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“Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” Here is the essence of mankind’s creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum.
“Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.” Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: “Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”
To be a true poet is to become God. — I TRIED TO explain this to my friends on Heaven’s Gate. “Piss, shit,” I said. “Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!”
For me, the first few months of life as a celebrity in the Hegemony were far more disorienting than my earlier transition from spoiled son of Old Earth to enslaved stroke victim on Heaven’s Gate.
I spoke to the Interplanetary Society of PEN Women and to the Lusus Writers’ Union; I was given honorary degrees at the University of New Earth and at Cambridge Two; I was feted, interviewed, imaged, reviewed (favorably), bioed (unauthorized), lionized, serialized, and swindled. It was a busy time.
PERHAPS IT WAS my refusal to use Flashback again which hastened Helenda’s departure, but I doubt it. I was a toy to her—a primitive who amused her by my innocence about a life she had taken for granted for many decades. Whatever the case, my refusal to Flashback left me with many days without her; the time spent in replay is real time and Flashback users often die having spent more days of their lives under the drug than they ever experienced conscious.
Someone once estimated that the All Thing deals with about a hundred active pieces of Hegemony legislation per day, and during my months spent screwed into the sensorium I missed none of them. My voice and name became well known on the debate channels. No bill was too small, no issue too simple or too complex for my input. The simple act of voting every few minutes gave me a false sense of having accomplished something.
A person constantly busy accessing on his implants makes a pitiful sight in public and it didn’t take Helenda’s derision to make me realize that if I stayed home I would turn into an All Thing sponge like so many millions of other slugs around the Web. So I gave up politics. But by then I had found a new passion: religion.
“NO ONE WANTS to read poetry,” she said, leafing through the thin stack of Cantos I had written in the past year and a half. “What do you mean?” I said. “The Dying Earth was poetry.” “The Dying Earth was a fluke,” said Tyrena. Her nails were long and green and curved in the latest mandarin fashion; they curled around my manuscript like the claws of some chlorophyll beast. “It sold because the mass subconscious was ready for it.”
“So no one wants to pay for a look at another person’s angst,” laughed Tyrena.
After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
What the Cantos lacked in sales it made up for in negative reviews: “Indecipherable…archaic…irrelevant to all current concerns,” said the Times Book Section. “M. Silenus has committed the ultimate act of noncommunication,” wrote Urban Kapry in the TC2 Review,
“You said seventy million were planned,” I said. “Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline’s resident AI read it.” I slumped lower in the flowfoam. “Even the AI hated it?” “The AI loved it,” said Tyrena. “That’s when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it.” I sat up. “Couldn’t we have sold copies to the TechnoCore?” “We did,” said Tyrena. “One. The millions of AIs there probably real-time-shared it the minute it came in over fatline. Interstellar copyright doesn’t mean shit when you’re dealing with silicon.”
The book was in novel form, short enough not to intimidate the potential buyer at Food Mart checkout stands, and the cover was a twenty-second interactive holo wherein the tall, swarthy stranger—Amalfi Schwartz, I suppose, although Amalfi was short and pale and wore corrective lenses—rips the bodice of the struggling female just to the nipple line before the protesting blonde turns toward the viewer and cries for help in a breathless whisper provided by porn holie star Leeda Swann.
“Listen, you miserable, no-talent hack,” she hissed. “Transline owns you from the balls up. If you give us any more trouble we’ll have you working in the Gothic Romance factory under the name Rosemary Titmouse. Now go home, sober up, and get to work on Dying Earth X.”
Sad King Billy’s reputation for gloominess is exaggerated. He often laughs; it is merely his misfortune that his peculiar form of laughter makes most people think he is sobbing. A man cannot help his physiognomy, but in His Highness’s case, the entire persona tends to suggest either “buffoon” or “victim.”
In some ways King Billy is the fat child with his face eternally pressed to the candy store window. He loves and appreciates fine music but cannot produce it. A connoisseur of ballet and all things graceful, His Highness is a klutz, a moving series of pratfalls and comic bits of clumsiness. A passionate reader, unerring poetry critic, and patron of forensics, King Billy combines a stutter in his verbal expression with a shyness which will not allow him to show his verse or prose to anyone else.
but the royal ruler of the kingdom of Monaco-in-Exile seemed more melted than ever when he called me in. “Martin,” said His Majesty, “you’ve h-h-heard about the b-battle for Fomalhaut?”
No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn’s cat. I decided to kill myself. But first I spent some time, nine years at least, carrying out a community service by providing the one thing new Hyperion lacked: decadence. From a biosculptor aptly named Graumann Hacket, I obtained the hairy flanks, hooves, and goat legs of a satyr. I cultivated my beard and extended my ears. Graumann made interesting alterations to my sexual apparatus. Word got around. Peasant girls, indigenies, the wives of our true-blue city planners and pioneers—all awaited a visit
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Then Hoban Kristus, the abstract implosionist, fails to appear at the midweek performance at Poets’ Amphitheatre,
The sculptor Pete Garcia is found in his studio…and in his bedroom…and in the yard beyond.
We are all secretly thrilled and titillated. True, the dialogue is bad, straight out of a million movies and holies we’ve scared ourselves with, but now we are part of the show.
Sissipriss Harris had been one of my first conquests as a satyr—and one of my most enthusiastic—a beautiful girl, long blond hair too soft to be real, a fresh-picked-peach complexion too virginal to dream of touching, a beauty too perfect to believe: precisely the sort that even the most timid male dreams of violating. Sissipriss now had been violated in earnest. They
I knew when I heard these details precisely what kind of creature we were dealing with, for a cat I had owned on Mother’s estate had left similar offerings on the south patio most summer mornings—the head of a mouse staring up from the sandstone in pure rodent amazement, or perhaps a ground squirrel’s toothy grin—killing trophies from a proud but hungry predator.
“I haven’t forced my attentions on a ewe since my boyhood days on the farm,” I said. “I promised my mother in song that I wouldn’t indulge in sheep fucking again without asking her permission.”
the indigenies started, the Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the Angel of Final Atonement, come from a place beyond time to announce the end of the human race. I liked that conceit.” “The end of the human race,” repeated King Billy. “Yeah. He’s Michael the Archangel and Moroni and Satan and Masked Entropy and the Frankenstein monster all rolled into one package,”
“Because the Shrike Cult believes that mankind somehow created the thing,” I said, although I knew that King Billy knew everything I knew and more.
“Before you go, can you think of anything else that could help us understand this thing?” I paused in the doorway, feeling my heart batting at my ribs to get out. “Yeah,” I said, my voice only marginally steady. “I can tell you who and what the Shrike really is.” “Oh?” “It’s my muse,” I said, and turned, and went back to my room to write.
OF COURSE I had summoned the Shrike. I knew that. I had summoned it by beginning my epic poem about it. In the beginning was the Word. I retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos. It was not about the planet but about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans.
What began as a comic-serious homage to the ghost of John Keats became my last reason for existence, an epic tour de force in an age of mediocre farce. Hyperion Cantos was written with a skill I could never have attained, with a mastery I could never have gained, and sung in a voice which was not mine. The passing of humankind was my topic. The Shrike was my muse.
WHEN YOU THINK about it, the cause-effect begins to resemble some mad logic-loop by the data artist Carolus or perhaps a print by Escher: the Shrike had come into existence because of the incantatory powers of my poem but the poem could not have existed without the threat/presence of the Shrike as muse. Perhaps I was a bit mad in those days.
“But you can’t write it, can you, Martin? You can’t c-c-c-compose this poetry unless your m-m-muse is shedding blood, can you?” “Bullshit,” I said. “Perhaps. But a fascinating coincidence. Have you ever wondered why you have been spared, Martin?” I shrugged again and slid another stack of papers out of his reach. I was taller, stronger, and meaner than Billy, but I had to be sure that none of the manuscript would be damaged if he struggled as I lifted him out of his seat and threw him out.
“Go!” cried King Billy, stutter forgotten, voice exalted, a blazing mass of poetry in each hand. “Return to the pit from whence you came!” The Shrike seemed to incline its head ever so slightly. Red light gleamed on sharp surfaces. “My lord!” I cried, although to King Billy or the apparition from hell I did not know then and know not now. I staggered the last few paces and reached for Billy’s arm.
For a second the pyre was a perfect sculpture of flame, a blue and yellow Pietà with a four-armed madonna holding a blazing Christ figure. Then the burning figure writhed and arched, still pinned by steel thorns and a score of scalpeled talons, and a cry went up which to this day I cannot believe emanated from the human half of that death-embraced pair.
ANTICLIMAX IS, OF course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement. It took me several months, perhaps a year, to recopy the kerosene-damaged pages and to rewrite the burned Cantos. It will be no surprise to learn that I did not finish the poem. It was not by choice. My muse had fled.
telling, much less reliving. The Poulsen treatments to keep the instrument alive and waiting. Two long, cold sleeps in illegal, sublight, cryogenic voyages; each swallowing a century or more; each taking its toll in brain cells and memory. I waited then. I wait still. The poem must be finished. It will be finished.
“What will you do now?” Colonel Kassad asked the android. “According to the terms of the Temple bonditure, we are free after this trip,” said Bettik. “We shall leave the Benares here for your return and take the launch downriver. And then we go on our way.” “With the general evacuations?” asked Brawne Lamia. “No.” Bettik smiled. “We have our own purposes and pilgrimages on Hyperion.”
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.”
Nightenhelser was a small school, fewer than three thousand students, but its academic reputation was outstanding and it attracted young people from all over the Web. The primary complaint of these students was that Nightenhelser and its surrounding community of Crawford constituted an island of civilization in an ocean of corn.
Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.
“Dad, why do Jews feel that things are…less important now than before the Hegira?” Sol spread his hands—strong hands, more those of a stoneworker than an academic. “That’s a good question, Rachel. Probably because so much of the dream is dead. Israel is gone. The New Temple lasted less time than the first and second. God broke His word by destroying the Earth a second time in the way He did. And this Diaspora is…forever.”
“Dad,” said Rachel, “I’m going to ask you a question I’ve asked about a million times since I was two. Do you believe in God?” Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the answer he had given her a million times. “I’m waiting to,” he said.
The thought that she was flying away from him faster than the speed of light, wrapped in the artificial quantum cocoon of the Hawking effect, seemed unnatural and ominous to him.
Sarai, but although both of them enjoyed the idea of traveling, the actual experience of facing strange foods, different gravities, and the light from strange suns all paled after a while and Sol found himself spending more time at home researching his next book, attending conferences, if he had to, via interactive holo from the college.
“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”
And Sol awakened half laughing, half chilled by the dream. Amused by the thought that the entire Talmud and the Old Testament might be nothing more than a cosmic shaggy-dog story.
“No,” said Singh, “in fact your daughter’s illness has no name. The medics here are calling it Merlin’s sickness. You see…your daughter is aging at a normal rate…but as far as we can tell, she is aging backward.”
She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
“Ahh,” gasped Sol the day they arrived in the sun-baked village of Dan above the sun-baked kibbutz of K’far Shalom, “what masochists we Jews are. Twenty thousand surveyed worlds fit for our kind when the Hegira began, and those schmucks came here.”
After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.
