The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (208 page)

“Great,” I said again. I lifted the belt with its bulky battery and harness and tossed it over the side of the raft. It sank beneath the violet waves without a trace.

“All set here,” said Aenea. She was sitting cross-legged on the hawking mat, which was floating twenty centimeters above the raft. “Want to look around with me?”

I did not argue, but sat behind her on the mat, folded my legs, and watched her tap the flight threads.

About five thousand meters up, gasping for air and leaning out over the edge of our little carpet, things seemed a lot scarier than they had on the raft. The violet sea was very big, very empty, and our raft only a speck below, a tiny black rectangle on the reticulated violet-and-black sea. From this altitude, the waves that had seemed so serious on the raft were invisible.

“I think I’ve found another level of that ‘fellowship with essence’ response to nature that your father wrote about,” I said.

“What’s that?” Aenea was shivering in the cold air of the jet stream. She had worn just the undershirt and vest she had been wearing on the raft.

“Scared shitless,” I said.

Aenea laughed. I have to say here that I loved Aenea’s laugh then, and I warm at the thought of it now. It was a soft laugh,
but full and unselfconscious and melodic to the extreme. I miss it.

“We should have let A. Bettik come up to scout instead of us,” I said.

“Why?”

“From what he said about his high-altitude scouting before,” I said, “evidently he doesn’t need to breathe air, and he’s impervious to little things like depressurization.”

Aenea leaned back against me. “He’s not impervious to anything,” she said softly. “They just designed his skin to be a little tougher than ours—it can act like a pressure suit for short periods, even in hard vacuum—and he can hold his breath a bit longer, that’s all.”

I looked at her. “Do you know a lot about androids?”

“No,” said Aenea, “I just asked him.” She scooted forward a bit and laid her hands on the control threads. We flew “east.”

I admit that I was terrified of the thought of losing contact with the raft, of flying around this ocean-planet until these flight threads lost their charge and we plummeted to the sea, probably to be eaten by a Lamp Mouth Leviathan. I’d programmed my inertial compass with the raft as a starting point, so unless I dropped the compass—which was unlikely because I now kept it on a lanyard around my neck—we would find our way back, all right. But still I worried.

“Let’s not go too far,” I said.

“All right.” Aenea was keeping the speed down, about sixty or seventy klicks, I guessed, and had swooped back down to where we could breathe more easily and the air was not so cold. Below us, the violet sea stayed empty in a great circle to the horizon.

“Your farcasters seem to be playing tricks on us,” I said.

“Why do you call them my farcasters, Raul?”

“Well, you’re the one they … recognize.”

She did not answer.

“Seriously,” I said, “do you think there’s some rhyme or reason to the worlds they’re sending us to?”

Aenea glanced over her shoulder at me. “Yes,” she said, “I do.”

I waited. The deflection fields were minimal at this speed, so the wind tossed the girl’s hair back toward my face.

“Do you know much about the Web?” she asked. “About farcasters?”

I shrugged, realized that she was not looking back at me now, and said aloud, “They were run by the AIs of the TechnoCore. According to both the Church and your Uncle Martin’s
Cantos
, the farcasters were some sort of plot by the AIs to use human brains—neurons—as a sort of giant DNA computer thingee. They were parasites on us each time a human transited the farcasters, right?”

“Right,” said Aenea.

“So every time we go through one of these portals, the AIs … wherever they are … are hanging on our brains like big, blood-filled ticks, right?” I said.

“Wrong,” said the girl. She swiveled toward me again. “Not all of the farcasters were built or put in place or maintained by the same elements of the Core,” she said. “Do Uncle Martin’s finished
Cantos
tell about the civil war in the Core that my father discovered?”

“Yeah,” I said. I closed my eyes in an effort to remember the actual stanzas of the oral tale I’d learned. It was my turn to recite: “In the
Cantos
it’s some sort of AI persona that the Keats cybrid talks to in the Core megasphere of dataspace,” I said.

“Ummon,” said the girl. “That was the AI’s name. My mother traveled there once with Father, but it was my … my uncle … the second Keats cybrid who had the final showdown with Ummon. Go on.”

“Why?” I said. “You must know the thing better than I do.”

“No,” she said. “Uncle Martin hadn’t gone back to work on the
Cantos
when I knew him.… He said he didn’t want to finish them. Tell me how he described what Ummon said about the civil war in the Core.”

I closed my eyes again.

“That was two hundred seventy-some standard years ago for you,” said Aenea. “That was right before the Fall.”

“Yeah,” I said, opening my eyes and searching the sea for anything other than violet waves.

“Did Uncle Martin’s poem explain the motivations of the Stables, Volatiles, and Ultimates?”

“More or less,” I said. “It’s hard to follow—the poem has Ummon and the other Core AIs speaking in Zen koans.”

Aenea nodded. “That’s about right.”

“According to the
Cantos
,” I said, “the group of Core AIs known as the Stables wanted to keep being parasites on our human brains when we used the Web. The Volatiles wanted to wipe us out. And I guess the Ultimates didn’t give much of a damn as long as they could keep working on the evolution of their own machine god … what’d they call it?”

“The UI,” said Aenea, slowing the carpet and swooping lower. “The Ultimate Intelligence.”

“Yes,” I said. “Pretty esoteric stuff. How does it relate to our going through these farcaster portals … if we ever find another portal?” At that moment I doubted that we would: the world was too big, the ocean too large. Even if the current was bearing our little raft in the right direction, the odds that we would float within that hundred-meter-or-so hoop of the next portal seemed too small to consider.

“Not all of the farcaster portals were built or maintained by the Stables to be … how did you put it?… like big ticks on our brains.”

“All right,” I said. “Who else built the farcasters?”

“The River Tethys farcasters were designed by the Ultimates,” said Aenea. “They were an … experiment, I guess you’d say … with the Void Which Binds. That’s the Core phrase … did Martin use it in his
Cantos
?”

“Yeah,” I said. We were lower now, just a thousand or so meters above the waves, but there was no sight of the raft or anything else. “Let’s head back,” I said.

“All right.” We consulted the compass and set our course home … if a leaky raft can be called home.

“I never understood what the hell the ‘Void Which Binds’ was supposed to be,” I said. “Some sort of hyperspace stuff that the farcasters used and where the Core was hiding while it preyed on us. I got that part. I thought it was destroyed when Meina Gladstone ordered bombs dropped into the farcasters.”

“You can’t destroy the Void Which Binds,” said Aenea, her voice remote, as if she were thinking about something else. “How did Martin describe it?”

“Planck time and Planck length,” I said. “I don’t remember exactly—something about combining the three fundamental constants of physics—gravity, Planck’s constant, and the speed of light. I remember it gave some tiny little units of length and time.”

“About 10
⁻³⁵
of a meter for the length,” said the girl, accelerating the carpet a bit. “And 10
⁻⁴³
of a second for time.”

“That doesn’t tell me much,” I said. “It’s just fucking small and short … pardon the language.”

“You’re absolved,” said the girl. We were gently gaining altitude. “But it wasn’t the time or length that was important, it was how they were woven into … the Void Which Binds. My father tried to explain it to me before I was born …”

I blinked at that phrase but continued listening.

“… you know about the planetary dataspheres.”

“Yes,” I said, and tapped the comlog. “This trinket says that Mare Infinitus doesn’t have one.”

“Right,” said Aenea. “But most of the Web worlds used to. And from the dataspheres, there was the megasphere.”

“The farcaster medium … the Void thing … linked dataspheres, right?” I said. “FORCE and the Hegemony electronic government, the All Thing, they used the megasphere as well as the fatline to stay connected.”

“Yep,” said Aenea. “The megasphere actually existed on a subplane of the fatline.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. The FTL medium had not existed in my lifetime.

“Do you remember what the last message on the fatline was before it went down during the Fall?” asked the child.

“Yes,” I said, closing my eyes. The lines of the poem did not come to me this time. The ending of the
Cantos
had always been too vague to interest me enough to memorize all those stanzas, despite Grandam’s drilling. “Some cryptic message from the Core,” I said. “Something about—get off the line and quit tying it up.”

“The message,” said Aenea, “was—THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL. YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS
PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s in the
Cantos
. I think. And then the hyperstring medium just quit working. The Core sent that message and shut down the fatline.”

“The Core did not send that message,” said Aenea.

I remember the slow chill that spread through me then, despite the heat of the two suns. “It didn’t?” I said stupidly. “Who did?”

“Good question,” said the child. “When my father talked about the metasphere—the wider datumplane that was somehow connected to or by the Void Which Binds—he always used to say it was filled with lions and tigers and bears.”

“Lions and tigers and bears,” I repeated. Those were Old Earth animals. I don’t think that any of them made the Hegira. I don’t think any of them were still around to make the trip—not even their stored DNA—when Old Earth crumbled into its black hole after the Big Mistake of ’08.

“Hmm-hmm,” said Aenea. “I’d like to meet them someday. There we are.”

I looked over her shoulder. We were about a thousand meters above the sea now, and the raft looked tiny but was clearly visible. A. Bettik was standing—shirtless once again in the midday heat—at the steering oar. He waved a bare blue arm. We both waved back.

“I hope there’s something good for lunch,” said Aenea.

“If not,” I said, “we’ll just have to stop at Gus’s Oceanic Aquarium and Grill.”

Aenea laughed and set up our glide path to home.

It was just after dark and the moons had not risen when we saw the lights blinking on the eastern horizon. We rushed to the front of the raft and tried to make out what was out there—Aenea using the binoculars, A. Bettik the night goggles on full amplification, and me the rifle’s scope.

“It’s not the arch,” said Aenea. “It’s a platform in the ocean—big—on stilts of some sort.”

“I do see the arch, however,” said the android, who was looking several degrees north of the blinking light. The girl and I looked in that direction.

The arch was just visible, a chord of negative space cutting into the Milky Way just above the horizon. The platform, with its blinking navigation beacons for aircraft and lamplit windows just becoming visible, was several klicks closer. And between us and the farcaster.

“Damn,” I said. “I wonder what it is.”

“Gus’s?” said Aenea.

I sighed. “Well, if it is, I think it’s under new ownership. There’s been a dearth of River Tethys tourists the last couple of centuries.” I studied the large platform through the rifle scope. “It has a lot of levels,” I muttered. “There are several ships tied up … fishing boats is my bet. And a pad for skimmers and other aircraft. I think I see a couple of thopters tied down there.”

“What’s a thopter?” asked the girl, lowering the binoculars.

A. Bettik answered. “A form of aircraft utilizing movable wings, much like an insect, M. Aenea. They were quite popular during the Hegemony, although rare on Hyperion. I believe they were also called dragonflies.”

“They’re still called that,” I said. “The Pax had a few on Hyperion. I saw one down on the Ursus iceshelf.” Raising the scope again, I could see the eyelike blisters on the front of the dragonfly, illuminated by a lighted window. “They’re thopters,” I said.

“It seems that we will have some trouble passing that platform to get to the arch undetected,” said A. Bettik.

“Quick,” I said, turning away from the blinking lights, “let’s get the tent and mast down.”

We had rerigged the tent to provide a sort of shelter/wall on the starboard side of the raft near the back—for purposes of privacy and sanitation that I won’t go into here—but now we tumbled the microfiber down and folded it away into a packet the size of my palm. A. Bettik lowered the pole at the front. “The steering oar?” he said.

I looked at it a second. “Leave it. It doesn’t have much of a radar cross section, and it’s no higher than we are.”

Aenea was studying the platform again through the binoculars. “I don’t think they can see us now,” she said. “We’re between these swells most of the time. But when we get closer …”

“And when the moons rise,” I added.

A. Bettik sat near the hearth. “If we could just go around in a large arc to get to the portal …”

I scratched my cheek, hearing the stubble there. “Yeah. I thought of using the flying belt to tow us, but …”

“We have the mat,” said the girl, joining us near the heating cube. The low platform seemed empty without the tent above it.