The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (171 page)

“Do I have a choice?”

The face smiled again, but the eyes were as unchanging as the stone in the walls. “We always have choices, dear boy. In this case you can ignore any debt you might owe me for saving your life and simply leave here … walk away. My servants will not stop you. With luck you will get out of this restricted area, find your way back to more civilized regions, and avoid Pax patrols where your identity and lack of papers might be … ah … embarrassing.”

I nodded. My clothes, chronometer, work papers, and Pax ID were probably in Toschahi Bay by now. Working as a hunting guide in the fens made me forget how often the authorities checked IDs in the cities. I would soon be reminded if I wandered back to any of the coastal cities or inland towns. And
even rural jobs such as shepherd and guide required Pax ID for tax and tithe forms. Which left hiding in the interior for the rest of my life, living off the land and avoiding people.

“Or,” said the old man, “you can run an errand for me and become rich.” He paused, his dark eyes inspecting me the way I had seen professional hunters inspect pups that might or might not prove to be good hunting dogs.

“Tell me,” I said.

The old man closed his eyes and rattled in a deep breath. He did not bother to open his eyes when he spoke. “Can you read, Raul Endymion?”

“Yes.”

“Have you read the poem known as the
Cantos
?”

“No.”

“But you have heard some of it? Surely, being born into one of the nomadic shepherd clans of the north, the storyteller has touched on the
Cantos
?” There was a strange tone in the cracked voice. Modesty, perhaps.

I shrugged. “I’ve heard bits of it. My clan preferred the
Garden Epic
or the
Glennon-Height Saga
.”

The satyr features creased into a smile. “The
Garden Epic
. Yes. Raul was a centaur-hero in that, was he not?”

I said nothing. Grandam had loved the character of the centaur named Raul. My mother and I both had grown up listening to tales of him.

“Do you believe the stories?” snapped the old man. “The
Cantos
tales, I mean.”

“
Believe
them?” I said. “That they actually happened that way? The pilgrims and the Shrike and all that?” I paused a minute. There were those who believed all the tall tales told in the
Cantos
. And there were those who believed none of it, that it was all myth and maundering thrown together to add mystery to the ugly war and confusion that was the Fall. “I never really thought about it,” I said truthfully. “Does it matter?”

The old man seemed to be choking, but then I realized that the dry, rattling sounds were chuckles. “Not really,” he said at last. “Now, listen. I will tell you the outline of the … errand. It takes energy for me to speak, so save your questions for when I am finished.” He blinked and gestured with his mottled claw toward the chair covered with a white sheet. “Do you wish to sit?”

I shook my head and remained at parade rest.

“All right,” said the old man. “My story begins almost two hundred seventy-some years ago during the Fall. One of the pilgrims in the
Cantos
was a friend of mine. Her name was Brawne Lamia. She was real. After the Fall … after the death of the Hegemony and the opening of the Time Tombs … Brawne Lamia gave birth to a daughter. The child’s name was Diana, but the little girl was headstrong and changed her name almost as soon as she was old enough to talk. For a while she was known as Cynthia, then Cate … short for Hecate … and then, when she turned twelve, she insisted that her friends and family call her Temis. When I last saw her, she was called Aenea.…” I heard the name as Ah-nee-a.

The old man stopped and squinted at me. “You think this is not important, but names
are
important. If you had not been named after this city, which was in turn named after an ancient poem, then you would not have come to my attention and you could not be here today. You would be dead. Feeding the skarkworms in the Great South Sea. Do you understand, Raul Endymion?”

“No,” I said.

He shook his head. “It does not matter. Where was I?”

“The last time you saw the child, she called herself Aenea.”

“Yes.” The old man closed his eyes again. “She was not an especially attractive child, but she was … unique. Everyone who knew her felt that she was different. Special. Not spoiled, despite all the nonsense with the name changes. Just … different.” He smiled, showing pink gums. “Have you ever met someone who is profoundly different, Raul Endymion?”

I hesitated only a second. “No,” I said. It was not quite true. This old man was different. But I knew he was not asking that.

“Cate … Aenea … was different,” he said, eyes closed again. “Her mother knew it. Of course, Brawne knew that the child was special before she was born.…” He stopped and opened his eyes enough to squint at me. “You’ve heard this part of the
Cantos
?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was foretold by a cybrid entity that the woman named Lamia was to give birth to a child known as the One Who Teaches.”

I thought that the old man was going to spit. “A stupid title. No one called Aenea that during the time I knew her. She was simply a child, brilliant and headstrong, but a child. Everything that was unique was unique only in potential. But then …”

His voice trailed off and his eyes seemed to film over. It was as if he had lost track of the conversation. I waited.

“But then Brawne Lamia died,” he said several minutes later, voice stronger, as if there had been no gap in the monologue, “and Aenea disappeared. She was twelve. Technically, I was her guardian, but she did not ask my permission to disappear. One day she left and I never heard from her again.” Here the story paused again, as if the old man were a machine that ran down occasionally and required some internal rewinding.

“Where was I?” he said at last.

“You never heard from her again.”

“Yes. I never heard
from
her, but I know where she went and when she will reappear. The Time Tombs are off-limits now, guarded from public view by the Pax troops stationed there, but do you remember the names and functions of the tombs, Raul Endymion?”

I grunted. Grandam used to grill me on aspects of the oral tales in much this way. I used to think that Grandam was old. Next to this ancient, wizened thing, Grandam had been an infant. “I think I remember the tombs,” I said. “There was the one called the Sphinx, the Jade Tomb, the Obelisk, the Crystal Monolith, where the soldier was buried …”

“Colonel Fedmahn Kassad,” muttered the old man. Then his gaze returned to me. “Go on.”

“The three Cave Tombs …”

“Only the Third Cave Tomb led anywhere,” interrupted the old man again. “To labyrinths on other worlds. The Pax sealed it. Go on.”

“That’s all I can remember … oh, the Shrike Palace.”

The old man showed a turtle’s sharp smile. “One mustn’t forget the Shrike Palace or our old friend the Shrike, must one? Is that all of them?”

“I think so,” I said. “Yes.”

The mummified figure nodded. “Brawne Lamia’s daughter disappeared through one of these tombs. Can you guess which one?”

“No.” I did not know, but I suspected.

“Seven days after Brawne died, the girl left a note, went to the Sphinx in the dead of night, and disappeared. Do you remember where the Sphinx led, boy?”

“According to the
Cantos
,” I said, “Sol Weintraub and his daughter traveled to the distant future through the Sphinx.”

“Yes,” whispered the ancient thing in the hoverbed. “Sol and Rachel and a precious few others disappeared into the Sphinx before the Pax sealed it and closed off the Valley of the Time Tombs. Many tried in those early days—tried to find a shortcut to the future—but the Sphinx seemed to choose who might travel its tunnel through time.”

“And it accepted the girl,” I said.

The old man merely grunted at this statement of the obvious. “Raul Endymion,” he rasped at last, “do you know what I am going to ask of you?”

“No,” I said, although once again I had a strong suspicion.

“I want you to go after my Aenea,” said the old man. “I want you to find her, to protect her from the Pax, to flee with her, and—when she has grown up and become what she must become—to give her a message. I want you to tell her that her uncle Martin is dying and that if she wishes to speak to him again, she must come home.”

I tried not to sigh. I’d guessed that this ancient thing had once been the poet Martin Silenus. Everyone knew the
Cantos
and its author. How he had escaped the Pax purges and been allowed to live in this restricted place was a mystery, but one I did not choose to explore. “You want me to go north to the continent of Equus, fight my way past several thousand Pax troops, somehow get into the Valley of the Time Tombs, get into the Sphinx, hope it … accepts me … then chase this child into the distant future, hang around with her for a few decades, and then tell her to go back in time to visit you?”

For a moment there was a silence broken only by the soft sounds of Martin Silenus’s life-support equipment. The machines were breathing. “Not exactly,” he said at last.

I waited.

“She has not traveled to some distant future,” said the old man. “At least not distant from us, now. When she stepped through the entrance of the Sphinx two hundred forty-seven years ago, it was for a short trip through time … two hundred sixty-two Hyperion years, to be exact.”

“How do you know this?” I asked. From everything I had read, no one—not even the Pax scientists who had had two centuries to study the sealed tombs—had been able to predict how far into the future the Sphinx would send someone.

“I
know
it,” said the ancient poet. “Do you doubt me?”

Instead of responding to that, I said, “So the child … Aenea … will step out of the Sphinx sometime this year.”

“She will step out of the Sphinx in forty-two hours, sixteen minutes,” said the old satyr.

I admit that I blinked.

“And the Pax will be waiting for her,” he continued. “They also know to the minute when she will emerge …”

I did not ask how they came by the information.

“… and capturing Aenea is the single most important thing on the Pax’s agenda,” rasped the old poet. “They know that the future of the universe depends upon this.”

I knew now that the old poet was senile. The future of the universe depended upon no single event … that I knew. I held my silence.

“There are—at this moment—more than thirty thousand Pax troops in and around the Valley of the Time Tombs. At least five thousand of them are Vatican Swiss Guard.”

I whistled at this. The Vatican Swiss Guard was the elite of the elite, the best-trained, best-equipped military force in the far-flung expanse of the Pax. A dozen Vatican Guard troops in full regalia could have beaten the entire ten thousand troops of Hyperion’s Home Guard. “So,” I said, “I have forty-two hours to get to Equus, cross the Sea of Grass and the mountains, somehow get past twenty or thirty thousand of the Pax’s best troops, and rescue the girl?”

“Yes,” said the ancient figure in the bed.

I managed not to roll my eyes. “What then?” I said. “There is nowhere we can hide. The Pax controls all of Hyperion, all spacecraft, the spacelanes, and every world of what used to be the Hegemony. If she is as important as you say, they will turn Hyperion upside down until they find her. Even if we could somehow get offplanet, which we can’t, there would be no way we could escape.”

“There is a way for you to get offplanet,” the poet said in a tired voice. “There is a ship.”

I swallowed hard.
There is a ship
. The idea of traveling between the stars for months while decades or years passed back home took my breath away. I had joined the Home Guard with the childish notion of someday belonging to the Pax military and flying between the stars. A foolish notion for a youngster who had already decided not to accept the cruciform.

“Still,” I said, not truly believing that there was a ship. No
member of the Pax Mercantilus would transport fugitives. “Even if we make it to another world, they would have us. Unless you see us fleeing by ship for centuries of time-debt.”

“No,” said the old man. “Not centuries. Not decades. You will escape by ship to one of the nearest worlds of the old Hegemony. Then you will go a secret way. You will see the old worlds. You will travel the River Tethys.”

I knew now that the old man had lost his reason. When the farcasters fell and the AI TechnoCore abandoned humankind, the WorldWeb and Hegemony had died that same day. The tyranny of interstellar distances had been reimposed upon humanity. Now only the Pax forces, their puppet Mercantilus, and the hated Ousters braved the darkness between the stars.

“Come,” rasped the old man. His fingers would not uncurl as he gestured me closer. I leaned over the low com console. I could smell him … a vague combination of medicine, age, and something like leather.

I did not need the memories of Grandam’s campfire tales to explain the River Tethys and to know why I now knew that the old man was far gone into senility. Everyone knew about the River Tethys; it and the so-called Grand Concourse had been two constant farcaster avenues between the Hegemony worlds. The Concourse had been a street connecting a hundred-some worlds under a hundred-some suns, its broad avenue open to everyone and stitched together by farcaster portals that never closed. The River Tethys had been a less-traveled route, but still important for bulk commerce and the countless pleasure boats that had floated effortlessly from world to world on the single highway of water.

The Concourse had been sliced into a thousand separate segments by the Fall of the WorldWeb farcaster network; the Tethys had simply ceased to exist, the connecting portals useless, the single river on a hundred worlds reverted to a hundred smaller rivers that would never be connected again. Even the old poet seated before me had described the river’s death. I remembered the words from Grandam’s recitation of the
Cantos: