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‘This is poetry. You’re writing about Heaven’s Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what comes across is loneliness, displacement, angst, and a cynical look at humanity.’ ‘So?’ ‘So no one wants to pay for a look at another person’s angst,’ laughed Tyrena.
‘Who was Hitler?’ I said. Tyrena smiled slightly. ‘An Old Earth politician who did some writing. Mein Kampf is still in print . . . Transline renews the copyright every hundred and thirty-eight years.’
‘I suppose you’ll want to edit it the way you did last time?’ ‘Not at all,’ said Tyrena. ‘Since there’s no core of nostalgia this time, you might as well write it the way you want.’ I blinked. ‘You mean I can keep in the blank verse this time?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘And the philosophy?’ ‘Please do.’ ‘And the experimental sections?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you’ll print it the way I write it?’ ‘Absolutely.’ ‘Is there a chance it’ll sell?’ ‘Not a hope in hell.’
After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
‘I tried to discover the voice of some of the Ancients,’ I said, suddenly shy. ‘You succeeded brilliantly.’ ‘The Heaven’s Gate Interlude is still rough,’ I said. ‘It’s perfect.’ ‘It’s about loneliness,’ I said. ‘It is loneliness.’ ‘Do you think it’s ready?’ I asked. ‘It’s perfect . . . a masterpiece.’ ‘Do you think it’ll sell?’ I asked. ‘No fucking way.’
‘Look,’ said Tyrena. ‘In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.’
Her new office occupied the highest level of the Tau Ceti Center Transline Spire and standing there was like perching on the carpeted summit of the galaxy’s tallest, thinnest peak; only the invisible dome of the slightly polarized containment field arched overhead and the edge of the carpet ended in a six-kilometer drop. I wondered if other authors felt the urge to jump.
Page one had a single sentence: ‘And then, one fine morning in October, the Dying Earth swallowed its own bowels, spasmed its final spasm and died.’ The other two hundred and ninety-nine pages were blank.
‘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.’
‘One word to Collections and we’ll seize every room of your house except that goddamn raft you use as an outhouse. You can sit on it until the oceans fill up with crap.’
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.
It was fucking wonderful. It was fucking hell.
‘Never?’ he said. ‘Not unless you outlive me.’ ‘Which I plan to do,’ said the King. ‘While you expire from playing goat to the kingdom’s ewes.’
‘If I were a detective,’ he said, ‘I would be suspicious. The city’s least productive citizen starts writing again after a decade of silence only . . . what, Martin? . . . two days after the first murders happened. Now he’s disappeared from the social life he once dominated and spends his time composing an epic poem . . . why, even the young girls are safe from his goatish ardor.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘You’ve got me. I confess. I’ve been murdering them and bathing in their blood. It works as a fucking literary aphrodisiac. I figure two . . . three hundred more victims, tops . . . and I’ll have my next book ready for publication.’
‘Shrike,’ I muttered, more in greeting than in identification.
The King rubbed his brow and winced as he accidentally stuck his little finger in his eye.
Why does this make me chuckle. The clumsy fuck lol
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘According to the Shrike Cult gospel that 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.’
‘Yeah. He’s Michael the Archangel and Moroni and Satan and Masked Entropy and the Frankenstein monster all rolled into one package,’ I said. ‘He hangs around the Time Tombs waiting to come out and wreak havoc when it’s mankind’s time to join the dodo and the gorilla and the sperm whale on the extinction Hit Parade list.’
‘Because the Shrike Cult believes that mankind somehow created the thing,’
‘Do they know how to kill it?’ he asked. ‘Not that I know of. He’s supposed to be immortal, beyond time.’ ‘A god?’
‘More like one of the universe’s worst nightmares come to life. Sort of like the Grim Reaper, but with a penchant for sticking souls on a giant thorn tree . . . while the people’s souls are still in their bodies.’
‘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.
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.
I moved from room to room in King Billy’s abandoned palace, working on my poem, waiting for my muse.
Skimmers, dropships, and helicopters had not had much luck flying to the Time Tombs region in recent years. The machines arrived sans passengers. It had done wonders in fueling the Shrike myth.
In the beginning was the Word. In the end . . . past honor, past life, past caring . . . In the end will be the Word.
‘And there are the grass serpents,’ said Kassad, lowering the glasses. ‘It’s a well-preserved ecosystem but not one to take a stroll in.’
THE SCHOLAR’S TALE: The River Lethe’s Taste is Bitter
Oh boy. Here we go
‘Not too exciting, I hope,’ said Sarai and all of them had smiled.
If only you knew
She’s twenty-five years old and in love. Let her be happy.’
While she can
Our apartment was filled with photos of us, notes I wrote to myself about us, holos of us on Hyperion, but . . . you know. In the morning he would be an absolute stranger. By afternoon I began to believe what we’d had, even if I couldn’t remember. By evening I’d be crying in his arms . . . then, sooner or later, I’d go to sleep. It’s better this way.’
‘It’s sort of funny in a weird way, isn’t it?’ ‘No,’ Sol said quietly. ‘No, I’m sure it’s not,’ said Rachel.
‘Don’t tell me, Dad,’ she said firmly. ‘Don’t let me tell me. It just hurts. I mean, I didn’t live those times . . .’ She paused and touched her forehead. ‘You know what I mean, Dad. The Rachel who went to another planet and fell in love and got hurt . . . that was a different Rachel ! I shouldn’t have to suffer her pain.’ She was crying now. ‘Do you understand? Do you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Sol. He opened his arms and felt her warmth and tears against his chest. ‘Yes, I understand.’
The Rachel who went to another planet and fell in love and got hurt . . . that was a different Rachel ! I shouldn’t have to suffer her pain.’ She was crying now. ‘Do you understand? Do you?’
‘No,’ agreed Sol. ‘It’s not fair.’ The sunlight coming through the dusty attic panes had a sad, cathedral quality to it. Sol had always loved the smell of an attic – the hot and stale promise of a place so underused and filled with future treasures. Today it was ruined.
IF IT BECOMES TOO MUCH, COME. It soon became too much.
Rachel clutched the teddy bear Sarai had resurrected from the attic six months earlier. She said, ‘It’s not fair.’ ‘No,’ agreed Sol. ‘It’s not fair.’
—A child is innocent, thought Sol. Isaac was. Rachel is. —‘Innocent’ by the mere fact of being a child? —Yes.
‘You heard me. We can’t wait until she is too young to walk . . . to talk. Also, we’re not getting any younger.’ Sarai barked a mirthless laugh. ‘That sounds strange, doesn’t it? But we’re not. The Poulsen treatments will be wearing off in a year or two.’
Ten thousand times in the past twenty years he had wished that he could take Rachel’s illness; that if anyone had to suffer it should be the father, not the child. Any parent would feel that way – did feel that way every time his child lay injured or racked with fever. Surely it could not be that simple.
First and Second Holocausts,
Second lol ?
‘No. Something I’ve been playing with called The Abraham Problem.’ ‘Clumsy title,’ said Sarai. ‘It’s a clumsy problem,’ said Sol.
In the evening Sol walked the ridge lines above the village while Judy watched his sleeping child. He found that his dialogue with God was audible now and he resisted the urge to shake his fist at the sky, to shout obscenities, to throw stones. Instead he asked questions, always ending with – Why?
’Later, alligator.’ ‘Huh?’ ‘See you later, alligator.’ Rachel giggled. ‘You say – “In a while, crocodile,” ’ said Sol. He told her what an alligator and crocodile were. ‘In a while, ’acadile,’ giggled Rachel. In the morning she had forgotten.
Rachel’s last word was ‘Mamma’, uttered when she was just over five months old.
My heart is literary breaking
‘Hope is good,’ Robert said in cautious tones. Sol grinned, his teeth white against the gray of his beard. ‘It had better be,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it is all we’re given.’
‘We wish you luck, M. Weintraub. And’ – Whiteshire’s large hand touched Rachel’s cheek – ‘we wish you Godspeed, our young friend.’
Sol smiled at his seven-week-old daughter. She smiled back. It was her last and her first smile.
‘I’m a private investigator,’ said Lamia, leveling her gaze on the poet. Martin Silenus shrugged. ‘Hoyt here is a priest of some forgotten religion. That doesn’t mean we have to genuflect when he says Mass.’
