Дэн Симмонс - The Fall of Hyperion

“Yes.” Melio Arundez and Theo Lane were standing beside and a step behind the Consul, and their faces were grim.

Freeman Ghenga folded her arms. She was a tall woman in the classic Ouster mode—bald, thin, draped in a regal, dark blue flowsuit which seemed to absorb light. Her face was old but almost free of wrinkles. Her eyes were dark.

“Even though this was four of your standard years ago, did you think we would forget?” asked Ghenga.

“No.” The Consul lowered his gaze to meet hers. It appeared as if he almost smiled. “Few cultures forget traitors, Freeman Ghenga.”

“Yet you returned.”

The Consul did not reply. Standing near him, Theo Lane felt a light breeze tug at his own formal tricorne. Theo felt as if he were still dreaming. The ride here had been surreal.

Three Ousters had met them in a long, low gondola, floating easily on the calm waters below the Consul’s ship. With the three Hegemony visitors sitting amidships, the Ouster at the stem had pushed off with a long pole, and the ship had floated back the way it had come, as if the current of the impossible river had reversed itself. Theo had actually closed his eyes as they approached the waterfall where the stream rose perpendicular to the surface of their asteroid, but when he opened his eyes a second later, down was still down, and the river seemed to be flowing along normally enough, even though the grassy sphere of the small world hung to one side like a great, curved wall and stars were visible through the two-meter-thick ribbon of water beneath them.

Then they were through the containment field, out of the atmosphere, and their velocity increased as they followed the twisting ribbon of water. There was a tube of containment sphere around them—logic and the absence of their immediate and dramatic death dictated that there had to be—but it lacked the usual shimmer and optic texture that was so reassuring on Templar treeships or the occasional tourist habitat open to space. Here there were only the river, the boat, the people, and the immensity of space.

“They can’t possibly use this as their form of transportation between Swarm units,” Dr. Melio Arundez had said in a shaky voice. Theo had noted that Arundez also was gripping the gunwales with white fingers.

Neither the Ouster in the stern nor the two seated in the bow had communicated with anything more than a nod of confirmation when the Consul had asked if this then was their promised transportation.

“They’re showing off with the river,” the Consul had said softly. “It’s used when the Swarm is at rest, but for ceremonial purposes. Deploying it while the Swarm is moving is for effect.”

“To impress us with their superior technology?” asked Theo, sotto voce.

The Consul nodded.

The river had wound and twisted through space, sometimes almost doubling back on itself in huge, illogical loops, sometimes wrapping itself in tight spirals like a fiberplastic cord, always gleaming in sunlight from Hyperion’s star and receding to infinity ahead of them. At times the river occluded the sun, and the colors then were magnificent; Theo gasped as he looked at the river loop a hundred meters above them and saw fish silhouetted against the solar disk.

But always the bottom of the boat was down, and they hurtled along at what must have been near cislunar transfer speeds on a river unbroken by rocks or rapids. It was, as Arundez noted some minutes into their voyage, like driving one’s canoe over the edge of an immense waterfall and trying to enjoy the ride on the way down.

The river passed some of the elements of the Swarm, which filled the sky like false stars: massive comet farms, their dusty surfaces broken by the geometries of hard vacuum crops; zero-g globe cities, great irregular spheres of transparent membrane looking like improbable amoebae filled with busy flora and fauna; ten-klick-long thrust clusters, accreted over centuries, their innermost modules and lifecans and 'cologies looking like something stolen from O'Neill’s Boondoggle and the dawn of the space age; wandering forests covering hundreds of kilometers like immense, floating kelp beds, connected to their thrust clusters and command nodes by containment fields and tangled skeins of roots and runners—the spherical tree-forms weaving to gravity breezes and burning bright green and deep orange and the hundred shades of Old Earth autumn when ignited by direct sunlight; hollowed-out asteroids long-since abandoned by their residents, now given over to automated manufacturing and heavy-metal reprocessing, every centimeter of surface rock covered by prerusted structures, chimneys, and skeletal cooling towers, the glow of their internal fusion fires making each cinderish world look like Vulcan’s forge; immense spherical docking globes, given scale only by the torchship- and cruiser-size warcraft flitting around their surfaces like spermatazoa attacking an egg; and, most indelible, organisms which the river came near or which flew near the river… organisms which might have been manufactured or born but probably were both, great butterfly shapes, opening wings of energy to the sun, insects which were spacecraft or vice versa, their antennae turning toward the river and gondola and its passengers as they passed, multifaceted eyes gleaming in starlight, smaller winged shapes—humans—entering and exiting an opening in a belly the size of a FORCE attack carrier’s dropship bay.

And finally had come the mountain—an entire range of mountains, actually: some blistered with a hundred environment bubbles, some open to space but still heavily populated, some connected to others by suspension bridges thirty klicks long or tributary rivers, others regal in their solitude, many as empty and formal as a Zen garden. Then the final mountain, rising higher than Mons Olympus or Asquith’s Mount Hillary, and the river’s penultimate plunge toward its summit, Theo and the Consul and Arundez, pale and silent, gripping the thwarts with quiet intensity as they plunged the final few kilometers with a suddenly perceptible and terrifying velocity. Finally, in the impossible last hundred meters as the river shed energy without deceleration, wider atmosphere surrounded them once again, and the boat floated to a halt in a grassy meadow where the Ouster Clan Tribunal stood waiting, and stones rose in their circle of Stonehenge silence.

“If they did this to impress me,” Theo had whispered as the boat bumped the grassy shore, “they succeeded.”

“Why did you return to the Swarm?” asked Freeman Ghenga. The woman paced, moving in the minuscule gravity with the grace common only to those born in space.

“CEO Gladstone asked me to,” said the Consul.

“And you came knowing that your own life would be forfeit?”

The Consul was too much the gentleman and diplomat to shrug, but his expression conveyed the same sentiment.

“What does Gladstone want?” asked another Ouster, the man who had been introduced by Ghenga as Spokesman of the Eligible Citizens Coredwell Minmun.

The Consul repeated the CEO’s five points.

Spokesman Minmun folded his arms and looked at Freeman Ghenga.

“I will answer now,” said Ghenga. She looked at Arundez and Theo.

“You two will listen carefully in the event that the man who brought these questions does not return to your ship with you.”

“Just a minute,” said Theo, stepping forward to face the taller Ouster, “before passing judgment here, you have to take into account the fact that—”

“Silence,” commanded Spokesman Freeman Ghenga, but Theo had already been silenced by the Consul’s hand on his shoulder.

“I will answer these questions now,” repeated Ghenga. Far above her, a score of the small warships which FORCE had called lancers flashed silently past, darting like a school of fish in three-hundred-g zigs and zags.