The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (18 page)

For a second the Consul felt lost, disoriented on a world he thought he knew well, but then he remembered the claxon at the Karla Locks and realized that they had entered a rarely used stretch of the Hoolie north of Doukhobor’s Copse. The Consul had never seen this part of the river, having always traveled on or flown above the Royal Transport Canal which lay to the west of the bluffs. He could only surmise that some danger or disturbance along the main route to the Sea of Grass had sent them this back way along bypassed stretches of the Hoolie. He guessed that they were about a hundred and eighty kilometers northwest of Keats.

“It looks different in the daylight, doesn’t it?” said Father Hoyt.

The Consul looked at the shore again, not sure what Hoyt was talking about; then he realized the priest meant the barge.

It had been strange—following the android messenger in the rain, boarding the old barge, making their way through its maze of tessellated rooms and passages, picking up Het Masteen at the ruins of the Temple, and then watching the lights of Keats fall astern.

The Consul remembered those hours before and after midnight as from a fatigue-blurred dream, and he imagined the others must have been just as exhausted and disoriented. He vaguely remembered his surprise that the barge’s crew were all android, but mostly he recalled his relief at finally closing the door of his stateroom and crawling into bed.

“I was talking to A. Bettik this morning,” said Weintraub, referring to the android who had been their guide. “This old scow has quite a history.”

Martin Silenus moved to the sideboard to pour himself more tomato juice, added a dash of something from the flask he carried, and said, “It’s obviously been around a bit. The goddamn railings’ve been oiled by hands, the stairs worn by feet, the ceilings darkened by lamp soot, and the beds beaten saggy by generations of humping. I’d say it’s several centuries old. The carvings and rococo finishes
are fucking marvelous. Did you notice that under all the other scents the inlaid wood still smells of sandalwood? I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing came from Old Earth.”

“It does,” said Sol Weintraub. The baby, Rachel, slept on his arm, softly blowing bubbles of saliva in her sleep. “We’re on the proud ship
Benares
, built in and named after the Old Earth city of the same name.”

“I don’t remember hearing of any Old Earth city with that name,” said the Consul.

Brawne Lamia looked up from the last of her breakfast. “Benares, also known as Varanasi or Gandhipur, Hindu Free State. Part of the Second Asian Co-prosperity Sphere after the Third Sino-Japanese War. Destroyed in the Indo-Soviet Muslim Republic Limited Exchange.”

“Yes,” said Weintraub, “the
Benares
was built quite some time before the Big Mistake. Mid-twenty-second century, I would guess. A. Bettik informs me that it was originally a levitation barge …”

“Are the EM generators still down there?” interrupted Colonel Kassad.

“I believe so,” said Weintraub. “Next to the main salon on the lowest deck. The floor of the salon is clear lunar crystal. Quite nice if we were cruising at two thousand meters … quite useless now.”

“Benares,” mused Martin Silenus. He ran his hand lovingly across a time-darkened railing. “I was robbed there once.”

Brawne Lamia put down her coffee mug. “Old man, are you trying to tell us that you’re ancient enough to remember
Old Earth?
We’re not fools, you know.”

“My dear child,” beamed Martin Silenus, “I am not trying to tell you anything. I just thought it might be entertaining—as well as edifying and enlightening—if at some point we exchanged lists of all the locations at which we have either robbed or been robbed. Since you have the unfair advantage of having been the daughter of a senator, I am sure that your list would be much more distinguished … and
much
longer.”

Lamia opened her mouth to retort, frowned, and said nothing.

“I wonder how this ship got to Hyperion?” murmured Father
Hoyt. “Why bring a levitation barge to a world where EM equipment doesn’t work?”

“It would work,” said Colonel Kassad. “Hyperion has
some
magnetic field. It just would not be reliable in holding anything airborne.”

Father Hoyt raised an eyebrow, obviously at a loss to see the distinction.

“Hey,” cried the poet from his place at the railing, “the gang’s all here!”

“So?” said Brawne Lamia. Her lips all but disappeared into a thin line whenever she spoke to Silenus.

“So we’re all here,” he said. “Let’s get on with the storytelling.”

Het Masteen said, “I thought it had been agreed that we would tell our respective stories after the dinner hour.”

Martin Silenus shrugged. “Breakfast, dinner, who the fuck cares? We’re assembled. It’s not going to take six or seven days to get to the Time Tombs, is it?”

The Consul considered. Less than two days to get as far as the river could take them. Two more days, or less if the winds were right, on the Sea of Grass. Certainly no more than one more day to cross the mountains. “No,” he said. “Not quite six days.”

“All right,” said Silenus, “then let’s get on with the telling of tales. Besides, there’s no guarantee that the Shrike won’t come calling before we knock on his door. If these bedtime stories are supposed to be helpful to our survival chances in some way, then I say let’s hear from everyone before the contributors start getting chopped and diced by that ambulatory food processor we’re so eager to visit.”

“You’re disgusting,” said Brawne Lamia.

“Ah, darling,” smiled Silenus, “those are the same words you whispered last night after your second orgasm.”

Lamia looked away. Father Hoyt cleared his throat and said, “Whose turn is it? To tell a story, I mean?” The silence stretched.

“Mine,” said Fedmahn Kassad. The tall man reached into the pocket of his white tunic and held up a slip of paper with a large 2 scribbled on it.

“Do you mind doing this now?” asked Sol Weintraub.

Kassad showed a hint of a smile. “I wasn’t in favor of doing it at all,” he said, “but if it were done when ‘tis done, then’ twere well it were done quickly.”

“Hey!” cried Martin Silenus. “The man knows his pre-Hegira playwrights.”

“Shakespeare?” said Father Hoyt.

“No,” said Silenus. “Lerner and fucking Lowe. Neil buggering Simon. Hamel fucking Posten.”

“Colonel,” Sol Weintraub said formally, “the weather is nice, none of us seems to have anything pressing to do in the next hour or so, and we would be obliged if you would share the tale of what brings you to Hyperion on the Shrike’s last pilgrimage.”

Kassad nodded. The day grew warmer as the canvas awning snapped, the decks creaked, and the levitation barge
Benares
worked its steady way upstream toward the mountains, the moors, and the Shrike.

THE SOLDIER’S TALE:
THE WAR LOVERS

It was during the Battle of Agincourt that Fedmahn Kassad encountered the woman he would spend the rest of his life seeking.

It was a wet and chilly late October morning in
A.D
. 1415.
Kassad had been inserted as an archer into the army of Henry V of England. The English force had been on French soil since August 14 and had been retreating from superior French forces since October 8. Henry had convinced his War Council that the army could beat the French in a forced march to the safety of Calais. They had failed. Now, as October 25 dawned gray and drizzly, seven thousand Englishmen, mostly bowmen, faced a force of some twenty-eight thousand French men-at-arms across a kilometer of muddy field.

Kassad was cold, tired, sick, and scared. He and the other archers had been surviving on little more than scavenged berries for the past week of the march and almost every man on the line that morning was suffering from diarrhea. The air temperature was in the low fifties Fahrenheit and Kassad had spent a long night trying to sleep on damp ground. He was impressed with the unbelievable realism of the experience—the Olympus Command School Historical Tactical Network was as far beyond regular stimsims as full-form holos were beyond tintypes—but the physical sensations were so convincing, so
real
, that Kassad did not relish the thought of being wounded. There were tales of cadets receiving fatal wounds in the OCS:HTN sims and being pulled dead from their immersion creches.

Kassad and the other bowmen on Henry’s right flank had been staring at the larger French force for most of the morning when pennants waved, the fifteenth-century equivalent of sergeants brayed, and the archers obeyed the King’s command and began marching against the enemy. The ragged English line, stretching about seven hundred meters across the field from treeline to treeline, consisted of clusters of archers like Kassad’s troop interspersed with smaller groups of men-at-arms. The English had no formal cavalry and most of the horses Kassad could see on his end of the field were carrying men clustered near the King’s command group three hundred meters toward the center, or huddled around the Duke of York’s position much closer to where Kassad and the other archers stood near the right flank. These command groups reminded Kassad of a FORCE:ground mobile staff HQ, only instead of the inevitable forest of comm antennae giving away their position, bright banners
and pennants hung limp on pikes. An obvious artillery target, thought Kassad, and then reminded himself that this particular military nuance did not yet exist.

Kassad noticed that the French had plenty of horses. He estimated six or seven hundred mounted men formed in ranks on each of the French flanks and a long line of cavalry behind the main battle line. Kassad did not like horses. He had seen holos and pictures, of course, but he had not encountered the animals themselves until this exercise, and the size, smell, and sound of them tended to be unnerving—especially so when the damn quadrupeds were armored chest and head, shod in steel, and trained to carry armored men wielding four meters of lance.

The English advance halted. Kassad estimated that his battle line was about two hundred and fifty meters from the French. He knew from the experience of the past week that this was within longbow range, but he also knew that he would have to pull his arm half out of its socket to hold the pull.

The French were shouting what Kassad assumed were insults. He ignored them as he and his silent comrades stepped forward from where they had planted their long arrows and found soft ground in which to drive their stakes. The stakes were long and heavy and Kassad had been carrying his for a week. Almost a meter and a half long, the clumsy thing had been sharpened at both ends. When the order first came down for all archers to find saplings and cut stakes, somewhere in the deep woods just after they had crossed the Somme, Kassad had wondered idly what the things were for. Now he knew.

Every third archer carried a heavy mallet and now they took turns driving their stakes in at a careful angle. Kassad pulled out his long knife, resharpened the end which, even leaning, rose almost to his chest, and stepped back through the hedgehog of sharpened stakes to await the French charge.

The French did not charge.

Kassad waited with the others. His bow was strung, forty-eight arrows were planted in two clusters at his feet, and his feet were set properly.

The French did not charge.

The rain had stopped but a cool breeze had come up and what
little body heat Kassad had generated by the short march and the task of driving stakes had been lost quickly. The only sounds were the metallic shufflings of men and horses, occasional mutterings or nervous laughs, and the heavier thud of hooves as the French cavalry rearranged itself but still refused to charge.

“Fuck this,” said a grizzled yeoman a few feet from Kassad. “Those bastards’ve wasted our whole bleeding morning. They’d better piss or get off the pot.”

Kassad nodded. He was not sure if he was hearing and understanding Middle English or if the sentence had been in simple Standard. He had no idea if the grizzled archer was another Command School cadet, an instructor, or merely an artifact of the sim. He could not guess if the slang had been correct. He did not care. His heart was pounding and his palms were sweaty. He wiped his hands on his jerkin.