“We did predict the inevitability of war with the Ousters, M. Executive. We also predicted the great danger of defending Hyperion. You must believe me that the inclusion of Hyperion in any predictive equation brings the reliability factor down as low as—”

“All right,” sighed Gladstone. “I need to talk to someone else in the Core, Albedo. Someone in your indecipherable hierarchy of intelligences who actually has some decision-making power.”

“I assure you that I represent all Core elements when I—”

“Yes, yes. But I want to speak to one of the… the Powers I believe you call them. One of the elder AIs. One with clout, Albedo. I need to speak to someone who can tell me why the Core kidnapped my artist Severn and my aide Leigh Hunt.”

The holo looked shocked. “I assure you, M. Gladstone, on the honor of four centuries of our alliance, that the Core had nothing to do with the unfortunate disappearance of—”

Gladstone stood. “This is why I need to talk to a Power. The time for assurances is past, Albedo. It is time for straight talk if either of our species is going to survive. That is all.” She turned her attention to the faxpad flimsies on her desk.

Councilor Albedo stood, nodded a farewell, and shimmered out of existence.

Gladstone called her personal farcaster portal into existence, spoke the Government House infirmary codes, and started to step through.

In the instant before touching the opaque surface of the energy rectangle, she paused, gave thought to what she was doing, and for the first time in her life felt anxiety about stepping through a farcaster.

What if the Core wanted to kidnap her? Or kill her?

Meina Gladstone suddenly realized that the Core had the power of life and death over every farcaster-traveling citizen in the Web… which was every citizen with power. Leigh and the Severn cybrid did not have to be kidnapped, translated somewhere… only the persistent habit of thinking of farcasters as foolproof transportation created the subconscious conviction that they had gone somewhere. Her aide and the enigmatic cybrid could easily have been translated to… to nothing.

To scattered atoms stretched through a singularity. Farcasters did not “teleport” people and things—such a concept was silly—but how much less silly was it to trust a device that punched holes in the fabric of space-time and allowed one to step through black hole “trapdoors"?

How silly was it for her to trust the Core to transport her to the infirmary?

Gladstone thought of the War Room… three giant rooms connected by permanently activated, vision-clear farcaster portals… but three rooms nonetheless, separated by at least a thousand light-years of real space, decades of real time even under Hawking drive. Every time Morpurgo or Singh or one of the others moved from a map holo to the plotting board, he or she stepped across great gulfs of space and time.

All the Core had to do to destroy the Hegemony or anyone in it was to tamper with the farcasters, allow a slight “mistake” in targeting.

To hell with this, thought Meina Gladstone and stepped through to see Paul Duré in the Government House infirmary.

The two rooms on the second floor of the house on the Piazza di Spagna are small, narrow, high ceilinged, and—except for a single dim lamp burning in each room as if lighted by ghosts in expectation of a visit by other ghosts—quite dark. My bed is in the smaller of the two rooms: the one facing the Piazza, although all one can see from the high windows this night is darkness creased by deeper shadows and accented by the ceaseless burbling of Bernini’s unseen fountain.

Bells ring on the hour from one of the twin towers of Santa Trinità dei Monti, the church that crouches in the dark like a massive, tawny cat at the head of the stairs outside, and each time I hear the bells toll the brief notes of the early hours of the mom, I imagine ghostly hands pulling rotting bell ropes. Or perhaps rotting hands pulling ghostly bell ropes; I don’t know which image suits my macabre fancies this endless night.

Fever lies upon me this night, as dank and heavy and stifling as a thick, water-soaked blanket. My skin alternately burns and then is clammy to the touch. Twice I have been seized with coughing spasms; the first brought Hunt running in from his couch in the other room, and I watched his eyes widen at the sight of the blood I had vomited on the damask sheets; the second spasm I stifled as best I could, staggering to the basin on the bureau to spit up smaller quantities of black blood and dark phlegm. Hunt did not wake the second time.

To be back here. To come all this way to these dark rooms, this grim bed. I half remember awakening here, miraculously cured, the “real” Severn and Dr. Clark and even little Signora Angeletti hovering in the outer room. That period of convalescence from death; that period of realization that I was not Keats, was not on the true Earth, that this was not in the century I had closed my eyes in that last night… that I was not human.

Sometime after two, I sleep, and as I sleep, I dream. The dream is one I have never suffered before. I dream that I rise slowly through the datumplane, through the datasphere, into and through the megasphere, and finally into a place I do not know, have never dreamt of… a place of infinite spaces, unhurried, indescribable colors, a place with no horizons, no ceilings, no floors or solid areas one might call the ground. I think of it as the metasphere, for I sense immediately that this level of consensual reality includes all of the varieties and vagaries of sensation which I have experienced on Earth, all of the binary analyses and intellectual pleasures I have felt flowing from the TechnoCore through the datasphere, and, above all, a sense of… of what? Expansiveness? Freedom?—potential might be the word I am hunting for.

I am alone in this metasphere. Colors flow above me, under me, through me… sometimes dissolving into vague pastels, sometimes coalescing into cloudlike fantasies, and at other times, rarely, appearing to form into more solid objects, shapes, distinct forms which may or may not be humanoid in appearance—I watch them the way a child might watch clouds and imagine elephants, crocodiles from the Nile, and great gunboats marching from west to east on a spring day in the Lake District.

After a while I hear sounds: the maddening trickle of the Bernini fountain in the Piazza outside; doves rustling and cooing on the ledges above my window; Leigh Hunt moaning softly in his sleep. But above and beneath these noises, I hear something more stealthy, less real, but infinitely more threatening.

Something large this way comes. I strain to see through the pastel gloom; something is moving just beyond the horizon of sight. I know that it knows my name. I know that it holds my life in one palm and death in its other fist.

There is no place to hide in this space beyond space. I cannot run.

The siren song of pain continues to rise and fall from the world I left behind—the everyday pain of each person everywhere, the pain of those suffering from the war just begun, the specific, focused pain of those on the Shrike’s terrible tree, and, worst of all, the pain I feel for and from the pilgrims and those others whose lives and thoughts I now share.

It would be worth rushing to greet this approaching shadow of doom if it would grant me freedom from that song of pain.

“Severn! Severn!”

For a second I think that I am the one calling, just as I had before in these rooms, calling Joseph Severn in the night when my pain and fever ranged beyond my ability to contain it. And he was always there: Severn with his hulking, well-meaning slowness and that gentle smile which I often wanted to wipe from his face with some small meanness or comment. It is hard to be good-natured when one is dying; I had led a life of some generosity… why then was it my fate to continue that role when I was the one suffering, when I was the one coughing the ragged remnants of my lungs into stained handkerchiefs?