“Our predictors say that it is important that the pilgrims be left alone until their act is played out,” came Gladstone’s voice in the darkness.

She seemed to be looking to the side, toward the stream.

I felt sudden, inexplicable, implacable anger surge through me. “Father Hoyt is already 'played out,'” I said more sharply than I intended. “They could have saved him if the ship had been allowed to rendezvous with the pilgrims. Arundez and his people might be able to save the baby—Rachel—even though there are only a few days left.”

“Less than three days,” said Gladstone. “Was there anything else? Any impressions of the planet or Admiral Nashita’s command ship which you found… interesting?”

My hands clenched into fists, relaxed. “You won’t allow Arundez to fly up to the Tombs?”

“Not now, no.”

“What about the evacuation of civilians from Hyperion? At least the Hegemony citizens?”

“That is not a possibility at this time.”

I started to say something, checked myself. I stared at the sound of the water beneath the bridge.

“No other impressions, M. Severn?”

“No.”

“Well, I wish you a good night and pleasant dreams. Tomorrow may be a very hectic day, but I do want to talk to you about those dreams at some point.”

“Good night,” I said and turned on my heel and walked quickly back to my wing of Government House.

In the darkness of my room, I called up a Mozart sonata and took three trisecobarbitals. Most probably they would knock me out in a drugged, dreamless sleep, where the ghost of dead Johnny Keats and his even more ghostly pilgrims could not find me. It meant disappointing Meina Gladstone, and that did not dismay me in the least.

I thought of Swift’s sailor, Gulliver, and his disgust with mankind after his return from the land of the intelligent horses—the Houyhnhnms—a disgust with his own species which grew to the point that he had to sleep in the stables with the horses just to be reassured by their smell and presence.

My last thought before sleep was To hell with Meina Gladstone, to hell with the war, and to hell with the Web.

And to hell with dreams.

Brawne Lamia slept fitfully just before dawn, and her dreams were filled with images and sounds from elsewhere—half-heard and little-understood conversations with Meina Gladstone, a room that seemed to be floating in space, a movement of men and women along corridors where the walls whispered like a poorly tuned fatline receiver—and underlying the feverish dreams and random images was the maddening sense that Johnny—her Johnny—was so close, so close. Lamia cried out in her sleep, but the noise was lost in the random echoes of the Sphinx’s cooling stones and shifting sands.

Lamia awoke suddenly, coming completely conscious as surely as a solid-state instrument switching on. Sol Weintraub had been supposed to be standing guard, but now he slept near the low door of the room where the group sheltered. His infant daughter, Rachel, slept between blankets on the floor next to him; her rump was raised, face pressed against the blanket, a slight bubble of saliva on her lips.

Lamia looked around. In the dim illumination from a low-wattage glow-globe and the faint daylight reflected down four meters of corridor, only one other of her fellow pilgrims was visible, a dark bundle on the stone floor. Martin Silenus lay there snoring. Lamia felt a surge of fear, as if she had been abandoned while sleeping. Silenus, Sol, the baby… she realized that only the Consul was missing. Attrition had eaten at the pilgrimage party of seven adults and an infant: Het Masteen, missing on the windwagon crossing of the Sea of Grass; Lenar Hoyt killed the night before; Kassad missing later that night… the Consul… where was the Consul?

Brawne Lamia looked around again, satisfied herself that the dark room held nothing but packs, blanket bundles, the sleeping poet, scholar and child, and then she rose, found her father’s automatic pistol amidst—the tumble of blankets, felt in her pack for the neural stunner, and then slipped past Weintraub and the baby into the corridor beyond.

It was morning and so bright out that Lamia had to shield her eyes with her hand as she stepped from the Sphinx’s stone steps onto the hard-packed trail which led away down the valley. The storm had passed. Hyperion’s skies were a deep, crystalline lapis lazuli shot through with green, Hyperion’s star, a brilliant white point source just rising above the eastern cliff walls. Rock shadows blended with the outflung silhouettes of the Time Tombs across the valley floor. The Jade Tomb sparkled. Lamia could see the fresh drifts and dunes deposited by the storm, white and vermilion sands blending in sensuous curves and striations around stone. There was no evidence of their campsite the night before. The Consul sat on a rock ten meters down the hill. He was gazing down the valley, and smoke spiraled upward from his pipe.

Slipping the pistol in her pocket with the stunner, Lamia walked down the hill to him.

“No sign of Colonel Kassad,” said the Consul as she approached.

He did not turn around.

Lamia looked down the valley to where the Crystal Monolith stood.

Its once-gleaming surface was peeked and pitted, the upper twenty or thirty meters appeared to be missing, and debris still smoked at its base.

The half kilometer or so between the Sphinx and the Monolith were scorched and cratered. “It looks as if he didn’t leave without a fight,” she said.

The Consul grunted. The pipe smoke made Lamia hungry. “I searched as far as the Shrike Palace, two klicks down the valley,” said the Consul. “The locus of the firefight seems to have been the Monolith. There’s still no sign of a ground-level opening to the thing but there are enough holes farther up now so that you can see the honeycomb pattern which deep radar has always shown inside.”

“But no sign of Kassad?”

“None.”

“Blood? Scorched bones? A note saying that he’d be back after delivering his laundry?”

“Nothing.”

Brawne Lamia sighed and sat on a boulder near the Consul’s rock.

The sun was warm on her skin. She squinted out toward the opening to the valley. “Well, hell,” she said, “what do we do next?”

The Consul removed his pipe, frowned at it, and shook his head. “I tried the comlog relay again this morning, but the ship is still penned in.” He shook ashes out. “Tried the emergency bands too, but obviously we’re not getting through. Either the ship isn’t relaying, or people have orders not to respond.”

“Would you really leave?”

The Consul shrugged. He had changed from his diplomatic finery of the day before into a rough wool pullover tunic top, gray whipcord trousers, and high boots. “Having the ship here would give us—you —the option of leaving. I wish the others would consider going. After all, Masteen’s missing, Hoyt and Kassad are gone… I’m not sure what to do next.”

A deep voice said, “We could try making breakfast.”

Lamia turned to watch Sol come down the path. Rachel was in the infant carrier on the scholar’s chest. Sunlight glinted on the older man’s balding head. “Not a bad idea,” she said. “Do we have enough provisions left?”

“Enough for breakfast,” said Weintraub. “Then a few more meals of cold foodpaks from the Colonel’s extra provisions bag. Then we’ll be eating googlepedes and each other.”

The Consul attempted a smile, set the pipe back in his tunic pocket.

“I suggest we walk back to Chronos Keep before we reach that point. We’d used up the freeze-dried foods from the Benares, but there were storerooms at the Keep.”

“I’d be happy to—” began Lamia but was interrupted by a shout from inside the Sphinx.

She was the first to reach the Sphinx, and she had the automatic pistol in her hand before she went through the entrance. The corridor was dark, the sleeping room darker, and it took a second for her to realize that no one was there. Brawne Lamia crouched, swinging the pistol toward the dark curve of corridor even as Silenus’s voice again shouted “Hey! Come here!” from somewhere out of sight.