“Play back the destruction of the singularity containment sphere,” said the Consul.

“Yes, sir,” said the ship and interrupted its fatline messages for a replay of the sudden burst of white, followed by a brief blossoming of debris and sudden collapse as the singularity swallowed itself and everything within a six-thousand-klick radius. Instruments showed the effect of gravity tides: easily adjusted for at this distance but playing havoc with the Hegemony and Ouster ships still locked in battle closer to Hyperion.

“All right,” said the Consul, and the rush of fatline reports resumed.

“There’s no doubt?” asked Arundez.

“None,” said the Consul. “Hyperion is an Outback world again. Only this time there is no Web to be Outback to.”

“It’s so hard to believe,” said Theo Lane. The ex-Governor-General sat drinking Scotch: the only time the Consul had ever seen his aide indulge in a drug. Theo poured another four fingers. “The Web… gone. Five hundred years of expansion wiped out.”

“Not wiped out,” said the Consul. He set his own drink, still unfinished, on a table. “The worlds remain. The cultures will grow apart, but we still have the Hawking drive. The one technological advance we gave ourselves rather than leased from the Core.”

Melio Arundez leaned forward, his palms together as if praying. “Can the Core really be gone? Destroyed?”

The Consul listened a moment to the babble of voices, cries, entreaties, military reports, and pleas for help coming over the fatline voice-only bands. “Perhaps not destroyed,” he said, “but cut off, sealed away.”

Theo finished his drink and carefully set his glass down. His green eyes had a placid, glazed look. “You think there are… other spider-webs for them? Other farcaster systems? Reserve Cores?”

The Consul made a gesture with his hand. “We know they succeeded in creating their Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps that UI allowed this… winnowing… of the Core. Perhaps it’s keeping some of the old AIs on line—in a reduced capacity—the way they had planned to keep a few billion humans in reserve.”

Suddenly the fatline babble ceased as if cut off by a knife.

“Ship?” queried the Consul, suspecting a power failure somewhere in the receiver.

“All fatline messages have ceased, most in midtransmission,” said the ship.

The Consul felt his heart pounding as he thought The deathwand device. But no, he realized at once, that couldn’t affect all of the worlds at once. Even with hundreds of such devices detonating simultaneously, there would be lag time as FORCE ships and other far-flung transmission sources got in their final messages. But what then?

“The messages appear to have been cut off by a disturbance in the transmission medium,” said the ship. “Which is, to my current knowledge, impossible.”

The Consul stood. A disturbance in the transmission medium? The fatline medium, as far as humans understood it, was the hyperstring Planck-infinite topography of space-time itself: what AIs had cryptically referred to as the Void Which Binds. There could be no disturbance in that medium.

Suddenly the ship said, “Fatline message coming in—transmission source, everywhere; encryption base, infinite; squirt rate, realtime.”

The Consul opened his mouth to tell the ship to quit spouting nonsense when the air above the holopit misted in something neither image nor data column, and a voice spoke:

“THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL. YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE.”

The three men sat in silence unbroken except for the reassuring rush of ventilator fans and the myriad soft noises of a ship under way. Finally the Consul said, “Ship, please send out a standard fatline time-location squirt without encoding. Add ‘receiving stations respond.’”

There was a pause of seconds—an impossibly long response time for the AI-caliber computer that was the ship. “I’m sorry, that is not possible,” it said at last.

“Why not?” demanded the Consul.

“Fatline transmissions are no longer being… allowed. The hyperstring medium is no longer receptive to modulation.”

“There’s nothing on the fatline?” asked Theo, staring at the empty space above the holopit as if someone had turned off a holie just as it was getting to the exciting part.

Again the ship paused. “To all intents and purposes, M. Lane,” it said, “there is no fatline any longer.”

“Jesus wept,” muttered the Consul. He finished his drink in one long gulp and went to the bar for another. “It’s the old Chinese curse,” he muttered.

Melio Arundez looked up. “What’s that?”

The Consul took a long drink. “Old Chinese curse,” he said. “May you live in interesting times.”

As if compensating for the loss of fatline, the ship played audio of in-system radio and intercepted tightbeam babble while it projected a real-time view of the blue-and-white sphere of Hyperion turning and growing as they decelerated toward it at two hundred gravities.

I escape the Web datasphere just before escape ceases to be an option.

It is incredible and oddly disturbing, the sight of the megasphere swallowing itself. Brawn Lamia’s view of the megasphere as an organic thing, a semisentient organism more analogous to an ecology than a city, was essentially correct. Now, as the farcaster links cease to be and the world inside those avenues folds and collapses upon itself, the external datasphere simultaneously collapsing like a burning big-top tent suddenly without poles, wires, guys, or stakes, the living mega-sphere devours itself like some ravenous predator gone mad—chewing its own tail, belly, entrails, forepaws, and heart—until only the mindless jaws are left, snapping on emptiness.

The metasphere remains. But it is more wilderness than ever now.

Black forests of unknown time and space…

Sounds in the night.

Lions.

And tigers.

And bears.

When the Void Which Binds convulses and sends its single, banal message to the human universe, it is as if an earthquake has sent ripples through solid rock. Hurrying through the shifting metasphere above Hyperion, I have to smile. It is as if the God-analog has grown tired of the ants scribbling graffiti on Its big toe.

I don’t see God—either one of them—in the metasphere. I don’t try. I have enough problems of my own.

The black vortexes of the Web and Core entrances are gone now, erased from space and time like warts removed, vanished as thoroughly as whirlpools in water when the storm has passed.

I am stuck here unless I want to brave the metasphere.

Which I do not. Not yet.

But this is where I want to be. The datasphere is all but gone here in Hyperion System, the pitiful remnants on the world itself and in what remains of the FORCE fleet drying up like tidepools in the sun, but the Time Tombs glow through the metasphere like beacons in the gathering darkness. If the farcaster links had been black vortexes, the Tombs blaze like white holes shedding an expanding light.

I move toward them. So far, as the One Who Comes Before, all I have accomplished is to appear in others’ dreams. It is time to do something.

Sol waited.

It had been hours since he had handed his only child to the Shrike.

It had been days since he had eaten or slept. Around him the storm had raged and abated, the Tombs had glowed and rumbled like runaway reactors, and the time tides had whipped him with tsunami force. But Sol had clung to the stone steps of the Sphinx and waited through it all. He waited now.

Half conscious, pummeled by fatigue and fear for his daughter, Sol found that his scholar’s mind was working at a rapid pace.

For most of his life and for all of his career, Sol Weintraub the historian-cum-classicist-cum-philosopher had dealt with the ethics of human religious behavior. Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.