Breakfast had been set out on a long sideboard near a weathered table which could be retracted into the deck planking. An awning shaded the eating area and the crimson and gold canvas snapped to the breeze of their passage. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and bright, with Hyperion’s sun making up in ferocity what it lacked in size.
M. Weintraub, Lamia, Kassad, and Silenus had been up for some time. Lenar Hoyt and Het Masteen joined the group a few minutes after the Consul arrived.
The Consul helped himself to toasted fish, fruit, and orange juice at the buffet and then moved to the railing. The water was wide here, at least a kilometer from shore to shore, and its green and lapis sheen echoed the sky. At first glance the Consul did not recognize the land on either side of the river. To the east, periscope-bean paddies stretched away into the haze of distance where the rising sun reflected on a thousand flooded surfaces. A few indigenie huts were visible at the junction of paddy dikes, their angled walls made of bleached weirwood or golden halfoak. To the west, the bottomland along the river was overgrown with low tangles of gissen, womangrove root, and a flamboyant red fern the Consul did not recognize, all growing around mud marshes and miniature lagoons which stretched another kilometer or so to bluffs where scrub everblues clung to any bare spot between granite slabs.
For a second the Consul felt lost, disoriented on a world he thought he knew well, but then he remembered the claxon at the Karla Locks and realized that they had entered a rarely used stretch of the Hoolie north of Doukhobor’s Copse. The Consul had never seen this part of the river, having always traveled on or flown above the Royal Transport Canal which lay to the west of the bluffs. He could only surmise that some danger or disturbance along the main route to the Sea of Grass had sent them this back way along bypassed stretches of the Hoolie. He guessed that they were about a hundred and eighty kilometers northwest of Keats.
“It looks different in the daylight, doesn’t it?” said Father Hoyt.
The Consul looked at the shore again, not sure what Hoyt was talking about; then he realized the priest meant the barge.
It had been strange—following the android messenger in the rain, boarding the old barge, making their way through its maze of tessellated rooms and passages, picking up Het Masteen at the ruins of the Temple, and then watching the lights of Keats fall astern.
The Consul remembered those hours before and after midnight as from a fatigue-blurred dream, and he imagined the others must have been just as exhausted and disoriented. He vaguely remembered his surprise that the barge’s crew were all android, but mostly he recalled his relief at finally closing the door of his stateroom and crawling into bed.
“I was talking to A. Bettik this morning,” said Weintraub, referring to the android who had been their guide. “This old scow has quite a history.”
Martin Silenus moved to the sideboard to pour himself more tomato juice, added a dash of something from the flask he carried, and said, “It’s obviously been around a bit. The goddamn railings’ve been oiled by hands, the stairs worn by feet, the ceilings darkened by lamp soot, and the beds beaten saggy by generations of humping. I’d say it’s several centuries old. The carvings and rococo finishes are fucking marvelous. Did you notice that under all the other scents the inlaid wood still smells of sandalwood? I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing came from Old Earth.”
“It does,” said Sol Weintraub. The baby, Rachel, slept on his arm, softly blowing bubbles of saliva in her sleep. “We’re on the proud ship Benares, built in and named after the Old Earth city of the same name.”
“I don’t remember hearing of any Old Earth city with that name,” said the Consul.
Brawne Lamia looked up from the last of her breakfast. “Benares, also known as Varanasi or Gandhipur, Hindu Free State. Part of the Second Asian Co-prosperity Sphere after the Third Sino-Japanese War. Destroyed in the Indo-Soviet Muslim Republic Limited Exchange.”
“Yes,” said Weintraub, “the Benares was built quite some time before the Big Mistake. Mid-twenty-second century, I would guess. A. Bettik informs me that it was originally a levitation barge …”
“Are the EM generators still down there?” interrupted Colonel Kassad.
“I believe so,” said Weintraub. “Next to the main salon on the lowest deck. The floor of the salon is clear lunar crystal. Quite nice if we were cruising at two thousand meters … quite useless now.”
“Benares,” mused Martin Silenus. He ran his hand lovingly across a time-darkened railing. “I was robbed there once.”
Brawne Lamia put down her coffee mug. “Old man, are you trying to tell us that you’re ancient enough to remember Old Earth? We’re not fools, you know.”
“My dear child,” beamed Martin Silenus, “I am not trying to tell you anything. I just thought it might be entertaining—as well as edifying and enlightening—if at some point we exchanged lists of all the locations at which we have either robbed or been robbed. Since you have the unfair advantage of having been the daughter of a senator, I am sure that your list would be much more distinguished … and much longer.”
Lamia opened her mouth to retort, frowned, and said nothing.
“I wonder how this ship got to Hyperion?” murmured Father Hoyt. “Why bring a levitation barge to a world where EM equipment doesn’t work?”
“It would work,” said Colonel Kassad. “Hyperion has some magnetic field. It just would not be reliable in holding anything airborne.”
Father Hoyt raised an eyebrow, obviously at a loss to see the distinction.
“Hey,” cried the poet from his place at the railing, “the gang’s all here!”
“So?” said Brawne Lamia. Her lips all but disappeared into a thin line whenever she spoke to Silenus.
“So we’re all here,” he said. “Let’s get on with the storytelling.”
Het Masteen said, “I thought it had been agreed that we would tell our respective stories after the dinner hour.”
Martin Silenus shrugged. “Breakfast, dinner, who the fuck cares? We’re assembled. It’s not going to take six or seven days to get to the Time Tombs, is it?”
The Consul considered. Less than two days to get as far as the river could take them. Two more days, or less if the winds were right, on the Sea of Grass. Certainly no more than one more day to cross the mountains. “No,” he said. “Not quite six days.”
“All right,” said Silenus, “then let’s get on with the telling of tales. Besides, there’s no guarantee that the Shrike won’t come calling before we knock on his door. If these bedtime stories are supposed to be helpful to our survival chances in some way, then I say let’s hear from everyone before the contributors start getting chopped and diced by that ambulatory food processor we’re so eager to visit.”
“You’re disgusting,” said Brawne Lamia.
“Ah, darling,” smiled Silenus, “those are the same words you whispered last night after your second orgasm.”
Lamia looked away. Father Hoyt cleared his throat and said, “Whose turn is it? To tell a story, I mean?” The silence stretched.
“Mine,” said Fedmahn Kassad. The tall man reached into the pocket of his white tunic and held up a slip of paper with a large 2 scribbled on it.
“Do you mind doing this now?” asked Sol Weintraub.
Kassad showed a hint of a smile. “I wasn’t in favor of doing it at all,” he said, “but if it were done when ‘tis done, then’ twere well it were done quickly.”
“Hey!” cried Martin Silenus. “The man knows his pre-Hegira playwrights.”
“Shakespeare?” said Father Hoyt.
“No,” said Silenus. “Lerner and fucking Lowe. Neil buggering Simon. Hamel fucking Posten.”