Hyperion

PROLOGUEThe Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff'sPrelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green,saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below. A thunderstorm was brewing to thenorth. Bruise-black clouds silhouetted a forest 0f giant gymnosperms while stratocumulustowered nine kilometers high in a violent sky. Lightning rippled along the horizon. Closer to theship, occasional vague, reptilian shapes would blunder into the interdiction field, cry out, andthen brash away through indigo mists. The Consul concentrated on a difficult section of thePrelude and ignored the approach of storm and nightfall.The fatline receiver chimed.The Consul stopped, fingers hovering above the keyboard, and listened. Thunder rumbledthrough the heavy air. From the direction of the gymnosperm forest there came the mournfulululation of a carrion-breed pack. Somewhere in the darkness below, a smallbrained beasttrumpeted its answering challenge and fell quiet. The interdiction field added its sonicundertones to the sudden silence. The fatline chimed again."Damn," said the Consul and went in to answer it.While the computer took a few seconds to convert and decode the burst of decaying tachyons, theConsul poured himself a glass of Scotch. He settled into the cushions of the projection pit just asthe diskey blinked green. "Play," he said.'You have been chosen to return to Hyperion," came a woman's husky voice. Full visuals had notyet formed; the air remained empty except for the pulse of transmission codes which told theConsul that this fatline squirt had originated on the Hegemony administralive world of Tau Ceti Center.The Consul did not need the transmission coordinates to know this. The aged but still beautifulvoice of Meina Gladstone was unmistakable. "You have been chosen to return to Hyperion as amember of the Shrike Pilgrimage," contin-ued the voice.The hell you say, thought the Consul and rose to leave the pit."You and six others have been selected by the Church of the Shrike and confirmed by the AllThing," said Meina Gladstone. "It is in the interest of the Hegemony that you accept."The consul stood motionless in the pit, his back to the flickering transmission codes. Withoutturning, he raised his glass and drained the last of the Scotch."The situation is very confused," said Meina Gladstone. Her voice was weary. "The consulate andHome Rule Council fàtlined us three standard weeks ago with the news that the Time Tombsshowed signs of opening. The anti-entropic fields around them were expanding rapidly and theShrike has begun ranging as far south as the Bridle Range."The Consul turned and dropped into the cushions. A holo had formed of Meina Gladstone's ancientface. Her eyes looked as tired as her voice sounded."A FORCE:space task force was immediately dispatched from Parvati to evacuate the Hegemonycitizens on Hyperion before the Time Tombs open. Their time-debt will be a lithe more thanthree 1-lyperion years." Meina Gladstone paused. The Consul thought he had never seen theSenate CEO look so grim. "We do not know if the evacuation fleet will arrive in time," she said,"but the situation is even more complicated. An Ouster migration cluster of at least fourthousand . . . units … has been detected approaching the Hyperion system. Our evacuation taskforce should arrive only a short while before the Ousters."The Consul understood Gladstone's hesitation. An Ouster migration cluster might consist of ships ranging in size from single-person ramscouts to can cities and comet forts holding tens of thousands of the interstellar barbarians."The FORCE joint chiefs believe that this is the Ousters' big push," said Meina Gladstone. Theship's computer had positioned the holo so that the woman's sad brown eyes seemed to be staringdirectly at the Consul. "Whether they seek to control just I-Iyperion for the Time Tombs orwhether this is an all-out attack on the Woridweb remains to be seen. In the meantime, a fullFORCE:space battle fleet complete with a farcaster construction battalion has spun up from theCamn System to join the evacuation task force, but this fleet may be recalled depending uponcircumstances."The Consul nodded and absently raised the Scotch to his lips. He frowned at the empty glass anddropped it onto the thick carpeting of the holopit. Even with no military training he understoodthe difficult tactical decision Gladstone and the joint chiefs were faced with. Unless a militaryfarcaster were hurriedly constructed in the Hyperion system-at staggering expense-therewould be no way to resist the Ouster invasion. Whatever secrets the Time Tombs might holdwould go to the Hegemony's enemy. If the fleet did construct a farcaster in time and theHegemony committed the total resources of FORCE to defending the single, distant, colonial worldof Hyperion, the Worldweb ran the terrible risk of suffering an Ouster attack elsewhere on theperimeter, or-in a worst-case scenariohaving the barbarians actually seizing the farcaster andpenetrating the Web itself. The Consul fried to imagine the reality of armored Ouster troopsstepping through farcaster portals into the undefended home cities on a hundred worlds.The Consul walked through the holo of Meina Gladstone, retrieved his glass, and went to pouranother Scotch."You have been chosen to join the pilgrimage to the Shrike," said the image of the old CEO whomthe press loved to compare to Lincoln or Churchill or Alvarez-Temp or whatever otherpreHegira legend was in historical vogue at the time. "The Templars are sending their treeshipYdrasi1I," said Gladstone, "and the evacuation task force commander has instructions to let itpass. With a three-week time-debt, you can rendezvous with the Yggdrasill before it goesquantum from the Parvati system. The six other pilgrims chosen by the Shrike Church will beaboard the treeship. Our intelligence reports suggest that at least one of the seven pilgrims is an agent of the Ousters. Wedo not . at this time – . have any way of knowing which one it is"The Consul had to smile. Among all the other risks Gladstone was taking, the 01d woman had toconsider the possibility that he was the spy and that she was fatlining crucial information to anOuster agent. Or had she given him any crucial information? The fleet movements weredetectable as soon as the ships used their Hawking drives, and if the Consul were the spy, theCEO's revelation might be a way to scare him off. The Consul's smile faded and he drank hisScotch."Sol Weintraub and Fedmahn Kassad are among the seven pilgrims chosen," said Gladstone.The Consul's frown deepened. He stared at the cloud of digits flickering like dust motes aroundthe 01d woman's image. Fifteen seconds of fatline transmission time remained."We need your help," said Meina Gladstone. "It is essential that the secrets of the Time Tombsand the Shrike be uncovered. This pilgrimage may be our last chance. If the Ousters conquerHyperion, their agent must be eliminated and the Time Tombs sealed at all cost. The fate of theHegemony may depend upon it."The transmission ended except for the pulse of rendezvous coordinates. "Response?" asked theship's computer. Despite the tremendous energies involved, the spacecraft was capable ofplacing a brief, coded squirt into the incessant babble of FTL bursts which tied the humanportions of the galaxy together."No," said the Consul and went outside to lean on the balconyrailing. Night had fallen and the clouds were low. No stars were visible. The darkness wouldhave been absolute except for the intermittent flash of lightning to the north and a softphosphorescence rising from the marshes. The Consul was suddenly very aware that he was, atthat second, the only sentient being on an unnamed world. He listened to the antediluvian nightsounds rising from theswamps and he thought about morning, about setting out in theVikken EMV at first light, about spending the day in sunshine,about hunting big game in the fern forests to the south and thenreturning to the ship in the evening for a good steak and a cold beer.The Consul thought about the sharp pleasure of the hunt and the equally sharp solace of solitude:solitude he had earned through the pain and nightmare he had already suffered on l-lyperion.Hyperion.The Consul went inside, brought the balcony in, and sealed the ship just as the first heavyraindrops began to fall. He climbed the spiral staircase to his sleeping cabin at the apex of theship. The circular room was dark except for silent explosions of lightning which outlinedrivulets of rain coursing the skylight. The Consul stripped, lay back on the firm mattress, andswitched on the sound system and external audio pickups. He listened as the fury of the stormblended with the violence of Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries." Hurricane winds buffeted theship. The sound of thunderclaps filled the room as the skylight flashed white, leavingafterimages burning in the Consul's retinas.Wagner is good only for thunderstorms, he thought. He closed his eyes but the lightning wasvisible through closed eyelids. He remembered the glint of ice crystals blowing through thetumbled ruins on the low hills near the Time Tombs and the colder gleam of steel on the Shrike'simpossible free of metal thorns. He remembered screams in the night and the hundred-facet,ruby-and-blood gaze of the Shrike itself.Hyperion.The Consul silently commanded the computer to shut off all speakers and raised his wrist tocover his eyes. In the sudden silence he lay thinking about how insane it would be to return toHyperion' During his eleven years as Consul on that distant and enigmati world, the mysteriousChurch of the Shrike had allowed a dozen barges of offworld pilgrims to depart for the windswept barrens, around the Time Tombs, northof the mountains. No one had returned. And that had been in normal times, when the Shrike hadbeen prisoner to the tides of time and forces no one understood, and theanti-entropic fields hadbeen contained to a fewdozen meters" around the Time Tombs. And there had been no threat of airOuster invasion.The Consul thought of the Shrike, free to wander everywhere on, Hyperion, of the millions ofindigenies and thousands of Hegemony citizens helpless before a creature which defied physical laws and which communicated onlythrough death, and he shivered despite the warmth of the cabin.Hyperion.The night and storm passed. Another stormfront raced ahead of the approaching dawn.Gymnosperms two hundred meters tall bent and whipped before the coming torrent. Just beforefirst light, the Consul's ebony spaceship rose on a tail of blue plasma and punched throughthickening clouds as it climbed toward space and rendezvous.