The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (34 page)

Surprisingly, I was not the only one to stay behind; at least two hundred remained, although most of us avoided social contact, smiling politely when we passed on Poets’ Walk or while we ate apart in the echoing emptiness of the dining dome.

The murders and disappearances continued, averaging about one a local fortnight, although they were usually discovered not by us but by the regional SDF commander, who demanded a head count of citizens every few weeks.

The image that remains in my mind from that first year is an unusually communal one: the night we gathered on the Commons to watch the seedship leave. It was at the height of the autumn meteor season and Hyperion’s night skies were already ablaze with gold streaks and red crisscrosses of flame when the seedship’s engines fired, a small sun flared, and for an hour we watched as friends and fellow artists receded as a streak of fusion flame. Sad King Billy joined us that night and I remember that he looked at me before he solemnly reentered his ornate coach to return to the safety of Keats.

* * *

In the dozen years which followed I left the city only half a dozen times; once to find a biosculptor who could rid me of my satyr affectation, the other times to buy food and supplies. The Shrike Temple had renewed the Shrike pilgrimages by this time, and on my trips I would use their elaborate avenue to death in reverse—the walk to Chronos Keep, the aerial tram across the Bridle Range, the windwagons, and the Charon barge down the Hoolie. Coming back, I would stare at the pilgrims and wonder who would survive.

Few visited the City of Poets. Our half-finished towers began to look like tumbled ruins. The gallerias with their splendid metal-glass domes and covered arcades grew heavy with vines; pyreweed and scargrass poked up between the flagstones. The SDF added to the chaos, setting mines and booby traps to kill the Shrike, but only succeeding in devastating once beautiful sections of the city. Irrigation broke down. The aqueduct collapsed. The desert encroached. I moved from room to room in King Billy’s abandoned palace, working on my poem, waiting for my muse.

   When you think about it, the cause-effect begins to resemble some mad logic-loop by the data artist Carolus or perhaps a print by Escher: the Shrike had come into existence because of the incantatory powers of my poem but the poem could not have existed without the threat/presence of the Shrike as muse. Perhaps I was a bit mad in those days.

In a dozen years sudden death culled the city of dilettantes until only the Shrike and I remained. The annual passage of the Shrike Pilgrimage was a minor irritation, a distant caravan crossing the desert to the Time Tombs. Sometimes a few figures returned, fleeing across vermilion sands to the refuge of Chronos Keep twenty kilometers to the southwest. More often, no one emerged.

I watched from the shadows of the city. My hair and beard had grown until they covered some of the rags I wore. I came out mostly at night, moving through the ruins like a furtive shadow, sometimes
gazing at my lighted palace tower like David Hume peering in his own windows and solemnly deciding that he wasn’t home. I never moved the food synthesizer from the dining dome to my apartments, preferring instead to eat in the echoing silence under that cracked
duomo
like some addled Eloi fattening himself up for the inevitable Morlock.

I never saw the Shrike. Many nights, just before dawn, I would awaken from a nap at a sudden sound—the scratch of metal on stone, the rasp of sand under something’s foot—but although I was often sure that I was being watched, I never saw the watcher.

Occasionally I made the short trip to the Time Tombs, especially at night, avoiding the soft, disconcerting tugs of the anti-entropic time tides while I moved through complicated shadows under the wings of the Sphinx or stared at stars through the emerald wall of the Jade Tomb. It was upon my return from one of these nocturnal pilgrimages that I found an intruder in my study.

“Impressive, M-M-M-Martin,” said King Billy, tapping one of several heaps of manuscript which lay about the room. Seated in the oversized chair at the long table, the failed monarch looked old, more melted than ever. It was obvious that he had been reading for several hours. “Do you r-r-really think that mankind d-d-d-deserves such an end?” he asked softly. It had been a dozen years since I had heard the stutter.

I moved away from the door but did not answer. Billy had been a friend and patron for more than twenty standard years, but at that moment I could have killed him. The thought of someone reading
Hyperion
without permission filled me with rage.

“You d-d-date your p-p-p … cantos?” said King Billy, riffling through the most recent stack of completed pages.

“How did you get here?” I snapped. It was not an idle question. Skimmers, dropships, and helicopters had not had much luck flying to the Time Tombs region in recent years. The machines arrived
sans
passengers. It had done wonders in fueling the Shrike myth.

The little man in the rumpled cape shrugged. His uniform was meant to be brilliant and regal but merely made him look like an overweight Harlequin. “I followed the last batch of pilgrims,” he
said. “And then c-c-came down from Keep Chronos to visit. I notice that you’ve written nothing in many months, M-M-Martin. Can you explain that?”

I glowered in silence while sidling closer.

“Perhaps I can explain it,” said King Billy. He looked at the last completed page of
Hyperion Cantos
as if it had the answer to a long-puzzled riddle. “The last stanzas were written the same week last year that J. T. Telio disappeared.”

“So?” I had moved to the far edge of the table now. Feigning a casual attitude, I pulled a short stack of manuscript pages closer and moved them out of Billy’s reach.

“So that w-w-w-was … according to the SDF monitors … the d-d-date of the death of the last remaining Poets’ City dweller,” he said. “The last except for y-y-you, that is, Martin.”

I shrugged and began moving around the table. I needed to get to Billy without getting the manuscript in the way.

“You know, you haven’t f-f-f-finished it, Martin,” he said in his deep, sad voice. “There is still some chance that humanity s-s-s-survives the Fall.”

“No,” I said and sidled closer.

“But you can’t write it, can you, Martin? You can’t c-c-c-compose this poetry unless your m-m-muse is shedding blood, can you?”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Perhaps. But a fascinating coincidence. Have you ever wondered why
you
have been spared, Martin?”

I shrugged again and slid another stack of papers out of his reach. I was taller, stronger, and meaner than Billy, but I had to be sure that none of the manuscript would be damaged if he struggled as I lifted him out of his seat and threw him out.

“It’s t-t-t-time we did something about this problem,” said my patron.

“No,” I said, “it’s time you left.” I shoved the last stacks of poetry aside and raised my arms, surprised to see a brass candlestick in one hand.

“Stop right there, please,” King Billy said softly and lifted a neural stunner from his lap.

I paused only a second. Then I laughed. “You miserable little hangdog fraud,” I said. “You couldn’t use a fucking weapon if your life depended on it.”

I stepped forward to beat him up and throw him out.

   My cheek was against the stone of the courtyard but one eye was open enough for me to see that stars still shone through the broken latticework of the galleria dome. I could not blink. My limbs and torso tingled with the pinpricks of returning sensation, as if my entire body had fallen asleep and was now coming painfully awake. It made me want to scream, but my jaw and tongue refused to work. Suddenly I was lifted and propped against a stone bench so that I could see the courtyard and the dry fountain which Rithmet Corbet had designed. The bronze Laocoön wrestled with bronze snakes in the flickering illumination of the predawn meteor showers.

“I’m s-s-sorry, Martin,” came a familiar voice, “b-b-but this m-m-madness has to end.” King Billy came into my field of view carrying a tall stack of manuscript. Other heaps of pages lay on the shelf of the fountain at the foot of the metal Trojan. An open bucket of kerosene sat nearby.

I managed to blink. My eyelids moved like rusted iron.

“The stun should w-w-wear off any s-s-s … any minute,” said King Billy. He reached into the fountain, raised a sheaf of manuscript, and ignited it with a flick of his cigarette lighter.

“No!” I managed to scream through clenched jaws.

The flames danced and died. King Billy let the ashes drop into the fountain and lifted another stack of pages, rolling them into a cylinder. Tears glistened on lined cheeks illuminated by flame. “You c-c-called it f-f-forth,” gasped the little man. “It must be f-f-finished.”

I struggled to rise. My arms and legs jerked like a marionette’s mishandled limbs. The pain was incredible. I screamed again and the agonized sound echoed from marble and granite.

King Billy lifted a fat sheaf of papers and paused to read from the top page:

King Billy raised his face to the stars and consigned this page to flame.

“No!” I cried again and forced my legs to bend. I got to one knee, tried to steady myself with an arm ablaze with pinpricks, and fell on my side.

The shadow in the cape lifted a stack too thick to roll and peered at it in the dim light.

King Billy moved his lighter and this and fifty other pages burst into flame. He dropped the burning papers into the fountain and reached for more.

“Please!” I cried and pulled myself up, stiffening my legs against the twitches of random nerve impulses while leaning against the stone bench. “Please.”

The third figure did not actually appear so much as allow its
presence to impinge upon my consciousness; it was as if it always had been there and King Billy and I had failed to notice it until the flames grew bright enough. Impossibly tall, four-armed, molded in chrome and cartilage, the Shrike turned its red gaze on us.

King Billy gasped, stepped back, and then moved forward to feed more cantos to the fire. Embers rose on warm drafts. A flight of doves burst from the vine-choked girders of the broken dome with an explosion of wing sound.

I moved forward in a motion more lurch than step. The Shrike did not move, did not shift its bloody gaze.

“Go!” cried King Billy, stutter forgotten, voice exalted, a blazing mass of poetry in each hand. “Return to the pit from whence you came!”

The Shrike seemed to incline its head ever so slightly. Red light gleamed on sharp surfaces.

“My lord!” I cried, although to King Billy or the apparition from hell I did not know then and know not now. I staggered the last few paces and reached for Billy’s arm.

He was not there. One second the aging King was a hand’s length from me and in the next instant he was ten meters away, raised high above the courtyard stones. Fingers like steel thorns pierced his arms and chest and thighs, but he still writhed and my
Cantos
burned in his fists. The Shrike held him out like a father offering his son for baptism.

“Destroy it!” Billy cried, his pinned arms making pitiful gestures. “Destroy it!”

I stopped at the fountain’s edge, tottered weakly against the rim. At first I thought he meant destroy the Shrike … and then I thought he meant the poem … and then I realized that he meant both. A thousand pages and more of manuscript lay tumbled in the dry fountain. I picked up the bucket of kerosene.

The Shrike did not move except to pull King Billy slowly back against his chest in an oddly affectionate motion. Billy writhed and screamed silently as a long steel thorn emerged from his harlequin silk just above the breastbone. I stood there stupidly and thought of butterfly collections I had displayed as a child. Slowly, mechanically, I sloshed kerosene on the scattered pages.

“End it!” gasped King Billy. “Martin, for the love of God!”

I picked up the lighter from where he had dropped it. The Shrike made no move. Blood soaked the black patches of Billy’s tunic until they blended with the crimson squares already there. I thumbed the antique lighter once, twice, a third time; sparks only. Through my tears I could see my life’s work lying in the dusty fountain. I dropped the lighter.

Billy screamed. Dimly, I heard blades rubbing bone as he twisted in the Shrike’s embrace. “Finish it!” he cried. “Martin … oh, God!”

I turned then, took five fast paces, and threw the half-full bucket of kerosene. Fumes blurred my already blurred vision. Billy and the impossible creature that held him were soaked like two comics in a slapstick holie. I saw Billy blink and splutter, I saw the slickness on the Shrike’s chiseled muzzle reflect the meteor-brightened sky, and then the dying embers of burned pages in Billy’s still clenched fists ignited the kerosene.

I raised my hands to protect my face—too late, beard and eyebrows singed and smoldered—and staggered backward until the rim of the fountain stopped me.