The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (152 page)

[Careful/

Keats/

thinking may become a habit]

—
And it’s the Empathy part of this trinity who’s fled back in time to avoid the war with your UI?

[Correct]

[Our UI and your UI have

sent back

the Shrike

to find him]

—
Our UI! The human UI sent the Shrike also?

[It allowed it]

[Empathy is a

foreign and useless thing/

a vermiform appendix of

the intellect

But the human UI smells with it/

and we use pain to

drive him out of hiding/

thus the tree]

—
Tree? The Shrike’s tree of thorns?

[Of course]

[It broadcasts pain

across fatline and thin/

like a whistle in

a dog’s ear

Or a god’s]

I feel my own analog form waver as the truth of things strikes me. The chaos beyond Ummon’s forcefield egg is beyond imagining now, as if the fabric of space itself were being rent by giant hands. The Core is in turmoil.

—
Ummon
, who
is the human UI in our time? Where is that consciousness hiding, lying dormant?

[You must understand/

Keats/

our only chance

was to create a hybrid/

Son of Man/

Son of Machine

And make that refuge so attractive

that the fleeing Empathy

would consider no other home/

A consciousness already as near divine

as humankind has offered in thirty

generations

an imagination which can span

space and time

And in so offering/

and joining/

form a bond between worlds

which might allow

that world to exist

for both]

—
Who, Goddamn you, Ummon! Who is it? No more of your riddles or double-talk you formless bastard! Who?

[You have refused

this godhood twice/

Keats

If you refuse

a final time/

all ends here/

for time there is

no more]

[Go!

Go and die to live!

Or live a while and die

for all of us!

Either way Ummon and the rest

are finished with

you!]

[Go away!]

And in my shock and disbelief I fall, or am cast out, and fly through the TechnoCore like a windblown leaf, tumbling through the megasphere without aim or guidance, then fall into darkness even deeper and emerge, screaming obscenities at shadows, into the metasphere.

Here, strangeness and vastness and fear and darkness with a single campfire of light burning below.

I swim for it, flailing against formless viscosity.

It’s Byron who drowns
, I think,
not I
. Unless one counts drowning in one’s own blood and shredded lung tissue.

But now I know I have a choice. I can choose to live and stay a mortal, not cybrid but human, not Empathy but poet.

Swimming against a strong current, I descend to the light.

“Hunt! Hunt!”

Gladstone’s aide staggers in, his long face haggard and alarmed. It is still night, but the false light of predawn dimly touches the panes, the walls.

“My God,” says Hunt and looks at me in awe.

I see his gaze and look down at the bedclothes and nightshirt soaked with bright arterial blood.

My coughing has awakened him; my hemorrhage brought me home.

“Hunt!” I gasp and lie back on the pillows, too weak to raise an arm.

The older man sits on the bed, clasps my shoulder, takes my hand. I know that he knows that I am a dying man.

“Hunt,” I whisper, “things to tell. Wonderful things.”

He shushes me. “Later, Severn,” he says. “Rest. I’ll get you cleaned up and you can tell me later. There’s plenty of time.”

I try to rise but succeed only in hanging onto his arm, my small fingers curled against his shoulder. “No,” I whisper, feeling the gurgling in my throat and hearing the gurgling in the fountain outside. “Not so much time. Not much at all.”

And I know at that instant, dying, that I am not the chosen vessel for the human UI, not the joining of AI and human spirit, not the Chosen One at all.

I am merely a poet dying far from home.

FORTY-TWO