“Severn!”

It is not my voice. Hunt is shaking me by the shoulders, calling Severn’s name. I realize that he thinks he is calling my name. I brush away his hands and sink back into the pillows. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“You were moaning,” says Gladstone’s aide. “Crying out.”

“A nightmare. Nothing more.”

“Your dreams are usually more than dreams,” says Hunt. He glances around the narrow room, illuminated now by the single lamp he has carried in. “What a terrible place, Severn.”

I try to smile. “It cost me twenty-eight shillings a month. Seven scudi. Highway robbery.”

Hunt frowns at me. The stark light makes his wrinkles seem deeper than usual. “Listen, Severn, I know you’re a cybrid. Gladstone told me that you were the retrieval persona of a poet named Keats. Now obviously all this…"—he gestured helplessly toward the room, shadows, tall rectangle of windows, and high bed—"all this has something to do with that. But how? What game is the Core playing here?”

“I’m not sure,” I say truthfully.

“But you know this place?”

“Oh yes,” I say with feeling.

“Tell me,” pleads Hunt, and it is his restraint to this point in not asking as much as the earnestness of that plea now which decides me to tell him.

I tell him about the poet John Keats, about his birth in 1795, his short and frequently unhappy life, and about his death from “consumption” in 1821, in Rome, far from his friends and only love. I tell him about my staged “recovery” in this very room, about my decision to take the name of Joseph Severn—the artist acquaintance who stayed with Keats until his death—and, finally, I tell him about my short time in the Web, listening, watching, condemned to dream the lives of the Shrike Pilgrims on Hyperion and the others.

“Dreams?” says Hunt. “You mean even now you’re dreaming about what’s occurring in the Web?”

“Yes.” I tell him of the dreams about Gladstone, the destruction of Heaven’s Gate and God’s Grove, and the confused images from Hyperion.

Hunt is pacing back and forth in the narrow room, his shadow thrown high on the rough walls. “Can you contact them?”

“The ones I dream of? Gladstone?” I think a second. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

I try to explain. “I’m not even in these dreams, Hunt. I have no… no voice, no presence… there’s no way I can contact those I dream about.”

“But sometimes you dream what they’re thinking?”

I realize that this is true. Close to the truth. “I sense what they are feeling…”

“Then can’t you leave some trace in their mind… in their memory? Let them know where we are?”

“No.”

Hunt collapses into the chair at the foot of my bed. He suddenly seems very old.

“Leigh,” I say, “even if I could communicate with Gladstone or the others—which I can’t—what good would it do? I’ve told you that this replica of Old Earth is in the Magellanic Cloud. Even at quantum-leap Hawking velocities it would take centuries for anyone to reach us.”

“We could warn them,” says Hunt, his voice so tired that it sounds almost sullen.

“Warn them of what? All of Gladstone’s worst nightmares are coming true around her. Do you think she trusts the Core now? That’s why the Core could kidnap us so blatantly. Events are proceeding too quickly for Gladstone or anyone in the Hegemony to deal with.”

Hunt rubs his eyes, then steeples his fingers under his nose. His stare is not overly friendly. “Are you really the retrieved personality of a poet?”

I say nothing.

“Recite some poetry. Make something up.”

I shake my head. It is late, we’re both tired and frightened, and my heart has not yet quit pounding from the nightmare which was more than a nightmare. I won’t let Hunt make me angry.

“Come on,” he says. “Show me that you’re the new, improved version of Bill Keats.”

“John Keats,” I say softly.

“Whatever. Come on, Severn. Or John. Or whatever I should call you. Recite some poesy.”

“All right,” I say, returning his stare. “Listen.”

“I don’t know,” says Hunt. “That doesn’t sound like something a poet whose reputation has lasted a thousand years would have written.”

I shrug.

“Were you dreaming about Gladstone tonight? Did something happen that caused those moans?”

“No. It wasn’t about Gladstone. It was a… real nightmare for a change.”

Hunt stands, lifts his lamp, and prepares to take the only light from the room. I can hear the fountain in the Piazza, the doves on the windowsills. “Tomorrow,” he says, “we’ll make sense of all this and figure out a way to get back. If they can farcast us here, there must be a way to farcast home.”

“Yes,” I say, knowing it is not true.

“Good night,” says Hunt. “No more nightmares, all right?”

“No more,” I say, knowing this is even less true.

Moneta pulled the wounded Kassad away from the Shrike and seemed to hold the creature at bay with an extended hand while she fumbled a blue torus from the belt of her skinsuit and twisted it behind her.

A two-meter-high gold oval hung burning in midair.

“Let me go,” muttered Kassad. “Let us finish it.” There was blood spattered where the Shrike had clawed huge rents in the Colonel’s skinsuit. His right foot was dangling as if half-severed; he could put no weight on it, and only the fact that he had been struggling with the Shrike, half-carried by the thing in a mad parody of a dance, had kept Kassad upright as they fought.

“Let me go,” repeated Fedmahn Kassad.

“Shut up,” said Moneta, and then, more softly, “Shut up, my love.”

She dragged him through the golden oval, and they emerged into blazing light.

Even through his pain and exhaustion, Kassad was dazzled by the sight. They were not on Hyperion; he was sure of that. A vast plain stretched to an horizon much farther away than logic or experience would allow. Low, orange grass—if grass it was—grew on the flatlands and low hills like fuzz on the back of some immense caterpillar, while things which might have been trees grew like whiskered-carbon sculptures, their trunks and branches Escher-ish in their baroque improbability, their leaves a riot of dark blue and violet ovals shimmering toward a sky alive with light.

But not sunlight. Even as Moneta carried him away from the closing portal—Kassad did not think of it as a farcaster since he felt sure it had carried them through time as well as space—and toward a copse of those impossible trees, Kassad turned his eyes toward the sky and felt something close to wonder. It was as bright as a Hyperion day; as bright as midday on a Lusian shopping mall; as bright as midsummer on the Tharsis Plateau of Kassad’s dry homeworld, Mars, but this was no sunlight—the sky was filled with stars and constellations and star clusters and a galaxy so cluttered with suns that there were almost no patches of darkness between the lights. It was like being in a planetarium with ten projectors, thought Kassad. Like being at the center of the galaxy.