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John Carter Brigade
vicious and unpopular Island War began there, and eventually the FORCE:combined commander at Firstsite got so tired of seeing the young Kassad waiting in his outer office that he allowed the boy to enlist in the 23rd Supply Regiment as an assistant hydrofoil driver. Eleven
But it was during the short reign of the New Prophet on Qom-Riyadh that Captain Fedmahn Kassad came to the attention of the entire Web.
The FORCE:space captain of the only Hegemony ship within two leap years of the colony world had been paying a courtesy call when the New Prophet chose to lead thirty million New Order Shi’ites against two continents of Suni shopkeepers and ninety thousand resident Hegemony infidels.
He said that he had been raised as a Muslim. He also announced that interpretation of the Koran since the Shi’ites’ seedship days had definitely shown that the God of Islam would neither condone nor allow the slaughter of the innocent, no matter how many jihads were proclaimed by tinhorn heretics like the New Prophet. Captain Kassad gave the leaders of the thirty million zealots three hours to surrender their hostages and return to their homes on the desert continent of Qom.
Firing squads had been busy day and night settling ancient theological disputes and it was estimated that at least a quarter of a million Sunis had been slaughtered in the first two days of the New Prophet’s occupation.
The New Prophet agreed with Kassad’s statement that Allah would horribly punish heretics but announced that it was the Hegemony infidels who would be so punished. It was the only time the New Prophet ever had been seen to lose his temper on camera. Screaming, saliva flying, he ordered the human wave attacks to be renewed on the grounded assault boat.
literally in the middle of pronouncing the word “heretic”—when 1730 hours arrived. For almost two minutes the TV screens and walls around the planet carried the image of the New Prophet’s headless body slumped over the microphone. Then Fedmahn Kassad cut in on all bands to announce that his next deadline was one hour away and that any actions against the hostages would be met with a more dramatic demonstration of Allah’s displeasure. There were no reprisals.
The New Bushido Code which governed Colonel Kassad’s life had evolved out of the necessity for the military class to survive. After the obscenities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries on Old Earth, when military leaders had committed their nations to strategies wherein entire civilian populations were legitimate targets while their uniformed executioners sat safe in self-contained bunkers fifty meters under the earth, the repugnance of the surviving civilians was so great that for more than a century the word “military” was an invitation to a lynching.
The Ousters had been the single external threat to the Hegemony for the four centuries since the forebears of the barbarian hordes had left Sol System in their crude fleet of leaking O’Neill cities, tumbling asteroids, and experimental comet farm clusters. Even after the Ousters acquired the Hawking drive, it remained official Hegemony policy to ignore them as long as their swarms stayed in the darkness between the stars
By the time the Ousters withdrew ninety-seven days after the FORCE “rescue” of Bressia, Kassad had earned the double-edged nickname of the Butcher of South Bressia. It was rumored that even his own troops were afraid of him. And Kassad dreamed of her with dreams that were more—and less—than dreams. On the last night of the Battle for Stoneheap,
AS TENDS TO be the case in a universe apparently ruled by irony, Fedmahn Kassad passed unscathed through ninety-seven days of the worst fighting the Hegemony had ever seen, only to be wounded two days after the last of the Ousters had retreated to their fleeing swarmships.
This section—a boom-arm and medical ward mod, a ragged chunk of the hull—had been ripped free of the ship as easily as Beowulf had torn the arm from Grendel’s body. The final, unsealed doorway to the dropshaft led to open space. Some
The third Ouster would have escaped if he had not rediscovered honor and turned to fight. Kassad felt an inexplicable sense of déjà vu as he put an energy bolt through the man’s left eye from five meters away.
There seemed to be no obvious bail-out control, no ejection apparatus. Every FORCE:space shuttle carried some sort of atmospheric egress device—it was a custom dating back almost eight centuries to when the entire realm of space flight consisted only of tentative excursions just above the skin of Old Earth’s atmosphere. A ship-to-ship shuttle probably would never need a planetary bail-out device, but age-old fears written into ancient regulations tended to die hard.
all but accepted the fact that the Ousters had not wasted money or space on such low-probability rescue devices for their squids. Why should they? Their lifetimes were spent in the darknesses between star systems; their concept of an atmosphere was the eight-klick pressurized tube of a can city.
“Your name?” Kassad asked as they left the building with the shattered dome and walked through a dead city. “Moneta,” said his dream, “or Mnemosyne, whichever name pleases you more.” “Moneta,” whispered Kassad. He looked up at a small sun rising into a lapis sky. “This is Hyperion?”
“The City of Poets. Abandoned more than a hundred years ago. Beyond that hill lie the Time Tombs.” “The Ouster assault boats that were following me?” “One landed nearby. The Pain Lord took the crew unto himself. The other two set down some distance away.”
The Time Tombs lay in a valley. A low obelisk glowed softly. A stone sphinx seemed to absorb the light. A complex structure of twisted pylons threw shadows onto itself. Other tombs were silhouettes against the rising sun. Each of the tombs had a door and each door was open.
“The tombs are ancient. The anti-entropic fields keep them from aging.” “No,” said Moneta. “The time tides drive the Tombs backward through time.”
Branches shifted, dissolved, and reformed like elements of a poorly tuned hologram. Sunlight danced on five-meter-long thorns. Corpses of Ouster men and women, all naked, were impaled on at least a score of these thorns. Other branches held other bodies. Not all were human.
“You have been in my dreams for years,” he told her. “Yes. Your past. My future. The shock wave of events moves across time like ripples on a pond.”
His altered body spoke to him now as clearly as troops reporting in on an implant command circuit. Kassad felt the bloodlust build in him with turgid strength.
Kassad dreamily noted the four arms, retractable fingerblades, the profusion of thornspikes on throat, forehead, wrists, knees, and body, but not once did his gaze leave the two thousand-faceted eyes which burned with a red flame that paled sunlight and dimmed the day to blood shadows. The Shrike, thought Kassad. “The Lord of Pain,” whispered Moneta. The thing turned and led them out of the dead city.
—He controls time. —The Pain Lord? —Of course. —Why are we here? Moneta gestured toward the motionless Ousters.—They are your enemies.
Meanwhile, Kassad and Moneta and the Shrike could kill all of them without the Ousters realizing that they were under attack. It was not fair, Kassad realized. It was wrong. It was the ultimate violation of the New Bushido, worse in its way than the wanton murder of civilians. The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals. He was about to communicate this to Moneta when she said/thought—Watch.
Time was still out of joint; the enemy moved in extreme slow motion one second, jerked like a damaged holo to four-fifths speed in the next instant. They were never as quick as Kassad. Gone
She looked at him across the battlefield and Kassad felt a renewed surge of bloodlust in himself. Behind her, the Shrike moved slowly through the chaos, choosing victims as if he were harvesting. Kassad watched the creature wink in and out of existence and realized that to the Pain Lord he and Moneta would appear to be moving as slowly as the Ousters did to Kassad.
Kassad’s sense of honor and sanity called out for him to stop the slaughter but his almost sexual bloodlust overpowered any objections.
her dark hair was matted against her temples; her nipples were hard. “Come here.” Kassad glanced down at himself. His own forcefield was gone—he had willed it away—and he was more sexually excited than he could ever remember being.
Lying among the dead. More dead to come. The thousands. The millions. Laughter out of dead bellies. The long lines of troops emerging from JumpShips to enter the waiting flames.
…in the last seconds before orgasm Kassad tries to pull away…his hands on her throat, pressing…she clings like a leech, a lamprey ready to drain him…they roll against dead bodies… …her eyes like red jewels, blazing with a mad heat like that which fills his aching testicles, expanding like a flame, spilling over… …Kassad slams both hands against the soil, lifts himself away from her…from it…his strength insane but not enough as terrible gravities press them together…sucking like a lamprey’s mouth as he threatens to explode, looks in her eyes…the death of worlds…the death of worlds!
Kassad slumps on his side, rolls away, hips moving, unable to stop his ejaculation. Semen explodes in streams, falls on the curled fist of a corpse. Kassad moans, rolls again, curls in a fetal position even as he comes again. And again.
Upon returning to the Web, Kassad resigned his commission. For a while he was active in antiwar movements, occasionally appearing on the All Thing net arguing disarmament. But the attack on Bressia had mobilized the Hegemony toward true interstellar war as had nothing else in three centuries, and Kassad’s voice was either drowned out or dismissed as the guilty conscience of the Butcher of South Bressia. In the sixteen years after Bressia, Colonel Kassad had disappeared from the Web and from the Web consciousness. Although there had been no more major battles, the Ousters remained the
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“My God,” Father Hoyt was saying, “so, according to this Moneta creature, the Time Tombs are moving backward in time?” “Yes,” said Kassad. “Is that possible?” asked Hoyt. “Yes.” It was Sol Weintraub who answered.
“If that’s true,” said Brawne Lamia, “then you ‘met’ this Moneta…or whatever her real name is…in her past but your future…in a meeting that’s still to come.” “Yes,” said Kassad.
Kassad smiled for the first time. It was a thin smile, and very, very cold. “I will make no petition,” said Kassad. “I will ask nothing of them. When I meet them this time, I will kill them.” The other pilgrims did not speak or look at one another as Kassad went below.
Now he asked, his voice as careful and unslurred as only a true alcoholic’s can be, whose turn it was to tell a tale.
THE POET’S TALE: “HYPERION CANTOS” IN THE BEGINNING was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes. Francis Bacon once said, “There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” We have all contributed our wonderful obstructions to the mind, have we not?
But, in the end, it was none of these things, of course. It was only Hrothgar’s claustrophobic mead hall with the monster waiting in the darkness without. We had our Grendel, to be sure. We even had our Hrothgar if one squints a bit at Sad King Billy’s poor slouched profile.
It occurs to me that the Grendel tale is premature. The players have not been brought upon the stage. Dislinear plotting and noncontiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum.
And so, somewhere in the TechnoCore vaults of my mother’s estate, frozen sperm from my long-dead daddy was defrosted, set in suspension, shaken like the vanilla malts of yore, loaded into something part squirt gun and part dildo, and—at the magic touch of a trigger—ejaculated into Mother at a time when the moon was full and the egg was ripe.
It was after the Big Mistake but before everything grew uninhabitable. Mostly we occupied the estate during what we quaintly called “periods of remission”—stretches of ten to eighteen quiet months between planet-wide spasms as the Kiev Team’s goddamn little black hole digested bits of the Earth’s center and waited for its next feast.
I knew that I would be—should be—a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race’s thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; I became a poet.
Don Balthazar had little interest in what he referred to as “the mechanical side of the universe.” I was twenty-two before I realized that computers, RMUs, and Uncle Kowa’s asteroidal life-support devices were machines and not some benevolent manifestations of the animas around us.
Don Balthazar never commented on my work; primarily, I assume, because I never showed him any of it. Don Balthazar thought that the venerable Daton was a fraud, that Salmud Brevy and Robert Frost should have hanged themselves with their own entrails, that Wordsworth was a fool, and that anything less than Shakespeare’s sonnets was a profanation of the language. I saw no reason to bother don Balthazar with my verse, rife with budding genius though I knew it to be.
She liquidated all available assets some weeks before that phrase became a literal reality, deposited a quarter of a million marks in long-term accounts in the fleeing Ring Bank,
No, Mother sent me to this back end of the outback on a Phase Three ramship, slower than light, frozen with the cattle embryos and orange juice concentrate and feeder viruses, on a trip that took one hundred and twenty-nine shipboard years, with an objective time-debt of one hundred and sixty-seven standard years!
So while I slept the Hegemony became a formal entity, the Worldweb was spun to something close to its final shape, the All Thing took its democratic place among the list of humanity’s benevolent despots, the TechnoCore seceded from human service and then offered its help as an ally rather than a slave, and the Ousters retreated to darkness and the role of Nemesis…but
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
