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The young man stood there for a second, irresolute, seeing no place to sit or stand, and then he moved to the rear of the room near me, stood at parade rest, and stared at something near the ceiling—possibly the end of his military career.
“But if the woman who carries your counterpart is crucified on the Shrike’s legendary tree of thorns, will you suffer for all eternity in your dreams?”
“Such an odd choice,” she said, “considering that no one ever read the Cantos when poor Martin was alive. Well, nothing helps an artist’s career more than a little death and obscurity, I always say.”
His wit was obvious, his attention to others sincere, and his sense of humor legendary. I found myself disliking the son of a bitch at once.
From where I sat half a table away, I could feel the impact of the FORCE chiefs gazes like one of the one-hundred-million-joule laser blasts used to ignite deuterium-tritium spheres in one of the ancient inertial confinement fusion reactors. I was amazed that Lee did not collapse, implode, ignite, and fuse before our very eyes.
Albedo smiled. He spread his hands. “M. Executive, the shock of this terrible news must have caused you to make a poor joke. Declaring war against the Core would be like … like a fish declaring war against water, like a driver attacking his EMV because of disturbing news of an accident elsewhere.” Gladstone did not smile. “I once had a grandfather on Patawpha,” she said slowly, her dialect thickening, “who put six slugs from a pulse rifle into the family EMV when it did not start one morning. You are dismissed, Councilor.”
“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones. “To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”
The entrance to the Sphinx pulsed blue, then violet, then a terrible white. Behind the Sphinx, on the wall of the plateau above the Valley of the Time Tombs, an impossible tree shimmered into existence, its huge trunk and sharp steel branches rising into the glowing clouds and above. Sol glanced quickly, saw the three-meter thorns and the terrible fruit they bore, and then he looked back at the entrance to the Sphinx. Somewhere the wind howled and thunder rumbled. Somewhere vermilion dust blew like curtains of dried blood in the terrible light from the Tombs. Somewhere voices cried out and a
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Sol remembered the dream, remembered his daughter’s hug, and realized that in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith—true faith—was trusting in that love.
There is no blood. But there is pain. Oh yes, there is pain in abundance here—pain beyond the poet’s wildest imaginings of what pain was, pain beyond human endurance and the boundaries of suffering. But Silenus endures. And Silenus suffers.
Pain, he discovers, has a structure. It has a floor plan. It has designs more intricate than a chambered nautilus, features more baroque than the most buttressed Gothic cathedral. Even as he screams, Martin Silenus studies the structure of this pain. He realizes that it is a poem.
The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight … and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.
—No. He is asking us if we can truly bear hearing the story. Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield. —I’ve never been too fond of ignorance. Brawne waves at the megalith. Tell us.
Not now nor ten thousand years from now but sometime in a future so distant that yellow suns are red and bloated with age/ swallowing their children Saturn-like
It the UI steps through time or shouts through time as easily as Ummon moves through what you call the megasphere or you walk the mallways of the Hive you called home on Lusus Imagine our surprise then/ our chagrin/ the Ultimates’ embarrassment when the first message our UI sent us across space/ across time/ across the barriers of Creator and Created was this simple phrase THERE IS ANOTHER// Another Ultimate Intelligence up there where time itself creaks with age
Never underestimate/Ummon says/ the power of a few beads and trinkets and bits of glass over avaricious natives]
“If Ummon’s story is true,” I said. “If the third part of this human deity fled to our time, where and who do you think it is? There are more than a hundred billion human beings in the Web.” Father Duré smiled. It was a gentle smile, free of irony. “Have you considered that it might be yourself, M. Severn?”
I shook my head but took the seat he offered. “It might not work,” I said. “Then we have lost nothing,” said Duré.
The Bishop rubbed one of his chins.
For a person born and raised into a world where information was always at hand, communication with anyone anywhere a given, and no distance more than a farcaster step away, this sudden regression to life as our ancestors had known it would be like suddenly awakening blind and crippled.
“Who knows what they’ll do? Or what Gladstone believes for that matter. The Hegemony and its relationship with the Ousters aren’t my worry now. I sincerely wish a plague on both their houses.” “To the extent that humanity suffers?” “I don’t know humanity,” said the Consul in an exhausted monotone. “I do know Sol Weintraub. And Rachel. And an injured woman named Brawne Lamia. And Father Paul Duré. And Fedmahn Kassad.
“It’s all right, Brawne,” he said softly, sheltering her, his eyes bright with the tears of disappointment he would not let fall. “It’s all right. You’re back.”
He sits in the straight-backed chair next to the bed and lifts a cooling cup of tea. “If you die, what happens to me?” “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “If I die, I don’t even know what happens to me.”
“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”
I will try. Before surrendering to the dreams or death, I will try.
In the end, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.
[Because it is scary out there/ and there are other things] —Other things? Other intelligences? [Kwatz!] [Too kind a word Things/ Other things/ Lions and tigers and bears]
[Careful/ Keats/ thinking may become a habit]
Lying on cold stone, listening to the wind scream die, Sol saw the cold stars appear, saw the meteor trail and laser-lance thrust and counterthrust of orbital war, knew in his heart that the war was lost, that the Web was in danger, that great empires were falling as he watched, the human race might be hanging in the balance this endless night … and he did not care. Sol Weintraub cared about his daughter.
In the end, thought Sol, past logic and hope, it is dreams and the love of those dearest to us that form Abraham’s answer to God.
All Sol wanted, he realized now, was the same possibility once again to worry about those future years which every parent fears and dreads. To not allow her childhood and teenage years and awkward young adulthood to be stolen and destroyed by the sickness.
To demonstrate it, Councilor Albedo had explained, you must use it on at least one Ouster Swarm. The excitement of the War Council had not been lessened. Perfect, said All Thing Speaker Gibbons, choose one Swarm, test the device, fatline the results to the other Swarms, and give them a one-hour deadline to break off their attacks. We didn’t provoke this war. Better millions of the enemy dead than a war that claims tens of billions over the next decade. Hiroshima, Gladstone had said, her only comment of the day. It had been said too softly for anyone except her aide Sedeptra to hear.
Martin Silenus’s eyes twitched and opened like an owl’s. “Hey,” he said, “do you know the fucking Shrike’s standing right behind you?”
“We have three hours.” Morpurgo looked at his comlog. “Two hours and forty-two minutes. Hardly time enough for a miracle, Meina.” Gladstone did not smile. “Hardly time enough for anything else, Arthur.”
“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”
Death is not, I discovered, a pleasant experience.
Well-to-do family members listening to Gladstone’s speech in their fashionable multiworld residence looked up to stare at each other, separated by only a few meters and open portals between the rooms, blinked, and were separated by light-years and actual years, their rooms now opening onto nothing.
The River Tethys ceased to flow as the giant portals went opaque and died. Water spilled out, dried up, and left fish to rot under two hundred suns.
“THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL, YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE.”
Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.
If God evolved, and Sol was sure that God must, then that evolution was toward empathy—toward a shared sense of suffering rather than power and dominion.
descending spacecraft slice the predawn sky. He turned to look but did not retreat when he heard the spacecraft landing and saw three figures emerge. He glanced but did not step back when he heard other noises, shouts, from deeper in the valley and saw a familiar figure lugging another in a fireman’s carry, moving toward him from beyond the Jade Tomb. None of these things related to his child. He waited for Rachel.
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.”
“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.
