He rises from my chair and walks across the room to stand close to me as if in challenge. He points to the chair.
“That is a chair I cannot fill. I will not fill. Every man and woman in this army volunteered to fight with the understanding that they would be led by the Reaper of Mars. Behind him, we liberated our homes. Behind him, we found our way from the desert. He will deliver us from this planet. And he will take us home, where we will fix this madness and string Caraval up by his ears.” He tilts his chin upward. “Even if he does not, I would rather follow him to the Vale than abandon him and live to a hundred and fifty.”
“Fuck the Vox,” Colloway calls from his chair. “Hail Reaper.”
The officers echo the call.
I walk to the chair without a word. I pause before it. It is an ornate Votum treasure carved with birds and trees. I did not notice before, when it meant nothing to me. I sit down in it, and the arms of it embrace me. For a moment, I imagine they are the arms of my wife and son. I close my eyes and think of them. I believe they are alive. I believe I will return to them. And if not, on the road to home is where I will die. I grip Pax’s key on its chain. When my eyes open, my officers are waiting
for a miracle. This is my family too. Colloway, Screwface, Harnassus, Thraxa, Rhonna. We have given Mercury Alexandar, Orion, Tongueless, Felix, Marbles, and so many more. I am done with sacrifice. I will get my family home. I will endure.
“Summon the Master Maker Glirastes.”
I LIE ON THE COLD FLOOR, starving myself to death.
When last did I dance? When ever did my brothers spin me between them till I tumbled to the dirt and watched their pale legs move beneath a horizon of skirts and ribbons? Was the rhythm of life really once made by dancing drums and shift-calls and boots rattling as Gamma miners came home to the squealing of kettles?
Or was that all a dream?
They said we were slaves. And we were, I reckon. I ain’t so dumb or so lonely to forget that forty years once marked a man as old, or the radiation tumors that’d make a child’s belly swell. But that world at least made sense, before we were told it didn’t.
It had rhythm I felt. It had family I loved. We had purpose I understood. Now that world’s gone. Not just for me. For everyone.
But there was no purpose to the assimilation camp, where my family was hacked to pieces by the Red Hand. There was no family in Hyperion. Save Liam. And no rhythm in this prison chamber where I lie victim to sound and light.
Light spasms in the center of my prison. The light combusts with the violence of deepmine gas, only to melt into thin red ribbons like the ones sweethearts would tie on the sleeves of Lagalos gallants for the Laureltide dance.
Noise pumps through the walls to torture me. Not music, but human screams that morph and stretch and scrape like teeth along ragged rock. Deafening percussion makes my eardrums crackle. I’d cover them but then I can’t cover my eyes, and even when I cover my eyes, the light flares so bright I can see the bones in my hands. They look like the veins of a leaf.
What I’d do to hear a leaf whisper in the wind again.
Sometimes when all those bodies crammed into my family’s shack grated on my nerves, I’d go sit at the edge of the jungle and listen to it speak.
Since that bitch of a Brown plunged the syringe into my neck, I’ve heard nothing of jungles or the wind. Last thing I remember was the warm water of the shower falling on my tummy. The cold of the stone against my back. When darkness came, I felt I’d slipped back into my mother’s womb. I dreamt of her, and my sister. Then I woke to the cold of my chamber, a headache pulsing behind the left eye, and bile crusted on my lips.
How long ago was that again?
A week?
A month?
Five?
Of my family, only Liam survives. I hold out hope for his father, Varon, my sister’s husband. And for my brothers: cherished Aengus, and even brooding, angry Dagan. But all three are at the front. Who knows if they have gone on to the Vale, if Liam has.
I wish I could dream of them as I did my mother and sister. But dreams are scarce now. Fragments of sleep crumble through my fingers, shaken away by the noise, the light. Even if I do manage to doze off, the gravity inverts, wrenching my guts as the ceiling becomes the floor and I collide hard enough with the metal to scare me.
The room is cold, glossy black, ten long paces by ten. There is no bed, only nodules that retract to reveal a tube for my piss. You gotta really seal your squat to the floor or the room will stink something fierce. It’s worse for shit. If I miss, I gotta scoop it up and push it in with my fingers or find myself falling into it the next time I doze.
I’ve given up shouting through the food delivery nodule. No one is listening. At first I thought the Julii cow might want something from me. But she doesn’t. This is revenge. Took her first and only visit to drive that through my skull.
A rectangle of light carved the darkness and then she was inside the room staring down at me. Time was, I would have thought her a god. Some warrior maiden pulled from my pa’s savage tales. But there’s no romance to her, to them any longer. Her Gold rage seemed petty. Her glamour vile in the face of the poverty I’ve seen in my family’s assimilation camp on Mars and in Hyperion.
Still, I told her all I knew, thinking she would be rational. All I told the Sovereign. She said nothing, and it was then I knew the deepspine truth: she doesn’t care two licks ’bout what I know. Only when I crawled to her on my hands and knees and begged her to let me out to see Liam did she finally part those rich lips.
“I want to be forthright and say I visually enjoy your degradation.” The words seemed to boil, as if drawn up from a black cauldron deep in her belly. “I am aware you are not a member of the Red Hand, nor are you a Gorgon operator. However, stupidity is not a crime without victims. Seeing as how you have deprived me of my daughter, my nephew, whom I love like my own bone and blood, it can only be reckoned fair if I deprive you of something: your ‘sanity.’ Consider it a mercy that I left that blind child out of this. Would that you had the same decency.”
I choked on sobs knowing Liam was safe somewhere beyond this room. Pathetically, I thought to beseech her.