“ ’Later, alligator.”
“ ’While, crocodile.”
Rachel giggled into her pillow.
It was, Sol thought during the final two years, not so much different from watching a loved one falling into old age. Only worse. A thousand times worse.
Rachel’s permanent teeth had fallen out over intervals between her eighth and second birthdays. Baby teeth replaced them but by her eighteenth month half of these had receded into her jaw.
Rachel’s hair, always her one vanity, grew shorter and thinner. Her face lost its familiar structure as baby fat obscured the cheekbones and firm chin. Her coordination failed by degrees, noticeable at first in a sudden clumsiness as she handled a fork or pencil. On the day she could no longer walk, Sol put her down in her crib early and then went into his study to get thoroughly and quietly drunk.
Language was the hardest for him. Her vocabulary loss was like the burning of a bridge between them, the severing of a final line of hope. It was sometime after her second birthday receded that Sol tucked her in and, pausing in the doorway, said, “ ’Later, alligator.”
“Huh?”
“See you later, alligator.”
Rachel giggled.
“You say—‘In a while, crocodile,’ ” said Sol. He told her what an alligator and crocodile were.
“In a while, ’acadile,” giggled Rachel.
In the morning she had forgotten.
Sol took Rachel with him as he traveled the Web—no longer caring about the newsteeps—petitioning the Shrike Church for pilgrimage rights, lobbying the Senate for a visa and access to forbidden areas on Hyperion, and visiting any research institute or clinic which might offer a cure. Months were lost while more medics admitted failure. When he fled back to Hebron, Rachel was fifteen standard months old; in the ancient units used on Hebron she weighed twenty-five pounds and measured thirty inches tall. She could no longer dress herself. Her vocabulary consisted of twenty-five words, of which her favorites were “Mommy” and “Daddy.”
Sol loved carrying his daughter. There were times when the curve of her head against his cheek, her warmth against his chest, the smell of her skin—all worked to allow him to forget the fierce injustice of it all. At those times Sol would have been temporarily at peace with the universe if only Sarai had been there. As it was, there were temporary cease-fires in his angry dialogue with a God in Whom he did not believe.
— What possible reason can there be for this?
— What reason has been visible for all of the forms of pain suffered by humankind?
— Precisely, thought Sol, wondering if he had just won a point for the first time. He doubted it.
— The fact of a thing not being visible does not mean it does not exist.
— That’s clumsy. It shouldn’t take three negatives to make a statement. Especially to state something as nonprofound as that.
— Precisely, Sol. You’re beginning to get the drift of all this.
— What?
There was no answer to his thoughts. Sol lay in his house and listened to the desert wind blow.
Rachel’s last word was “Mamma,” uttered when she was just over five months old.
She awoke in her crib and did not—could not—ask where she was. Her world was one of mealtimes, naps, and toys. Sometimes when she cried Sol wondered if she was crying for her mother.
Sol shopped in the small stores in Dan, taking the infant with him as he selected diapers, nursing paks, and the occasional new toy.
The week before Sol left for Tau Ceti Center, Ephraim and the two other elders came to talk. It was evening and the fading light glowed on Ephraim’s bald scalp. “Sol, we’re worried about you. The next few weeks will be hard. The women want to help. We want to help.”
Sol laid his hand on the older man’s forearm. “It’s appreciated, Ephraim. Everything the last few years is appreciated. This is our home now, too. Sarai would have … would have wanted me to say thank you. But we’re leaving on Sunday. Rachel is going to get better.”
The three men on the long bench looked at one another. Avner said, “They’ve found a cure?”
“No,” said Sol, “but I’ve found a reason to hope.”
“Hope is good,” Robert said in cautious tones.
Sol grinned, his teeth white against the gray of his beard. “It had better be,” he said. “Sometimes it is all we’re given.”
The studio holo camera zoomed in for a close-up of Rachel as the infant sat cradled in Sol’s arm on the set of “Common Talk.” “So you’re saying,” said Devon Whiteshire, the show’s host and third-best-known face in the Web datasphere, “that the Shrike Church’s refusal to allow you to return to the Time Tombs … and the Hegemony’s tardiness in processing a visa … these things will doom your child to this … extinction?”
“Precisely,” said Sol. “The voyage to Hyperion cannot be made in under six weeks. Rachel is now twelve weeks old. Any further delay by either the Shrike Church or the Web bureaucracy will kill this child.”
The studio audience stirred. Devon Whiteshire turned toward the nearest imaging remote. His craggy, friendly visage filled the monitor frame. “This man doesn’t know if he can save his child,” said Whiteshire, his voice powerful with subtle feeling, “but all he asks is a chance. Do you think he … and the baby … deserve one? If so, access your planetary representatives and your nearest Church of the Shrike temple. The number of your nearest temple should be appearing now.” He turned back to Sol. “We wish you luck, M. Weintraub. And”—Whiteshire’s large hand touched Rachel’s cheek—“we wish you Godspeed, our young friend.”
The monitor image held on Rachel until it faded to black.
The Hawking effect caused nausea, vertigo, headache, and hallucinations. The first leg of the voyage was the ten-day transit to Parvati on the Hegemony torchship HS Intrepid.
Sol held Rachel and endured. They were the only people fully conscious aboard the warship. At first Rachel cried, but after some hours she lay quietly in Sol’s arms and stared up at him with large, dark eyes. Sol remembered the day she was born—the medics had taken the infant from atop Sarai’s warm stomach and handed her to Sol. Rachel’s dark hair was not much shorter then, her gaze no less profound.
Eventually they slept from sheer exhaustion.
Sol dreamed that he was wandering through a structure with columns the size of redwood trees and a ceiling lost to sight far above him. Red light bathed cool emptiness. Sol was surprised to find that he still carried Rachel in his arms. Rachel as a child had never been in his dream before. The infant looked up at him and Sol felt the contact of her consciousness as surely as if she had spoken aloud.
Suddenly a different voice, immense and cold, echoed through the void:
“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, Whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”
Sol hesitated and looked back to Rachel. The baby’s eyes were deep and luminous as she looked up at her father. Sol felt the unspoken yes. Holding her tightly, he stepped forward into the darkness and raised his voice against the silence:
“Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.”
Sol listened. He could feel the pounding of his heart and Rachel’s warmth against his arm. From somewhere high above there came the cold sound of wind through unseen fissures. Sol cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted: