gistfile1.txt

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad screamed and attacked the Shrike. The surreal, out-of-time landscape—a
minimalist stage designer’s version of the Valley of the Time Tombs, molded in plastic and set in a gel of
viscous air—seemed to vibrate to the violence of Kassad’s rush.

For an instant there had been a mirror-image scattering of Shrikes—Shrikes throughout the valley,
spread across the barren plain—but with Kassad’s shout these resolved themselves to the single monster,
and now it moved, four arms unfolding and extending, curving to greet the Colonel’s rush with a hearty
hug of blades and thorns.

Kassad did not know if the energy skinsuit he wore, Moneta’s gift, would protect him or serve him well
in combat. It had years before when he and Moneta had attacked two dropships’ worth of Ouster
commandos, but time had been on their side then; the Shrike had frozen and unfrozen the flow of moments
like a bored observer playing with a holopit remote control. Now they were outside time, and the was the
enemy, not some terrible patron. Kassad shouted and put his head down and attacked, no longer aware of
Moneta watching, nor of the impossible tree of thorns rising into the clouds with its terrible, impaled
audience, nor even aware of himself except as a fighting tool, an instrument of revenge.

The Shrike did not disappear in its usual manner, did not cease being there to suddenly be here.

Instead, it crouched and opened its arms wider. Its fingerblades caught the light of the violent sky. The
Shrike’s metal teeth glistened in what might have been a smile.

Kassad was angry; he was not insane. Rather than rush into that embrace of death, he threw himself
aside at the last instant, rolling on arm and shoulder, and kicking out at the monster’s lower leg, below the
cluster of thornblades at the knee joint, above a similar array on the ankle, If he could get it down …
It was like kicking at a pipe embedded in half a klick of concrete. The blow would have broken
Kassad’s own leg if the skinsuit had not acted as armor and shock absorber.

The Shrike moved, quickly but not impossibly; the two right arms swinging up and down and around in
a blur, ten fingerblades carving soil and stone in surgical furrows, arm thorns sending sparks flying as the
hands continued upward, slicing air with an audible rush. Kassad was out of range, continuing his roll,
coming to his feet again, crouching, his own arms tensed, palms flat, energy-suited fingers rigid and
extended.

Single combat, thought Fedmahn Kassad. The most honorable sacrament in the New Bushido.
The Shrike feinted with its right arms again, swung the lower left arm around and up with a sweeping
blow violent enough to shatter Kassad’s ribs and scoop his heart out.

Kassad blocked the right-arm feint with his left forearm, feeling the skinsuit flex and batter bone as the
steel-and-axe force of the Shrike’s blow struck home. The left-arm killing blow he stopped with his right
hand on the monster’s wrist, just above the corsage of curved spikes there. Incredibly, he slowed the
blow’s momentum enough that scalpel-sharp fingerblades were now scraping against his skinsuit field
rather than splintering ribs.

Kassad was almost lifted off the ground with the effort of restraining that rising claw; only the
downward thrust of the Shrike’s first feint kept the Colonel from flying backward. Sweat poured freely
under the skinsuit, muscles flexed and ached and threatened to rip in that interminable twenty seconds of
struggle before the Shrike brought its fourth arm into play, slashing downward at Kassad’s straining leg.
Kassad screamed as the skinsuit field ripped, flesh tore, and at least one fingerblade sliced close to
bone. He kicked out with his other leg, released the thing’s wrist, and rolled frantically away.
The Shrike swung twice, the second blow whistling millimeters from Kassad’s moving ear, but then
jumped back itself, crouching, moving to its right.

Kassad got to his left knee, almost fell, then staggered to his feet, hopping slightly to keep his balance.
The pain roared in his ears and filled the universe with red light, but even as he grimaced and staggered,
close to fainting from the shock of it, he could feel the skinsuit closing on the wound—serving as both
tourniquet and compress. He could feel the blood on his lower leg, but it was no longer flowing freely,
and the pain was manageable, almost as if the skinsuit carried medpak injectors like his FORCE battle
armor.

The Shrike rushed him.

Kassad kicked once, twice, aiming for and finding the smooth bit of chrome carapace beneath the chest
spike. It was like kicking the hull of a torchship, but the Shrike seemed to pause, stagger, step back.
Kassad stepped forward, planted his weight, struck twice where the creature’s heart should be with a
closed-fist blow that would have shattered tempered ceramic, ignored the pain from his fist, swiveled,
and slammed a straight-armed, open-palmed blow into the creature’s muzzle, just above the teeth. Any
human being would have heard the sound of his nose being broken and felt the explosion of bone and
cartilage being driven into his brain.

The Shrike snapped at Kassad’s wrist, missed, swung four hands at Kassad’s head and shoulders.
Panting, pouring sweat and blood under his quicksilver armor, Kassad spun to his right once, twice,
and came around with a killing blow to the back of the creature’s short neck. The noise of the impact
echoed in the frozen valley like the sound of an axe thrown from miles on high into the heart of a metal
redwood.

The Shrike tumbled forward, rolled onto its back like some steel crustacean.

It had gone down!

Kassad stepped forward, still crouched, still cautious, but not cautious enough as the Shrike’s armored
foot, claw, whatever the hell it was, caught the back of Kassad’s ankle and half-sliced, half-kicked him off
his feet.

Colonel Kassad felt the pain, knew that his Achilles tendon had been severed, tried to roll away, but
the creature was throwing itself up and sideways on him, spikes and thorns and blades coming at
Kassad’s ribs and face and eyes. Grimacing with the pain, arching in a vain attempt to throw the monster
off, Kassad blocked some blows, saved his eyes, and felt other blades slam home in his upper arms,
chest, and belly.

The Shrike hovered closer and opened its mouth. Kassad stared up into row upon row of steel teeth set
in a metal lamprey’s hollow orifice of a mouth. Red eyes filled his sight through vision already tinged
with blood.

Kassad got the base of his palm under the Shrike’s jaw and tried to find leverage. It was like trying to
lift a mountain of sharp scrap with no fulcrum. The Shrike’s fingerblades continued to tear at Kassad’s
flesh. The thing opened its mouth and tilted its head until teeth filled Kassad’s field of vision from ear to
ear. The monster had no breath, but the heat from its interior stank of sulphur and heated iron filings.
Kassad had no defense left; when the thing snapped its jaws shut, it would take the flesh and skin of
Kassad’s face off to the bone.

Suddenly Moneta was there, shouting in that place where sound did not carry, grabbing the Shrike by its
ruby-faceted eyes, skinsuited fingers arching like talons, her boot planted firmly on its carapace below the
back spike, pulling, pulling.

The Shrike’s arms snapped backward, as double-jointed as some nightmare crab, fingerblades raked
Moneta and she fell away, but not before Kassad rolled, scrambled, felt the pain but ignored it, and
leaped to his feet, dragging Moneta with him as he retreated across the sand and frozen rock.
For a second, their skinsuits merged as it had when they were making love, and Kassad felt her flesh
next to his, felt their blood and sweat mingling and heard the joined poundings of their hearts.

Kill it Moneta whispered urgently, pain audible even through that subvocal medium.

I’m trying. I’m trying.

The Shrike was on its feet, three meters of chrome and blades and other people’s pain. It showed no
damage. Someone’s blood ran in narrow rivulets down its wrists and carapace. Its mindless grin seemed
wider than before.

Kassad separated his skinsuit from Moneta’s, lowered her gently to a boulder although he sensed that
he had been hurt worse than she. This was not her fight. Not yet.

He moved between his love and the Shrike.

Kassad hesitated, hearing a faint but rising susurration as if from a rising surf on an invisible shore. He
glanced up, never fully removing his gaze from the slowly advancing Shrike, and realized that it was a
shouting from the thorn tree far behind the monster. The crucified people there—small dabs of color
hanging from the metal thorns and cold branches—were making some noise other than the subliminal
moans of pain Kassad had heard earlier. They were cheering.

Kassad returned his attention to the Shrike as the thing began to circle again. Kassad felt the pain and
weakness in his almost-severed heel—his right foot was useless, unable to bear weight—and he halfhopped,
half-swiveled with one hand on the boulder to keep his body between the Shrike and Moneta.

The distant cheering seemed to stop as if in a gasp

The Shrike ceased being there and came into existence here, next to Kassad, on top of Kassad, its arms
already around him in a terminal hug, thorns and blades already impinging. The Shrike’s eyes blazed with
light. Its jaws opened again.

Kassad shouted in pure rage and defiance and struck at it.

...

Moneta pulled the wounded Kassad away from the Shrike and seemed to hold the creature at bay with
an extended hand while she fumbled a blue torus from the belt of her skinsuit and twisted it behind her.
A two-meter-high gold oval hung burning in midair.

“Let me go,” muttered Kassad. “Let us finish it.” There was blood spattered where the Shrike had
clawed huge rents in the Colonel’s skinsuit. His right foot was dangling as if half-severed; he could put no
weight on it, and only the fact that he had been struggling with the Shrike, half-carried by the thing in a
mad parody of a dance, had kept Kassad upright as they fought.

“Let me go,” repeated Fedmahn Kassad.

“Shut up,” said Moneta, and then, more softly, “Shut up, my love.” She dragged him through the golden
oval, and they emerged into blazing light.

Even through his pain and exhaustion, Kassad was dazzled by the sight. They were not on Hyperion; he
was sure of that. A vast plain stretched to an horizon much farther away than logic or experience would
allow. Low, orange grass—if grass it was—grew on the flatlands and low hills like fuzz on the back of
some immense caterpillar, while things which might have been trees grew like whiskered-carbon
sculptures, their trunks and branches Escherish in their baroque improbability, their leaves a riot of dark
blue and violet ovals shimmering toward a sky alive with light.

But not sunlight. Even as Moneta carried him away from the closing portal—Kassad did not think of it
as a farcaster since he felt sure it had carried them through time as well as space—and toward a copse of
those impossible trees, Kassad turned his eyes toward the sky and felt something close to wonder. It was
as bright as a Hyperion day; as bright as midday on a Lusian shopping mall; as bright as midsummer on
the Tharsis Plateau of Kassad’s dry homeworld, Mars, but this was no sunlight—the sky was filled with
stars and constellations and star clusters and a galaxy so cluttered with suns that there were almost no
patches of darkness between the lights. It was like being in a planetarium with ten projectors, thought
Kassad. Like being at the center of the galaxy.

The center of the galaxy.

A group of men and women in skinsuits moved out from the shade of the Escher trees to circle Kassad
and Moneta. One of the men—a giant even by Kassad’s Martian standards—looked at him, raised his
head toward Moneta, and even though Kassad could hear nothing, sense nothing on his skinsuit’s radio
and tightband receivers, he knew the two were communicating.

“Lie back,” said Moneta as she laid Kassad on the velvety orange grass. He struggled to sit up, to
speak, but both she and the giant touched his chest with their palms, and he lay back so that his vision was
filled with the slowly twisting violet leaves and the sky of stars.

The man touched him again, and Kassad’s skinsuit was deactivated. He tried to sit up, tried to cover
himself as he realized he was naked before the small crowd that had gathered, but Moneta’s firm hand
held him in place. Through the pain and dislocation, he vaguely sensed the man touching his slashed arms
and chest, running a silver-coated hand down his leg to where the Achilles tendon had been cut. The
Colonel felt a coolness wherever the giant touched, and then his consciousness floated away like a
balloon, high above the tawny plain and the rolling hills, drifting toward the solid canopy of stars where a
huge figure waited, dark as a towering thundercloud above the horizon, massive as a mountain.

“Kassad,” whispered Moneta, and the Colonel drifted back. “Kassad,” she said again, her lips against
his cheek, his skinsuit reactivated and melded with hers.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad sat up as she did. He shook his head, realized that he was clothed in
quicksilver energy once again, and got to his feet. There was no pain. He felt his body tingle in a dozen
places where injuries had been healed, serious cuts repaired. He melded his hand to his own suit, ran
flesh across flesh, bent his knee and touched his heel, but could feel no scars.

Kassad turned toward the giant. “Thank you,” he said, not knowing if the man could hear.

The giant nodded and stepped back toward the others.

“He’s a … a doctor of sorts,” said Moneta. “A healer.”

Kassad half-heard her as he concentrated on the other people. They were human—he knew in his heart
that they were human—but the variety was staggering: their skinsuits were not all silver like Kassad’s and
Moneta’s but ranged through a score of colors, each as soft and organic as some living wild creature’s
pelt. Only the subtle energy-shimmer and blurred facial features revealed the skinsuit surface. Their
anatomy was as varied as their coloration: the healer’s Shrike-sized girth and massive bulk, his massive
brow and a cascade of tawny energy flow which might be a mane … a female next to him, no larger than a
child but obviously a woman, perfectly proportioned with muscular legs, small breasts, and faery wings
two meters long rising from her back—and not merely decorative wings, either, for when the breeze
ruffled the orange prairie grass, this woman gave a short run, extended her arms, and rose gracefully into
the air.

Behind several tall, thin women with blue skinsuits and long, webbed fingers, a group of short men
were as visored and armor-plated as a FORCE Marine going into battle in a vacuum, but Kassad sensed
that the armor was part of them. Overhead, a cluster of winged males rose on thermals, thin, yellow
beams of laser light pulsing between them in some complex code. The lasers seemed to emanate from an
eye in each of their chests.

Kassad shook his head again.

“We need to go,” said Moneta. “The Shrike cannot follow us here. These warriors have enough to
contend with without dealing with this particular manifestation of the Lord of Pain.”

“Where are we?” asked Kassad.

Moneta brought a violet oval into existence with a golden ferule from her belt. “Far in humankind’s
future. One of our futures. This is where the Time Tombs were formed and launched backward in time.”
Kassad looked around again. Something very large moved in front of the starfield, blocking out
thousands of stars and throwing a shadow for scant seconds before it was gone. The men and women
looked up briefly and then went back to their business: harvesting small things from the trees, huddling in
clusters to view bright energy maps called up by a flick of one man’s fingers, flying off toward the horizon
with the speed of a thrown spear. One low, round individual of indeterminate sex had burrowed into the
soft soil and was visible now only as a faint line of raised earth moving in quick concentric circles
around the band.

“Where is this place?” Kassad asked again. “What is it?” Suddenly, inexplicably, he felt himself close
to tears, as if he had turned an unfamiliar corner and found himself at home in the Tharsis Relocation
Projects, his long-dead mother waving to him from a doorway, his forgotten friends and siblings waiting
for him to join a game of scootball.

“Come,” said Moneta and there was no mistaking the urgency in her voice. She pulled Kassad toward
the glowing oval. He watched the others and the dome of stars until he stepped through and the view was
lost to sight.

They stepped out into darkness, and it took the briefest of seconds for the filters in Kassad’s skinsuit to
compensate his vision. They were at the base of the Crystal Monolith in the Valley of the Time Tombs on
Hyperion. It was night. Clouds boiled overhead, and a storm was raging. Only a pulsing glow from the
Tombs themselves illuminated the scene. Kassad felt a sick lurch of loss for the clean, well-lighted place
they had just left, and then his mind focused on what he was seeing.

Sol Weintraub and Brawne Lamia were half a klick down the valley, Sol bending over the woman as
she lay near the front of the Jade Tomb. Wind swirled dust around them so thickly that they did not see the
Shrike moving like another shadow down the trail past the Obelisk, toward them.

Fedmahn Kassad stepped off the dark marble in front of the Monolith and skirted the shattered crystal
shards which littered the path. He realized that Moneta still clung to his arm.

“If you fight again,” she said, her voice soft and urgent in his ear, “the Shrike will kill you.”

“They’re my friends,” said Kassad. His FORCE gear and torn armor lay where Moneta had thrown it
hours earlier. He searched the Monolith until he found his assault rifle and a bandolier of grenades, saw
the rifle was still functional, checked charges and clicked off safeties, left the Monolith, and stepped
forward at double time to intercept the Shrike.