“If the tramway is running,” added Kassad.
The Consul sipped the hot coffee and made a face. “We have to assume it is. Otherwise …”
“Otherwise what?” demanded Lamia.
“Otherwise,” said Colonel Kassad, moving to the open window and putting his hands on his hips, “we will be stranded six hundred klicks from the Time Tombs and a thousand from the southern cities.”
The Consul shook his head. “No,” he said. “The Temple priests or whoever are behind this pilgrimage have seen to it that we’ve gotten this far. They’ll make sure we go all the way.”
Brawne Lamia crossed her arms and frowned. “As what … sacrifices?”
Martin Silenus whooped a laugh and brought out his bottle:
“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.”
Brawne Lamia reached under her tunic and brought out a cutting laser no larger than her little finger. She aimed it at the poet’s head. “You miserable little shit. One more word out of you and … I swear … I’ll slag you where you stand.”
The silence was suddenly absolute except for the background rumble-groan of the ship. The Consul moved toward Martin Silenus. Colonel Kassad took two steps behind Lamia.
The poet took a long drink and smiled at the dark-haired woman. His lips were moist. “Oh build your ship of death,” he whispered. “Oh build it!”
Lamia’s fingers were white on the pencil laser. The Consul edged closer to Silenus, not knowing what to do, imagining the whipping beam of light fusing his own eyes. Kassad leaned toward Lamia like two meters of tensed shadow.
“Madam,” said Sol Weintraub from where he sat on the bunk against the far wall, “need I remind you that there is a child present?”
Lamia glanced to her right. Weintraub had removed a deep drawer from a ship’s cupboard and had set it on the bed as a cradle. He had bathed the infant and come in silently just before the poet’s recitation. Now he set the baby softly in the padded nest.
“I’m sorry,” said Brawne Lamia and lowered the small laser. “It’s just that he makes me so … angry.”
Weintraub nodded, rocking the drawer slightly. The gentle roll of the windwagon combined with the incessant rumble of the great wheel appeared to have already put the child to sleep. “We’re all tired and tense,” said the scholar. “Perhaps we should find our lodgings for the night and turn in.”
The woman sighed and tucked the weapon in her belt. “I won’t sleep,” she said. “Things are too … strange.”
Others nodded. Martin Silenus was sitting on the broad ledge below the stern windows. Now he pulled up his legs, took a drink, and said to Weintraub, “Tell your story, old man.”
“Yes,” said Father Hoyt. The priest looked exhausted to the point of being cadaverous, but his feverish eyes burned. “Tell us. We need to have the stories told and time to think about them before we arrive.”
Weintraub passed a hand across his bald scalp. “It’s a dull tale,” he said. “I’ve never been to Hyperion before. There are no confrontations with monsters, no acts of heroism. It’s a tale by a man whose idea of epic adventure is speaking to a class without his notes.”
“All the better,” said Martin Silenus. “We need a soporific.”
Sol Weintraub sighed, adjusted his glasses, and nodded. There were a few streaks of dark in his beard, but most of it had gone gray. He turned the lantern low over the baby’s bed and moved to a chair in the center of the room.
The Consul turned down the other lamps and poured more coffee for those who wanted it. Sol Weintraub’s voice was slow, careful in phrase and precise in wording, and before long the gentle cadence of his story blended with the soft rumble and slow pitchings of the windwagon’s progress north.
THE SCHOLAR’S TALE:
THE RIVER LETHE’S TASTE IS BITTER
Sol Weintraub and his wife Sarai had enjoyed their life even before the birth of their daughter; Rachel made things as close to perfect as the couple could imagine.
Sarai was twenty-seven when the child was conceived, Sol was twenty-nine. Neither of them had considered Poulsen treatments because neither of them could afford it, but even without such care they looked forward to another fifty years of health.
Both had lived their entire lives on Barnard’s World, one of the oldest but least exciting members of the Hegemony. Barnard’s was in the Web, but it made little difference to Sol and Sarai since they could not afford frequent farcaster travel and had little wish to go at any rate. Sol had recently celebrated his tenth year with Nightenhelser College, where he taught history and classical studies and did his own research on ethical evolution. Nightenhelser was a small school, fewer than three thousand students, but its academic reputation was outstanding and it attracted young people from all over the Web. The primary complaint of these students was that Nightenhelser and its surrounding community of Crawford constituted an island of civilization in an ocean of corn. It was true; the college was three thousand flat kilometers away from the capital of Bussard and the terraformed land in between was given over to farming. There had been no forests to fell, no hills to deal with, and no mountains to break the flat monotony of cornfields, beanfields, cornfields, wheatfields, cornfields, rice paddies, and cornfields. The radical poet Salmud Brevy had taught briefly at Nightenhelser before the Glennon-Height Mutiny, had been fired, and upon farcasting to Renaissance Vector had told his friends that Crawford County on South Sinzer on Barnard’s World constituted the Eighth Circle of Desolation on the smallest pimple on the absolute ass-end of Creation.
Sol and Sarai Weintraub liked it. Crawford, a town of twenty-five thousand, might have been reconstructed from some nineteenth-century mid-American template. The streets were wide and overarched with elms and oaks. (Barnard’s had been the second extrasolar Earth colony, centuries before the Hawking drive and Hegira, and the seedships then had been huge.) Homes in Crawford reflected styles ranging from early Victorian to Canadian Revival, but they all seemed to be white and set far back on well-trimmed lawns.
The college itself was Georgian, an assemblage of red brick and white pillars surrounding the oval common. Sol’s office was on the third floor of Placher Hall, the oldest building on campus, and in the winter he could look out on bare branches which carved the common into complex geometries. Sol loved the chalk-dust and old-wood smell of the place, a smell which had not changed since he was a freshman there, and each day climbing to his office he treasured the deeply worn grooves in the steps, a legacy of twenty generations of Nightenhelser students.
Sarai had been born on a farm halfway between Bussard and Crawford and had received her PhD in music theory a year before Sol earned his doctorate. She had been a happy and energetic young woman, making up in personality what she lacked in accepted norms of physical beauty, and she carried this attractiveness of person into later life. Sarai had studied offworld for two years at the University of New Lyons on Deneb Drei, but she was homesick there: the sunsets were abrupt, the much-vaunted mountains slicing off the sunlight like a ragged scythe, and she longed for the hours-long sunsets of home where Barnard’s Star hung on the horizon like a great, tethered, red balloon while the sky congealed to evening. She missed the perfect flatness where—peering from her third-floor room under the steep gables—a little girl could look fifty kilometers across tasseled fields to watch a storm approach like a bruise-black curtain lit within by lightning bolts. And Sarai missed her family.