Chapter 34 chapter Ten

"Pureest?" I asked at the time. "You mean the greatest?" "No, no," said Billy, "it would be ridiculous to talk about who-who-who was the greatest. I'd love to know your opinion on the purest-pure-pure...you describe the closest thing to the essence." I thought about this question for days, and finally I brought him the answer as we watched the sun set over the top of the cliff next to the palace.Red and blue shadows stretched toward us across the amber grass. "Keats," I said to him. "John Keats," said Sad King Billy softly, "ah," he asked after a moment, "why?"

So I told him everything I knew, everything about this 19th-century old-land poet; The mystery and beauty of poetry creation are gone. Billy seemed in high spirits then; now, he seemed fascinated, and with a wave of his hand, a holographic model appeared, filling nearly the entire room.I stepped back, stepping over hills, houses, grazing animals, to get a good look. "Behold, Hyperion," whispered my protector.As always, Billy King forgot about his stutter when he was concentrating.At different observation points, the holographic image will change: the riverside city, the port city, the mountain houses, and there is a city on the mountain, full of monuments, which is a natural match with the strange buildings in the nearby valley.

"Time Tomb?" I asked. "Yes. The greatest mystery in the known world." I frowned at his rhetoric. "It's fucking empty," I said, "They've been empty since they were found." "They're the source of some kind of strange anti-entropic force field that lingers quietly," Billy King said, "one of the few phenomena outside of the singularity that dares to tamper with time." "It's nothing special," I said, "it must be like putting anti-rust paint on iron. They can last a long time, but they are completely empty. When did we start fucking technology?"

"Not technology," sighed Billy King, his face melted into the deep groove, "but mystery! The uncannyness of that place was necessary to the spirit of creation. It was the classic utopia and pagan mysticism." perfect combination." I shrugged, it didn't impress me. Sad King Billy waved his hand, and the hologram disappeared. "Is your poem-poem-poetry getting any better?" I folded my arms and glared at the king, the dwarven fool. "No." "Is your myu-myu-muse back?" I didn't say a word.If looks could kill, we'd all cry before dusk, "The king is dead, long live the king!"

"Very-very-good," he said, with a look on his face that showed that he could be sadly sad and unbearably smug. "My boy, get-get-pack your bags. We're going to Hyperion." (fade in) Sad King Billy's five seed ships floated like golden dandelions in the blue sky.The white city stands on three continents: Keats, Endymian, Port Romance...and the City of Poets itself.More than 8,000 pilgrims of art escaped the tyranny of mediocrity, hoping to find revival of fantasy in this degraded world. In the century after the Exile, Asquith and Windsor in Exile were the centers of finished robot creatures, and now these blue-skinned friends of man toiled and farmed, knowing that once this last labor was done they were free .The White City stood up.The natives, who are tired of playing natives, have come out of the villages and forests to help us transform the colony into more human norms.The technocrats, the bureaucrats, the ecocrats are unfrozen and unleashed on this unsuspecting world, and Billy the Sad King's dream is one step closer to reality.

By the time we reached Hyperion, General Horace Glennongold was dead, his brief and brutal mutiny suppressed, but we did not return. A few rough, down-to-earth artists and craftsmen proudly abandoned the City of Poets for Jack's Town or Port Romance, trying to maintain a hard life full of creativity, some even running beyond the developing frontier.But I stayed. During my first few years in Hyperion, I didn't find my muse.For many, the territory has expanded (due to limited means of transportation, electromagnetic vehicles are unreliable here, and skimmers are rare), and artificial consciousness has been reduced (there is no data network here, only a hyperoptical transmitter, which cannot be accessed. into the big picture), so all this leads to a revival of creative energy and new achievements as human beings and artists.

Maybe that's what I've heard. No muse appears.My verse continues to be superficial, as dead as Huck Finn's cat. I decided to end my life. But first, I took some time, at least nine years, to implement a reformation that would give New Hyperion the one thing it lacked: decadence. Through a creature sculptor (the guy's aptly named Grauman Woodaxe), I had the hairy flanks, hooves, and goat legs that Sedi had.I took good care of my beard and lengthened my ears.Grauman made interesting changes to my sexy skin.The news spreads from ten to hundreds.Farmer girls, natives, the wives of our loyal city planners and pioneers—all await a visit from Hyperion's only resident Satyr, or they themselves will visit my house.I figured out what a "penis worship" and a few words like that were all about.In addition to the endless rivalry, I also made my drinking competition legendary and my vocabulary returned to something close to old post-stroke.

It's fucking amazing.What the hell. Then, one night, I was about to give up on my plan to blow my head off, when Grendel showed up. A sketch of our visiting monster: Our worst dreams come alive.Something evil escaped the daylight.That is the shadow of Dr. Mobius and the old demon Kerui.Mom, hold the fire high, Grendel is coming out of the hole tonight. At first it seemed to us that the missing had simply gone elsewhere; there were no sentries on the Weeping Wall of our city, as a matter of fact we have no walls, and no warriors at the gates of our mead halls.Then a husband reported that his wife disappeared after dinner and before nursing their two children.Hoban Christus, the abstract implosion performer, was absent from the Poets Amphitheater on Wednesday for his performance, missing a line for the first time in his eighty-two years as an actor.Worries abound.Sad King Billy inspected the reconstruction work of Jack Town, and when he came back, he promised that everyone would strengthen the security of the city.A network of sensors stretched around the town.The ship's security officers swept the Time Tombs and reported that they were still empty.The mechanical troops were sent to the entrance of the maze at the bottom of the Emerald Tomb. After six kilometers of investigation, nothing was found.Skimmers, whether automated or manned, swept the territory between the city and the Bridle Mountains, detecting no heat signature larger than a stone eel.For the next week, no one went missing.

Then death begins. The body of sculptor Pete Garcia was found, in the study...in the bedroom...in the far yard.Chu Yin Haynes, the ship's security officer, was so stupid that he told the reporter: "It looks like he was torn apart by some vicious animal. But I have never seen any animal that can torture a person to death." Such." All of us were shivering behind our backs, greatly stimulated.Yes, the lines are atrocious, straight out of those millions of flat and hologram movies that scare themselves, but now, we're all part of the movie. Suspicion turns to the most obvious: a psychopath is on the loose among us, perhaps killing with a pulse knife or hell whip.This time the guy didn't have time to dispose of the body.Poor Pete.

Haynes, the ship's security officer, was fired.Mayor Pratt has obtained approval from His Highness, he can hire 20 officers, train them, and form a city guard force.Rumors arose that they were going to give a polygraph test to six thousand people throughout the City of Poets.There is a lot of discussion in the roadside restaurant, full of speeches about human rights... We are not under the jurisdiction of the hegemony. According to this reason, do we still have human rights? . . . people began to hatch rash schemes to catch the murderer. Then the slaughter began. Homicide has no set pattern.The bodies found were either two or three pieces, a single body, or no fart at all.Some disappeared without leaving a drop of blood on the ground; others left gallons of clots.There were no witnesses and no survivors of the attack.The location doesn't seem to matter: the Weymonts lived in a remote cottage, but Sheila Robb died in a tower studio in the center of town; the two victims each disappeared at night, apparently in a Zen garden and Chancellor Lyman's daughter, who was alone in the bathroom on the seventeenth floor of Sad King Billy's palace, disappeared suddenly, even though she was protected by personal bodyguards.

In Luthers, in the Whale Center, or a dozen other ancient ring worlds, a thousand deaths add up to make little news—and that's only a short-lived entry in the datanet, or It's the inside page of the morning paper.But in a city of only six thousand in all fifty thousand colonizing the world, a dozen murders—like the proverbial morning hang—would have caught everyone's eye. I knew one of the victims from the beginning.Hiccuprice Harris was the first (and hottest) I ever captured as a sex emperor, a beauty, long blond hair soft as if it wasn't real, complexion like a freshly picked peach, pure Too untouchable, too beautiful to believe: just the kind of thing even the most timid man would dream of touching.Now, Hihipris is truly tainted.They found only her head, erected in the center of Sir Byron Square, as if buried from the neck down in movable marble.When I heard these details I finally understood what creature we were dealing with - I had a cat on my mother's estate that would leave a similar pattern in the southern yard on most summer mornings The sacrifices—the upward-gazing rat heads, perched on sandstone in pure rodent amazement, or the toothy grin of a gopher—are the hunted trophies of proud, hungry predators.