She raised an eyebrow. “Shall I call you M. Keats?”

“You can call me No Man,” I said. “So that when the other cyclopes come, you can say that No Man has blinded you, and they will go away, saying that it’s the will of the gods.”

“Do you plan to blind me?”

“Right now I could wring your neck and walk away without a twinge of remorse. Millions will die before this week is out. How could you have allowed it?”

Gladstone touched her lower lip. “The future branches only two directions,” she said softly. “War and total uncertainty, or peace and totally certain annihilation. I chose war.”

“Who says this?” There was more curiosity than anger in my voice now.

“It is a fact.” She glanced at her comlog. “In ten minutes I have to go before the Senate to declare war. Tell me the news of the Hyperion pilgrims.”

I crossed my arms and stared down at her. “I will tell you if you promise to do something.”

“I will if I can.”

I paused, realized that no amount of leverage in the universe could make this woman write a blank check on her word. “All right,” I said. “I want you to fatline Hyperion, release the hold you have on the Consul’s ship, and send someone up the Hoolie River to find the Consul himself. He’s about a hundred and thirty klicks from the capital, above the Karia Locks. He may be hurt.”

Gladstone crooked a finger, rubbed her lip, and nodded. “I will send someone to find him. Releasing the ship depends upon what else you have to tell me. Are the others alive?”

I curled my short cape around me and collapsed on a couch across from her. “Some are.”

“Byron Lamia’s daughter? Brawne?”

“The Shrike took her. For a while, she was unconscious, connected to some sort of neural shunt to the datasphere. I dreamed… she was floating somewhere, reunited with the implant persona of the first Keats retrieval personality. Just entering the datasphere… the megasphere really. Core connections and dimensions I never dreamed of as well as the accessible ’sphere.”

“Is she alive now?” Gladstone leaned forward, intense.

“I don’t know. Her body disappeared. I was awakened before I saw where her persona entered the megasphere.”

Gladstone nodded. “What about the Colonel?”

“Kassad was taken somewhere by Moneta, the human female who seems to reside in the Tombs as they travel through time. The last I saw of him, he was attacking the Shrike barehanded. Shrikes, actually, there were thousands of them.”

“Did he survive?”

I opened my hands. “I don’t know. These were dreams. Fragments. Bits and pieces of perception.”

“The poet?”

“Silenus was carried off by the Shrike. Impaled on the tree of thorns. But I glimpsed him there later in Kassad’s dream. Silenus was still alive. I don’t know how.”

“So the tree of thorns is real, not merely Shrike Cult propaganda?”

“Oh yes, it’s real.”

“And the Consul left? Tried to return to the capital?”

“He had his grandmother’s hawking mat. It worked all right until he reached the place near Karia Locks I mentioned. It… and he… fell into the river.” I preempted her next question. “I don’t know if he survived.”

“And the priest? Father Hoyt?”

“The cruciform brought him back as Father Duré.”

“Is it Father Duré? Or a mindless duplicate?”

“It’s Duré,” I said. “But… damaged. Discouraged.”

“And he is still in the valley?”

“No. He disappeared in one of the Cave Tombs. I don’t know what happened to him.”

Gladstone glanced at her comlog. I tried to imagine the confusion and chaos which reigned in the rest of this building… this world… in the Web. The CEO obviously had retreated here for fifteen minutes prior to her speech to the Senate. It might be the last such solitude she would see for the next several weeks. Perhaps ever.

“Captain Masteen?”

“Dead. Buried in the valley.”

She took a breath. “And Weintraub and the child?”

I shook my head. “I dreamed things out of sequence… out of time. I think it’s already happened, but I’m confused.” I looked up. Gladstone was waiting patiently. “The baby was only a few seconds old when the Shrike came,” I said. “Sol offered her to the thing. I think it took her into the Sphinx. The Tombs were glowing very brightly. There were… other Shrikes… emerging.”

“The Tombs have opened, then?”

“Yes.”

Gladstone touched her comlog. “Leigh? Have the duty officer in the communications center contact Theo Lane and the necessary FORCE people on Hyperion. Release the ship we have in quarantine. Also, Leigh, tell the Governor-General that I will have a personal message for him in a few minutes.” The instrument chirped and she looked back at me. “Is there anything else from your dreams?”

“Images. Words. I don’t understand what’s going on. Those are the high points.”

Gladstone smiled slightly. “Are you aware that you are dreaming events beyond the range of the other Keats persona’s experience?”

I said nothing, stunned with the shock of what she said. My contact with the pilgrims had been possible through some Core-based connection to the persona implant in Brawne’s Schrön loop, through it and the primitive datasphere they had shared. But the persona had been liberated; the datasphere destroyed by separation and distance.

Even a fatline receiver cannot receive messages when there is no transmitter.

Gladstone’s smile disappeared. “Can you explain this?”

“No.” I looked up. “Perhaps they were only dreams. Real dreams.”

She stood. “Perhaps we’ll know when and if we find the Consul. Or when his ship arrives in the valley. I have two minutes before I appear in the Senate. Is there anything else?”

“A question,” I said. “Who am I? Why am I here?”

The slight smile again. “We all ask those questions, M. Sev– M. Keats.”

“I’m serious. I think you know better than I.”

“The Core sent you to be my liaison with the pilgrims. And to observe. You are, after all, a poet and artist.”

I made a noise and stood. We walked slowly toward the private farcaster portal that would take her to the Senate floor. “What good does observation do when it’s the end of the world?”

“Find out,” said Gladstone. “Go see the end of the world.” She handed me a microcard for my comlog. I inserted it, glanced at the diskey; it was a universal authorization chip, allowing me access to all portals, public, private, or military. It was a ticket to the end of the world.

I said, “What if I get killed?”

“Then we will never hear the answers to your questions,” said CEO Gladstone. She touched my wrist fleetingly, turned her back, and stepped through the portal.

For a few minutes I stood alone in her chambers, appreciating the light and silence and art. There was a van Gogh on one of the walls, worth more than most planets could pay. It was a painting of the artist’s room at Aries. Madness is not a new invention.

After a while, I left, let my comlog memory guide me through the maze of Government House until I found the central farcaster terminex, and stepped through to find the end of the world.

There were two full-access farcaster pathways through the Web: the Concourse and River Tethys. I ’cast to the Concourse where the half-kilometer strip of Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna connected to New Earth and the short seaside strip of Nevermore. Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna was a first-wave world, thirty-four hours away from the Ouster onslaught.

New Earth had been on the second-wave list, even now being announced, and had a little over a standard week before invasion.

Nevermore was deep in the Web, years away from attack.

There were no signs of panic. People were taking to the datasphere and All Thing rather than the streets. Walking the narrow lanes of Tsingtao, I could hear Gladstone’s voice from a thousand receivers and personal comlogs, a strange verbal undertone to the shouts of street vendors and hiss of tires on wet pavement as electric rickshaws hummed overhead on the transport levels.