The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (112 page)

Heaven’s Gate was the first world on the list of invasion. I stepped through the Mudflat VIP portal and looked down from Rifkin Heights at the beautiful city which belied its name. It was deep night, so late the mech street sweepers were out, their brushes and sonics humming against cobblestone, but here there
was
movement, long lines of silent people at the Rifkin Heights public terminex and even longer lines visible below at the Promenade portals. Local police were in evidence, tall figures in brown impact coveralls, but if FORCE units were rushing to reinforce this area, they were invisible.

The people in the lines were not local residents—the Rifkin Heights and Promenade landowners almost certainly had private portals—but looked to be workers from the reclamation projects many klicks out beyond the fern forest and parks. There was no panic and very little conversation. The lines filed past with the patient stoicism of families shuffling toward a theme park attraction. Few carried anything larger than a travel bag or backpack.

Have we attained such equanimity
, I wondered,
that we handle ourselves with dignity even in the face of invasion?

Heaven’s Gate was thirteen hours from H-hour. I keyed my comlog to the All Thing.

“… if we can meet this threat, then worlds we love may remain free and the life of the Web may move forward into the sunlit future. But if we fail, then the whole Web, the Hegemony, everything we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made infinitely more sinister and protracted by the lights of science perverted and human freedom denied.

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the Hegemony of Man and its Protectorate and allies were to last ten thousand years, humankind will still say: ‘
This
was their finest hour.’ ”

Somewhere in the silent, fresh-smelling city below, shooting began. First came the rattle of fléchette guns, then the deep hum of antiriot stunners, then screams and the sizzle of weapon lasers. The crowd on the Promenade surged forward toward the terminex, but riot police emerged from the park, switched on powerful halogen searchlights which bathed the crowd in glare, and began ordering them through bullhorns to resume lines or disperse. The crowd hesitated, surged back and forth like a jellyfish caught in tricky currents, and then—spurred on by the sound of firing, louder and closer now—surged forward toward the portal platforms.

The riot cops fired tear gas and vertigo cannisters. Between the mob and the farcaster, violet interdiction fields whined into existence. A flight of military EMVs and security skimmers came in low over the city, searchlights stabbing downward. One of the beams of light caught me, held me until my comlog winked at an interrogation signal, and then moved on. It began to rain.

So much for equanimity
.

The police had secured the Rifkin Heights public terminex and were stepping through the private Atmospheric Protectorate portal I had used. I decided to go elsewhere.

There were FORCE commandos guarding the halls of Government House, screening the farcaster arrivals despite the fact that this portal was one of the most difficult to access in the Web. I passed through three checkpoints before reaching the executive/residential wing where
my apartments were. Suddenly, guards stepped out to empty the main hall and secure its tributaries, and Gladstone swept by accompanied by a swirling crowd of advisors, aides, and military leaders. Surprisingly, she saw me, brought her retinue to a clumsy halt, and spoke to me through the barricade of combat-armored Marines.

“How did you like the speech, M. No Man?”

“Fine,” I said. “Stirring. And stolen from Winston Churchill if I’m not mistaken.”

Gladstone smiled and shrugged slightly. “If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters.” The smile faded. “What is the news from the frontier?”

“The reality is just beginning to sink in,” I said. “Expect panic.”

“I always do,” said the CEO. “What news have you from the pilgrims?”

I was surprised. “The pilgrims? I haven’t been … dreaming.”

The current of Gladstone’s retinue and impending events began to sweep her away down the hall. “Perhaps you no longer need to sleep to dream,” she called. “Try it.”

I watched her go, was released to seek out my suite, found the door, and turned away in disgust with myself. I was retreating in fear and shock from the terror descending on us all. I would be quite happy to lie in bed, avoiding sleep, the covers pulled tight to my chin while I wept for the Web, for the child Rachel, and for myself.

I left the residential wing and found my way out to the central garden, wandering down graveled paths. Tiny microremotes buzzed like bees through the air, one pacing me as I passed through the rose garden, into the area where a sunken path twisted through steamy tropical plants, and into the Old Earth section near the bridge. I sat on the stone bench where Gladstone and I had talked.

Perhaps you no longer need to sleep to dream. Try it
.

I pulled my feet up on the bench, touched my chin to my knees, set fingertips against my temples, and closed my eyes.

THIRTY-TWO

Martin Silenus twists and writhes in the pure poetry of pain. A steel thorn two meters long enters his body between his shoulder blades and passes out through his chest, extending to a point a terrible, tapering meter beyond him. His flailing arms cannot touch the point. The thorn is frictionless, his sweaty palms and curling fingers can find no purchase there. Despite the thorn’s slickness to the touch, his body does not slide; he is as firmly impaled as a butterfly pinned for exhibition.

There is no blood.

In the hours after rationality returned through the mad haze of pain, Martin Silenus wondered about that. There is no blood. But there is pain. Oh yes, there is pain in abundance here—pain beyond the poet’s wildest imaginings of what pain was, pain beyond human endurance and the boundaries of suffering.

But Silenus endures. And Silenus suffers.

He screams for the thousandth time, a ragged sound, empty of content, free of language, even obscenities. Words fail to convey such agony. Silenus screams and writhes. After a while, he hangs limply, the long thorn bouncing slightly in response to his gyrations. Other people hang above, below, and behind him, but Silenus spends little time observing them. Each is separated by his or her own private cocoon of agony.

“
Why this is hell
,” thinks Silenus, quoting Marlowe, “
nor am I out of it
.”

But he knows it is not hell. Nor any afterlife. But he also knows that it is not some subbranch of reality; the thorn passes through his
body!
Eight centimeters of organic steel through his chest! But he has not
died. He does not bleed. This place was somewhere and something, but it was not hell and it was not living.

Time was strange here. Silenus had known time to stretch and slow before—the agony of the exposed nerve in the dentist’s chair, the kidney-stone pain in the Med clinic waiting room—time could slow, seem not to move as the hands of an outraged biological clock stood still in shock. But time did move then. The root canal was finished. The ultramorph finally arrived, took effect. But here the very air is frozen in the absence of time. Pain is the curl and foam of a wave
that does not break
.

Silenus screams in anger and pain. And writhes upon his thorn.

“Goddamn!” he manages at last. “Goddamn motherfuck sonofabitch.” The words are relics of a different life, artifacts from the dream he had lived before the reality of the tree. Silenus only half remembers that life, as he only half remembers the Shrike carrying him here, impaling him here, leaving him here.

“Oh
God!
” screams the poet and clutches at the thorn with both hands, trying to lever himself up to relieve the great weight of his body which adds so immeasurably to the unmeasurable pain.

There is a landscape below. He can see for miles. It is a frozen, papier-mâché diorama of the Valley of the Time Tombs and the desert beyond. Even the dead city and the distant mountains are reproduced in plasticized, sterile miniature. It does not matter. For Martin Silenus there is only the tree and the pain, and the two are indivisible. Silenus shows his teeth in a pain-cracked smile. When he was a child on Old Earth, he and Amalfi Schwartz, his best friend, had visited a commune of Christians in the North American Preserve, learned their crude theology, and afterward had made many jokes about crucifixion. Young Martin had spread his arms wide, crossed his legs, lifted his head, and said, “Gee, I can see the whole town from up here.” Amalfi had roared.

Silenus screams.

Time does not truly pass, but after a while Silenus’s mind returns to something resembling linear observation … something other than the scattered oases of clear, pure agony separated by the desert of mindlessly received agony … and in that linear perception of his own pain, Silenus begins to impose time on this timeless place.

First, the obscenities add clarity to his pain. Shouting hurts, but his anger clears and clarifies.

Then, in the exhausted times between shouting or pure spasms of
pain, Silenus allows himself thought. At first it is merely an effort to sequence, to recite the times tables in his mind, anything to separate the agony of ten seconds ago from the agony yet to come. Silenus discovers that in the effort of concentrating, the agony is lessened slightly—still unbearable, still driving all true thought like wisps before a wind, but lessened some indefinable amount.

So Silenus concentrates. He screams and rails and writhes, but he concentrates. Since there is nothing else to concentrate on, he concentrates on the pain.

Pain, he discovers, has a structure. It has a floor plan. It has designs more intricate than a chambered nautilus, features more baroque than the most buttressed Gothic cathedral. Even as he screams, Martin Silenus studies the structure of this pain. He realizes that it is a poem.

Silenus arches his body and neck for the ten-thousandth time, seeking relief where no relief is possible, but this time he sees a familiar form five meters above him, hanging from a similar thorn, twisting in the unreal breeze of agony.

“Billy!” gasps Martin Silenus, his first true thought.

His former liege lord and patron stares across a sightless abyss, made blind with the pain that had blinded Silenus, but turning slightly as if in response to the call of his name in this place beyond names.

“Billy!” cries Silenus again and then loses vision and thought to the pain. He concentrates on the structure of pain, following its patterns as if he were tracing the trunk and branches and twigs and thorns of the tree itself. “My lord!”

Silenus hears a voice above the screams and is amazed to find that both the screams and the voice are his:

He knows the verse, not his, John Keats’s, and feels the words further structuring the seeming chaos of pain around him. Silenus understands
that the pain has been with him since birth—the universe’s gift to a poet. It is a physical reflection of the pain he has felt and futilely tried to set to verse, to pin down with prose, all those useless years of life. It is worse than pain; it is unhappiness because the universe offers pain to all.

Silenus shouts it but does not scream. The roar of pain from the tree, more psychic than physical, abates for the barest fraction of a second. There is an island of distraction amidst this ocean of single-mindedness.

“Martin!”

Silenus arches, lifts his head, tried to focus through the haze of pain. Sad King Billy is looking at him.
Looking
.