I frowned, feeling the stiffness in my side and arm as I shifted position ever so slightly. “Hebron? I thought it was …”
“Captured by the Ousters,” finished A. Bettik. “Yes, that was our information as well. It does not matter, sir. We will seek medical care for you with the Ousters as happily … more happily … than we would with the Pax.”
I looked down at the medpak now lying next to me. Filaments ran to my chest, arm, and legs. Most of the lights on the pak were blinking amber. This was not good.
“Your wounds are sealed and cleaned,” said Aenea. “We gave you all the plasma the old pak had. But you need more … and there seems to be some sort of infection that the multispectrum antibiotics can’t handle.”
That explained the terrible feverish quality I felt beneath my skin.
“Perhaps some microorganism in the sea on Mare Infinitus,” said A. Bettik. “The medpak cannot quite diagnose it. We will know when we get to a hospital. It is our guess that this section of the Tethys will lead to Hebron’s one large city.…”
“New Jerusalem,” I whispered.
“Yes,” said the android. “Even after the Fall, it was famous for its Sinai Medical Center.”
I started to shake my head but stopped when the pain and dizziness struck. “But the Ousters …”
Aenea moved a damp cloth across my brow. “We’re going to get help for you,” she said. “Ousters or no Ousters.”
A thought was trying to burrow up out of my befuddled brain. I waited until it arrived. “Hebron … didn’t have … I don’t think it had …”
“You are right, sir,” said A. Bettik. He tapped the small book in his hand. “According to the guide, Hebron was not part of the River Tethys and allowed only a single farcaster terminex in New Jerusalem, even during the height of the Web. Offworld visitors were not allowed to leave the capital. They treasured privacy and independence here.”
I looked out at the passing aqueduct walls. Suddenly we were off the high trestle and moving between high dunes and sunbaked rocks. The heat was terrible.
“But the book must have been wrong,” said Aenea, mopping my brow again. “The farcaster portal was there … and we’re here.”
“You’re sure … it’s … Hebron?” I whispered.
Aenea nodded. A. Bettik held up the comlog bracelet. I had forgotten about it. “Our mechanical friend here got a reliable star sighting,” he said. “We are on Hebron and … I would guess … only hours away from New Jerusalem.”
Pain tore through me then, and no matter how I tried to hide it, I must have writhed. Aenea brought the ultramorph injector out.
“No,” I said through cracked lips.
“This is the last one for a while,” she whispered. I heard the hiss and felt the blessed numbness spreading. If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller.
WHEN I AWOKE AGAIN, THE SHADOWS WERE LONG and we were in the shade of a low building. A. Bettik was carrying me from the raft. Each step sent pain racking through me. I made no sound.
Aenea was walking ahead. The street was wide and dusty, the buildings low—none over three stories—and made of an adobelike material. No one was in sight.
“Hello!” called the child, cupping her hands to her mouth. The two syllables echoed down the empty street.
I felt foolish being carried like a child, but A. Bettik did not seem to mind, and I knew that I could not stand if my life depended upon it.
Aenea walked back to us, saw my open eyes, and said, “This is New Jerusalem. There’s no doubt. According to the guidebook, three million people lived here during the Web days, and A. Bettik says that there were at least a million still here the last he heard.”
“Ousters …,” I managed.
Aenea nodded tersely. “The shops and buildings near the canal were empty, but they looked like they’d been lived in until a few weeks or months ago.”
A. Bettik said, “According to the transmissions we monitored on Hyperion, this world was supposed to have fallen to the Ousters approximately three standard years ago. But there are signs of habitation here much more recent than that.”
“The power grid’s still on,” said Aenea. “Food that was left out has all spoiled, but the fridge compartments are still cold. Tables are set in some of the houses, holopits humming with static, radios hissing. But no people.”
“But also no signs of violence,” said the android, laying me carefully in the back of a groundcar with a flat metal bed behind the cab. Aenea had set out a blanket to keep my skin away from the hot metal. The pain in my side sent spots dancing in front of my eyes.
Aenea rubbed her arms. There were goose bumps there despite the blazing heat of the evening. “But something terrible happened here,” she said. “I can feel it.”
I admit that I felt nothing but pain and fever. My thoughts were like mercury—always shifting away before I could grab them or form them into a cohesive shape.
Aenea jumped up onto the flatbed of the groundcar and crouched next to me while A. Bettik opened the door to the cab and crawled in. Amazingly, the vehicle started with a touch of the ignition plate. “I can drive this,” said the android, putting the vehicle in gear.
So can I, I thought at them. I drove one like it in Ursus. It’s one of the few things in the universe I know how to operate. It may be one of the few things I can do right.
We bumped down the main street. The pain made me cry out a few times, despite my best efforts to stay quiet. I clamped my jaws tight.
Aenea was holding my hand. Her fingers felt so cool that they almost made me shiver. I realized that my own skin was on fire.
“… it’s that damned infection,” she was saying. “Otherwise you’d be recovering now. Something in that ocean.”
“Or on his knife,” I whispered. I closed my eyes and saw the lieutenant flying to pieces as the flechette clouds tore into him. I opened my eyes to escape the image. The buildings were taller here, ten stories at least, and they cast a deeper shade. But the heat was terrible.
“… a friend of my mother’s on the last Hyperion pilgrimage lived here for a while,” she was saying. Her voice seemed to move in and out of hearing range, like a poorly tuned radio station.
“Sol Weintraub,” I croaked. “The scholar in the old poet’s Cantos.”
Aenea patted my hand. “I forget that everything Mother lived has become grist for Uncle Martin’s legend mill.”
We bounced over a bump. I ground my back teeth together to keep from screaming.
Aenea’s grip on my hand intensified. “Yes,” she said. “I wish I had met the old scholar and his daughter.”
“They went ahead … in the … Sphinx,” I managed. “Like … you … did.”
Aenea leaned close, moistened my lips from the canteen, and nodded. “Yes. But I remember Mother’s stories about Hebron and the kibbutzim here.”
“Jews,” I whispered, and then quit talking. It took too much energy that I needed to fight the pain.
“They fled the Second Holocaust,” she said, looking ahead now as the groundcar rounded a corner. “They called their Hegira the Diaspora.”
I closed my eyes. The lieutenant flew apart, his clothing and flesh mangled to long streamers that spiraled slowly down to the violet sea.…
Suddenly A. Bettik was lifting me. We were entering a building larger and more sinuous than the others—all soaring plasteel and tempered glass. “The medical center,” the android said. The automatic door whispered open ahead of us. “It has power … now if only the medical machinery is intact.”
I must have dozed briefly, for when I opened my eyes again, terrified because the twin dorsal fins were circling closer and closer, I was on a gurney-trolley being slid into a long cylinder of some sort of diagnostic autosurgeon.
“See you later,” Aenea was saying, releasing my hand. “See you on the other side.”
WE WERE ON HEBRON FOR THIRTEEN OF ITS LOCAL days—each day being some twenty-nine standard hours. For the first three
days the autosurgeon had its way with me: no fewer than eight invasive surgeries and an even dozen therapy treatments according to the digitized record at the end.
It was, indeed, some microorganism from that miserable ocean on Mare Infinitus that had decided to kill me, although when I saw the magnetic resonance and deep bioradar scans, I realized that the organism had not been so micro after all. Whatever it was—the autodiagnostic equipment was ambivalent—had taken hold along the inside of my scraped rib and grown like fen fungus until it had begun to branch out to my internal organs. Another standard day without surgery, the autosurgeon reported later, and they would have made the initial incision to find only lichen and liquefaction.
After opening me up, cleaning me out, and then repeating the process twice more when infinitesimal traces of the oceanborne organism started colonizing again, the autosurgeon pronounced the fungus kaput and began working on my lesser life-threatening wounds. The knife cut in the side had opened me up enough that I should have bled to death—especially with all of my kicking and high pulse rate brought on by my dorsaled friends in the sea. Evidently the plasma cartridges in the old medpak and several days of being kept near comatose by Aenea’s liberal doses of ultramorph had kept me alive until the surgeon could transfuse eight more units of plasma into me.
The deep wound in my arm had not—as I had feared—severed tendons, but enough important muscles and nerves had been slashed that the autosurgeon had worked on that arm during operations two and three. Because the hospital still had power when we arrived, the surgeon had taken it upon its own silicon initiative to have the organ tanks in the basement grow the replacement nerves I needed. On the eighth day, when Aenea sat at my bedside and told me how the autosurgeon repeatedly kept asking for advice and authorization from its human overseers, I was even able to laugh when she talked of how “Dr. Bettik” authorized each critical operation, transplant, and therapy.
The leg the color-shark had tried to bite off turned out to be the most painful part of the ordeal. After the infinitus-fungus had been cleaned out of the area laid bare by the shark’s teeth, new skin and muscle tissue had been transplanted layer by layer. It hurt. And after it quit hurting, it itched. During my second week of confinement in that hospital, I was undergoing ultramorph withdrawal and would seriously have considered holding my pistol on the girl or the android and demanding morph if I had actually believed they could be intimidated into bringing me relief from withdrawal symptoms and that hellish itching. But the pistol was gone—sunk in the bottomless violet sea.
It was on about the eighth day, when I could sit up in bed and actually eat food—although just bland, vat-replicated hospital food—that I talked to Aenea about my short stint as Hero. “On my last night on Hyperion, I got drunk with the old poet and promised him I’d accomplish certain things on this trip,” I said.
“What things?” said the girl, her spoon in my dish of green gelatin.
“Nothing much,” I said. “Protect you, get you home, find Old Earth and bring it back so he could see it again before he died …”
Aenea paused in her gelatin eating. Her dark eyebrows were very high on her forehead. “He told you to bring Old Earth back? Interesting.”
“That’s not all,” I said. “Along the way I was supposed to talk to the Ousters, destroy the Pax, overthrow the Church, and—I quote—’find out what the fuck the TechnoCore is up to and stop it.’ ”
Aenea set her spoon down and dabbed at her lips with my napkin. “Is that all?”
“Not quite,” I said, leaning back into the pillows. “He also wanted me to keep the Shrike from hurting you or destroying humanity.”
She nodded. “Is that it?”
I rubbed my sweaty forehead with my good left hand. “I think so. At least that’s all I remember. I was drunk, as I said.” I looked at the child. “How am I doing with the list?”
Aenea made that casting-away gesture with her slender hands. “Not bad. You have to remember that we’ve only been at this a few standard months … less than three, actually.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking out the window at the low shafts of sunlight striking the tall adobe building across from the hospital. Beyond the city, I could see the rocky hills burning red with evening light. “Yeah,” I said again, all of the energy and amusement drained from my voice, “I’m doing great.” I sighed and pushed the dinner tray farther away. “One thing I don’t understand—even in all that confusion, I don’t know why their radar didn’t track the raft when we were so close.”
“A. Bettik shot it out,” said the girl, working on the green gelatin again.
“Say what?”
“A. Bettik shot it out. The radar dish. With your plasma rifle.” She finished the green goop and set the spoon in place. During the last week she had been nurse, doctor, chef, and bottle washer.
“I thought he said he could not shoot at humans,” I said.
“He can’t,” said Aenea, clearing the tray and setting it on a nearby dresser. “I asked him. But he said that there was no prohibition against his shooting as many radar dishes as he wanted. So he did. Before we fixed your position and dived in to save you.”
“That was a three- or four-klick shot,” I said, “from a pitching raft. How many pulse bolts did he use?”
“One,” said Aenea. She was looking at the monitor readouts above my head.
I whistled softly. “I hope he never gets mad at me. Even from a distance.”
“I think you’d have to be a radar dish before you’d have to worry,” she said, tucking in the clean sheets.
“Where is he?”
Aenea walked to the window and pointed east. “He found an EMV that had a full charge and was checking out the kibbutzim way out toward the Great Salt Sea.”
“All the others have been empty?”
“Every one. Not even a dog, cat, horse, or pet chipmunk left behind.”
I knew that she was not kidding. We had talked about it—when communities are evacuated in a hurry, or when disaster strikes, pets are often left behind. Packs of wild dogs had been a problem during the South Talon uprising on Aquila. The Home Guard had to shoot former pets on sight.
“That means they had time to take their pets with them,” I said.
Aenea turned toward me and crossed her thin arms. “And leave their clothes behind? And their computers, comlogs, private diaries, family holos … all their personal junk?”
“And none of those tell you what happened? No final diary entries? No surveillance cameras or frenzied last-minute comlog entries?”
“Nope,” said the girl. “At first I was reluctant to intrude into their private comlogs and such. But by now I’ve played back dozens of them. During the last week there was the usual news of the fighting nearby. The Great Wall was less than a light-year away and the Pax ships were filling the system. They didn’t come down to the planet much, but it was obvious that Hebron would have to join the Pax Protectorate after it was all over. Then there were some final newscasts about the Ousters breaking through the lines … then nothing. Our guess is that the Pax evacuated the entire population and then the Ousters moved on, but there’s no notice of evacuation in the news holos, or in the computer entries, or anywhere. It’s like the people just disappeared.” She rubbed her arms. “I have some of the holocast disks if you want to see them.”
“Maybe later,” I said. I was very tired.
“A. Bettik will be back in the morning,” she said, pulling the thin blanket up to my chin. Beyond the window, the sun had set but the hills literally glowed from stored-up light. It was a twilight effect of the stones on this world that I thought I would never tire of watching. But right then, I could not keep my eyes open.
“Do you have the shotgun?” I mumbled. “The plasma rifle? Bettik gone … all alone here …”
“They’re on the raft,” said Aenea. “Now, go to sleep.”
ON THE FIRST DAY I WAS FULLY CONSCIOUS, I TRIED to thank both of them for saving my life. They
resisted.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“It wasn’t hard,” said the girl. “You left the mike open right up to the time the Pax officer stabbed it and broke it. We could hear everything. And we could see you through the binoculars.”
“You shouldn’t have both left the raft,” I said. “It was too dangerous.”
“Not really, M. Endymion,” said A. Bettik. “Besides rigging the sea anchor, which slowed the raft’s progress considerably, M. Aenea had the idea of tying one of the climbing ropes to a small log for flotation and allowing the line to trail behind the raft for almost a hundred meters. If we could not catch up to the raft, we felt certain we could get you back to the trailing line before it moved out of reach. And, as events showed, we did.”
I shook my head. “It was still stupid.”
“You’re welcome,” said the girl.
ON THE TENTH DAY I TRIED STANDING. IT WAS A short-lived victory, but a victory nonetheless. On the twelfth day I walked the length of the corridor to the toilet there. That was a major victory. On the thirteenth day, the power failed all over the city.
Emergency generators in the hospital basement kicked in, but we knew our time there was limited.
• • •
“I WISH WE COULD TAKE THE AUTOSURGEON WITH us,” I said as we sat on the ninth-floor terrace that last evening, looking down on the shadowed avenues.
“It would fit on the raft,” said A. Bettik, “but the extension cord would be a problem.”
“Seriously,” I said, trying not to sound like the paranoid, victimized, demoralized patient that I was then, “we need to check the pharmacies here for stuff we need.”