A. Bettik stepped forward. “The crew will be happy to wait and ferry you back to Keats in the Benares should the windwagon not appear.”
“No,” said the Consul, “take the launch and go.”
“Hey, just a fucking minute!” cried Martin Silenus. “I don’t remember electing you dictator, amigo. We need to get there. If the fucking windwagon doesn’t show, we’ll have to find another way.”
The Consul wheeled to face the smaller man. “How? By boat? It takes two weeks to sail up the Mane and around the North Littoral to Otho or one of the other staging areas. And that’s when there are ships available. Every seagoing vessel on Hyperion is probably evolved in the evacuation effort.”
“Dirigible then,” growled the poet.
Brawne Lamia laughed. “Oh, yes. We’ve seen so many in the two days we’ve been on the river.”
Martin Silenus whirled and clenched his fists as if to strike the woman. Then he smiled. “All right then, lady, what do we do? Maybe if we sacrifice someone to a grass serpent the transportation gods will smile on us.”
Brawne Lamia’s stare was arctic. “I thought burned offerings were more your style, little man.”
Colonel Kassad stepped between the two. His voice barked command. “Enough. The Consul’s right. We stay here until the wagon arrives. M. Masteen, M. Lamia, go with A. Bettik to supervise the unloading of our gear. Father Hoyt and M. Silenus will bring some wood up for a bonfire.”
“A bonfire?” said the priest. It was hot on the hillside.
“After dark,” said Kassad. “We want the windwagon to know we’re here. Now let’s move.”
It was a quiet group that watched the powered launch move downriver at sunset. Even from two kilometers away the Consul could see the blue skins of the crew. The Benares looked old and abandoned at its wharf, already a part of the deserted city. When the launch was lost in the distance, the group turned to watch the Sea of Grass. Long shadows from the river bluffs crept out across what the Consul already found himself thinking of as the surf and shallows. Farther out, the sea seemed to shift in color, the grass mellowing to an aquamarine shimmer before darkening to a hint of verdurous depths. The lapis sky melted into the reds and golds of sunset, illuminating their hilltop and setting the pilgrims’ skins aglow with liquid light. The only sound was the whisper of wind in grass.
“We’ve got a fucking huge heap of baggage,” Martin Silenus said loudly. “For a bunch of folks on a one-way trip.”
It was true, thought the Consul. Their luggage made a small mountain on the grassy hilltop.
“Somewhere in there,” came the quiet voice of Het Masteen, “may lie our salvation.”
“What do you mean?” asked Brawne Lamia.
“Yeah,” said Martin Silenus, lying back, putting his hands under his head, and staring at the sky. “Did you bring a pair of undershorts that are Shrikeproof?”
The Templar shook his head slowly. The sudden twilight cast his face in shadow under the cowl of the robe. “Let us not trivialize or dissemble,” he said. “It is time to admit that each of us has brought on this pilgrimage something which he or she hopes will alter the inevitable outcome when the moment arrives that we must face the Lord of Pain.”
The poet laughed. “I didn’t bring even my lucky fucking rabbit’s foot.”
The Templar’s hood moved slightly. “But your manuscript perhaps?”
The poet said nothing.
Het Masteen moved his invisible gaze to the tall man on his left. “And you, Colonel, there are several trunks which bear your name. Weapons, perhaps?”
Kassad raised his head but did not speak.
“Of course,” said Het Masteen, “it would be foolish to go hunting without a weapon.”
“What about me?” asked Brawne Lamia, folding her arms. “Do you know what secret weapon I’ve smuggled along?”
The Templar’s oddly accented voice was calm. “We have not yet heard your tale, M. Lamia. It would be premature to speculate.”
“What about the Consul?” asked Lamia.
“Oh, yes, it is obvious what weapon our diplomatic friend has in store.”
The Consul turned from his contemplation of the sunset. “I brought only some clothes and two books to read,” he said truthfully.
“Ah,” sighed the Templar, “but what a beautiful spacecraft you left behind.”
Martin Silenus jumped to his feet. “The fucking ship!” he cried. “You can call it, can’t you? Well, goddammit, get your dog whistle out, I’m tired of sitting here.”
The Consul pulled a strand of grass and stripped it. After a minute he said:
“Even if I could call it … and you heard A. Bettik say that the comsats and repeater stations were down … even if I could call it, we couldn’t land north of the Bridle Range. That meant instant disaster even before the Shrike began ranging south of the mountains.”
“Yeah,” said Silenus, waving his arms in agitation, “but we could get across this fucking … lawn! Call the ship.”
“Wait until morning,” said the Consul. “If the windwagon’s not here, we will discuss alternatives.”
“Fuck that …” began the poet, but Kassad stepped forward with his back to him, effectively removing Silenus from the circle.
“M. Masteen,” said the Colonel, “what is your secret?”
There was enough light from the dying sky to show a slight smile on the Templar’s thin lips. He gestured toward the mound of baggage. “As you see, my trunk is the heaviest and most mysterious of all.”
“It’s a Möbius cube,” said Father Hoyt. “I’ve seen ancient artifacts transported that way.”
“Or fusion bombs,” said Kassad.
Het Masteen shook his head. “Nothing so crude,” he said.
“Are you going to tell us?” demanded Lamia.
“When it is my turn to speak,” said the Templar.
“Are you next?” asked the Consul. “We can listen while we wait.”
Sol Weintraub cleared his throat. “I have number 4,” he said, showing the slip of paper. “But I would be more than pleased to trade with the True Voice of the Tree.” Weintraub lifted Rachel from his left shoulder to his right, patting her gently on the back.
Het Masteen shook his head. “No, there is time. I meant only to point out that in hopelessness there is always hope. We have learned much from the stories so far. Yet each of us has some seed of promise buried even deeper than we have admitted.”
“I don’t see …” began Father Hoyt but was interrupted by Martin Silenus’s sudden shout.
“It’s the wagon! The fucking windwagon. Here at last!”
It was another twenty minutes before the windwagon tied up to one of the wharves. The craft came out of the north, its sails white squares against a dark plain draining of color. The last light had faded by the time the large ship had tacked close to the low bluff, folded its main sails, and rolled to a stop.
The Consul was impressed. The thing was wooden, handcrafted, and huge—curved in the pregnant lines of some seagoing galleon out of Old Earth’s ancient history. The single gigantic wheel, set in the center of the curving hull, normally would have been invisible in the two-meter-tall grass, but the Consul caught a glimpse of the underside as he carried luggage onto the wharf. From the ground it would be six or seven meters to the railing, and more than five times that height to the tip of the mainmast. From where he stood, panting from exertion, the Consul could hear the snap of pennants far above and a steady, almost subsonic hum that would be coming from either the ship’s interior flywheel or its massive gyroscopes.
A gangplank extruded from the upper hull and lowered itself to the wharf. Father Hoyt and Brawne Lamia had to step back quickly or be crushed.
The windwagon was less well lighted than the Benares; illumination appeared to consist of several lanterns hanging from spars. No crew had been visible during the approach of the ship and no one came into view now.
“Hallo!” called the Consul from
the base of the gangplank. No one answered.
“Wait here a minute, please,” said Kassad and mounted the long ramp in five strides.
The others watched While Kassad paused at the top, touched his belt where the small deathwand was tucked, and then disappeared amidships. Several minutes later a light flared through broad windows at the stern, casting trapezoids of yellow on the grass below.
“Come up,” called Kassad from the head of the ramp. “It’s empty.”
The group struggled with their luggage, making several trips. The Consul helped Het Masteen with the heavy Möbius trunk and through his fingertips he could feel a faint but intense vibration.
“So where the fuck is the crew?” asked Martin Silenus when they were assembled on the foredeck. They had taken their single-file tour through the narrow corridors and cabins, down stairways more ladder than stairs, and through cabins not much bigger than the built-in bunks they contained. Only the rearmost cabin—the captain’s cabin, if that is what it was—approached the size and comfort of standard accommodations on the Benares.
“It’s obviously automated,” said Kassad. The FORCE officer pointed to halyards which disappeared into slots in the deck, manipulators all but invisible among the rigging and spars, and the subtle hint of gears halfway up the lateen-rigged rear mast.
“I didn’t see a control center,” said Lamia. “Not so much as a diskey or C-spot nexus.” She slipped her comlog from a breast pocket and tried to interface on standard data, comm, and biomed frequencies. There was no response from the ship.
“The ships used to be crewed,” said the Consul. “Temple initiates used to accompany the pilgrims to the mountains.”
“Well, they’re not here now,” said Hoyt. “But I guess we can assume that someone is still alive at the tram station or Keep Chronos. They sent the wagon for us.”
“Or everyone’s dead and the windwagon is running on an automatic schedule,” said Lamia. She looked over her shoulder as rigging and canvas creaked in a sudden gust of wind. “Damn, it’s weird to be cut off from everybody and everything like this. It’s like being blind and deaf. I don’t know how colonials stand it.”
Martin Silenus approached the group and sat on the railing. He drank from a long green bottle and said:
“Where’s the Poet? Show him! Show him,
Muses mine, that I may know him!
’Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he king,
Or poorest of the beggar-class,
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato.
’Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts. He hath heard
The lion’s roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the tigers yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother-tongue.”
“Where did you get that wine bottle?” asked Kassad.
Martin Silenus smiled. His eyes were small and bright in the lantern glow. “The galley’s fully stocked and there’s a bar. I declared it open.”
“We should fix some dinner,” said the Consul although all he wanted at the moment was some wine. It had been more than ten hours since they had last eaten.
There came a clank and whir and all six of them moved to the starboard rail. The gangplank had drawn itself in. They whirled again as canvas unfurled, lines grew taut, and somewhere a flywheel hummed into the ultrasonic. Sails filled, the deck tilted slightly, and the windwagon moved away from the wharf and into the darkness. The only sounds were the flap and creak of the ship, the distant, rumble of the wheel, and the rasp of grass on the hull bottom.
The six of them watched as the shadow of the bluff fell behind, the unlighted beacon pyre receding as a faint gleam of starlight on pale wood, and then there were only the sky and night and swaying circles of lantern light.
“I’ll go below,” said the Consul, “and see if I can get a meal together.”
The others stayed above awhile, feeling the slight surge and rumble through the soles of their feet and watching darkness pass. The Sea of Grass was visible only as the place where stars ended and flat blackness began. Kassad used a handbeam to illuminate glimpses of canvas and rigging, lines being pulled tight by invisible hands, and then he checked all the corners and shadowed places from stern to bow. The others watched in silence. When he clicked the light off, the darkness seemed less oppressive, the starlight brighter. A rich, fertile smell—more of a farm in springtime than of the sea—came to them on a breeze which had swept across a thousand kilometers of grass.
Sometime later the Consul called to them and they went below to eat.
The galley was cramped and there was no mess table, so they used the large cabin in the stern as their common room, pushing three of the trunks together as a makeshift table. Four lanterns swinging from low beams made the room bright. A breeze blew in when Het Masteen opened one of the tall windows above the bed.
The Consul set plates piled high with sandwiches on the largest trunk and returned again with thick white cups and a coffee therm. He poured while the others ate.
“This is quite good,” said Fedmahn Kassad. “Where did you get the roast beef?”
“The cold box is fully stocked. There’s another large freezer in the aft pantry.”
“Electrical?” asked Het Masteen.
“No. Double insulated.”
Martin Silenus sniffed a jar, found a knife on the sandwich plate, and added great dollops of horseradish to his sandwich. His eyes sparkled with tears as he ate.
“How long does this crossing generally take?” Lamia asked the Consul.
He looked up from his study of the circle of hot black coffee in his cup. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Crossing the Sea of Grass. How long?”
“A night and a half a day to the mountains,” said the Consul. “If the winds are with us.”
“And then … how long to cross the mountains?” asked Father Hoyt.
“Less than a day,” said the Consul.
“If the tramway is running,” added Kassad.
The Consul sipped the hot coffee and made a face. “We have to assume it is. Otherwise …”
“Otherwise what?” demanded Lamia.
“Otherwise,” said Colonel Kassad, moving to the open window and putting his hands on his hips, “we will be stranded six hundred klicks from the Time Tombs and a thousand from the southern cities.”
The Consul shook his head. “No,” he said. “The Temple priests or whoever are behind this pilgrimage have seen to it that we’ve gotten this far. They’ll make sure we go all the way.”
Brawne Lamia crossed her arms and frowned. “As what … sacrifices?”
Martin Silenus whooped a laugh and brought out his bottle:
“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.”
Brawne Lamia reached under her tunic and brought out a cutting laser no larger than her little finger. She aimed it at the poet’s head. “You miserable little shit. One more word out of you and … I swear … I’ll slag you where you stand.”
The silence was suddenly absolute except for the background rumble-groan of the ship. The Consul moved toward Martin Silenus. Colonel Kassad took two steps behind Lamia.
The poet took a long drink and smiled at the dark-haired woman. His lips were moist. “Oh build your ship of death,” he whispered. “Oh build it!
”
Lamia’s fingers were white on the pencil laser. The Consul edged closer to Silenus, not knowing what to do, imagining the whipping beam of light fusing his own eyes. Kassad leaned toward Lamia like two meters of tensed shadow.
“Madam,” said Sol Weintraub from where he sat on the bunk against the far wall, “need I remind you that there is a child present?”
Lamia glanced to her right. Weintraub had removed a deep drawer from a ship’s cupboard and had set it on the bed as a cradle. He had bathed the infant and come in silently just before the poet’s recitation. Now he set the baby softly in the padded nest.
“I’m sorry,” said Brawne Lamia and lowered the small laser. “It’s just that he makes me so … angry.”
Weintraub nodded, rocking the drawer slightly. The gentle roll of the windwagon combined with the incessant rumble of the great wheel appeared to have already put the child to sleep. “We’re all tired and tense,” said the scholar. “Perhaps we should find our lodgings for the night and turn in.”
The woman sighed and tucked the weapon in her belt. “I won’t sleep,” she said. “Things are too … strange.”
Others nodded. Martin Silenus was sitting on the broad ledge below the stern windows. Now he pulled up his legs, took a drink, and said to Weintraub, “Tell your story, old man.”
“Yes,” said Father Hoyt. The priest looked exhausted to the point of being cadaverous, but his feverish eyes burned. “Tell us. We need to have the stories told and time to think about them before we arrive.”
Weintraub passed a hand across his bald scalp. “It’s a dull tale,” he said. “I’ve never been to Hyperion before. There are no confrontations with monsters, no acts of heroism. It’s a tale by a man whose idea of epic adventure is speaking to a class without his notes.”
“All the better,” said Martin Silenus. “We need a soporific.”
Sol Weintraub sighed, adjusted his glasses, and nodded. There were a few streaks of dark in his beard, but most of it had gone gray. He turned the lantern low over the baby’s bed and moved to a chair in the center of the room.