The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (57 page)

“His apparent suicide?”

“Yeah.”

The wind moved gold grass in waves. Something very small scurried away in the stalks at our feet. “It is not beyond the realm of possibility, Brawne. But there was absolutely no evidence. Tell me what this cybrid is going to do.”

“First tell me why the Core is so interested in Hyperion.”

The older woman spread her hands. “If we knew that, Brawne, I would sleep much easier nights. As far as we know, the TechnoCore has been obsessed with Hyperion for centuries. When CEO Yevshensky allowed King Billy of Asquith to recolonize the planet, it almost precipitated a true secession of AIs from the Web. Recently the establishment of our fatline transmitter there brought about a similar crisis.”

“But the AIs didn’t secede.”

“No, Brawne, it appears that, for whatever reason, they need us almost as badly as we need them.”

“But if they’re so interested in Hyperion, why don’t they allow it into the Web so they can go there themselves?”

Gladstone ran a hand through her hair. The bronze clouds far above rippled in what must be a fantastic jet stream. “They are adamant about Hyperion not being admitted to the Web,” she said. “It is an interesting paradox. Tell me what the cybrid is going to do.”

“First tell me why the Core is obsessed with Hyperion.”

“We do not know for sure.”

“Best guess then.”

CEO Gladstone removed the stem of grass from her mouth and regarded it. “We believe that the Core is embarked on a truly incredible project which would allow them to predict … everything.
To handle every variable of space, time, and history as a quantum of manageable information.”

“Their Ultimate Intelligence Project,” I said, knowing that I was being careless and not caring.

This time CEO Gladstone did register shock. “How do you know about that?”

“What does that project have to do with Hyperion?”

Gladstone sighed. “We don’t know for sure, Brawne. But we do know that there is an anomaly on Hyperion which they have not been able to factor into their predictive analyses. Do you know about the so-called Time Tombs that the Shrike Church holds holy?”

“Sure. They’ve been off limits to tourists for a while.”

“Yes. Because of an accident to a researcher there a few decades ago, our scientists have confirmed that the anti-entropic fields around the Tombs are not merely a protection against time’s erosive effects as has been widely believed.”

“What are they?”

“The remnants of a field … or force … which has actually propelled the Tombs and their contents backward in time from some distant future.”

“Contents?” I managed. “But the Tombs are empty. Ever since they were discovered.”

“Empty now,” said Meina Gladstone. “But there is evidence that they were full … will be full … when they open. In our near future.”

I stared at her. “How near?”

Her dark eyes remained soft but the movement of her head was final. “I’ve told you too much already, Brawne. You are forbidden to repeat it. We’ll ensure that silence if necessary.”

I hid my own confusion by finding a piece of grass to strip for chewing. “All right,” I said. “What’s going to come out of the Tombs? Aliens? Bombs? Some sort of reverse time capsules?”

Gladstone smiled tightly. “If we knew that, Brawne, we would be ahead of the Core, and we are not.” The smile disappeared. “One hypothesis is that the Tombs relate to some future war. A settling of future scores by rearranging the past, perhaps.”

“A war between who, for Chrissakes?”

She opened her hands again. “We need to be getting back, Brawne. Would you please tell me what the Keats cybrid is going to do now?”

I looked down and then back up to meet her steady gaze. I couldn’t trust anyone, but the Core and the Shrike Church already knew Johnny’s plans. If this was a three-sided game, perhaps each side should know in case there was a good guy in the bunch. “He’s going to invest all consciousness in the cybrid,” I said rather clumsily. “He’s going to become human, M. Gladstone, and then go to Hyperion. I’m going with him.”

The CEO of the Senate and All Thing, chief officer for a government which spanned almost two hundred worlds and billions of people, stared at me in silence for a long moment. Then she said, “He plans to go with the Templar ship on the pilgrimage then.”

“Yes.”

“No,” said Meina Gladstone.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the
Sequoia Sempervirens
will not be allowed to leave Hegemony space. There will be no pilgrimage unless the Senate decides it is in
our
interest.” Her voice was iron-hard.

“Johnny and I’ll go by spinship,” I said. “The pilgrimage is a loser’s game anyway.”

“No,” she said. “There will be no more civilian spinships to Hyperion for some time.”

The word “civilian” tipped me. “War?”

Gladstone’s lips were tight. She nodded. “Before most spinships could reach the region.”

“A war with … the Ousters?”

“Initially. View it as a way to force the issue between the TechnoCore and ourselves, Brawne. We will either have to incorporate the Hyperion system into the Web to allow it FORCE protection, or it will fall to a race which despises and distrusts the Core and all AIs.”

I didn’t mention Johnny’s comment that the Core had been in touch with the Ousters. I said, “A way to force the issue. Fine. But who manipulated the Ousters into attacking?”

Gladstone looked at me. If her face was Lincolnesque at that
moment, then Old Earth’s Lincoln was one tough son of a bitch. “It’s time to get back, Brawne. You appreciate how important it is that none of this information gets out.”

“I appreciate the fact that you wouldn’t have told me unless you had a reason to,” I said. “I don’t know who you want the stuff to go to, but I know I’m a messenger, not a confidante.”

“Don’t underestimate our resolve to keep this classified, Brawne.”

I laughed. “Lady, I wouldn’t underestimate your resolve in anything.”

Meina Gladstone gestured for me to step through the farcaster portal first.

   “I know a way we can discover what the Core is up to,” said Johnny as we rode alone in a rented jetboat on Mare Infinitus. “But it would be dangerous.”

“So what else is new?”

“I’m serious. We should only attempt it if we feel that it is imperative to understand what the Core fears from Hyperion.”

“I do.”

“We will need an operative. Someone who is an artist in datumplane operations. Someone smart but not so smart that they won’t take a chance. And someone who would risk everything and keep the secret just for the ultimate in cyberpuke pranks.”

I grinned at Johnny. “I’ve got just the man.”

   BB lived alone in a cheap apartment at the base of a cheap tower in a cheap TC
²
neighborhood. But there was nothing cheap about the hardware that filled most of the space in the four-room flat. Most of BB’s salary for the past standard decade had gone into state-of-the-art cyberpuke toys.

I started by saying that we wanted him to do something illegal. BB said that, as a public employee, he couldn’t consider such a thing. He asked what the thing was. Johnny began to explain. BB leaned forward and I saw the old cyberpuke gleam in his eyes from
our college days. I half expected him to try to dissect Johnny right there just to see how a cybrid worked. Then Johnny got to the interesting part and BB’s gleam turned into a sort of green glow.

“When I self-destruct my AI persona,” said Johnny, “the shift to cybrid consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but during that time my section of the Core perimeter defenses will drop. The security phages will fill the gap before too many more nanoseconds pass, but during that time …”

“Entry to the Core,” whispered BB, his eyes glowing like some antique VDT.

“It would be
very
dangerous,” stressed Johnny. “To my knowledge, no human operator has ever penetrated Core periphery.”

BB rubbed his upper lip. “There’s a legend that Cowboy Gibson did it before the Core seceded,” he mumbled. “But nobody believes it. And Cowboy disappeared.”

“Even if you penetrate,” said Johnny, “there would be insufficient time to access except for the fact that I have the data coordinates.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” whispered BB. He turned back to his console and reached for his shunt. “Let’s do it.”

“Now?” I said. Even Johnny looked taken aback.

“Why wait?” BB clicked in his shunt and attached metacortex leads, but left the deck idling. “Are we doing this, or what?”

I went over next to Johnny on the couch and took his hand. His skin was cool. He showed no expression now but I could imagine what it must be like to be facing imminent destruction of one’s personality and previous existence. Even if the transfer worked, the human with the John Keats persona would not be “Johnny.”

“He’s right,” said Johnny. “Why wait?”

I kissed him. “All right,” I said. “I’m going in with BB.”

“No!” Johnny squeezed my hand. “You can’t help and the danger would be terrible.”

I heard my own voice, as implacable as Meina Gladstone’s. “Perhaps. But I can’t ask BB to do this if I won’t. And I won’t leave you in there alone.” I squeezed his hand a final time and went over to sit by BB at the console. “How do I connect with this fucking thing, BB?”

* * *

You’ve read all the cyberpuke stuff. You know all about the terrible beauty of datumplane, the three-dimensional highways with their landscapes of black ice and neon perimeters and Day-Glo Strange Loops and shimmering skyscrapers of data blocks under hovering clouds of AI presence. I saw all of it riding piggyback on BB’s carrier wave. It was almost too much. Too intense. Too terrifying. I could
hear
the black threats of the hulking security phages; I could
smell
death on the breath of the counterthrust tapeworm viruses even through the ice screens; I could
feel
the weight of the AIs’ wrath above us—we were insects under elephants’ feet—and we hadn’t even
done
anything yet except travel approved dataways on a logged-in access errand BB had dreamed up, some homework stuff for his Flow Control Records and Statistics job.

And I was wearing stick-on leads, seeing things in a datumplane version of fuzzy black and white TV while Johnny and BB were viewing full stimsim holo, as it were.

I don’t know how they took it.

“OK,” whispered BB in some datumplane equivalent of a whisper, “we’re here.”

“Where?” All I saw was an infinite maze of bright lights and even brighter shadows, ten thousand cities arrayed in four dimensions.

“Core periphery,” whispered BB. “Hang on. It’s about time.”

I had no arms to hang on to and nothing physical in this universe to grasp, but I concentrated on the waveform shades that were our data truck and
clung
.

Johnny died then.

I’ve seen a nuclear explosion firsthand. When Dad was a senator he took Mom and me to Olympus Command School to see a FORCE demonstration. For the last course the audience viewing pod was farcast to some godforsaken world … Armaghast, I think … and a FORCE:ground recon platoon fired a clean tactical nuke at a pretend adversary some nine klicks away. The viewing pod was shielded with a class ten containment field, polarized, the nuke only a fifty-kiloton field tactical, but I’ll never forget the blast, the shock wave rocking the eighty-ton pod like a leaf on its repellers, the
physical shock of light so obscenely bright that it polarized our field to midnight and still brought tears to our eyes and clamored to get in.

This was worse.

A section of datumplane seemed to flash and then to implode on itself, reality flushed down a drain of pure black.

“Hang on!” BB screamed against datumplane static that rasped at my bones and we were whirling, tumbling, sucked into the vacuum like insects in an oceanic vortex.

Somehow, incredibly, impossibly, black-armored phages thrust toward us through the din and madness. BB avoided one, turned the other’s acid membranes against itself. We were being sucked into something colder and blacker than any void in our reality could ever be.

“There!” called BB, his voice analog almost lost in the tornado rush of ripping datasphere.

There what?
Then I saw it: a thin line of yellow rippling in the turbulence like a cloth banner in a hurricane. BB rolled us, found our own wave to carry us against the storm, matched coordinates that danced past me too quickly to see, and we were riding the yellow band into …

 … into what? Frozen fountains of fireworks. Transparent mountain ranges of data, endless glaciers of ROMworks, access ganglia spreading like fissures, iron clouds of semisentient internal process bubbles, glowing pyramids of primary source stuff, each guarded by lakes of black ice and armies of black-pulse phages.

“Shit,” I whispered to no one in particular.

BB followed the yellow band down, in, through. I felt a
connection
as if someone had suddenly given us a great mass to carry.

“Got it!” screamed BB, and suddenly there was a sound louder and larger than the maelstrom of noise surrounding and consuming us. It was neither klaxon nor siren, but it was both in its tone of warning and aggression.

We were climbing out of it all. I could see a vague wall of gray through the brilliant chaos and somehow knew it to be the periphery, the vacuum dwindling but still breaching the wall like a shrinking black stain. We were climbing out.

But not quickly enough.

The phages hit us from five sides. During the twelve years I’ve been an investigator I’ve been shot once, knifed twice. I’ve had more than this one rib broken. This hurt more than all that combined. BB was fighting and climbing at the same time.

My contribution to the emergency was to scream. I felt cold claws on us, pulling us down, back into the brightness and noise and chaos. BB was using some program, some formula of enchantment to fight them off. But not enough. I could feel the blows slamming home—not against me primarily, but connecting to the matrix analog that was BB.

We were sinking back. Inexorable forces had us in tow. Suddenly I felt Johnny’s presence and it was as if a huge, strong hand had scooped us up, lifted us through the periphery wall an instant before the stain snapped our lifeline to existence and the defensive field crashed together like steel teeth.