in the recovery nutrient and suffering from a punctured lung, a broken leg and ribs, a fractured jaw, and innumerable cuts and bruises. She had smiled at him, lifted a thumb, and said through her wired jaw, “I’ll make it next time!”

Sol and Sarai had sat there in the med center that night while Rachel slept. They had waited for morning. Sol had held her hand through the night.

He waited now.

Time tides from the open entrance to the Sphinx still held Sol back
like insistent winds, but he leaned into them like an immovable rock and stood there, five meters out and waiting, squinting into the glare.

He glanced up but did not move back when he saw the fusion flame of a descending spacecraft slice the predawn sky. He turned to look but did not retreat when he heard the spacecraft landing and saw three figures emerge. He glanced but did not step back when he heard other noises, shouts, from deeper in the valley and saw a familiar figure lugging another in a fireman’s carry, moving toward him from beyond the Jade Tomb.

None of these things related to his child. He waited for Rachel.

Even without a datasphere, it is quite possible for my persona to travel through the rich, Void-Which-Binds soup which now surrounds Hyperion. My immediate reaction is to want to visit the One Who Will Be, but although that one’s brilliance dominates the metasphere, I am not yet ready for that. I am, after all, little John Keats, not John the Baptist
.

The Sphinx—a tomb patterned after a real creature that will not be designed by genetic engineers for centuries to come—is a maelstrom of temporal energies. There are really several Sphinxes visible to my expanded sight: the anti-entropic tomb carrying its Shrike cargo back in time like some sealed container with its deadly bacillus, the active, unstable Sphinx which contaminated Rachel Weintraub in its initial efforts to open a portal through time, and the Sphinx which has opened and is moving forward through time again. This last Sphinx is the blazing portal of light, which, second only to the One Who Will Be, lights Hyperion with its metaspherical bonfire
.

I descend to this bright place in time to watch Sol Weintraub hand his daughter to the Shrike
.

I could not have interfered with this even if I had arrived earlier. I would not if I were able. Worlds beyond reason depend upon this act
.

But I await within the Sphinx for the Shrike to pass, carrying its tender cargo. Now I can see the child. She is seconds old, blotched, moist, and wrinkled. She is crying her newborn lungs out. From my old attitudes of bachelorhood and reflective poet’s stance, I find it hard to understand the attraction this bawling, unaesthetic infant exerts on its father and the cosmos
.

Still, the sight of a baby’s flesh—however unattractive this newborn might be—held by the Shrike’s bladed talons stirs something in me
.

Three paces into the Sphinx have carried the Shrike and the child hours forward in time. Just beyond the entrance, the river of time accelerates. If I don’t do something within seconds, it will be too late—the Shrike will have used this portal to carry the child off to whatever distant-future dark hole it seeks
.

Unbidden, the images arrive of spiders draining their victims of fluids, of digger wasps burying their own larvae in the paralyzed bodies of their prey, perfect sources for incubation and food
.

I have to act, but I have no more solidity here than I had in the Core. The Shrike walks through me as if I were an unseen holo. My analog persona is useless here, armless and insubstantial as a wisp of swamp gas
.

But swamp gas has no brain, and John Keats did
.

The Shrike takes another two steps, and more hours pass for Sol and the others outside. I can see blood on the crying infant’s skin where the Shrike’s scalpeled fingers have cut into flesh
.

To hell with this
.

Outside, on the broad stone porch of the Sphinx, caught now in the flood of temporal energies flowing in and through the tomb, lay backpacks, blankets, abandoned food containers, and all the detritus Sol and the pilgrims had left there
.

Including a single Möbius cube
.

The box had been sealed with a class-eight containment field on the Templar treeship
Yggdrasill
when Voice of the Tree Het Masteen had prepared for his long voyage. It contained a single erg—sometimes known as a binder—one of the small creatures which might not be intelligent by human standards but which had evolved around distant stars and developed the ability to control more powerful forcefields than any machine known to humankind
.

The Templars and Ousters had communicated with the creatures for generations. Templars used them for control redundancy on their beautiful but exposed treeships
.

Het Masteen had brought this thing hundreds of light-years to complete the Templar agreement with the Church of the Final Atonement to help fly the Shrike’s thorn tree. But, seeing the Shrike and the tree of torment, Masteen had not been able to fulfill the contract. And so he died
.

The Möbius cube remained. The erg was visible to me as a constrained sphere of red energy in the temporal flood
.

Outside, through a curtain of darkness, Sol Weintraub was just visible—a sadly comic figure, speeded up like a silent-film figure by the subjective rush of time beyond the Sphinx’s temporal field—but the Möbius cube lay within the Sphinx’s circle
.

Rachel cried with the fear even a newborn can know. Fear of falling. Fear of pain. Fear of separation
.