The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (39 page)

Wait. There had been old lights throughout the Sphinx maze but the research team had strung the glow-globes.
Strung
them. There was a perlon line connecting them all the way to the surface.

Fine. Rachel groped her way toward the exit, feeling the cold stone under her fingers. Was it this cold before?

There came the clear sound of something sharp scraping its way down the access shaft.

“Melio?” called Rachel into the blackness. “Tanya? Kurt?”

The scraping sounded very close. Rachel backed away, knocking over an instrument and chair in the blackness. Something touched her hair and she gasped, raised her hand.

The ceiling was lower. The solid block of stone, five meters square, slid lower even as she raised her other hand to touch it. The opening to the corridor was halfway up the wall. Rachel staggered toward it, swinging her hands in front of her like a blind person. She tripped over a folding chair, found the instrument table, followed it to the far wall, felt the bottom of the corridor shaft disappearing as the ceiling came lower. She pulled back her fingers a second before they were sliced off.

Rachel sat down in the darkness. An oscilloscope scraped against the ceiling until the table cracked and collapsed under it. Rachel moved her head in short, desperate arcs. There was a metallic rasp—almost a breathing sound—less than a meter from her. She began to back away, sliding across a floor suddenly filled with broken equipment. The breathing grew louder.

Something sharp and infinitely cold grasped her wrist.

Rachel screamed at last.

* * *

There was no fatline transmitter on Hyperion in those days. Nor did the spinship HS
Farraux City
have FTL-comm capability. So the first Sol and Sarai heard of their daughter’s accident was when the Hegemony consulate on Parvati fatlined the college that Rachel had been injured, that she was stable but unconscious, and that she was being transferred from Parvati to the Web world of Renaissance Vector via medical torchship. The trip would take a little over ten days’ shiptime with a five-month time-debt. Those five months were agony for Sol and his wife, and by the time the medical ship put in at the Renaissance farcaster nexus, they had imagined the worst a thousand times. It had been eight years since they had last seen Rachel.

The Med Center in DaVinci was a floating tower sustained by direct broadcast power. The view over the Como Sea was breathtaking but neither Sol nor Sarai had time for it as they went from level to level in search of their daughter. Dr. Singh and Melio Arundez met them in the hub of Intensive Care. Introductions were rushed.

“Rachel?” asked Sarai.

“Asleep,” said Dr. Singh. She was a tall woman, aristocratic but with kind eyes. “As far as we can tell, Rachel has suffered no physical … ah … injury. But she has been unconscious now for some seventeen standard weeks, her time. Only in the past ten days have her brain waves registered deep sleep rather than coma.”

“I don’t understand,” said Sol. “Was there an accident at the site? A concussion?”

“Something happened,” said Melio Arundez, “but we’re not sure what. Rachel was in one of the artifacts … alone … her comlog and other instruments recorded nothing out of the ordinary. But there was a surge in a phenomenon there known as anti-entropic fields … ”

“The time tides,” said Sol. “We know about them. Go on.”

Arundez nodded and opened his hands as if molding air. “There was a … field surge … more like a tsunami than a tide … the Sphinx … the artifact Rachel was in … was totally inundated. I
mean, there was no
physical
damage but Rachel was unconscious when we found her …” He turned to Dr. Singh for help.

“Your daughter was in a coma,” said the doctor. “It was not possible to put her into cryogenic fugue in that condition.…”

“So she came through quantum leap without fugue?” demanded Sol. He had read about the psychological damage to travelers who had experienced the Hawking effect directly.

“No, no,” soothed Singh. “She was unconscious in a way which shielded her quite as well as fugue state.”

“Is she
hurt?
” demanded Sarai.

“We don’t know,” said Singh. “All life signs have returned to near normal. Brain-wave activity is nearing a conscious state. The problem is that her body appears to have absorbed … that is, the anti-entropic field appears to have contaminated her.”

Sol rubbed his forehead. “Like radiation sickness?”

Dr. Singh hesitated. “Not precisely … ah … this case is quite unprecedented. Specialists in aging diseases are due in this afternoon from Tau Ceti Center, Lusus, and Metaxas.”

Sol met the woman’s gaze. “Doctor, are you saying that Rachel contracted some aging disease on Hyperion?” He paused a second to search his memory. “Something like Methuselah syndrome or early Alzheimer’s disease?”

“No,” said Singh, “in fact your daughter’s illness has no name. The medics here are calling it Merlin’s sickness. You see … your daughter is aging at a normal rate … but as far as we can tell, she is aging backward.”

Sarai pulled away from the group and stared at Singh as if the doctor were insane. “I want to see my daughter,” she said, quietly but very firmly. “I want to see Rachel
now
.”

   Rachel awakened less than forty hours after Sol and Sarai arrived. Within minutes she was sitting up in bed, talking even while the medics and technicians bustled around her. “
Mom! Dad!
What are you doing here?” Before either could answer, she looked around her and blinked. “Wait a minute, where’s
here
? Are we in Keats?”

Her mother took her hand. “We’re in a hospital in DaVinci, dear. On Renaissance Vector.”

Rachel’s eyes widened almost comically. “Renaissance. We’re in the
Web
?” She looked around her in total bewilderment.

“Rachel, what is the last thing you remember?” asked Dr. Singh.

The young woman looked uncomprehendingly at the medic. “The last thing I … I remember going to sleep next to Melio after …” She glanced at her parents and touched her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. “Melio? The others? Are they …”

“Everyone on the expedition is all right,” soothed Dr. Singh. “You had a slight accident. About seventeen weeks have passed. You’re back in the Web. Safe. Everyone in your party is all right.”

“Seventeen
weeks
 …” Under the fading remnant of her tan, Rachel went very pale.

Sol took her hand. “How do you feel, kiddo?” The return pressure on his fingers was heartbreakingly weak.

“I don’t know, Daddy,” she managed. “Tired. Dizzy.
Confused
.”

Sarai sat on the bed and put her arms around her. “It’s all right, baby. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Melio entered the room, unshaven, his hair rumpled from the nap he had been taking in the outer lounge. “Rache?”

Rachel looked at him from the safety of her mother’s arm. “Hi,” she said, almost shyly. “I’m back.”

   Sol’s opinion had been and continued to be that medicine hadn’t really changed much since the days of leeches and poultices; nowadays they whirred one in centrifuges, realigned the body’s magnetic field, bombarded the victim with sonic waves, tapped into the cells to interrogate the RNA, and then admitted their ignorance without actually coming out and saying so. The only thing that had changed was that the bills were bigger.

He was dozing in a chair when Rachel’s voice awoke him.

“Daddy?”

He sat up, reached for her hand. “Here, kiddo.”

“Where am I, Dad? What’s happened?”

“You’re in a hospital on Renaissance, baby. There was an accident on Hyperion. You’re all right now except it’s affecting your memory a bit.”

Rachel clung to his hand. “A hospital? In the Web? How’d I get here? How long have I been here?”

“About five weeks,” whispered Sol. “What’s the last thing you remember, Rachel?”

She sat back on her pillows and touched her forehead, feeling the tiny sensors there. “Melio and I had been at the meeting. Talking with the team about setting up the search equipment in the Sphinx. Oh … Dad … I haven’t told you about Melio … he’s …”

“Yes,” said Sol and handed Rachel her comlog. “Here, kiddo. Listen to this.” He left the room.

Rachel touched the diskey and blinked as her own voice began talking to her. “OK, Rache, you just woke up. You’re confused. You don’t know how you got here. Well, something’s happened to you, kid. Listen up.

“I’m recording this on the twelfth day of Tenmonth, year 457 of the Hegira,
A.D
. 2739 old reckoning. Yes, I
know
that’s half a standard year from the last thing you remember. Listen.

“Something happened in the Sphinx. You got caught up in the time tide. It changed you. You’re aging backward, as dumb as that sounds. Your body’s getting younger every minute, although that’s not the important part right now. When you sleep … when
we
sleep … you forget. You lose another day from your memory
before
the accident, and you lose everything since. Don’t ask me why. The doctors don’t know. The experts don’t know. If you want an analogy, just think of a tapeworm virus … one of the old kind … that’s chewing up the data in your comlog … 
backward
from the last entry.

“They don’t know why the memory loss hits you when you sleep, either. They tried stay-awakes, but after about thirty hours you just go catatonic for a while and the virus does its thing anyway. So what the hell.

“You know something? This talking about yourself in the third person is sort of therapeutic. Actually, I’m lying here waiting for them to take me up to imaging, knowing I’ll fall asleep when I get
back … knowing I’ll forget
everything
again … and it scares the shit out of me.

“OK, key the diskey for short-term and you get a prepared spiel here that should catch you up on everything since the accident. Oh … Mom and Dad are both here and they know about Melio. But
I
don’t know as much as I used to. When did we first make love with him, mmm? The second month on Hyperion? Then we have just a few weeks left, Rachel, and then we’ll be just acquaintances. Enjoy your memories while you can, girl.

“This is yesterday’s Rachel, signing off.”

Sol came in to find his daughter sitting upright in the bed, still grasping the comlog tightly, her face pale and terrified. “Daddy …”

He went to sit next to her and let her cry … for the twentieth night in a row.

   Eight standard weeks after she arrived on Renaissance, Sol and Sarai waved goodbye to Rachel and Melio at the DaVinci farcaster multiport and then farcast home to Barnard’s World.

“I don’t think she should have left the hospital,” muttered Sarai as they took the evening shuttle to Crawford. The continent was a patchwork of harvest-ready right angles below them.

“Mother,” said Sol, touching her knee, “the doctors would have kept her there forever. But they’re doing it for their own curiosity now. They’ve done everything they can to help her … nothing. She has a life to live.”

“But why go away with … with him?” said Sarai. “She barely knows him.”

Sol sighed and leaned back against the cushions of his seat. “In two weeks she won’t remember him at all,” he said. “At least in the way they share now. Look at it from her position, Mother. Fighting every day to reorient herself in a world gone mad. She’s twenty-five years old and in love. Let her be happy.”

Sarai turned her face to the window and together, not speaking, they watched the red sun hang like a tethered balloon on the edge of evening.

* * *

Sol was well into the second semester when Rachel called. It was a one-way message via farcaster cable from Freeholm and her image hung in the center of the old holopit like a familiar ghost.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Sorry I haven’t written or called the past few weeks. I guess you know that I’ve left the university. And Melio. It was dumb to try to take new graduate-level stuff. I’d just forget Tuesday whatever was discussed Monday. Even with disks and comlog prompts it was a losing battle. I may enroll in the undergraduate program again … I remember
all
of it! Just kidding.

“It was just too hard with Melio, too. Or so my notes tell me. It wasn’t
his
fault, I’m sure of that. He was gentle and patient and loving to the end. It’s just that … well, you can’t start from scratch on a relationship every
day
. Our apartment was filled with photos of us, notes I wrote to myself about us, holos of us on Hyperion, but … you know. In the morning he would be an absolute stranger. By afternoon I began to believe what we’d had, even if I couldn’t remember. By evening I’d be crying in his arms … then, sooner or later, I’d go to sleep. It’s better this way.”

Rachel’s image paused, turned as if she was going to break contact, and then steadied. She smiled at them. “So anyway, I’ve left school for a while. The Freeholm Med Center wants me full time but they’d have to get in line … I got an offer from the Tau Ceti Research Institute that’s hard to turn down. They offer a … I think they call it a ‘research honorarium’ … that’s bigger than what we paid for four years at Nightenhelser and all of Reichs combined.

“I turned them down. I’m still going in as an outpatient, but the RNA transplant series just leaves me with bruises and a depressed feeling. Of course, I could just be depressed because every morning I can’t remember where the bruises came from. Ha-ha.

“Anyway, I’ll be staying with Tanya for a while and then maybe … I thought maybe I’d come home for a while. Secondmonth’s my birthday … I’ll be twenty-two again. Weird, huh? At any rate, it’s a lot easier being around people I know and I met Tanya just after I transferred here when I was twenty-two … I think you understand.

“So … is my old room still there, Mom, or have you turned it into a mah-jongg parlor like you’ve always threatened? So write or give me a call. Next time I’ll shell out the money for two-way so we can really talk. I just … I guess I thought …”

Rachel waved. “Gottago. See you later, alligators. I love you both.”

   Sol flew to Bussard City the week before Rachel’s birthday to pick her up at the world’s only public farcaster terminex. He saw her first, standing with her luggage near the floral clock. She looked young but not noticeably younger than when they had waved goodbye on Renaissance Vector. No, Sol realized, there was something less
confident
about her posture. He shook his head to rid himself of such thoughts, called to her, and ran to hug her.