THIRTY-EIGHT

Today we entered the swampy wasteland which I recognize as the Campagna, and to celebrate I have another coughing fit, terminated by vomiting more blood. Much more. Leigh Hunt is beside himself with concern and frustration and, after holding my shoulders during the spasm and helping to clean my clothes with rags moistened in a nearby stream, he asks, “What can I do?”

“Collect flowers from the fields,” I gasp. “That’s what Joseph Severn did.”

He turns away angrily, not realizing that even in my feverish, exhausted state, I was merely telling the truth.

The little cart and tired horse pass through the Campagna with more painful bumping and rattling than before. Late in the afternoon, we pass some skeletons of horses along the way, then the ruins of an old inn, then a more massive ruin of a viaduct overgrown with moss, and finally posts to which it appears that white sticks have been nailed.

“What on earth is that?” asks Hunt, not realizing the irony of the ancient phrase.

“The bones of bandits,” I answer truthfully.

Hunt looks at me as if my mind has succumbed to the sickness. Perhaps it has.

Later we climb out of the swamplands of the Campagna and get a glimpse of a flash of red moving far out among the fields.

“What is that?” demands Hunt eagerly, hopefully. I know that he expects to see people any moment and a functioning farcaster portal a moment after that.

“A cardinal,” I say, again telling the truth. “Shooting birds.”

Hunt accesses his poor, crippled comlog. “A cardinal is a bird,” he says.

I nod, look to the west, but the red is gone. “Also a cleric,” I say. “And we are approaching Rome, you know.”

Hunt frowns at me and attempts for the thousandth time to raise someone on the comm bands of his comlog. The afternoon is silent except for the rhythmic creak of the vettura’s wooden wheels and the trill of some distant songbird. A cardinal, perhaps?

We enter Rome as the first flush of evening touches the clouds. The little cart rocks and rumbles through the Lateran Gate, and almost immediately we are confronted with the sight of the Colosseum, overgrown with ivy and obviously the home of thousands of pigeons, but immensely more impressive than holos of the ruin, set now as it was, not within the grubby confines of a postwar city ringed with giant arcologies, but contrasted against clusters of small huts and open fields where the city ends and countryside begins. I can see Rome proper in the distance … a scattering of rooftops and smaller ruins on its fabled Seven Hills, but here the Colosseum rules.

“Jesus,” whispers Leigh Hunt. “What is it?”

“The bones of bandits,” I say slowly, fearful of starting the terrible coughing once again.

We move on, clopping through the deserted streets of nineteenth-century Old Earth Rome as the evening settles thick and heavy around us and the light fails and pigeons wheel above the domes and rooftops of the Eternal City.

“Where is everyone?” whispers Hunt. He sounds frightened.

“Not here because they are not needed,” I say. My voice sounds sharp edged in the canyon dusk of the city streets. The wheels turn on cobblestones now, hardly more smooth than the random stones of the highway we just escaped.

“Is this some stimsim?” he asks.

“Stop the cart,” I say, and the obedient horse comes to a halt. I point out a heavy stone by the gutter. “Kick that,” I say to Hunt.

He frowns at me but steps down, approaches the stone, and gives it a hearty kick. More pigeons erupt skyward from bell towers and ivy, panicked by the echoes of his cursing.

“Like Dr. Johnson, you’ve demonstrated the reality of things,” I say. “This is no stimsim or dream. Or rather, no more one than the rest of our lives have been.”

“Why did they bring us here?” demands the CEO’s aide, glancing skyward as if the gods themselves were listening just beyond the fading pastel barriers of the evening clouds. “What do they want?”

They want me to die, I think, realizing the truth of it with the impact of a fist in my chest. I breathe slowly and shallowly to avoid a fit of coughing even as I feel the phlegm boil and bubble in my throat. They want me to die and they want you to watch.

The mare resumes its long haul, turning right on the next narrow street, then right again down a wider avenue filled with shadows and the echoes of our passing, and then stopping at the head of an immense flight of stairs.

“We’re here,” I say and struggle to exit the cart. My legs are cramped, my chest aches, and my ass is sore. In my mind runs the beginning of a satirical ode to the joys of traveling.

Hunt steps out as stiffly as I had and stands at the head of the giant, bifurcated staircase, folding his arms and glaring at them as if they are a trap or illusion. “Where, exactly, is here, Severn?”

I point to the open square at the foot of the steps. “The Piazza di Spagna,” I say. It is suddenly strange to hear Hunt call me Severn. I realize that the name ceased to be mine when we passed through the Lateran Gate. Or, rather, that my true name had suddenly become my own again.

“Before too many years pass,” I say, “these will be called the Spanish Steps.” I start down the right bend in the staircase A sudden dizziness causes me to stagger, and Hunt moves quickly to take my arm.

“You can’t walk,” he says. “You’re too ill.”

I point to a mottled old building forming a wall to the opposite side of the broad steps and facing the Piazza. “It’s not far, Hunt. There is our destination. ”

Gladstone’s aide turns his scowl toward the structure. “And what is there? Why are we stopping there? What awaits us there?”

I cannot help but smile at this least poetic of men’s unconscious use of assonance. I suddenly imagine us sitting up long nights in that dark hulk of a building as I teach him how to pair such technique with masculine or feminine caesura, or the joys of alternating iambic foot with unstressed pyrrhic, or the self-indulgence of the frequent spondee.

I cough, continue coughing, and do not cease until blood is spattering my palm and shirt.

Hunt helps me down the steps, across the Piazza where Bernini’s boat-shaped fountain gurgles and burbles in the dusk, and then, following my pointing finger, leads me into the black rectangle of the doorway—the doorway to Number 26 Piazza di Spagna—and I think, without volition, of Dante’s Commedia and seem to see the phrase “LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’INTRATE”—“Abandon Every Hope, Who Enter Here”—chiseled above the cold lintel of the doorway.

Sol Weintraub stood at the entrance to the Sphinx and shook his fist at the universe as night fell and the Tombs glowed with the brilliance of their opening and his daughter did not return.

Did not return.

The Shrike had taken her, lifted her newborn body in its palm of steel, and then stepped back into the radiance which even now pushed Sol away like some terrible, bright wind from the depths of the planet. Sol pressed against the hurricane of light, but it kept him out as surely as might a runaway containment field.

Hyperion’s sun had set, and now a cold wind blew from the barrens, driven in from the desert by a front of cold air sliding down the mountains to the south, and Sol turned to stare as vermilion dust blew into the searchlight glare of the opening Time Tombs.

The opening Tombs!

Sol squinted against the cold brilliance and looked down the valley to where the other Tombs glowed like pale green jack-o’-lanterns behind their curtain of blown dust. Light and long shadows leaped across the valley floor while the clouds were drained of the last of their sunset color overhead, and night came in with the howling wind.

Something was moving in the entrance of the second structure, the Jade Tomb. Sol staggered down the steps of the Sphinx, glancing up at the entrance where the Shrike had disappeared with his daughter, and then he was off the stairway, running past the Sphinx’s paws and stumbling down the windblown path toward the Jade Tomb.

Something moved slowly from the oval doorway, was silhouetted by the shaft of light emanating from the tomb, but Sol could not tell if it was human or not, Shrike or not. If it was the Shrike, he would seize it with his bare hands, shake it until it either returned his daughter to him or until one of them was dead.

It was not the Shrike.

Sol could see the silhouette as human now. The person staggered, leaned against the Jade Tomb’s doorway as if injured or tired. It was a young woman.

Sol thought of Rachel here in this place more than half a standard century earlier, the young archaeologist researching these artifacts and never guessing the fate awaiting her in the form of Merlin’s sickness. Sol had always imagined his child being saved by the sickness being canceled, the infant aging normally again, the child-who-would-some-day-be-Rachel given back her life. But what if Rachel returned as the twenty-six-year-old Rachel who had entered the Sphinx?

Sol’s pulse was pounding so loudly in his ears that he could not hear the wind rage around him. He waved at the figure, half-obscured now by the dust storm.

The young woman waved back.

Sol raced forward another twenty meters, stopped thirty meters from the tomb, and cried out. “Rachel! Rachel!”

The young woman silhouetted against the roaring light moved away from the doorway, touched her face with both hands, shouted something lost in the wind, and began to descend the stairs.

Sol ran, tripping over rocks as he lost the path and stumbled blindly across the valley floor, ignored the pain as his knee struck a low boulder, found the true path again, and ran to the base of the Jade Tomb, meeting her as she emerged from the cone of expanding light.

She fell just as Sol reached the bottom of the stairs, and he caught her, lowered her gently to the ground as blown sand rasped against his back and the time tides whirled about them in unseen eddies of vertigo and déjà vu.

“It is you,” she said and raised a hand to touch Sol’s cheek. “It’s real. I’m back.”

“Yes, Brawne,” said Sol, trying to hold his voice steady, brushing matted curls from Brawne Lamia’s face. He held her firmly, his arm on his knee, propping her head, his back bent to provide more shelter from the wind and sand. “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.”

Meina Gladstone walked up the stairs of the cavernous War Room and stepped out into the corridor where long strips of thick Perspex allowed a view down Mons Olympus to the Tharsis Plateau. It was raining far below, and from this vantage point almost twelve klicks high in the Martian sky, she could see pulses of lightning and curtains of static electricity as the storm dragged itself across the high steppes.

Her aide Sedeptra Akasi moved out into the corridor to stand silently next to the CEO.

“Still no word on Leigh or Severn?” asked Gladstone.

“None,” said Akasi. The young black woman’s face was illuminated by both the pale light of the Home System’s sun above and the play of lightning below. “The Core authorities say that it may have been a farcaster malfunction.”

Gladstone showed a smile with no warmth. “Yes. And can you remember any farcaster malfunction in our lifetime, Sedeptra? Anywhere in the Web?”

“No, M. Executive.”

“The Core feels no need for subtlety. Evidently they think they can kidnap whomever they want and not be held accountable. They think we need them too much in our hour of extremis. And you know something, Sedeptra?”

“What?”

“They’re right.” Gladstone shook her head and turned back toward the long descent into the War Room, “It’s less than ten minutes until the Ousters envelop God’s Grove. Let’s go down and join the others. Is my meeting with Councilor Albedo on immediately after this?”

“Yes, Meina. I don’t think … I mean, some of us think that it is too risky to confront them directly like that.”

Gladstone paused before entering the War Room. “Why?” she asked and this time her smile was sincere. “Do you think the Core will disappear me the way they did Leigh and Severn?”

Akasi started to speak, stopped, and raised her palms.

Gladstone touched the younger woman on the shoulder. “If they do, Sedeptra, it will be a mercy. But I think they will not. Things have gone so far that they believe that there is nothing an individual can do to change the course of events.” Gladstone withdrew her hand, her smile faded. “And they may be right.”

Not speaking, the two descended to the circle of waiting warriors and politicians.

“The moment approaches,” said the True Voice of the Worldtree Sek Hardeen.

Father Paul Duré was brought back from his reverie. In the past hour, his desperation and frustration had descended through resignation to something akin to pleasure at the thought of having no more choices, no more duties to perform. Duré had been sitting in companionable silence with the leader of the Templar Brotherhood, watching the setting of God’s Grove’s sun and the proliferation of stars and lights in the night that were not stars.

Duré had wondered at the Templar’s isolation from his people at such a crucial moment, but what he knew of Templar theology made Duré realize that the Followers of the Muir would meet such a moment of potential destruction alone on the most sacred platforms and in the most secret bowers of their most sacred trees. And the occasional soft comments Hardeen made into the cowl of his robe made Duré realize that the True Voice was in touch with fellow Templars via comlog or implants.

Still, it was a peaceful way to wait for the end of the world, sitting high in the known galaxy’s tallest living tree, listening to a warm evening breeze rustle a million acres of leaves and watching stars twinkle and twin moons hurtle across a velvet sky.

“We have asked Gladstone and the Hegemony authorities to offer no resistance, to allow no FORCE warships in-system,” said Sek Hardeen.

“Is that wise?” asked Duré. Hardeen had told him earlier what the fate of Heaven’s Gate had been.

“The FORCE fleet is not yet organized enough to offer serious resistance,” answered the Templar. “At least this way our world has some chance of being treated as a nonbelligerant.”

Father Duré nodded and leaned forward the better to see the tall figure in the shadows of the platform. Soft glow-globes in the branches below them were their only illumination other than the starlight and moonglow. “Yet you welcomed this war. Aided the Shrike Cult authorities in bringing it about.”

“No, Duré. Not the war. The Brotherhood knew it must be part of the Great Change.”

“And what is that?” asked Duré

“The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.”

“Cancer?”

“It is an ancient disease which—”

“Yes,” said Duré, “I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?”

Sek Hardeen’s perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. “We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the Seneschai empaths on Hebron. The marsh centaurs of Garden. The entire ecology was destroyed on Garden, Duré, so that a few thousand human colonists might live where millions of native life forms once had thrived.”

Duré touched his cheek with a curled finger. “That is one of the drawbacks of terraforming.”

“We did not terraform Whirl,” the Templar said quickly, “but the Jovian life forms there were hunted to extinction.”

“But no one ascertained that the zeplens were intelligent,” said Duré, hearing the lack of conviction in his own voice.

“They sang,” said the Templar. “They called across thousands of kilometers of atmosphere to each other in songs which held meaning and love and sorrow. Yet they were hunted to death like the great whales of Old Earth.”

Duré folded his hands. “Agreed, there have been injustices. But surely there is a better way to right them than to support the cruel philosophy of the Shrike Cult … and to allow this war to go on.”

The Templar’s hood moved back and forth. “No. If these were mere human injustices, other remedies could be found. But much of the illness … much of the insanity which has led to the destruction of races and the despoiling of worlds … this has come from the sinful symbiosis.”

“Symbiosis?”

“Humankind and the TechnoCore,” said Sek Hardeen in the harshest tones Duré had ever heard a Templar use. “Man and his machine intelligences. Which is a parasite on the other? Neither part of the symbiote can now tell. But it is an evil thing, a work of the Anti-Nature. Worse than that, Duré, it is an evolutionary dead end.”

The Jesuit stood and walked to the railing. He looked out over the darkened world of treetops spreading out like cloud tops in the night. “Surely there is a better way than turning to the Shrike and interstellar war.”

“The Shrike is a catalyst,” said Hardeen. “It is the cleansing fire when the forest has been stunted and allowed to grow diseased by overplanning. There will be hard times, but the result will be new growth, new life, and a proliferation of species … not merely elsewhere but in the community of humankind itself.”

“Hard times,” mused Duré. “And your Brotherhood is willing to see billions of people die to accomplish this … weeding out?”

The Templar clenched his fists. “That will not occur. The Shrike is the warning. Our Ouster brethren seek only to control Hyperion and the Shrike long enough to strike at the TechnoCore. It will be a surgical procedure … the destruction of a symbiote and the rebirth of humankind as distinct partner in the cycle of life.”

Duré sighed. “No one knows where the TechnoCore resides,” he said. “How can the Ousters strike at it?”

“They will,” said the True Voice of the Worldtree, but there was less confidence in his voice than there had been a moment before.

“And was attacking God’s Grove part of the deal?” asked the priest.

It was the Templar’s turn to stand and pace, first to the railing, then back to the table. “They will not attack God’s Grove. That is what I have kept you here to see. Then you must report to the Hegemony.”

“They’ll know at once whether the Ousters attack,” said Duré, puzzled.

“Yes, but they will not know why our world will be spared. You must bring this message. Explain this truth.”

“To hell with that,” said Father Paul Duré. “I’m tired of being everyone’s messenger. How do you know all this? The coming of the Shrike? The reason for the war?”

“There have been prophecies—” began Sek Hardeen.

Duré slammed his fist into the railing. How could he explain the manipulations of a creature who could—or at least was an agent of a force which could—manipulate time itself?

“You will see … ” began the Templar again, and as if to punctuate his words there came a great, soft sound, almost as though a million hidden people had sighed and then moaned softly.

“Good God,” said Duré and looked to the west where it seemed that the sun was rising where it had disappeared less than an hour before. A hot wind rustled leaves and blew across his face.

Five blossoming and inward-curling mushroom clouds climbed above the western horizon, turning night to day as they boiled and faded. Duré had instinctively covered his eyes until he realized that these explosions were so far away that although brilliant as the local sun, they would not blind him.

Sek Hardeen pulled back his cowl so that the hot wind ruffled his long, oddly greenish hair. Duré stared at the man’s long, thin, vaguely Asian features and realized that he saw shock etched there. Shock and disbelief. Hardeen’s cowl whispered with comm calls and the microbabble of excited voices.

“Explosions on Sierra and Hokkaido,” whispered the Templar to himself. “Nuclear explosions. From the ships in orbit.”

Duré remembered that Sierra was a continent, closed to outsiders, less than eight hundred kilometers from the Worldtree where they stood. He thought that he remembered that Hokkaido was the sacred isle where the potential treeships were grown and prepared.

“Casualties?” he asked, but before Hardeen could answer, the sky was slashed with brilliant light as a score or more tactical lasers, CPBs, and fusion lances cut a swath from horizon to horizon, switching and flashing like searchlights across the roof of the world forest that was God’s Grove. And where the lance beams cut, flame erupted in their wake.

Duré staggered as a hundred-meter-wide beam skipped like a tornado through the forest less than a kilometer from the Worldtree. The ancient forest exploded in flame, creating a corridor of fire rising ten kilometers into the night sky. Wind roared past Duré and Sek Hardeen as air rushed in to feed the fire storm. Another beam slashed north and south, passing close to the Worldtree before disappearing over the horizon. Another swath of flame and smoke rose toward the treacherous stars.

“They promised,” gasped Sek Hardeen. “The Ouster brethren promised!”

“You need help!” cried Duré. “Ask the Web for emergency assistance.”

Hardeen grabbed Duré’s arm, pulled him to the edge of the platform. The stairs were back in place. On the platform below, a farcaster portal shimmered.

“Only the advance units of the Ouster fleet have arrived,” cried the Templar over the sound of forests burning. Ash and smoke filled the air, drifting past amidst hot embers. “But the singularity sphere will be destroyed any second. Go!”

“I’m not leaving without you,” called the Jesuit, sure that his voice could not be heard over the wind roar and terrible crackling. Suddenly, only kilometers to the east, the perfect blue circle of a plasma explosion expanded, imploded inward, then expanded again with visible concentric circles of shock wave. Kilometer-tall trees bent and broke in the first wave of the blast, their eastern sides exploding in flame, leaves flying off by the millions and adding to the almost solid wall of debris hurtling toward the Worldtree. Behind the circle of flame, another plasma bomb went off. Then a third.

Duré and the Templar fell down the steps and were blown across the lower platform like leaves on a sidewalk. The Templar grabbed a burning muirwood baluster, seized Duré’s arm in an iron grip, and struggled to his feet, moving toward the still shimmering farcaster like a man leaning into a cyclone.

Half conscious, half aware of being dragged, Duré managed to get to his own feet just as Voice of the Worldtree Sek Hardeen pulled him to the edge of the portal. Duré clung to the portal frame, too weak to pull himself the final meter, and looked past the farcaster to see something which he would never forget.

Once, many, many years before, near his beloved Villefranche-sur-Saône, the youngster Paul Duré had stood on a cliff top, secure in the arms of his father and safe in a thick concrete shelter, and watched through a narrow window as forty-meter tall tsunami rushed toward the coast where they lived.

This tsunami was three kilometers high, was made of flame, and was racing at what seemed the speed of light across the helpless roof of the forest toward the Worldtree, Sek Hardeen, and Paul Duré. What the tsunami touched, it destroyed. It raged closer, rising higher and nearer until it obliterated the world and sky with flame and noise.

“No!” screamed Father Paul Duré.

“Go!” cried the True Voice of the Worldtree and pushed the Jesuit through the farcaster portal even as the platform, the Worldtree’s trunk, and the Templar’s robe burst into flames.

The farcaster shut down even as Duré tumbled through, slicing off the heel of his shoe as it contracted, and Duré felt his eardrums rupture and his clothes smolder even as he fell, struck something hard with the back of his head, and fell again into darkness more absolute.

Gladstone and the others watched in horrified silence as the civilian satellites sent images of the death throes of God’s Grove through the farcaster relays.

“We have to blow it now,” cried Admiral Singh over the crackling of forests burning. Meina Gladstone thought that she could hear the screams of human beings and the countless arboreals who lived in the Templar forests.

“We can’t let them get closer!” cried Singh. “We have only the remotes to detonate the sphere.”

“Yes,” said Gladstone, but although her lips moved she heard no sound.

Singh turned and nodded toward a FORCE:space colonel. The Colonel touched his tactical board. The burning forests disappeared, the giant holos went absolutely dark, but the sound of screams somehow remained. Gladstone realized that it was the sound of blood in her ears.

She turned toward Morpurgo. “How long … ” She cleared her throat. “General, how long until Mare Infinitus is attacked?”

“Three hours and fifty-two minutes, M. Executive,” said the General.

Gladstone turned toward the former Commander William Ajunta Lee. “Is your task force ready, Admiral?”

“Yes, CEO,” said Lee, his face pale beneath a tan.

“How many ships will be in the strike?”

“Seventy-four, M. Executive.”

“And you will hit them away from Mare Infinitus?”

“Just within the Oört Cloud, M. Executive.”

“Good,” said Gladstone. “Good hunting, Admiral.”

The young man took this as his cue to salute and leave the chamber. Admiral Singh leaned over and whispered something to General Van Zeidt.

Sedeptra Akasi leaned toward Gladstone and said, “Government House Security reports that a man just farcast into the secured GH terminex with an outdated priority access code. The man was injured, taken to the East Wing infirmary.”

“Leigh?” asked Gladstone. “Severn?”

“No, M. Executive,” said Akasi. “The priest from Pacem. Paul Duré”

Gladstone nodded. “I’ll see him after my meeting with Albedo,” she said to her aide. To the group, she announced, “Unless anyone has anything to add to what we saw, we shall adjourn for thirty minutes and take up the defense of Asquith and Ixion when we reassemble.”

The group stood as the CEO and her entourage stepped through the permanent connecting portal to Government House and filed through a door in the far wall. The rumble of argument and shock resumed when Gladstone was out of sight.

• • •

Meina Gladstone sat back in her leather chair and closed her eyes for precisely five seconds. When she opened them, the cluster of aides still stood there, some looking anxious, some looking eager, all of them waiting for her next word, her next command.

“Get out,” she said softly. “Go on, take a few minutes to get some rest. Put your feet up for ten minutes. There’ll be no more rest for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

The group filed out, some looking on the verge of protest, others on the verge of collapse.

“Sedeptra,” said Gladstone, and the young woman stepped back into the office. “Assign two of my personal guard to the priest who just came through, Duré.”

Akasi nodded and made a note on her faxpad.

“How is the political situation?” asked Gladstone, rubbing her eyes.

“The All Thing is chaos,” said Akasi. “There are factions but they haven’t coalesced into effective opposition yet. The Senate is a different story.”

“Feldstein?” said Gladstone, naming the angry senator from Barnard’s World. Less than forty-two hours remained before Barnard’s World would be attacked by the Ousters.

“Feldstein, Kakinuma, Peters, Sabenstorafem, Richeau … even Sudette Chier is calling for your resignation.”

“What about her husband?” Gladstone considered Senator Kolchev the most influential person in the Senate.

“No word from Senator Kolchev yet. Public or private.”

Gladstone tapped a thumbnail against her lower lip. “How much time do you think this administration has before a vote of no confidence brings us down, Sedeptra?”

Akasi, one of the most astute political operatives Gladstone had ever worked with, returned her boss’s stare. “Seventy-two hours at the outside, CEO. The votes are there. The mob just doesn’t know it’s a mob yet. Somebody has to pay for what’s happening.”

Gladstone nodded absently. “Seventy-two hours,” she murmured. “More than enough time.” She looked up and smiled. “That will be all, Sedeptra. Get some rest.”

The aide nodded but her expression showed her true opinion of that suggestion. It was very quiet in the study when the door closed behind her.

Gladstone sat thinking for a moment, her fist to her chin. Then she said to the walls, “Bring Councilor Albedo here, please.”

Twenty seconds later, the air on the other side of Gladstone’s broad desk misted, shimmered, and solidified. The representative of the TechnoCore looked as handsome as ever, short gray hair gleaming in the light, a healthy tan on his open, honest face.

“M. Executive,” began the holographic projection, “the Advisory Council and the Core predictors continue to offer their services in this time of great—”

“Where is the Core, Albedo?” interrupted Gladstone.

The Councilor’s smile did not falter. “I’m sorry, M. Executive, what was the question?”

“The TechnoCore, Where is it?”

Albedo’s friendly face showed a slight puzzlement but no hostility, no visible emotion other than bemused helpfulness. “You’re certainly aware, M. Executive, that it has been Core policy since the Secession not to reveal the location of the … ah … physical elements of the TechnoCore. In another sense, the Core is nowhere, since—”

“Since you exist on the datumplane and datasphere consensual realities,” said Gladstone, voice flat. “Yes, I’ve heard that crap all of my life, Albedo. So did my father and his father before him. I’m asking a straight question now. Where is the TechnoCore?”

The Councilor shook his head bemusedly, regretfully, as if he were an adult being asked for the thousandth time the child’s question Why is the sky blue, Daddy?

“M. Executive, it is simply not possible to answer that question in a way that would make sense in human three-dimensional coordinates. In a sense we … the Core … exist within the Web and beyond the Web. We swim in the datumplane reality which you call the datasphere, but as for the physical elements … what your ancestors called ‘hardware,’ we find it necessary to—”

“To keep it a secret,” finished Gladstone. She crossed her arms. “Are you aware, Councilor Albedo, that there will be those people in the Hegemony … millions of people … who will firmly believe that the Core … your Advisory Council … has betrayed humankind?”

Albedo made a motion with his hands. “That will be regrettable, M. Executive. Regrettable but understandable.”

“Your predictors were supposed to be close to foolproof, Councilor. Yet at no time did you tell us of the destruction of worlds by this Ouster fleet.”

The sadness on the projection’s handsome face was very close to convincing. “M. Executive, it is only fair to remind you that the Advisory Council warned you that bringing Hyperion into the Web introduced a random variable which even the Council could not factor.”

“But this isn’t Hyperion!” snapped Gladstone, her voice rising. “It’s God’s Grove burning. Heaven’s Gate reduced to slag. Mare Infinitus waiting for the next hammer blow! What good is the Advisory Council if it cannot predict an invasion of that magnitude?”

“We did predict the inevitability of war with the Ousters, M. Executive. We also predicted the great danger of defending Hyperion. You must believe me that the inclusion of Hyperion in any predictive equation brings the reliability factor down as low as—”

“All right,” sighed Gladstone. “I need to talk to someone else in the Core, Albedo. Someone in your indecipherable hierarchy of intelligences who actually has some decision-making power.”

“I assure you that I represent all Core elements when I—”

“Yes, yes. But I want to speak to one of the … the Powers I believe you call them. One of the elder AIs. One with clout, Albedo. I need to speak to someone who can tell me why the Core kidnapped my artist Severn and my aide Leigh Hunt.”

The holo looked shocked. “I assure you, M. Gladstone, on the honor of four centuries of our alliance, that the Core had nothing to do with the unfortunate disappearance of—”

Gladstone stood. “This is why I need to talk to a Power. The time for assurances is past, Albedo. It is time for straight talk if either of our species is going to survive. That is all.” She turned her attention to the faxpad flimsies on her desk.

Councilor Albedo stood, nodded a farewell, and shimmered out of existence.

Gladstone called her personal farcaster portal into existence, spoke the Government House infirmary codes, and started to step through. In the instant before touching the opaque surface of the energy rectangle, she paused, gave thought to what she was doing, and for the first time in her life felt anxiety about stepping through a farcaster.

What if the Core wanted to kidnap her? Or kill her?

Meina Gladstone suddenly realized that the Core had the power of life and death over every farcaster-traveling citizen in the Web … which was every citizen with power. Leigh and the Severn cybrid did not have to be kidnapped, translated somewhere … only the persistent habit of thinking of farcasters as foolproof transportation created the subconscious conviction that they had gone somewhere. Her aide and the enigmatic cybrid could easily have been translated to …to nothing. To scattered atoms stretched through a singularity. Farcasters did not “teleport” people and things—such a concept was silly—but how much less silly was it to trust a device that punched holes in the fabric of space-time and allowed one to step through black hole “trapdoors”? How silly was it for her to trust the Core to transport her to the infirmary?

Gladstone thought of the War Room … three giant rooms connected by permanently activated, vision-clear farcaster portals … but three rooms nonetheless, separated by at least a thousand light-years of real space, decades of real time even under Hawking drive. Every time Morpurgo or Singh or one of the others moved from a map holo to the plotting board, he or she stepped across great gulfs of space and time. All the Core had to do to destroy the Hegemony or anyone in it was to tamper with the farcasters, allow a slight “mistake” in targeting.

To hell with this, thought Meina Gladstone and stepped through to see Paul Duré in the Government House infirmary.