“First tell me why the Core is obsessed with Hyperion.”
“We do not know for sure.”
“Best guess then.”
CEO Gladstone removed the stem of grass from her mouth and regarded it. “We believe that the Core is embarked on a truly incredible project which would allow them to predict … everything. To handle every variable of space, time, and history as a quantum of manageable information.”
“Their Ultimate Intelligence Project,” I said, knowing that I was being careless and not caring.
This time CEO Gladstone did register shock. “How do you know about that?”
“What does that project have to do with Hyperion?”
Gladstone sighed. “We don’t know for sure, Brawne. But we do know that there is an anomaly on Hyperion which they have not been able to factor into their predictive analyses. Do you know about the so-called Time Tombs that the Shrike Church holds holy?”
“Sure. They’ve been off limits to tourists for a while.”
“Yes. Because of an accident to a researcher there a few decades ago, our scientists have confirmed that the anti-entropic fields around the Tombs are not merely a protection against time’s erosive effects as has been widely believed.”
“What are they?”
“The remnants of a field … or force … which has actually propelled the Tombs and their contents backward in time from some distant future.”
“Contents?” I managed. “But the Tombs are empty. Ever since they were discovered.”
“Empty now,” said Meina Gladstone. “But there is evidence that they were full … will be full … when they open. In our near future.”
I stared at her. “How near?”
Her dark eyes remained soft but the movement of her head was final. “I’ve told you too much already, Brawne. You are forbidden to repeat it. We’ll ensure that silence if necessary.”
I hid my own confusion by finding a piece of grass to strip for chewing. “All right,” I said. “What’s going to come out of the Tombs? Aliens? Bombs? Some sort of reverse time capsules?”
Gladstone smiled tightly. “If we knew that, Brawne, we would be ahead of the Core, and we are not.” The smile disappeared. “One hypothesis is that the Tombs relate to some future war. A settling of future scores by rearranging the past, perhaps.”
“A war between who, for Chrissakes?”
She opened her hands again. “We need to be getting back, Brawne. Would you please tell me what the Keats cybrid is going to do now?”
I looked down and then back up to meet her steady gaze. I couldn’t trust anyone, but the Core and the Shrike Church already knew Johnny’s plans. If this was a three-sided game, perhaps each side should know in case there was a good guy in the bunch. “He’s going to invest all consciousness in the cybrid,” I said rather clumsily. “He’s going to become human, M. Gladstone, and then go to Hyperion. I’m going with him.”
The CEO of the Senate and All Thing, chief officer for a government which spanned almost two hundred worlds and billions of people, stared at me in silence for a long moment. Then she said, “He plans to go with the Templar ship on the pilgrimage then.”
“Yes.”
“No,” said Meina Gladstone.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the Sequoia Sempervirens will not be allowed to leave Hegemony space. There will be no pilgrimage unless the Senate decides it is in our interest.” Her voice was iron-hard.
“Johnny and I’ll go by spinship,” I said. “The pilgrimage is a loser’s game anyway.”
“No,” she said. “There will be no more civilian spinships to Hyperion for some time.”
The word “civilian” tipped me. “War?”
Gladstone’s lips were tight. She nodded. “Before most spinships could reach the region.”
“A war with … the Ousters?”
“Initially. View it as a way to force the issue between the TechnoCore and ourselves, Brawne. We will either have to incorporate the Hyperion system into the Web to allow it FORCE protection, or it will fall to a race which despises and distrusts the Core and all AIs.”
I didn’t mention Johnny’s comment that the Core had been in touch with the Ousters. I said, “A way to force the issue. Fine. But who manipulated the Ousters into attacking?”
Gladstone looked at me. If her face was Lincolnesque at that moment, then Old Earth’s Lincoln was one tough son of a bitch. “It’s time to get back, Brawne. You appreciate how important it is that none of this information gets out.”
“I appreciate the fact that you wouldn’t have told me unless you had a reason to,” I said. “I don’t know who you want the stuff to go to, but I know I’m a messenger, not a confidante.”
“Don’t underestimate our resolve to keep this classified, Brawne.”
I laughed. “Lady, I wouldn’t underestimate your resolve in anything.”
Meina Gladstone gestured for me to step through the farcaster portal first.
“I know a way we can discover what the Core is up to,” said Johnny as we rode alone in a rented jetboat on Mare Infinitus. “But it would be dangerous.”
“So what else is new?”
“I’m serious. We should only attempt it if we feel that it is imperative to understand what the Core fears from Hyperion.”
“I do.”
“We will need an operative. Someone who is an artist in datumplane operations. Someone smart but not so smart that they won’t take a chance. And someone who would risk everything and keep the secret just for the ultimate in cyberpuke pranks.”
I grinned at Johnny. “I’ve got just the man.”
BB lived alone in a cheap apartment at the base of a cheap tower in a cheap TC2 neighborhood. But there was nothing cheap about the hardware that filled most of the space in the four-room flat. Most of BB’s salary for the past standard decade had gone into state-of-the-art cyberpuke toys.
I started by saying that we wanted him to do something illegal. BB said that, as a public employee, he couldn’t consider such a thing. He asked what the thing was. Johnny began to explain. BB leaned forward and I saw the old cyberpuke gleam in his eyes from our college days. I half expected him to try to dissect Johnny right there just to see how a cybrid worked. Then Johnny got to the interesting part and BB’s gleam turned into a sort of green glow.
“When I self-destruct my AI persona,” said Johnny, “the shift to cybrid consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but during that time my section of the Core perimeter defenses will drop. The security phages will fill the gap before too many more nanoseconds pass, but during that time …”
“Entry to the Core,” whispered BB, his eyes glowing like some antique VDT.
“It would be very dangerous,” stressed Johnny. “To my knowledge, no human operator has ever penetrated Core periphery.”
BB rubbed his upper lip. “There’s a legend that Cowboy Gibson did it before the Core seceded,” he mumbled. “But nobody believes it. And Cowboy disappeared.”
“Even if you penetrate,” said Johnny, “there would be insufficient time to access except for the fact that I have the data coordinates.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” whispered BB. He turned back to his console and reached for his shunt. “Let’s do it.”
“Now?” I said. Even Johnny looked taken aback.
“Why wait?” BB clicked in his shunt and attached metacortex leads, but left the deck idling. “Are we doing this, or what?”