The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (3 page)

When everyone was seated and quiet, Het Masteen made formal introductions. Although the Consul knew none of the others from personal experience, several of the names were familiar and he used his diplomat’s long training to file away identities and impressions.

To the Consul’s left sat Father Lenar Hoyt, a priest of the old-style Christian sect known as Catholic. For a second the Consul had forgotten the significance of the black clothing and Roman collar, but then he remembered St. Francis Hospital on Hebron where he had received alcohol trauma therapy after his disastrous first diplomatic assignment there almost four standard decades earlier. And at the mention of Hoyt’s name he remembered another priest, one who had disappeared on Hyperion halfway through his own tenure there.

Lenar Hoyt was a young man by the Consul’s reckoning—no more than his early thirties—but it appeared that something had aged the man terribly in the not too distant past. The Consul looked at the thin face, cheekbones pressing against sallow flesh, eyes large but hooded in deep hollows, thin lips set in a permanent twitch of muscle too downturned to be called even a cynical smile, the hairline not so much receding as ravaged by radiation, and he felt he was looking at a man who had been ill for years. Still, the Consul was surprised that behind that mask of concealed pain there remained the physical echo of the boy in the man—the faintest remnants of the round face, fair skin, and soft mouth which had belonged to a younger, healthier, less cynical Lenar Hoyt.

Next to the priest sat a man whose image had been familiar to most citizens of the Hegemony some years before. The Consul wondered if the collective attention span in the Worldweb was as short now as it had been when he had lived there. Shorter, probably. If so, then Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, the so-called Butcher of South Bressia, was probably no longer either infamous or famous. To the Consul’s generation and to all those who lived in the slow, expatriate fringe of things, Kassad was not someone one was likely to forget.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad was tall—almost tall enough to look the two-meter Het Masteen in the eye—and dressed in FORCE black with no rank insignia or citations showing. The black uniform was oddly similar to Father Hoyt’s garb, but there was no real resemblance between the two men. In lieu of Hoyt’s wasted appearance, Kassad was brown, obviously fit, and whip-handle lean, with strands of muscle showing in shoulder, wrist, and throat. The Colonel’s eyes were small, dark, and as all-encompassing as the lenses of some primitive video camera. His face was all angles: shadows, planes, and facets. Not gaunt like Father Hoyt’s, merely carved from cold stone. A thin line of beard along his jawline served to accent the sharpness of his countenance as surely as blood on a knife blade.

The Colonel’s intense, slow movements reminded the Consul of an Earth-bred jaguar he had seen in a private seedship zoo on Lusus many years before. Kassad’s voice was soft but the Consul did not fail to notice that even the Colonel’s silences commanded attention.

Most of the long table was empty, the group clustered at one end.
Across from Fedmahn Kassad sat a man introduced as the poet Martin Silenus.

Silenus appeared to be quite the opposite of the military man across from him. Where Kassad was lean and tall, Martin Silenus was short and visibly out of shape. Countering Kassad’s stone-cut features, the poet’s face was as mobile and expressive as an Earth primate’s. His voice was a loud, profane rasp. There was something, thought the Consul, almost pleasantly demonic about Martin Silenus, with his ruddy cheeks, broad mouth, pitched eyebrows, sharp ears, and constantly moving hands sporting fingers long enough to serve a concert pianist. Or a strangler. The poet’s silver hair had been cropped into rough-hewn bangs.

Martin Silenus seemed to be in his late fifties, but the Consul noticed the telltale blue tinge to throat and palms and suspected that the man had been through more than a few Poulsen treatments. Silenus’s true age might be anywhere from ninety to a hundred and fifty standard years. If he were close to the latter age, the Consul knew, the odds were that the poet was quite mad.

As boisterous and animated as Martin Silenus seemed upon first encounter, so the next guest at the table exuded an immediate and equally impressive sense of intelligent reticence. Sol Weintraub looked up upon introduction and the Consul noted the short gray beard, lined forehead, and sad, luminous eyes of the well-known scholar. The Consul had heard tales of the Wandering Jew and his hopeless quest, but he was shocked to realize that the old man now held the infant in his arms—his daughter Rachel, no more than a few weeks old. The Consul looked away.

The sixth pilgrim and only woman at the table was Brawne Lamia. When introduced, the detective stared at the Consul with such intensity that he could feel the pressure of her gaze even after she looked away.

A former citizen of the 1.3-g world of Lusus, Brawne Lamia was no taller than the poet two chairs to her right, but even her loose corduroy shipsuit did not conceal the heavy layers of muscle on her compact form. Black curls reached to her shoulders, her eyebrows were two dark lines dabbed horizontally across a wide brow, and her nose was solid and sharp, intensifying the aquiline quality of her
stare. Lamia’s mouth was wide and expressive to the point of being sensuous, curled slightly at the corners in a slight smile which might be cruel or merely playful. The woman’s dark eyes seemed to dare the observer to discover which was the case.

It occurred to the Consul that Brawne Lamia might well be considered beautiful.

Introductions completed, the Consul cleared his throat and turned toward the Templar. “Het Masteen, you said that there were seven pilgrims. Is M. Weintraub’s child the seventh?”

Het Masteen’s hood moved slowly from side to side. “No. Only those who make a conscious decision to seek the Shrike may be counted among the pilgrims.”

The group at the table stirred slightly. Each must know what the Consul knew; only a group comprising a prime number of pilgrims might make the Shrike Church–sponsored trip north.

“I am the seventh,” said Het Masteen, captain of the Templar treeship
Yggdrasill
and True Voice of the Tree. In the silence which followed the announcement, Het Masteen gestured and a group of crew clones began serving the pilgrims their last meal before planetfall.

   “So the Ousters are not in-system yet?” asked Brawne Lamia. Her voice had a husky, throaty quality which strangely stirred the Consul.

“No,” said Het Masteen. “But we cannot be more than a few standard days ahead of them. Our instruments have detected fusion skirmishes within the system’s Oört cloud.”

“Will there be war?” asked Father Hoyt. His voice seemed as fatigued as his expression. When no one volunteered a response, the priest turned to his right as if retroactively directing the question to the Consul.

The Consul sighed. The crew clones had served wine; he wished it had been whiskey. “Who knows what the Ousters will do?” he said. “They no longer appear to be motivated by human logic.”

Martin Silenus laughed loudly, spilling his wine as he gestured. “As if we fucking
humans
were ever motivated by human logic!” He took a deep drink, wiped his mouth, and laughed again.

Brawne Lamia frowned. “If the serious fighting starts too soon,” she said, “perhaps the authorities will not allow us to land.”

“We will be allowed to pass,” said Het Masteen. Sunlight found its way past folds in his cowl to fall on yellowish skin.

“Saved from certain death in war to be delivered to certain death at the hands of the Shrike,” murmured Father Hoyt.

“There is no death in all the Universe!” intoned Martin Silenus in a voice which the Consul felt sure could have awakened someone deep in cryogenic fugue. The poet drained the last of his wine and raised the empty goblet in an apparent toast to the stars:

Silenus abruptly broke off and poured more wine, belching once into the silence which had followed his recitation. The other six looked at one another. The Consul noticed that Sol Weintraub was smiling slightly until the baby in his arms stirred and distracted him.

“Well,” said Father Hoyt hesitantly, as if trying to retrieve an earlier strand of thought, “if the Hegemony convoy leaves and the Ousters take Hyperion, perhaps the occupation will be bloodless and they’ll let us go about our business.”

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad laughed softly. “The Ousters don’t want to
occupy
Hyperion,” he said. “If they take the planet they’ll loot what they want and then do what they do best. They’ll burn the cities into charred rubble, break the rubble into smaller pieces, and then bake the pieces until they glow. They’ll melt the poles, boil the oceans, and then use the residue to salt what’s left of the continents so nothing will ever grow there again.”

“Well …” began Father Hoyt and then trailed off.

There was no conversation as the clones cleared the soup and salad dishes and brought on the main course.

   “You said that there was a Hegemony warship escorting us,” the Consul said to Het Masteen as they finished their roast beef and boiled sky squid.

The Templar nodded and pointed. The Consul squinted but could make out nothing moving against the rotating starfield.

“Here,” said Fedmahn Kassad and leaned across Father Hoyt to hand the Consul a collapsible pair of military binoculars.

The Consul nodded his thanks, thumbed on the power, and scanned the patch of sky Het Masteen had indicated. Gyroscopic crystals in the binoculars hummed slightly as they stabilized the optics and swept the area in a programmed search pattern. Suddenly the image froze, blurred, expanded, and steadied.

The Consul could not avoid an involuntary intake of breath as the Hegemony ship filled the viewer. Neither the expected field-blurred seed of a solo ramscout nor the bulb of a torchship, the electronically outlined image was of a matte-black attack carrier. The thing was impressive in the way only warships through the centuries had succeeded in being. The Hegemony spinship was incongruously streamlined with its four sets of boom arms retracted in battle readiness, its sixty-meter command probe sharp as a Clovis point, and its Hawking drive and fusion blisters set far back along the launch shaft like feathers on an arrow.

The Consul handed the binoculars back to Kassad without comment. If the task force was using a full attack carrier to escort the
Yggdrasill
, what kind of firepower were they setting in place to meet the Ouster invasion?

“How long until we land?” asked Brawne Lamia. She had been using her comlog to access the treeship’s datasphere and obviously was frustrated with what she had found. Or had not found.

“Four hours until orbit,” murmured Het Masteen. “A few minutes more by dropship. Our consular friend has offered his private craft to ferry you down.”

“To Keats?” said Sol Weintraub. It was the first time the scholar had spoken since dinner had been served.

The Consul nodded. “It’s still the only spaceport on Hyperion set to handle passenger vehicles,” he said.

“Spaceport?” Father Hoyt sounded angry. “I thought that we were going straight to the north. To the Shrike’s realm.”

Het Masteen patiently shook his head. “The pilgrimage always begins from the capital,” he said. “It will take several days to reach the Time Tombs.”

“Several
days
,” snapped Brawne Lamia. “That’s absurd.”

“Perhaps,” agreed Het Masteen, “but it is the case, nonetheless.”

Father Hoyt looked as if something in the meal had caused him indigestion even though he had eaten almost nothing. “Look,” he said, “couldn’t we change the rules this once—I mean, given the war scare and all? And just land near the Time Tombs or wherever and get it over with?”

The Consul shook his head. “Spacecraft and aircraft have been trying to take the short route to the northern moors for almost four hundred years,” he said. “I know of none who made it.”

“May one inquire,” said Martin Silenus, happily raising his hand like a schoolboy, “just what the gibbering fuck
happens
to these legions of ships?”

Father Hoyt frowned at the poet. Fedmahn Kassad smiled slightly. Sol Weintraub said, “The Consul did not mean to suggest that the area is inaccessible. One may travel by ship or various land routes. Nor do spacecraft and aircraft disappear. They easily land near the ruins or the Time Tombs and just as easily return to whatever point their computers command. It is merely the pilots and passengers who are never seen again.” Weintraub lifted the sleeping baby from his lap and set her in an infant carrier slung around his neck.

“So the tired old legend goes,” said Brawne Lamia. “What do the ship logs show?”

“Nothing,” said the Consul. “No violence. No forced entry. No deviation from course. No unexplained time lapses. No unusual energy emissions or depletions. No physical phenomena of any sort.”

“No passengers,” said Het Masteen.

The Consul did a slow double take. If Het Masteen had, indeed,
just attempted a joke, it was the first sign in all of the Consul’s decades of dealing with the Templars that one of them had shown even a nascent sense of humor. What the Consul could see of the Captain’s vaguely oriental features beneath the cowl gave no hint that a joke had been attempted.

“Marvelous melodrama,” laughed Silenus. “A real-life, Christ-weeping Sargasso of Souls and we’re for it. Who orchestrates this shitpot of a plot, anyway?”

“Shut up,” said Brawne Lamia. “You’re drunk, old man.”

The Consul sighed. The group had been together for less than a standard hour.

Crew clones swept away the dishes and brought dessert trays showcasing sherbets, coffees, treeship fruits, draums, tortes, and concoctions made of Renaissance chocolate. Martin Silenus waved away the desserts and told the clones to bring him another bottle of wine. The Consul reflected a few seconds and then asked for a whiskey.