The squid began to break up. Overhead, the blister burned through and spattered liquid Perspex throughout the interior of the cockpit, splashing Kassad’s suit and visor. He smelled plastic melting. The squid was spinning as it broke up. Kassad’s sight turned pink, dimmed, was gone. He used numb fingers to tighten the harness … tighter … either it was cutting into his chest or the Perspex had burned through. His hand went back to the D-ring. Fingers too clumsy to close around it … no. Pull.
Too late. The squid flew apart in a final screech and explosion of flame, the control console tearing through the cockpit in ten thousand shrapnel-sized bits.
Kassad was slammed into his seat. Up. Out. Into the heart of the flame.
Tumbling.
Kassad was dimly aware that the seat was projecting its own containment field as it tumbled. Flame was centimeters from his face.
Pyrobolts fired, kicking the ejection seat out of the squid’s blazing slipstream. The command seat made its own track of blue flame across the sky. Microprocessors spun the seat so that the disc of the forcefield was between Kassad and the furnace of friction. A giant sat on Kassad’s chest as he decelerated across two thousand kilometers of sky at eight gravities.
Kassad forced his eyelids open once, noted that he lay curled in the belly of a long column of blue-white flame, and then he closed his eyes again. He saw no sign of a control for a parachute, suspension pack, or any other braking device. It didn’t matter. He could not move his arms or hands in any case.
The giant shifted, grew heavier.
Kassad realized that part of his helmet bubble had melted or been blown away. The noise was indescribable. It didn’t matter.
He closed his eyes more tightly. It was a good time to take a nap.
Kassad opened his eyes and saw the dark shape of a woman bending over him. For a second he thought it was her. He looked again and realized that it was her. She touched his cheek with cool fingers.
“Am I dead?” whispered Kassad, raising his own hand to grip her wrist.
“No.” Her voice was soft and throaty, burred with the hint of an accent he could not place. He had never heard her speak before.
“You’re real?”
“Yes.”
Kassad sighed and looked around. He lay naked under a thin robe on some sort of couch or platform set in the middle of a dark, cavernous room. Overhead, starlight was visible through a broken roof. Kassad raised his other hand to touch her shoulder. Her hair was a dark nimbus above him. She wore a loose, thin gown which—even in the starlight—allowed him to see the outlines of her body. He caught her scent, the fragrant hint of soap and skin and her that he knew so well from their other times together.
“You must have questions,” she whispered as Kassad released the gold clasp which held her gown in place. The gown whispered to the floor. She wore nothing underneath. Above them, the band of the Milky Way was clearly visible.
“No,” said Kassad and pulled her to him.
Toward morning a breeze arose, but Kassad pulled the light cover over them. The thin material seemed to preserve all of their body heat and they lay together in perfect warmth. Somewhere sand or snow rasped at bare walls. The stars were very clear and very bright.
They awoke at the first hint of dawn, their faces close together under the silken coverlet. She ran her hand down Kassad’s side, finding old and recent scars.
“Your name?” whispered Kassad.
“Hush,” she whispered back, her hand sliding lower.
Kassad moved his face into the scented curve of her neck. Her breasts were soft against him. Night paled to morning. Somewhere sand or snow blew against bare walls.
They made love, slept, made love again. In full light they rose and dressed. She had laid out underwear, gray tunic and trousers for Kassad. They fit perfectly, as did the spongesocks and soft boots. The woman wore a similar outfit of navy blue.
“Your name?” Kassad asked as they left the building with the shattered dome and walked through a dead city.
“Moneta,” said his dream, “or Mnemosyne, whichever name pleases you more.”
“Moneta,” whispered Kassad. He looked up at a small sun rising into a lapis sky. “This is Hyperion?”
“Yes.”
“How did I land? Suspensor field? Parachute?”
“You descended under a wing of gold foil.”
“I don’t hurt. There were no wounds?”
“They were tended to.”
“What is this place?”
“The City of Poets. Abandoned more than a hundred years ago. Beyond that hill lie the Time Tombs.”
“The Ouster assault boats that were following me?”
“One landed nearby. The Pain Lord took the crew unto himself. The other two set down some distance away.”
“Who is the Pain Lord?”
“Come,” said Moneta. The dead city ended in desert. Fine sand slid across white marble half buried in dunes. To the west an Ouster dropship sat with its portals irised open. Nearby, on a fallen column, a thermcube yielded hot coffee and fresh-baked rolls. They ate and drank in silence.
Kassad worked to recall the legends of Hyperion. “The Pain Lord is the Shrike,” he said at last.
“Of course.”
“You’re from here … from the City of Poets?”
Moneta smiled and slowly shook her head.
Kassad finished his coffee and set the cup down. The feeling that he was in a dream persisted, much stronger than during any sim he had ever participated in. But the coffee had tasted pleasantly bitter; the sun was warm on his face and hands.
“Come, Kassad,” said Moneta.
They crossed expanses of cold sand. Kassad found himself glancing skyward, knowing that the Ouster torchship could lance them from orbit … then knowing with a sudden certainty that it would not.
The Time Tombs lay in a valley. A low obelisk glowed softly. A stone sphinx seemed to absorb the light. A complex structure of twisted pylons threw shadows onto itself. Other tombs were silhouettes against the rising sun. Each of the tombs had a door and each door was open. Kassad knew that they had been open when the first explorers discovered the Tombs and that the structures were empty. More than three centuries of searching for hidden rooms, tombs, vaults, and passageways had been fruitless.
“This is as far as you can go,” Moneta said as they neared the cliff at the head of the valley. “The time tides are strong today.”
Kassad’s tactical implant was silent. He had no comlog. He searched his memory. “There are anti-entropic forcefields around the Time Tombs,” he said.
“Yes.”
“The tombs are ancient. The anti-entropic fields keep them from aging.”
“No,” said Moneta. “The time tides drive the Tombs backward through time.”
“Backward through time,” Kassad repeated stupidly.
“Look.”
Shimmering, miragelike, a tree of steel thorns appeared out of the haze and a sudden dust storm of ochre sand. The thing seemed to fill the valley, rising at least two hundred meters to the height of the cliffs. Branches shifted, dissolved, and reformed like elements of a poorly tuned hologram. Sunlight danced on five-meter-long thorns. Corpses of Ouster men and women, all naked, were impaled on at least a score of these thorns. Other branches held other bodies. Not all were human.
The dust storm obscured the view for a moment and when the winds subsided the vision was gone. “Come,” said Moneta.
Kassad followed her through the fringes of the time tides, avoiding the ebb and flow of the anti-entropic field the way children would play tag with an ocean surf on a broad beach. Kassad felt the pull of the time tides like waves of déjà vu tugging at every cell of his body.