The Consul felt as though someone had struck him below the third rib. He looked away, down at the maze of narrow streets and crooked buildings that was Jacktown, the Old City. When he could speak again, he said, “I can’t, Theo.”
“Listen, if you …”
“No. I mean I cannot. It would be no good if I did accept it, but the simple truth is, I can’t. I have to go on this pilgrimage.”
Theo straightened his glasses, stared straight ahead.
“Look, Theo, you’re the most competent and capable Foreign Service professional I’ve ever worked with. I’ve been out of things for eight years. I think …”
Theo nodded tersely, interrupted. “I suppose you want to go to the Shrike Temple.”
“Yes.”
The skimmer circled and settled. The Consul was staring at nothing, thinking, when the side doors of the skimmer raised and folded and Sol Weintraub said, “Good God.”
The group stepped out and stared at the charred and toppled wreckage of what had been the Shrike Temple. Since the Time Tombs had been closed as too dangerous some twenty-five local years earlier, the Shrike Temple had become Hyperion’s most popular tourist attraction. Filling three full city blocks, rising more than a hundred and fifty meters to its central, sharpened spire, the Shrike Church’s central temple was part awe-inspiring cathedral, part Gothic joke with its fluid, buttressed curves of stone permabonded to its whiskered-alloy skeleton, part Escher print with its tricks of perspective and impossible angles, part Boschian nightmare with its tunnel entrances, hidden chambers, dark gardens, and forbidden sections, and—more than anything else—it had been part of Hyperion’s past.
Now it was gone. Tall heaps of blackened stone were the only hint of the structure’s former majesty. Melted alloy girders rose from the stones like the ribs of some giant carcass. Much of the rubble had tumbled into the pits, basements, and passages which had lain beneath the three-century-old landmark. The Consul walked close to the edge of a pit and wondered if the deep basements had—as legend decreed—actually connected to one of the planet’s labyrinths.
“It looks as if they used a hellwhip on this place,” said Martin Silenus, using an archaic term for any high-energy laser weapon. The poet seemed suddenly sobered as he joined the Consul at the edge of the pit. “I remember when the Temple and parts of the Old City were the only things here,” he said. “After the disaster near the Tombs, Billy decided to relocate Jacktown here because of the Temple. Now it’s gone. Christ.”
“No,” said Kassad.
The others looked at him.
The Colonel rose from where he had been examining the rubble. “Not a hellwhip,” he said. “Shaped plasma charges. Several of them.”
“Now do you want to stay here and go on this useless pilgrimage?” asked Theo. “Come with me back to the consulate.” He was speaking to the Consul but extending the invitation to everyone.
The Consul turned away from the pit, looking at his former aide but now seeing, for the first time, the Governor-General of a besieged Hegemony world. “We can’t, Your Excellency,” said the Consul. “At least I can’t. I won’t speak for the others.”
The four men and the woman shook their heads. Silenus and Kassad began unloading luggage. The rain returned as a light mist falling out of the darkness. At that second the Consul noticed the two FORCE attack skimmers hovering above nearby rooftops. Darkness and chameleon-polymer hulls had hidden them well, but the rain now revealed their outlines. Of course, thought the Consul, the Governor-General does not travel unescorted.
“Did the priests escape? Were there survivors when the Temple was destroyed?” asked Brawne Lamia.
“Yes,” said Theo. The de facto dictator of five million doomed souls removed his glasses and dried them on his shirttail. “All of the Shrike Cult priests and acolytes escaped through tunnels. The mob had been surrounding this place for months. Their leader, a woman named Cammon from somewhere east of the Sea of Grass, gave everyone in the Temple plenty of warning before they set off the DL-20.”
“Where were the police?” asked the Consul. “The SDF? FORCE?”
Theo Lane smiled and at that second he looked decades older than the young man the Consul had known. “You folks have been in transit for three years,” he said. “The universe has changed. Shrike cultists are being burned out and beaten up in the Web. You can imagine the attitude here. The Keats police have been absorbed under the martial law I declared fourteen months ago. They and the SDF watched while the mob torched the Temple. So did I. There were half a million people here tonight.”
Sol Weintraub stepped closer. “Do they know about us? About this final pilgrimage?”
“If they did,” said Theo, “none of you would be alive. You’d think they’d welcome anything that might appease the Shrike, but the only thing the mob would notice is that you were chosen by the Shrike Church. As it was, I had to overrule my own Advisory Council. They were in favor of destroying your ship before it reached the atmosphere.”
“Why did you?” asked the Consul. “Overrule them, I mean.”
Theo sighed and adjusted his glasses. “Hyperion still needs the Hegemony, and Gladstone still has the vote of confidence of the All Thing, if not the Senate. And I still need you.”
The Consul looked at the rubble of the Shrike Temple.
“This pilgrimage was over before you got here,” said Governor-General Theo Lane. “Will you come back to the consulate with me … at least in an advisory capacity?”
“I’m sorry,” said the Consul. “I can’t.”
Theo turned without a word, dropped into the skimmer, and lifted off. His military escort followed as a blur in the rain.
It was raining harder now. The group moved closer together in the growing darkness. Weintraub had rigged a makeshift hood over Rachel and the noise of the rain on plastic made the baby cry.
“What now?” said the Consul, looking around at the night and narrow streets. Their luggage lay heaped in a soggy pile. The world smelled of ashes.
Martin Silenus grinned. “I know a bar.”
It turned out that the Consul also knew the bar; he had all but lived in Cicero’s for most of his eleven-year assignment on Hyperion.
Unlike most things in Keats, on Hyperion, Cicero’s was not named after some piece of pre-Hegira literary trivia. Rumor had it that the bar was named after a section of an Old Earth city—some said Chicago, USA, others were sure it was Calcutta, AIS—but only Stan Leweski, owner and great-grandson of the founder, knew for sure, and Stan had never revealed its secret. The bar itself had overflowed over the century and a half of its existence from a walk-up loft in one of Jacktown’s sagging older buildings along the Hoolie River to nine levels in four sagging old buildings along the Hoolie. The only consistent elements of decor at Cicero’s over the decades were the low ceilings, thick smoke, and constant background babble which offered a sense of privacy in the midst of bustle.
There was no privacy this night. The Consul and the others paused as they carried their gear through the Marsh Lane entrance.
“Jesus wept,” muttered Martin Silenus.
Cicero’s looked as if it had been invaded by barbarian hordes. Every chair was filled, every table occupied, mostly by men, and the floors were littered with packs, weapons, bedrolls, antiquated comm equipment, ration boxes, and all of the other detritus of an army of refugees … or perhaps a refugee army. The heavy air of Cicero’s, which once had been filled with the blended scent of broiling steaks, wine, stim, ale, and T-free tobacco, was now laden with the overlapping smells of unwashed bodies, urine, and hopelessness.