Then the deaths begin.
The sculptor Pete Garcia is found in his studio … and in his bedroom … and in the yard beyond. ShipSecurity Manager Truin Hines is foolish enough to tell a newsteep: “It’s like he was mauled by some vicious animal. But no animal I’ve ever seen could do that to a man.”
We are all secretly thrilled and titillated. True, the dialogue is bad, straight out of a million movies and holies we’ve scared ourselves with, but now we are part of the show.
Suspicion turns toward the obvious: a psychopath is loose among us, probably killing with a pulse-blade or hellwhip. This time he (or she) had not found time to dispose of the body. Poor Pete.
ShipSecurity Manager Hines is sacked and City Manager Pruett receives permission from His Majesty to hire, train, and arm a city police force of approximately twenty officers. There is talk of truth-testing the entire Poets’ City population of six thousand. Sidewalk cafes buzz with conversation of civil rights … we were technically out of the Hegemony—did we have any rights?… and harebrained schemes are hatched to catch the murderer.
Then the slaughter begins.
There was no pattern to the murders. Bodies were found in twos and threes, or alone, or not at all. Some of the disappearances were bloodless; others left gallons of gore. There were no witnesses, no survivors of attacks. Location did not seem to matter: the Weimont family lived in one of the outlying villas but Sira Rob never stirred from her tower studio near the center of town; two of the victims disappeared alone, at night, apparently while walking in the Zen Garden, but Chancellor Lehman’s daughter had private bodyguards yet vanished while alone in a bathroom on the seventh floor of Sad King Billy’s palace.
On Lusus or Tau Ceti Center or a dozen other of the old Web worlds, the deaths of a thousand people add up to minor news—items for datasphere short-term or the inside pages of the morning paper—but in a city of six thousand on a colony of fifty thousand, a dozen murders—like the proverbial sentence to be hanged in the morning—tend to focus one’s attention wonderfully well.
I knew one of the first victims. Sissipriss Harris had been one of my first conquests as a satyr—and one of my most enthusiastic—a beautiful girl, long blond hair too soft to be real, a fresh-picked-peach complexion too virginal to dream of touching, a beauty too perfect to believe: precisely the sort that even the most timid male dreams of violating. Sissipriss now had been violated in earnest. They found only her head, lying upright in the center of Lord Byron’s Plaza as if she had been buried to her neck in pourable marble. I knew when I heard these details precisely what kind of creature we were dealing with, for a cat I had owned on Mother’s estate had left similar offerings on the south patio most summer mornings—the head of a mouse staring up from the sandstone in pure rodent amazement, or perhaps a ground squirrel’s toothy grin—killing trophies from a proud but hungry predator.
Sad King Billy came to visit me while I was working on my Cantos.
“Good morning, Billy,” I said.
“It’s Your Majesty,” grumped His Majesty in a rare show of royal pique. His stutter had disappeared the day the royal dropship landed on Hyperion.
“Good morning, Billy, Your Majesty.”
“Hnnrh,” growled my liege lord, moving some papers and managing to sit in the only puddle of spilled coffee on an otherwise dry bench. “You’re writing again, Silenus.”
I saw no reason to acknowledge an acknowledgment of the obvious.
“Have you always used a pen?”
“No,” I said, “only when I want to write something worth reading.”
“Is that worth reading?” He gestured toward the small heap of manuscript I had accrued in two local weeks of work.
“Yes.”
“Yes? Just yes?”
“Yes.”
“Will I get to read it soon?”
“No.”
King Billy looked down and noticed that his left leg was in a puddle of coffee. He frowned, moved, and mopped at the shrinking pool with the hem of his cape. “Never?” he said.
“Not unless you outlive me.”
“Which I plan to do,” said the King. “While you expire from playing goat to the kingdom’s ewes.”
“Is that an attempt at a metaphor?”
“Not in the least,” said King Billy. “Merely an observation.”
“I haven’t forced my attentions on a ewe since my boyhood days on the farm,” I said. “I promised my mother in song that I wouldn’t indulge in sheep fucking again without asking her permission.” While King Billy looked on mournfully, I sang a few bars of an ancient ditty called “There’ll Never Be Another Ewe.”
“Martin,” he said, “someone or something is killing my people.”
I set aside my paper and pen. “I know,” I said.
“I need your help.”
“How, for Christ’s sake? Am I supposed to track down the killer like some HTV detective? Have a fight to the fucking death on Reichenbach fucking Falls?”
“That would be satisfactory, Martin. But in the meantime a few opinions and words of advice would suffice.”
“Opinion One,” I said, “it was stupid to come here. Opinion Two, it’s stupid to stay. Advice Alpha/Omega: leave.”
King Billy nodded dolefully. “Leave this city or all of Hyperion?”
I shrugged.
His Majesty rose and walked to the window of my small study. It looked out across a three-meter alley to the brick wall of the automated recycling plant next door. King Billy studied the view. “You’re aware,” he said, “of the ancient legend of the Shrike?”
“I’ve heard bits of it.”
“The indigenies associate the monster with the Time Tombs,” he said.
“The indigenies smear paint on their bellies for the harvest celebration and smoke unrecombinant tobacco,” I said.
King Billy nodded at the wisdom of this. He said: “The Hegemony Firstdown Team was wary of this area. They set up the multichannel recorders and kept their bases south of the Bridle.”
“Look,” I said, “Your Majesty … what do you want? Absolution for screwing up and building the city here? You’re absolved. Go and sin no more, my son. Now, if you don’t mind, Your Royalship, adiós. I’ve got dirty limericks to write here.”
King Billy did not turn away from the window. “You recommend that we evacuate the city, Martin?”
I hesitated only a second. “Sure.”
“And would you leave with the rest?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
King Billy turned and looked me in the eye. “Would you?”
I said nothing. After a minute I looked away.
“I thought so,” said the ruler of the planet. He clasped his pudgy hands behind his back and stared at the wall again. “If I were a detective,” he said, “I would be suspicious. The city’s least productive citizen starts writing again after a decade of silence only … what, Martin?… two days after the first murders happened. Now he’s disappeared from the social life he once dominated and spends his time composing an epic poem … shy, even the young girls are safe from his goatish ardor.”