and we use pain to

drive him out of hiding/

thus the tree]

–Tree? The Shrike’s tree of thorns?

[Of course]

[It broadcasts pain

across fatline and thin/

like a whistle in

a dog’s ear\\

Or a god’s]

I feel my own analog form waver as the truth of things strikes me.

The chaos beyond Ummon’s forcefield egg is beyond imagining now, as if the fabric of space itself were being rent by giant hands. The Core is in turmoil.

–Ummon, who is the human UI in our time? Where is that consciousness hiding, lying dormant?

[You must understand/

Keats/

our only chance

was to create a hybrid/

Son of Man/

Son of Machine\\

And make that refuge so attractive

that the fleeing Empathy

would consider no other home/

A consciousness already as near divine

as humankind has offered in thirty

generations\

an imagination which can span

space and time\\

And in so offering/

and joining/

form a bond between worlds

which might allow

that world to exist

for both]

–Who, Goddamn you, Ummon! Who is it? No more of your riddles or double-talk you formless bastard! Who?

[You have refused

this godhood twice/

Keats\\

If you refuse

a final time/

all ends here/

for time there is

no more]

[Go!

Go and die to live!

Or live a while and die

for all of us!

Either way Ummon and the rest

are finished with

you!]

[Go away!]

And in my shock and disbelief I fall, or am cast out, and fly through the TechnoCore like a windblown leaf, tumbling through the mega-sphere without aim or guidance, then fall into darkness even deeper and emerge, screaming obscenities at shadows, into the metasphere.

Here, strangeness and vastness and fear and darkness with a single campfire of light burning below.

I swim for it, flailing against formless viscosity.

It’s Byron who drowns, I think, not I. Unless one counts drowning in one’s own blood and shredded lung tissue.

But now I know I have a choice. I can choose to live and stay a mortal, not cybrid but human, not Empathy but poet.

Swimming against a strong current, I descend to the light.

“Hunt! Hunt!”

Gladstone’s aide staggers in, his long face haggard and alarmed. It is still night, but the false light of predawn dimly touches the panes, the walls.

“My God,” says Hunt and looks at me in awe.

I see his gaze and look down at the bedclothes and nightshirt soaked with bright arterial blood.

My coughing has awakened him; my hemorrhage brought me home.

“Hunt!” I gasp and lie back on the pillows, too weak to raise an arm.

The older man sits on the bed, clasps my shoulder, takes my hand.

I know that he knows that I am a dying man.

“Hunt,” I whisper, “things to tell. Wonderful things.”

He shushes me. “Later, Severn,” he says. “Rest. I’ll get you cleaned up and you can tell me later. There’s plenty of time.”

I try to rise but succeed only in hanging onto his arm, my small fingers curled against his shoulder. “No,” I whisper, feeling the gurgling in my throat and hearing the gurgling in the fountain outside. “Not so much time. Not much at all.”

And I know at that instant, dying, that I am not the chosen vessel for the human UI, not the joining of AI and human spirit, not the Chosen One at all.

I am merely a poet dying far from home.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad died in battle.

Still struggling with the Shrike, aware of Moneta only as a dim blur at the edge of his vision, Kassad shifted through time with a lurch of vertigo and tumbled into sunlight.

The Shrike retracted its arms and stepped back, its red eyes seeming to reflect the blood splashed on Kassad’s skinsuit. Kassad’s blood.

The Colonel looked around. They were near the Valley of the Time Tombs but in another time, a distant time. In place of desert rocks and the dunes of the barrens, a forest came to within half a klick of the valley. In the southwest, about where the ruins of the Poets’ City had lain in Kassad’s time, a living city rose, its towers and ramparts and domed gallerias glowing softly in evening light. Between the city on the edge of the forest and the valley, meadows of high, green grass billowed in soft breezes blowing in from the distant Bridle Range.

To Kassad’s left, the Valley of the Time Tombs stretched away as always, only the cliff walls were toppled now, worn down by erosion or landslide and carpeted with high grass. The Tombs themselves looked new, only recently constructed, with workmen’s scaffolds still in place around the Obelisk and Monolith. Each of the aboveground Tombs glowed bright gold, as if bound and burnished in the precious metal.

The doors and entrances were sealed. Heavy and inscrutable machinery sat around the Tombs, ringing the Sphinx, with massive cables and wire-slender booms running to and fro. Kassad knew at once that he was in the future—perhaps centuries or millennia in the future—and that the Tombs were on the verge of being launched back to his own time and beyond.

Kassad looked behind him.

Several thousand men and women stood in row upon row along the grassy hillside where once a cliff had been. They were totally silent, armed, and arrayed facing Kassad like a battle line awaiting its leader.

Skinsuit fields nickered around some, but others wore only the fur, wings, scales, exotic weapons, and elaborate colorations which Kassad had seen in his earlier visit with Moneta, to the place/time where he had been healed.

Moneta. She stood between Kassad and the multitudes, her skinsuit field shimmering about her waist but also wearing a soft jumpsuit which looked to be made of black velvet. A red scarf was tied around her neck.

A rod-thin weapon was slung over her shoulder. Her gaze was fixed on Kassad.

He weaved slightly, feeling the seriousness of his wounds beneath the skinsuit, but also seeing something in Moneta’s eyes which made him weak with surprise.

She did not know him. Her face mirrored the surprise, wonder… awe?… which the rows of other faces showed. The valley was silent except for the occasional snap of pennant on pike or the low rustle of wind in the grass as Kassad gazed at Moneta and she stared back.

Kassad looked over his shoulder.

The Shrike stood immobile as a metal sculpture, ten meters away.

Tall grass grew almost to its barbed and bladed knees.

Behind the Shrike, across the head of the valley near where the dark band of elegant trees began, hordes of other Shrikes, legions of Shrikes, row upon row of Shrikes, stood gleaming scalpel-sharp in the low sunlight.

Kassad recognized his Shrike, the Shrike, only because of its proximity and the presence of his own blood on the thing’s claws and carapace.

The creature’s eyes pulsed crimson.

“You are the one, aren’t you?” asked a soft voice behind him.

Kassad whirled, feeling the vertigo assail him for an instant. Moneta had stopped only a few feet away. Her hair was as short as he remembered from their first meeting, her skin as soft-looking, her eyes as mysterious with their depths of brown-specked green. Kassad had the urge to lift his palm and gently touch her cheekbone, run a curled finger along the familiar curve of her lower lip. He did not.

“You’re the one,” Moneta said again, and this time it was not a question. “The warrior I’ve prophesied to the people.”