The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (165 page)

Rachel gestured toward the open door of the Sphinx. “For some it will be a portal to the time I spoke of. But, Dad …” She hesitated. “It will mean raising me all over again. It means suffering through my childhood for a third time. No parent should be asked to do that.”

Sol managed a smile. “No parent would refuse that, Rachel.” He changed arms holding the sleeping infant, and shook his head again. “Will there be a time when … the two of you …?”

“Coexist again?” smiled Rachel. “No. I go the other way now. You can’t imagine the difficulty I had with the Paradox Board to get this one meeting approved.”

“Paradox Board?” said Sol.

Rachel took a breath. She had stepped back until only her fingertips touched her father’s, both their arms extended. “I have to go, Dad.”

“Will I …” He looked at the baby. “Will we be alone … up there?”

Rachel laughed, and the sound was so familiar that it closed around Sol’s heart like a warm hand. “Oh no,” she said, “not alone. There are wonderful people there. Wonderful things to learn and do. Wonderful places to see …” She glanced around. “Places we have not imagined yet in our wildest dreams. No, Dad, you won’t be alone. And I’ll be there, in all my teenage awkwardness and young-adult cockiness.” She stepped back, and her fingers slipped away from Sol.

“Wait a while before stepping through, Dad,” she called, moving back into the brilliance. “It doesn’t hurt, but once through you can’t come back.”

“Rachel, wait,” said Sol.

His daughter stepped back, her long robe flowing across stone, until
the light surrounded her. She raised one arm. “See you later, alligator!” she called.

Sol raised a hand. “After a while … crocodile.”

The older Rachel was gone in the light.

The baby awoke and began to cry.

It was more than an hour before Sol and the others returned to the Sphinx. They had gone to the Consul’s ship to tend to Brawne’s and Martin Silenus’s injuries, to eat, and to outfit Sol and the child for a voyage.

“I feel silly packing for what may be like a step through a farcaster,” said Sol, “but no wonder how wonderful this future is, if it doesn’t have nursing paks and disposable diapers, we’re in trouble.”

The Consul grinned and patted the full backpack on the step. “This should get you and the baby through the first two weeks. If you don’t find a diaper service by then, go to one of those other universes Rachel spoke about.”

Sol shook his head. “Is this happening?”

“Wait a few days or weeks,” said Melio Arundez. “Stay here with us until things get sorted out. There’s no hurry. The future will always be there.”

Sol scratched his beard as he fed the baby with one of the nursing paks the ship had manufactured. “We’re not sure this portal will always be open,” he said. “Besides, I might lose my nerve. I’m getting pretty old to raise a child again … especially as a stranger in a strange land.”

Arundez set his strong hand on Sol’s shoulder. “Let me go with you. I’m dying of curiosity about this place.”

Sol grinned and extended his hand, shook Arundez’s firmly. “Thank you, my friend. But you have a wife and children back in the Web … on Renaissance Vector … who await your return. You have your own duties.”

Arundez nodded and looked at the sky. “If we
can
return.”

“We’ll return,” the Consul said flatly. “Old-fashioned Hawking drive spaceflight still works, even if the Web is gone forever. It’ll be a few years’ time-debt, Melio, but you’ll get back.”

Sol nodded, finished feeding the baby, set a clean cloth diaper on his shoulder, and patted her firmly on the back. He looked around the small circle of people. “We all have our duties.” He shook hands with Martin Silenus. The poet had refused to crawl into the nutrient recovery
bath or have the neural shunt socket surgically removed. ‘I’ve had these things before,’ he’d said.

“Will you continue your poem?” Sol asked him.

Silenus shook his head. “I finished it on the tree,” he said. “And I discovered something else there, Sol.”

The scholar raised an eyebrow.

“I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God … or anything approaching a God … he’s a poet. And a failed one at that.”

The baby burped.

Martin Silenus grinned and shook Sol’s hand a final time. “Give them hell up there, Weintraub. Tell ’em you’re their great-great-great-great-great grandaddy, and if they misbehave, you’ll whop their butts.”

Sol nodded and moved down the line to Brawne Lamia. “I saw you conferring with the ship’s medical terminal,” he said. “Is everything all right with you and your unborn child?”

Brawne grinned. “Everything’s fine.”

“A boy or girl?”

“Girl.”

Sol kissed her on the cheek. Brawne touched his beard and turned her face away to hide tears unbecoming a former private investigator.

“Girls are such a chore,” he said, disentangling Rachel’s fingers from his beard and Brawne’s curls. “Trade yours in for a boy the first chance you get.”

“OK,” said Brawne and stepped back.

He shook hands a final time with the Consul, Theo, and Melio, shouldered his pack while Brawne held the infant, and then took Rachel in his arms. “Hell of an anticlimax if this thing doesn’t work and I end up wandering around the inside of the Sphinx,” he said.

The Consul squinted at the glowing door. “It will work. Although how, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a farcaster of any sort.”

“A whencaster,” ventured Silenus and held up his arm to block Brawne’s blows. The poet took a step back and shrugged. “If it continues to work, Sol, I have a feeling you won’t be alone up there. Thousands will join you.”

“If the Paradox Board permits,” said Sol, tugging at his beard the way he always did when his mind was elsewhere. He blinked, shifted backpack and baby, and stepped forward. The fields of force from the open door let him advance this time.

“So long everyone!” he cried. “By God, it was all worth it, wasn’t it?” He turned into the light, and he and the baby were gone.

·   ·   ·

There was a silence bordering on emptiness which stretched for several minutes. Finally the Consul said, in almost embarrassed tones, “Shall we go up to the ship?”

“Bring the elevator down for the rest of us,” said Martin Silenus. “M. Lamia here will walk on air.”

Brawne glared at the diminutive poet.

“You think it was something Moneta arranged?” said Arundez, referring to something Brawne had suggested earlier.

“It had to be,” said Brawne. “Some bit of future science or something.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed Martin Silenus, “
future science
 … that familiar phrase from those too timid to be superstitious. The alternative, my dear, is that you have this hitherto untapped power to levitate and turn monsters into shatterable glass goblins.”

“Shut up,” said Brawne, with no undertones of affection in her voice now. She looked over her shoulder. “Who says another Shrike won’t show up any minute?”

“Who indeed?” agreed the Consul. “I suspect we’ll always have a Shrike or rumors of a Shrike.”

Theo Lane, always embarrassed by discord, cleared his throat and said, “Look what I found among the baggage strewn around the Sphinx.” He held up an instrument with three strings, a long neck, and bright designs painted on its triangular body. “A guitar?”

“A balalaika,” said Brawne. “It belonged to Father Hoyt.”

The Consul took the instrument and strummed several chords. “Do you know this song?” He played a few notes.

“The ‘Leeda Tits Screwing Song’?” ventured Martin Silenus.

The Consul shook his head and played several more chords.

“Something old?” guessed Brawne.

“ ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ ” said Melio Arundez

“That must be from before my time,” said Theo Lane, nodding along as the Consul strummed.

“It’s from before everybody’s time,” said the Consul. “Come on, I’ll teach you the words as we go.”

Walking together in the hot sun, singing off-key and on-, losing the words and then starting again, they went uphill to the waiting ship.

EPILOGUE

Five and a half months later, seven months pregnant, Brawne Lamia took the morning dirigible north from the capital to the Poets’ City for the Consul’s farewell party.

The capital, now referred to as Jacktown by indigenie, visiting FORCE shipmen, and Ouster alike, looked white and clean in the morning light as the dirigible left the downtown mooring tower and headed northwest up the Hoolie River.

The biggest city on Hyperion had suffered during the fighting, but now most of it had been rebuilt, and a majority of the three million refugees from the fiberplastic plantations and smaller cities on the southern continent had elected to stay, despite recent surges of interest in fiberplastic from the Ousters. So the city had grown like Topsy, with basic services such as electricity, sewage, and cable HTV service just reaching the hilltop warrens between the spaceport and the old town.

But the buildings were white in the morning light, the spring air rich with promise, and Brawne saw the rough slashes of new roads and the bustle of river traffic below as a good sign for the future.

Fighting in Hyperion space had not lasted long after the destruction of the Web. De facto Ouster occupation of the spaceport, and capital had been translated into recognition of the Web’s demise and comanagement with the new Home Rule Council in the treaty brokered primarily by the Consul and former Governor-General Theo Lane. But in the almost six months since the death of the Web, the only traffic at the spaceport had been dropships from the remnants of the FORCE fleet still in-system and frequent planetary excursions from the Swarm. It was no longer unusual to see the tall figures of Ousters shopping in Jacktown Square or their more exotic versions drinking at Cicero’s.

Brawne had stayed at Cicero’s during the past few months, residing
in one of the larger rooms on the fourth floor of the old wing of the inn while Stan Leweski rebuilt and expanded the damaged sections of the legendary structure. “By God, I don’t need no help from pregnant womens!” Stan would shout each time Brawne offered a hand, but she invariably ended up doing some task while Leweski grumped and mumbled. Brawne might be pregnant, but she was still a Lusian, and her muscles had not completely atrophied after only a few months on Hyperion.

Stan had driven her to the mooring tower that morning, helping her with her luggage and the package she had brought for the Consul. Then the innkeeper had handed her a small package of his own. “It’s a damn, dull trip up into that godforsaken country,” he’d growled. “You have to have something to read, heh?”

The gift was a reproduction of the 1817 edition of John Keats’s
Poems
, leather bound by Leweski himself.

Brawne embarrassed the giant and delighted watching passengers by hugging him until the bartender’s ribs creaked. “Enough, goddammit,” he muttered, rubbing his side. “Tell that Consul I want to see his worthless hide back here before I give the worthless inn to my son. Tell him that, OK?”

Brawne had nodded and waved with the other passengers to well-wishers seeing them off. Then she had continued waving from the observation mezzanine as the airship untied, discharged ballast, and ponderously moved out over the rooftops.

Now, as the ship left the suburbs behind and swung west to follow the river, Brawne had her first clear view of the mountaintop to the south where the face of Sad King Billy still brooded down on the city. There was a fresh ten-meter scar, slowly fading from weather, on Billy’s cheek where a laser lance had slashed during the fighting.

But it was the larger sculpture taking shape on the northwest face of the mountain which caught Brawne’s attention. Even with modern cutting equipment borrowed from FORCE, the work was slow, and the great aquiline nose, heavy brow, broad mouth, and sad, intelligent eyes were just becoming recognizable. Many of the Hegemony refugees left on Hyperion had objected to Meina Gladstone’s likeness being added to the mountain, but Rithmet Corber III, great-grandson of the sculptor who had created Sad King Billy’s face there—and incidentally the man who now owned the mountain—had said, as diplomatically as possible, “Fuck you” and gone on with the work. Another year, perhaps two, and it would be finished.