Chapter 43 chapter Five

"right." "Could you take me to the Bethel temple tomorrow? I can borrow a khaki siola." "No," Saul said, "we can take the academy flight." He paused. "Okay," he said finally, "I'll take you to the synagogue tomorrow." Under the old elm trees, the night is gradually gathering.The street lights came on one after another, and the wide alleyway led to their house. "Dad," Rachel said, "there's a question I've asked you a million times since I was two—do you believe in God?" Sol didn't smile.He didn't know what to say other than the answer he'd given a million times. "Hopefully one day I will," he replied.

Rachel's academic research direction is about aliens and the remains of civilizations before the Great Exile.For three standard years, Thor and Sarai would occasionally receive telepathic messages from strange planets nearby but not in the Web, and the senders would come to visit.They both knew that their daughter's fieldwork for her senior thesis would take her beyond the Web, to outlying places where time debt would gradually consume the lives or memories of those stranded there. "Where the hell is Hyperion?" Sarai asked during Rachel's last vacation before her trip. "It sounds like a brand name for a new type of household product."

"It's a great place, Mother. Outside of Armaghast, it has the most remnants of a non-human civilization." "Then why don't you go to Armaghast?" Sarai asked. "It's only a few months from the Web. Why go to an inferior place?" “Hyperion hasn’t developed into a major tourist attraction yet,” Rachel said, “although there are signs of trouble. Rich people are more willing to travel off-net these days.” Suoer suddenly realized that his voice became hoarse. "Are you going to the labyrinth, or the ruins of civilization called the Tomb of Time?"

"To the Time Tombs, Dad. I'll be working with Dr. Melio Alandez, who knows more about the Time Tombs than anyone else." "They're not dangerous, are they?" Thor asked the question as casually as he could, but his tone grew eager. Rachel smiled. "Because of that legend about the Shrike? No way. No one has had trouble with that legend in nearly two standard centuries." "But I've seen some documents that record the turmoil that occurred during the second wave of colonization..." Thor said. "I've seen it too, Dad. But those people had no idea there was a giant stone eel that came down to the desert to feed. Some of them might have been eaten by these animals, and everyone was in a state of panic. You I know how the rumors started. Also, that kind of stone eel has been driven to extinction."

"The spaceship won't land there," Thor continued to persuade. "You have to take a boat across the Sea of ​​Grass to the Tomb of Time. Or walk there. Or some other way to kill people." Rachel smiled. "In the early days, people underestimated the effectiveness of the anti-entropy field, so accidents often occurred when flying in it. But now they also provide airship services. They also have a big inn called the Time Fortress built on the northern edge of the mountain range. Thousands of tourists stay there." "Will you rest there too?" Sarai asked.

"I'll be here for a while. I'm sure I'll be thrilled there, Mom." "I wish it wasn't so exciting there," Sarai said, and everyone laughed. During Rachel's four-year journey—including weeks in a frozen slumber—Saul discovered that, while unable to contact her as before, she had been busy researching online, so he I miss my daughter more than ever.When she thought of her flying away from her at a speed faster than the propagation of light, and her whole body wrapped in a Hawking-effect artificial quantum cocoon, an unnatural sense of foreboding came to her heart.

They are still very busy.Salai stopped his commentary career to devote more time to local environmental issues.For Saul, this period was near the peak of his career.His second and third books came out, and the second—"Moral Turning Point"—caused such a stir that he was regularly invited to conferences and seminars held around the Web.Some places he went alone, and some places he went with Sarai. Although they both liked to travel in their hearts, they always encountered strange food, different gravity, and very strange food in actual experience. In the light of an unfamiliar sun that was about to fade, Sol felt that most of the time he might as well be at home doing some research for his next book.If you have to attend the meeting as a last resort, you can do so through the academy's interactive hologram.

Nearly five years after Rachel left home for scientific research, Sol had a dream that changed his life forever. Sol dreamed that he was walking in a magnificent building, its columns were as thick as a small redwood tree, and its far-reaching ceiling cast red rays like solid arrows.From time to time he caught glimpses of something far away in the darkness to his left and right: once he saw a pair of stone legs rising out of the darkness like a gigantic building; another time he saw a crystal scarab hovering in the air far above his head. , the body radiates cold light. Finally Thor stopped to rest.Far behind him he heard the sound of a fire burning, and the whole city and forest were bathed in fire.And in front, where he was about to walk, two crimson ovals were shining brightly.

He was wiping the sweat from his forehead when suddenly a loud voice sounded: "Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, your beloved daughter, to a planet called Hyperion, where I will guide you, and sacrifice her as a burnt offering." In the dream, Thor stood up and said, "You must be joking." So he walked on in the dark, and the two red orbs hung like blood-red moons on the dark plain. When he stopped to rest, the loud voice sounded again: "Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, your beloved daughter, to a planet called Hyperion, where I will guide you, and sacrifice her as a burnt offering."

Thor shrugged, shaking off the oppressive voice, and then said clearly into the darkness: "I heard you the first time you spoke...I tell you, 'No way'." Sol knew that he was in a dream, and his consciousness felt the irony of this plot on the one hand, but on the other hand, he just wanted to wake up.But the situation took a turn for the worse when he suddenly found himself looking down from a low balcony at Rachel lying naked on a large rock in a room below.The whole scene is illuminated by red double balls.Thor looked to his right hand and found a long machete in his hand.Both the blade and handle are made of bone.

The voice came again, and it sounded like the voice of God processed by some shallow-minded third-rate holographic film directors to Saul: "Saul! You must listen carefully. The future of humanity depends on your obedience to this matter. You must take your daughter, your beloved daughter Rachel, to a planet called Hyperion, where I am about to Guide your land and offer her as a burnt offering." Sol, feeling sick from the whole dream, but somehow terrified, turned and threw the knife far into the darkness.Then he turns back to find his own daughter, and the whole scene disappears.The red spheres were so close overhead that Thor could see them now as two thousand-faced gems, each as big as an asteroid. The voice resounding through the sky came again: "How? You have a chance to choose, Saul Winterberg. If you change your mind, you know where to find me." Saul woke up with a smile, and at the same time was startled by the dream in a cold sweat.The idea that the whole of the Talmud and the Old Testament was but one long jumbled story running through the ages struck him as ludicrous. Around the time Saul was having this recurring dream, Rachel was doing her first year of research on Hyperion.A team of nine archaeologists and six physicists found the Fortress of Time fascinating but overcrowded with tourists and self-proclaimed Shrike pilgrims, so they commuted daily to and from work for the first month Land and hotel, and from the second month on, they set up a permanent tent between the dead city and the small valley where the Time Tombs were. While half of the team excavated the remains of a newer civilization in the unfinished city, Rachel, with the help of two colleagues, cataloged every aspect of the Time Tombs.Physicists have finished their work on anti-entropy fields and are spending a lot of time marking the boundaries of those so-called time tides with different colored flags. The work of Rachel's group is mainly focused on the structure called the Sphinx, although the creature carved out of that stone is neither a man nor a lion; The smooth lines on the top look like the unique curves of creatures, and the continuous curved additions remind everyone of wings.Unlike other tombs that are open and easy to survey, the Sphinx is a large group of honeycomb-shaped boulders connected by narrow passages. Some of them are extremely airtight, and others are as big as a stadium, but never If you start from any place, you can't reach the outside, you can only go back to the original point.There are no crypts, treasure chambers, looted sarcophagi, frescoes, or secret passages, just labyrinthine corridors winding among watery stones.