I returned to the Web. Over thirty years of Web-time had passed. Meina Gladstone was CEO. Siri’s Rebellion was a romantic legend, a minor footnote in the history of the Hegemony.
I met with Gladstone. I told her many—but not all—of the things the Ousters had revealed. I told her that they knew that any battle for Hyperion would be a trap, but that they were coming anyway. I told her that the Ousters wanted me to become Consul on Hyperion so that I might be a double agent when war came.
I did not tell her that they had promised to give me a device which would open the Time Tombs and allow the Shrike free rein.
CEO Gladstone had long talks with me. FORCE:Intelligence agents had even longer talks with me, some lasting months. Technologies and drugs were used to confirm that I was telling the truth and keeping nothing back. The Ousters also had been very good with technologies and drugs. I was telling the truth. I was also keeping something back.
In the end, I was assigned to Hyperion. Gladstone offered to raise the world to Protectorate status and me to an ambassadorship. I declined both offers, although I asked if I could keep my private spacecraft. I arrived on a regularly scheduled spinship, and my own ship arrived several weeks later in the belly of a visiting torchship. It was left in a parking orbit with the understanding that I could summon it and leave any time I wished.
Alone on Hyperion, I waited. Years passed. I allowed my aide to govern the Outback world while I drank at Cicero’s and waited.
The Ousters contacted me through private fatline and I took a three weeks’ leave from the Consulate, brought my ship down to an isolated place near the Sea of Grass, rendezvoused with their scoutship near the Oort Cloud, picked up their agent—a woman named Andil—and a trio of technicians, and dropped down north of the Bridle Range, a few kilometers from the Tombs themselves.
The Ousters did not have farcasters. They spent their lives on the long marches between the stars, watching life in the Web speed by like some film or holie set at a frenzied speed. They were obsessed with time. The TechnoCore had given the Hegemony the farcaster and continued to maintain it. No human scientists or team of human scientists had come close to understanding it. The Ousters tried. They failed. But even in their failures they made inroads into understanding the manipulation of space/time.
They understood the time tides, the antientropic fields surrounding the Tombs. They could not generate such fields, but they could shield against them and—theoretically—collapse them. The Time Tombs and all their contents would cease to age backward. The Tombs would “open.” The Shrike would slip its tether, no longer connected to the vicinity of the Tombs. Whatever else was inside would now be freed.
The Ousters believed that the Time Tombs were artifacts from their future, the Shrike a weapon of redemption awaiting the proper hand to seize it. The Shrike Cult saw the monster as an avenging angel; the Ousters saw it as a tool of human devising, sent back through time to deliver humanity from the TechnoCore. Andil and the technicians were there to calibrate and experiment.
“You won’t use it now?” I asked. We were standing in the shadow of the structure called the Sphinx.
“Not now,” said Andil. “When the invasion is imminent.”
“But you said it would take months for the device to work,” I said, “for the Tombs to open.”
Andil nodded. Her eyes were a dark green. She was very tall, and I could make out the subtle stripes of the powered exoskeleton on her skinsuit. “Perhaps a year or longer,” she said. “The device causes the antientropic field to decay slowly. But once begun, the process is irrevocable. But we will not activate it until the Ten Councils have decided that invasion of the Web is necessary.”
“There are doubts?” I said.
“Ethical debates,” said Andil. A few meters from us, the three technicians were covering the device with chameleon cloth and a coded containment field. “An interstellar war will cause the deaths of millions, perhaps billions. Releasing the Shrike into the Web will have unforeseen consequences. As much as we need to strike at the Core, there are debates as to which is the best way.”
I nodded and looked at the device and the valley of the Tombs. “But once this is activated,” I said, “there is no turning back. The Shrike will be released, and you will have to have won the war to control it?”
Andil smiled slightly. “That is true.”
I shot her then, her and the three technicians. Then I tossed Grand-mother Siri’s Steiner-Ginn laser far into the drift dunes and sat on an empty flowfoam crate and sobbed for several minutes. Then I walked over, used a technicians comlog to enter the containment field, threw off the chameleon cloth, and triggered the device.
There was no immediate change. The air held the same rich, late-winter light. The Jade Tomb glowed softly while the Sphinx continued to stare down at nothing. The only sound was the rasp of sand across the crates and bodies. Only a glowing indicator on the Ouster device showed that it was working … had already worked.
I walked slowly back to the ship, half expecting the Shrike to appear, half hoping that it would. I sat on the balcony of my ship for more than an hour, watching the shadows filling the valley and the sand covering the distant corpses. There was no Shrike. No thorn tree. After a while I played a Bach Prelude on the Steinway, buttoned up the ship, and rose into space.
I contacted the Ouster ship and said that there had been an accident. The Shrike had taken the others; the device had been activated prematurely. Even in their confusion and panic, the Ousters offered me refuge. I declined the offer and turned my ship toward the Web. The Ousters did not pursue.
I used my fatline transmitter to contact Gladstone and to tell her that the Ouster agents had been eliminated. I told her that the invasion was very likely, that the trap would be sprung as planned. I did not tell her about the device. Gladstone congratulated me and called me home. I declined. I told her that I needed silence and solitude. I turned my ship toward the Outback world nearest the Hyperion system, knowing that travel itself would eat time until the next act commenced.
Later, when the fatline call to pilgrimage came from Gladstone herself, I knew the role the Ousters had planned for me in these final days: the Ousters, or the Core, or Gladstone and her machinations. It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
The world as we know it is ending, my friends, no matter what happens to us. As for me, I have no request of the Shrike. I bring no final words for it or the universe. I have returned because I must, because this is my fate. I’ve known what I must do since I was a child, returning alone to Siri’s tomb and swearing vengeance on the Hegemony. I’ve known what price I must pay, both in life and in history.
But when the time comes to judge, to understand a betrayal which will spread like flame across the Web, which will end worlds, I ask you not to think of me—my name was not even writ on water as your lost poet’s soul said—but to think of Old Earth dying for no reason, to think of the dolphins, their gray flesh drying and rotting in the sun, to see—as I have seen—the motile isles with no place to wander, their feeding grounds destroyed, the Equatorial Shallows scabbed with drilling platforms, the islands themselves burdened with shouting, trammeling tourists smelling of UV lotion and cannabis.