Time tides from the open entrance to the Sphinx still held Sol back like insistent winds, but he leaned into them like an immovable rock and stood there, five meters out and waiting, squinting into the glare.
He glanced up but did not move back when he saw the fusion flame of a descending spacecraft slice the predawn sky. He turned to look but did not retreat when he heard the spacecraft landing and saw three figures emerge. He glanced but did not step back when he heard other noises, shouts, from deeper in the valley and saw a familiar figure lugging another in a fireman’s carry, moving toward him from beyond the Jade Tomb.
None of these things related to his child. He waited for Rachel.
Even without a datasphere, it is quite possible for my persona to travel through the rich, Void-Which-Binds soup which now surrounds Hyperion. My immediate reaction is to want to visit the One Who Will Be, but although that one’s brilliance dominates the metasphere, I am not yet ready for that. I am, after all, little John Keats, not John the Baptist.
The Sphinx—a tomb patterned after a real creature that will not be designed by genetic engineers for centuries to come—is a maelstrom of temporal energies. There are really several Sphinxes visible to my expanded sight: the anti-entropic tomb carrying its Shrike cargo back in time like some sealed container with its deadly bacillus, the active, unstable Sphinx which contaminated Rachel Weintraub in its initial efforts to open a portal through time, and the Sphinx which has opened and is moving forward through time again. This last Sphinx is the blazing portal of light, which, second only to the One Who Will Be, lights Hyperion with its metaspherical bonfire.
I descend to this bright place in time to watch Sol Weintraub hand his daughter to the Shrike.
I could not have interfered with this even if I had arrived earlier. I would not if I were able. Worlds beyond reason depend upon this act.
But I await within the Sphinx for the Shrike to pass, carrying its tender cargo. Now I can see the child. She is seconds old, blotched, moist, and wrinkled. She is crying her Newborn lungs out. From my old attitudes of bachelorhood and reflective poet’s stance, I find it hard to understand the attraction this bawling, unaesthetic infant exerts on its father and the cosmos.
Still, the sight of a baby’s flesh—however unattractive this Newborn might be—held by the Shrike’s bladed talons stirs something in me.
Three paces into the Sphinx have carried the Shrike and the child hours forward in time. Just beyond the entrance, the river of time accelerates. If I don’t do something within seconds, it will be too late—the Shrike will have used this portal to carry the child off to whatever distant-future dark hole it seeks.
Unbidden, the images arrive of spiders draining their victims of fluids, of digger wasps burying their own larvae in the paralyzed bodies of their prey, perfect sources for incubation and food.
I have to act, but I have no more solidity here than I had in the Core. The Shrike walks through me as if I were an unseen holo. My analog persona is useless here, armless and insubstantial as a wisp of swamp gas.
But swamp gas has no brain, and John Keats did.
The Shrike takes another two steps, and more hours pass for Sol and the others outside. I can see blood on the crying infant’s skin where the Shrike’s scalpeled fingers have cut into flesh.
To hell with this.
Outside, on the broad stone porch of the Sphinx, caught now in the flood of temporal energies flowing in and through the tomb, lay backpacks, blankets, abandoned food containers, and all the detritus Sol and the pilgrims had left there.
Including a single Möbius cube.
The box had been sealed with a class-eight containment field on the Templar treeship Yggdrasill when Voice of the Tree Het Masteen had prepared for his long voyage. It contained a single erg—sometimes known as a binder—one of the small creatures which might not be intelligent by human standards but which had evolved around distant stars and developed the ability to control more powerful forcefields than any machine known to humankind.
The Templars and Ousters had communicated with the creatures for generations. Templars used them for control redundancy on their beautiful but exposed treeships.
Het Masteen had brought this thing hundreds of light-years to complete the Templar agreement with the Church of the Final Atonement to help fly the Shrike’s thorn tree. But, seeing the Shrike and the tree of torment, Masteen had not been able to fulfill the contract. And so he died.
The Möbius cube remained. The erg was visible to me as a constrained sphere of red energy in the temporal flood.
Outside, through a curtain of darkness, Sol Weintraub was just visible—a sadly comic figure, speeded up like a silent-film figure by the subjective rush of time beyond the Sphinx’s temporal field—but the Möbius cube lay within the Sphinx’s circle.
Rachel cried with the fear even a Newborn can know. Fear of falling.
Fear of pain. Fear of separation.
The Shrike took a step, and another hour was lost to those outside.
I was insubstantial to the Shrike, but energy fields are something which even we Core-analog ghosts can touch. I canceled the Möbius cube’s containment field. I freed the erg.
Templars communicate with ergs via electromagnetic radiation, coded pulses, simple rewards of radiation when the creature does what they want… but primarily through a near-mystical form of contact which only the Brotherhood and a few Ouster exotics know. Scientists call it a crude telepathy. In truth, it is almost pure empathy.
The Shrike takes another step into the opening portal to the future.
Rachel cries with the energy only someone newly born to the universe can muster.
The erg expands, understands, and melds with my persona. John Keats takes on substance and form.
I hurry the five paces to the Shrike, remove the baby from its hands, and step back. Even in the energy maelstrom that is the Sphinx, I can smell the infant-newness of her as I hold the child against my chest and cup her moist head against my cheek.
The Shrike whirls in surprise. Four arms extend, blades snick open, and red eyes focus on me. But the creature is too close to the portal itself. Without moving, it recedes down the storm drain of temporal flow. The thing’s steam-shovel jaws open, steel teeth gnash, but it is already gone, a spot in the distance. Something less.
I turn toward the entrance, but it is too far. The erg’s draining energy could get me there, drag me upstream against the flow, but not with Rachel. Carrying another living thing that far against so much force is more than I can manage even with the erg’s help.
The baby cries, and I bounce her gently, whispering nonsense doggerel in her warm ear.
If we can’t go back and we can’t go forward, we’ll just wait here for a moment. Perhaps someone will come along.
Martin Silenus’s eyes widened and Brawne Lamia turned quickly, seeing the Shrike floating in midair above and behind her.
“Holy shit,” Brawne whispered reverently.
In the Shrike Palace, tiers of sleeping human bodies receded in the gloom and distance, all of the people except Martin Silenus still connected to the thorn tree, the machine UI, and God knows what else by pulsing umbilicals.
As if to show its power here, the Shrike had quit climbing, opened its arms, and floated up three meters until it hung in the air five meters out from the stone shelf where Brawne crouched next to Martin Silenus.
“Do something,” whispered Silenus. The poet was no longer attached by the neural shunt umbilical, but he was still too weak to hold his head up.
“Ideas?” said Brawne, the brave remark somewhat ruined by the quaver in her voice.