The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (144 page)

Words assail me. The thought of books makes me ache. Poetry echoes in my mind, and if I had the ability to banish it, I would do so at once.

Martin Silenus: I hear you on your living cross of thorns. You chant poetry as a mantra while wondering what Dante-like god condemned you to such a place. Once you said—I was there in my mind while you told your tale to the others!—you said:

“To be a poet, I realized, a
true poet
, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.

“To be a
true poet
is to become God.”

Well, Martin, old colleague, old chum, you’re carrying the cross
and suffering the pangs, but are you any closer to becoming God? Or do you just feel like some poor idiot who’s had a three-meter javelin shoved through his belly, feeling cold steel where your liver used to be? It hurts, doesn’t it? I feel your hurt. I feel
my
hurt.

In the end, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.

God
damn
it hurts. The urge to vomit is constant, but retching brings up bits of my lungs as well as bile and phlegm. For some reason it’s as difficult, perhaps more difficult, this time. Dying should become easier with practice.

The fountain in the Piazza makes its idiot sounds in the night. Somewhere out there the Shrike waits. If I were Hunt, I’d leave at once—embrace Death if Death offers embrace—and have done with it.

I promised him, though. I promised Hunt I’d try.

I can’t reach the megasphere or datasphere without passing through this new thing I think of as the metasphere, and this place frightens me.

It is mostly vastness and emptiness here, so different from the urban analogy landscapes of the Web’s datasphere and the biosphere analogs of the Core’s megasphere. Here it is … unsettled. Filled with strange shadows and shifting masses that have nothing to do with the Core Intelligences.

I move quickly to the dark opening I see as the primary farcaster connection to the megasphere. (Hunt was right … there must be a farcaster somewhere on the Old Earth replica … we did, after all, arrive by farcaster. And my consciousness is a Core phenomenon.) This then is my lifeline, my persona umbilical. I slide into the spinning black vortex like a leaf in a tornado.

Something is wrong with the megasphere. As soon as I emerge, I sense the difference; Lamia had perceived the Core environment as a busy biosphere of AI life, with roots of intellect, soil of rich data, oceans of connections, atmospheres of consciousness, and the humming, ceaseless shuttle of activity.

Now that activity is wrong, unchanneled,
random
. Great forests of
AI consciousness have been burned or swept aside. I sense massive forces in opposition, tidal waves of conflict surging outside the sheltered travelways of the main Core arteries.

It is as if I am a cell in my own Keats-doomed dying body, not understanding but sensing the tuberculosis destroying homeostasis and throwing an ordered internal universe into anarchy.

I fly like a homing pigeon lost in the ruins of Rome, swooping between once-familiar and half-remembered artifacts, trying to rest in shelters that no longer exist, and fleeing the distant sounds of the hunters’ guns. In this case, the hunters are roving packs of AIs, consciousness personas so great that they dwarf my Keats-ghost analog as if I were an insect buzzing in a human home.

I forget my way and flee mindlessly through the now-alien landscape, sure that I will not find the AI whom I seek, sure that I will never find my way back to Old Earth and Hunt, sure that I will not survive this four-dimensional maze of light and noise and energy.

Suddenly I slap into an invisible wall, the flying insect caught in a swiftly closing palm. Opaque walls of force blot out the Core beyond. The space may be the analog equivalent of a solar system in size, but I feel as if it is a tiny cell with curved walls closing in.

Something is in here with me. I feel its presence and its mass. The bubble in which I have been imprisoned is part of the thing.
I have not been captured, I have been swallowed
.

[Kwatz!]

[I knew you would come home someday]

It is Ummon, the AI whom I seek. The AI who was my father. The AI who killed my brother, the first Keats cybrid.

—
I’m dying, Ummon
.

[No/ your slowtime body is dying/changing toward nonbeing/becoming]

—
It hurts, Ummon. It hurts a lot. And I’m afraid to die
.

[So are we/ Keats]

—
You’re afraid to die? I didn’t think AI constructs could die
.

[We can
We are]

—
Why? Because of the civil war? The three-way battle among the Stables, the Volatiles, and the Ultimates?

[Once Ummon asked a lesser light

Where have you come from>///

From the matrix above Armaghast

Said the lesser light/// Usually

said Ummon

I don’t entangle entities

with words

and bamboozle them with phrases/

Come a little closer\\\

The lesser light came nearer

and Ummon shouted
Be off

with you]

—
Talk sense, Ummon. It has been too long since I have decoded your koans. Will you tell me why the Core is at war and what I must do to stop it?

[Yes]

[Will you/can you/should you listen>]

—
Oh yes
.