Chapter 35 Chapter Eleven

Sad King Billy came to visit me while I was writing my Psalms. "Good morning, Billy," I said. "I am your Highness!" Your Highness was furious, and it is rare to see his noble anger.His stutter had also disappeared since that noble dropship touched down in Hyperion. "Good morning, Billy, Your Highness." "Hmph," growled my lord, removing some papers and settling down on a bench overflowing with coffee ponds, which would have been clean. "Selenas, you're writing again." I don't see any reason to admit the obvious. "Do you always write with a pen?"

"No," I said, "I only use a pen when I want to write something worth reading." "Is this worth reading, then?" He pointed to the little pile of manuscripts I had amassed in two weeks' labor. "value." "Value? Just one value?" "right." "Can I read it sooner?" "No." King Billy looked down and finally found his leg dipped in the coffee pond.He frowned, moved away, and wiped the shrinking pond with the corner of his cloak. "Never?" he asked. "Never, unless you can outlive me." "That's what it is," said the King, "once you die, the goat who seduced the ewes of the kingdom."

"Are you making a metaphor?" "Not at all," said Billy King, "just a comment." "I've never looked at a ewe since I was a boy on the farm," I said to him. "I promised my mother in a song that I would never mess with a sheep again without her permission." Do it." King Billy looked on sadly, and then I sang some verses of an old ditty called "There'll Be No Another Ewe." "Martin," he said, "someone or something is killing my people." I put the paper and pen aside. "I know." I said. "I need your help."

"God, what can I help? Do you want me to hunt down this killer like some hologram detective? Do you want me to have a life-and-death fight with him at the fucking Reichenbach Falls fight?" "Martin, I'd love you to do that. But for now, I'll be content if you give me your opinion and advice." "One opinion," I said, "is that it's stupid to come here. Two, it's even more stupid to stay. All advice: it's best to walk." King Billy nodded mournfully. "Leave this city, or leave Hyperion?" I shrugged. His Highness got up and walked to the window of my small study.Outside the window is a three-meter path leading to a brick wall of automated regenerative crops next door.Billy King looked out the window at the scenery. "You know..." he said, "the old legend of the Shrike?"

"a little bit." "The natives associate this monster with the Time Tombs," he said. "The Aboriginals painted their bellies to celebrate the harvest and smoked non-GMO tobacco," I said. King Billy nodded approvingly of my ingenuity.He said: "The Overlord Landing Team was very cautious about the area. They set up multi-band recorders and set up their base just south of the bridle." "Hey," I said, "My lord... what do you want? Just because you built the city here and made a mess, and you want me to pardon you? Then I will pardon you. My child, Go, and sin no more. Now, if you don't mind, my lord, safe travels. I must go and write my dirty doggerel."

King Billy didn't turn away from the window. "Martin, you're suggesting we evacuate the city, aren't you?" I hesitated for a second. "certainly." "Are you going with the others?" "Why not?" King Billy turned and stared straight at me. "Really?" I didn't answer.After a minute, I turned my face away. "I knew it," said the ruler of the planet.He clasped his squat hands behind his back and stared at the wall again. "If I were a detective," he said, "I would be suspicious too. The least productive citizen of the city, after a decade of silence, is writing again. When was that, Martin?  … Only two days after the first murder. He disappeared from his social life to spend his time writing epics...Why? Even the young women escaped the clutches of his goat lust."

I sigh. "Your Excellency, what goat lust?" King Billy glanced over his shoulder at me. "Okay," I said, "you got me. I confess. I killed 'em, I drenched in their blood. This fucking works like a literary aphrodisiac. I reckon two... three It would be wonderful to have a thousand people, or more, fall under my knife... My next book is about to be published." King Billy turned his back to the window. "What's the matter?" I said, "don't you believe it?" "No." "why?" "Because," said the King, "I know who the murderer is."

We sat in a dark holowell as the Shrike killed novelist Sheila Robb and her lover.The light was dim; Sheila's middle-aged flesh seemed to glow with a pale luminescence, and in the twilight, the pale buttocks of her young boyfriend gave the illusion of floating there, and bronzed with him. The body is separated.Their passion was at the height of its fury when the inexplicable thing happened.There was no final violent movement, no sudden pause in orgasm, the young man suddenly buoyed up, into the air, as if Sheila had somehow managed to eject him out of her body with immense force.The soundtrack on the disc, which had previously been filled with the clichéd gasps, urgings, commands of the activity, now suddenly filled the holographic well with screams—first the young man's, then Sheila's.

The boy's body hits the wall opposite the camera with a bang.Sheila's body lay waiting, in a position that was at once wretched and comical, feet splayed, arms outstretched, chest flat, thighs pale.Her head had been thrown back in ecstasy, but now she was looking up, terror and anger replacing the impending apex, a strange orgasmic expression.She opened her mouth to scream. But no words.There was a sound like cutting a watermelon, the sound of the blade piercing through the flesh, and the hook pulling away from tendons and bones.Sheila's head was thrown back again, her mouth gaped unbelievably wide, and her body burst open from the breastbone down.Sheila Robb's flesh seemed to be severed with fury by an invisible axe.Invisible scalpels do the disemboweling, side incisions that look like the work of a mad doctor, captured in this scandalous time-lapse film.This is a brutal autopsy performed on a living person.Or, to be more precise, once alive, for just as the blood stopped splashing and the body stopped convulsing, Sheila's limbs slackened and died, and her legs spread open again in order to cater to the aforementioned obscene film content.Then—a brief second later—a blur of red and chrome appeared beside the bed.

"Stop, zoom in, zoom in," Billy King commanded the house computer. That vague shadow melted into the narcotics junkie's nightmare: a face, half iron, half chrome, half skull, with teeth like the intersecting steam shovels of a mechanical wolf, eyes like ruby ​​lasers burning among bloody gems, forehead pierced With a curved bayonet, thirty centimeters long, it towered over a mercury-like skull, and similar spines were inlaid around its neck. "A Shrike?" I asked. King Billy nodded—no, he just nodded his chin. "How is her beau?" I asked. "He was not there when we found Sheila's body," said the king. "No one knew he was missing until we found the disk. We recognized him as a young entertainment specialist from Andymion."

"Did you just discover holograms?" "Found it yesterday," said Billy King. "Security found the imager on the ceiling. It's tiny, not even a millimeter. Sheila's disks filled a library. Apparently, the camera Put it there for the record... ah..." "Sex." I said. "right." I stood up and approached the floating image of the creature.My hand ran across its forehead, its spines, its jaw.The computer calculated its size and represented it correctly.Judging from the head of this thing, our local Grendel is more than three meters tall. "Shrike," I muttered, more of a greeting than a recognition. "How much do you know about it? Tell me, Martin." "Why do you ask me?" I snapped. "I'm a poet, not a historian of mythology." "You accessed the computer of the seed ship and asked about the nature and origin of the Shrike." I frowned.Access to computers, like access to the data network in the hegemony society, should be hidden and anonymous. "So what?" I said, "Since this carnage started, there must have been hundreds of people who searched for the Shrike lore. Maybe thousands. It's the only fucking monster lore we really have." The wrinkles on King Billy's face folded. "Yes," he said, "but the time you searched for information was three months before the first disappearance." I sighed and sank into the cushions of the holowell. "Okay," I said, "I admit it, so what? I'm going to use this damn legend in a damn poem I'm writing. So I looked into it. Arrest me." "What do you know?" Now I'm furious.I stomped my satyr's hoof on the soft carpet. "It's the fucking files," I yelled. "What the hell do you want from me, Billy." The king rubbed his forehead, accidentally poked his eye, and tightened his body in pain. "I don't know," he said, "Security wanted to take you to the ship and put you through the full interrogation port. But I chose to talk to you face to face." I squinted, strangely, I felt His stomach seemed to have entered the zero-gravity zone, and there was a twitch. Full interrogation means cortical shunts and sockets in the skull.Most of those interrogated in this way are completely reformed.the vast majority.