Gladstone ignored the pleasant music rising from the concert on the Promenade, ignored the flights of commuter EMVs moving overhead like migrating fowl, ignored the pleasant air and soft light, as she called her portal to her and commanded it to farcast to Earth’s moon. The moon.

Instead of activating the translation, her comlog warned her of the dangers of going there. She overrode it.

Her microremote buzzed into existence, its tiny voice in her implant suggesting that it was not a good idea for the Chief Executive to travel to such an unstable place. She silenced it.

The farcaster portal itself began to argue with her choice until she used her universal card to program it manually.

The farcaster door blurred into existence, and Gladstone stepped through.

The only place on Old Earth’s moon still habitable was the mountain and Mare area preserved for the FORCE Masada Ceremony, and it was here that Gladstone stepped out. The viewing stands and marching field were empty. Class-ten containment fields blurred the stars and the distant rim walls, but Gladstone could see where internal heating from terrible gravity tides had melted the distant mountains and made them flow into new seas of rock.

She moved across a plain of gray sand, feeling the light gravity like an invitation to fly. She imagined herself as one of the Templar balloons, lightly tethered but eager to be away. She resisted the impulse to jump, to leap along in giant bounds, but her step was light, and dust flew in improbable patterns behind her.

The air was very thin under the containment field dome, and Gladstone found herself shivering despite the heating elements in her cape.

For a long moment she stood in the center of the featureless plain and tried to imagine just the moon, humankind’s first step in its long stagger from the cradle. But the FORCE viewing stands and equipment sheds distracted her, made such imaginings futile, and finally she raised her eyes to see what she had actually come for.

Old Earth hung in the black sky. But not Old Earth, of course, merely the pulsing accretion disk and globular cloud of debris which had once been Old Earth. It was very bright, brighter than any of the stars seen from Patawpha on even the rarest clear night, but its brightness was strangely ominous, and it cast a sick light across the mud-gray field.

Gladstone stood and stared. She had never been here before, had made herself not come before, and now that she was here, she desperately wanted to feel something, hear something, as if some voice of caution or inspiration or perhaps merely commiseration would come to her here.

She heard nothing.

She stood there another few minutes, thinking of little, feeling her ears and nose beginning to freeze, before she decided to go. It would be almost dawn on TC².

Gladstone had activated the portal and was taking a final look around when another portable farcaster door blurred into existence less than ten meters away. She paused. Not five human beings in the Web had individual access to Earth’s moon.

The microremote buzzed down to float between her and the figure emerging from the portal.

Leigh Hunt stepped out, glanced around, shivered from the cold, and walked quickly toward her. His voice was thin, almost amusingly childlike in the thin air.

“M. Chief Executive, you must return at once. The Ousters have succeeded in breaking through in an amazing counterattack.”

Gladstone sighed. She had known that this would be the next step, “All right,” she said. “Has Hyperion fallen? Can we evacuate our forces from there?”

Hunt shook his head. His lips were almost blue from the cold. “You don’t understand,” came the attenuated voice of her aide. “It’s not just Hyperion. The Ousters are attacking at a dozen points. They’re invading the Web itself!”

Suddenly numb and chilled to her core, more from shock than from the lunar cold, Meina Gladstone nodded, gathered her cape more tightly around her, and stepped back through the portal to a world which would never be the same again.

They gathered at the head of the Valley of the Time Tombs, Brawne Lamia and Martin Silenus burdened with as many backpacks and carrying bags as they could manage, Sol Weintraub, the Consul, and Father Duré standing silent as a tribunal of patriarchs. The first shadows of afternoon were beginning to stretch east across the valley, reaching for the softly glowing Tombs like fingers of darkness.

“I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to split up like this,” said the Consul, rubbing his chin. It was very hot. Sweat gathered on his stubbled cheeks and ran down his neck.

Lamia shrugged. “We knew that we each would be confronting the Shrike alone. Does it matter if we’re separated a few hours? We need the food. You three could come if you want.”

The Consul and Sol glanced at Father Duré. The priest was obviously exhausted. The search for Kassad had drained whatever reserves of energy the man had kept after his ordeal.

“Someone should wait here in case the Colonel returns,” said Sol.

The baby looked very small in his arms.

Lamia nodded agreement. She settled straps on her shoulders and neck. “All right. It should be about two hours getting to the Keep. A little longer coming back. Figure a full hour there loading supplies, and we’ll still be back before dark. Close to dinnertime.”

The Consul and Duré shook hands with Silenus. Sol put his arms around Brawne. “Come back safely,” he whispered.

She touched the bearded man’s cheek, set her hand on the infant’s head for a second, turned, and started up the valley at a brisk pace.

“Hey, wait a nicking minute for me to catch up!” called Martin Silenus, canteens and water bottles clattering as he ran.

They came up out of the saddle between the cliffs together. Silenus glanced back and saw the other three men already dwarfed by distance, small sticks of color amid the boulders and dunes near the Sphinx. “It isn’t going quite as planned, is it?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Lamia. She had changed into shorts for the hike, and the muscles of her short, powerful legs gleamed under a sheen of sweat. “How was it planned?”

“My plan was to finish the universe’s greatest poem and then go home,” said Silenus. He took a drink from the last bottle holding water.

“Goddamn, I wish we’d brought enough wine to last us.”

“I didn’t have a plan,” said Lamia, half to herself. Her short curls, matted with perspiration, clung to her broad neck.

Martin Silenus snorted a laugh. “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that cyborg lover…”

“Client,” she snapped.

“Whatever. It was the Johnny Keats retrieval persona who thought it was important to get here. So now you’ve dragged him this far… you’re still carrying the Schrön loop aren’t you?”

Lamia absently touched the tiny neural shunt behind her left ear. A thin membrane of osmotic polymer kept sand and dust out of the follicle-sized connector sockets. “Yes.”

Silenus laughed again. “What the tuck good is it if there’s no data-sphere to interact with, kid? You might as well have left the Keats persona on Lusus or wherever.” The poet paused a second to adjust straps and packs. “Say, can you access the personality on your own?”

Lamia thought other dreams the night before. The presence in them had felt like Johnny… but the images had been of the Web. Memories? “No,” she said, “I can’t access a Schrön loop by myself. It carries more data than a hundred simple implants could deal with. Now why don’t you shut up and walk?” She picked up the pace and left him standing there.

The sky was cloudless, verdant, and hinting of depths of lapis. The boulder field ahead stretched southwest to the barrens, the barrens surrendering to the dunefields. The two walked in silence for thirty minutes, separated by five meters and their thoughts. Hyperion’s sun hung small and bright to their right.