The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (195 page)

“I just did,” said the ship.

I had gone through the weapons locker carefully before we had reached Parvati space; there had been nothing there which could have slowed a Swiss Guardsman for a second. Now I studied the contents of the locker with different purposes in mind.

It is odd how old things look old. The spacesuits and flybikes and handlamps—almost everything aboard the ship—seemed antiquated, out of style. There were no skinsuits, for instance, and the bulk, design, and color of everything seemed like a holo from a history text. But the weapons were a slightly different story. They were old, yes, but very familiar to my eye and hand.

The Consul had obviously been a hunter. There were half a dozen shotguns on the rack: well oiled and stored properly. I could have taken any one of them and headed for the fens to bag ducks. They ranged from a petite .310 over-and-under to a massive 28-gauge double barrel. I chose an ancient but perfectly preserved 16-gauge pump with actual cartridges and set it in the corridor.

The rifles and energy weapons were beautiful. The Consul must have been a collector, because these specimens were works of art as well as killing devices—scrollwork on the stocks, blue steel, hand-fitted elements, perfect balance. In the millennium and more since the twentieth century, when personal weapons were mass-produced to be incredibly deadly, cheap, and ugly as metal doorstops, some of us—the Consul and I among the few—had learned to treasure beautiful handmade or limited-production guns. On the rack here were high-caliber hunting rifles, plasma rifles (not a misnomer, I had learned while in Home Guard basic training—the plasma cartridges were bolts of sheer energy, of course, when they emerged from the barrel, but the cartridges did benefit from the
barrel’s rifling before they volatilized), two elaborately carved laser-based energy rifles (this
was
a misnomer, an artifact of language rather than design) not that different from the one M. Herrig had killed Izzy with not so many days earlier, a matte-black FORCE assault rifle that probably resembled the one Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had brought to Hyperion three centuries ago, a huge-bore plasma weapon that the Consul must have used for shooting dinosaurs on some world, and three handguns. There were no deathwands. I was glad; I hated the damned things.

I removed one of the plasma rifles, the FORCE assault weapon, and the handguns for further inspection.

The FORCE weapon was ugly, an exception to the Consul’s collecting scheme, but I saw why it had been useful. The thing was multipurpose—an 18-mm plasma rifle, a variable-beam coherent-energy weapon, grenade launcher, a bhee-keeper (beams of high-energy electrons), flechette launcher, a wideband blinder, heat-seeking dart flinger—hell, a FORCE assault weapon could do everything but cook the trooper’s meals. (And, when in the field, the variable-beam, set to low, could usually do that as well.)

Before entering Parvati System, I had toyed with greeting any Swiss Guard boarders with the FORCE weapon, but modern combat suits would have shrugged off everything it could dole out, and—to be honest—I had been afraid it would make the Pax troopers mad.

Now I studied it more carefully; something this flexible might be useful if we wandered too far from the ship and I had to take on a more primitive foe—say, a caveman, or a jet fighter, or some poor slob equipped as we had been in Hyperion’s Home Guard. In the end, I rejected taking it—it was prohibitively heavy if one weren’t in an old FORCE exopowered combat suit, the thing had no ammunition for the flechette, grenade, or bhee settings, 18-mm pulse cartridges were impossible to find anymore, and to use the energy-weapon options, I would have to be near the ship or some other serious power source. I set the assault gun back in place, realizing as I did so that it might well have been the legendary Colonel Kassad’s personal weapon. It did not fit the profile of the Consul’s personal collection, but he had known Kassad—perhaps he had kept the thing for sentimental reasons.

I asked the ship, but the ship did not remember. “Surprise, surprise,” I muttered.

The handguns were more ancient than the assault gun, but much more promising. Each was a collector’s item, but they used cartridge magazines that could still be purchased—at least on Hyperion. I couldn’t vouch for the worlds we would visit. The biggest weapon was a .60-caliber Steiner-Ginn full-auto Penetrator. It was a serious weapon, but heavy: the cartridge templates weighed almost as much as the handgun, and it was designed to use ammunition at a prodigious rate. I set it back. The other two were more promising: a small, light, eminently portable flechette pistol that might have been the great-grand-daddy of the weapon M. Herrig had tried to kill me with. It came with several hundred shiny little needle-eggs—the grip magazine held five at a time—and each of the eggs held several thousand of the flechettes. It was a good weapon for someone who was not necessarily a good shot.

The final handgun amazed me. It was in its own oiled leather holster. I removed the weapon with fingers that were slightly shaking. I knew it only from old books—a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun, actual cartridges—the kind that came in brass casings, not a magazine template that created them as the gun was fired—patterned grip, metal sights, blue steel. I turned the weapon over in my hands. This thing could date back more than a thousand years.

I looked in the case in which I had found it: five boxes of .45 cartridges, several hundred rounds. I thought that they must be ancient as well, but I found the manufacturer’s tag: Lusus. About three centuries ago.

Hadn’t Brawne Lamia carried an ancient .45, according to the
Cantos
?
Later, when I asked Aenea, the child said that she had never seen her mother with a handgun.

Still, it and the flechette pistol seemed like weapons we should have with us. I did not know if the .45 cartridges would still fire, so I carried one out on the balcony, warned the ship that the external field should stop the slug from ricocheting, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. Then I remembered that these things had a manual safety. I found it, clicked it off, and tried again. My God, it was loud. But the bullets still worked. I set the weapon in its holster and clipped the holster to my utility belt. It felt right there. Of course, when the last .45 cartridge
had been fired, that would be it forever unless I could find an antique gun club that manufactured them.

I don’t plan to have to fire several hundred bullets at anything
, I thought wryly at the time. If only I had known.

Meeting with the girl and android later, I showed them the shotgun and plasma hunting rifle I’d chosen, the flechette pistol, and the .45. “If we go wandering through strange places—uninhabited strange places—we should go armed,” I said. I offered the flechette pistol to both of them, but they both refused. Aenea wanted no weapon; the android pointed out that he could not use one against a human being, and he trusted me to be around if a fierce animal was chasing him.

I grunted but set the rifle, shotgun, and flechette pistol aside. “I’ll wear this,” I said, touching the .45.

“It matches your outfit,” Aenea said with a slight smile.

There was no last-minute desperate discussion of a plan this time. None of us believed that Aenea’s threat of self-destruction would work again if the Pax was waiting. Our most serious discussion of coming events came two days before we spun down into the Renaissance System. We had eaten well—A. Bettik had prepared a filet of river manta with a light sauce, and we had raided the ship’s wine cellar for a fine wine from the Beak’s vineyards—and after an hour of music with Aenea on the piano and the android playing a flute he had brought with him, talk turned to the future.

“Ship, what can you tell us about Renaissance Vector?” asked the girl.

There was that brief pause that I had come to associate with the ship being embarrassed. “I am sorry, M. Aenea, but other than navigational information and orbital approach maps which are centuries out of date, I am afraid I have no information about the world.”

“I have been there,” said A. Bettik. “Also centuries ago, but we have been monitoring radio and television traffic that refers to the planet.”

“I’ve heard some of my offworld hunters talk,” I said. “Some of the richest are from Renaissance V.” I gestured to the android. “Why don’t you start?”

He nodded and folded his arms. “Renaissance Vector was
one of the most important worlds of the Hegemony. Extremely Earth-like on the Solmev Scale, it was settled by early seedships and was completely urbanized by the time of the Fall. It was famous for its universities, its medical centers—most Poulsen treatments were administered there for the Web citizens who could afford it—its baroque architecture—especially beautiful in its mountain fortress, Keep Enable—and its industrial output. Most of the FORCE spacecraft were manufactured there. In fact,
this
spacecraft must have been built there—it was a product of the Mitsubishi-Havcek complex.”

“Really?” said the ship’s voice. “If I knew that, the data have been lost. How interesting.”

Aenea and I exchanged worried glances for the dozenth time on this voyage. A ship that couldn’t remember its past or point of origin did not inspire confidence during the complexities of interstellar flight.
Oh, well
, I thought for the dozenth time,
it got us in and out of Parvati System all right
.

“DaVinci is the capital of Renaissance Vector,” continued A. Bettik, “although the entire landmass and much of the single large sea are urbanized, so there is little distinction between one urban center and the other.”

“It’s a busy Pax world,” I added. “One of the earliest to join the Pax after the Fall. The military is there in spades … both Renaissance V. and Renaissance M. have orbital and lunar garrisons, as well as bases all over each planet.”

“What’s Renaissance M.?” asked Aenea.

“Renaissance Minor,” said A. Bettik. “The second world from the sun … Renaissance V. is the third. Minor is also inhabited, but much less so. It is a largely agricultural world—huge automated farms covering much of the planet—and it feeds Vector. After the Fall of the farcasters, both worlds benefitted from this arrangement; before regularly scheduled interstellar commerce was reinstated by the Pax, the Renaissance System was fairly self-contained. Renaissance Vector manufactured goods; Renaissance Minor provided the food for the five billion people on Renaissance Vector.”

“What’s the population on Renaissance V. now?” I asked.

“I believe it is about the same—five billion people, give or take a few hundred million,” said A. Bettik. “As I said, the Pax arrived early and offered both the cruciform and the birth-control regime that goes with it.”

“You said you’d been there,” I said to the android. “What’s the world like?”

“Ahh,” said A. Bettik with a rueful smile, “I was at the Renaissance Vector spaceport for less than thirty-six hours while being shipped from Asquith in preparation for our colonizing King William’s new land on Hyperion. They did rouse us from cryogenic sleep but did not allow us to leave the ship. My personal recollections of the world are not extensive.”

“Are they mostly born-again Christians there?” asked Aenea. The girl seemed thoughtful and somewhat withdrawn. I noticed that she had been chewing her nails again.

“Oh, yes,” said A. Bettik. “Almost all five billion of them, I’m afraid.”

“And I wasn’t kidding about the heavy Pax military presence,” I said. “The Pax troopers who trained us in the Hyperion Home Guard staged out of Renaissance V. It’s a major garrison world and transshipment point for the whole war against the Ousters.”

Aenea nodded but still seemed distracted.

I decided not to beat around the bush. “Why are we going there?” I asked.

She looked up at me. Her dark eyes were beautiful but remote that moment. “I want to see the River Tethys.”

I shook my head. “The River Tethys was a farcaster construct, you know. It didn’t exist outside the Web. Or, rather, it existed as a thousand small sections of other rivers.”

“I know,” she said. “But I want to see a river that was
part
of Tethys during the Web days. My mother told me about it. How it was like the Grand Concourse, only more leisurely. How one could ride a barge from world to world for weeks—months.”

I resisted the impulse to get angry. “You know there’s almost no chance we can get past their defenses to Renaissance Vector,” I said. “And if we get there, River Tethys won’t be there … just whatever portion used to be part of it. What’s so important about seeing that?”

The girl started to shrug, then caught herself. “Remember how I said that there’s an architect I need to … want to … study with?”

“Yes,” I said. “But you don’t know his name or what world he’s on. So why come to Renaissance Vector to start your search? Couldn’t we look on Renaissance Minor, at least? Or
just skip this system and go somewhere empty, like Armaghast?”

Aenea shook her head. I noticed that she had brushed her hair especially well; the blond highlights were very visible. “In my dreams,” she said, “one of the architect’s buildings lies near the River Tethys.”

“There are hundreds of other old Tethys worlds,” I said, leaning closer to her so she could see that I was very serious. “Not all of them will get us caught or killed by the Pax. Do we have to start in Renaissance System?”

“I think so,” she said softly.

I dropped my large hands to my knees. Martin Silenus had not said that this trip would be easy or make sense—he had just said that it would make me a Hero. “All right,” I said again, hearing the weariness in my own voice, “what’s our plan this time, kiddo?”

“No plan,” said Aenea. “If they’re waiting for us, I’m just going to tell them the truth—that we’re going to land the ship on Renaissance Vector. I think they’ll let us land.”

“And if they do?” I said, trying to imagine the ship surrounded by thousands of Pax troopers.

“We’ll take it from there, I guess,” said the girl. She smiled at me. “Want to play one-sixth-g billiards, you two? For money this time?”