Chapter 30 28

I shouldn't have gone.said the consul. Father Duhei guards Brown.When Lamia, he and Saul took the still unconscious Heid.Mastine was carried from the cave mounds into the sphinx. It was almost midnight, and the valley was lit with the light from those time mounds. The wings of the sphinxes saw them from between the rock walls A slice of the arc is cut off from the sky.Brown lay motionless, the disgusting cable snaking into the darkness of the Tomb. Saul tapped the Consul on the shoulder, we've discussed it, you should go. The Consul shook his head, lazily touching the ancient falcon magic carpet.This may carry two people, you and Doohet can get to where the Benaris is.

Sol held his daughter's tiny head in his hand and gently rocked her. Rachel was only two days old, and besides, this was where we had to be. The Consul looked around, pain in his eyes, this is where I should be.Thorn Demon God Doo Hei leaned forward, his brow and high cheekbones illuminated by the light from Shizuka behind them.Boy, if you stay here, the only reason is suicide.You're doing someone else a favor if you try to bring the spaceship back to pick up Miss Lamia and this Templar. The Consul rubbed his cheek, he was very tired.There's still room for you on the magic carpet, Father.

Du Hei smiled and said: No matter what my fate is, I feel that I am destined to meet my fate here.I will wait for your return. The Consul shook his head again, but walked over and sat cross-legged on the magic carpet.Pulling the heavy duffel bag to his side, counted the rations and water bottles Thor had packed for him, there were too many, and you needed more. Du Hei smiled lightly, we had enough food and water for four days, all thanks to Miss Lamia.After four days, if we really have to fast, it is not the first time for me. But what if Cylenos and Kassad come back? They can drink our water, Saul said: If the others come back, we can go back to Chrono for food.

The Consul sighed, all right.He pressed the weaving pattern for flight, and the two-meter-long blanket stiffened, and rose to a place ten meters away from the rocky ground. Even if it would shake a little in this uncertain magnetic field, it was not worrying. Oxygen is needed when crossing mountain peaks.Saul said. The Consul removed the penetration mask from his backpack. Saul handed him Lamia's automatic. I can not If we encounter Jing Demon God, this thing will not be of much help to us.Saul said: But it probably has a lot to do with whether or not you get to Keats. The Consul nodded and put the gun back in his pouch.He shook hands with the priest first, and then with the old scholar, and Rachel's tiny fingers brushed against his arm.

Good luck.Du Hei said: May God be with you. The Consul nodded, touched the flying pattern, and leaned forward. The falcon magic carpet rose five meters, trembling slightly, then slid forward, and then went up as if climbing an invisible staircase in the air move. The Consul flew straight towards the mouth of the valley, flew over the dunes there at an altitude of ten meters, turned left and flew towards the barren land.He only looked back.The four figures on the top step of the Sphinx, two standing and two lying down, all look really small.And he couldn't see the baby in Thor's arms.

According to the result of their discussion, the Consul let the Falcon Magic Carpet fly westward over the City of Poets, hoping to find Martin.Cylenos.He had a hunch that the irascible poet might have taken a detour here.The skies in this part of the world saw less fighting, and the consul had to search by starlight as he passed the city's crumbling pinnacles and domes at a height of twenty meters.The poet was nowhere to be seen.Even if Braun and Selenus had been here, their footprints in the sand must have been wiped out by the night wind that was blowing the consul's thinning hair and his clothes now.

It's pretty cold to ride the magic carpet at this altitude.The Consul could feel the jitter of the magic carpet flying along the unstable force field.He knew that between the dangerous magnetic field of Hyperion and the old flight line, the magic carpet would probably fall from the sky before he reached the capital city of Keats. The Consul called out to Martin several times.The name of Cylenus, but there was no response, only a flock of pigeons suddenly flew out from a nest under the broken dome of a balcony.He shook his head, turned south, and flew towards the Bridle Mountains. The Consul knew the history of this falcon magic carpet from his grandfather Merlin.That is Vladimir, a well-known lepidopteran scholar and electromagnetic system engineer at Wanxing.com.One of Sholokhov's first amusing handicrafts was probably the one he gave to his teenage niece.Sholokhov's doting on the little girl and the fact that she scoffed at the gift of the flying carpet have become legends.

Others liked the idea, though, and while the Falcon Carpet quickly became a contraband in traffic control on all worlds, it continued to appear on colonized planets.And this one made the consul's grandfather meet his grandmother Siri in Maui︱Covenant Star. The Consul looked up as the mountains approached.A ten-minute flight crosses barren land that would take two hours to walk across.Before he set off, others advised him not to go to Time Fort to find Selenus, worrying that if the problem encountered by the poet fell on the consul.He therefore only hovered temporarily at the window, two hundred meters above the cliff, about an arm's length from the balcony where they had looked out over the valley three days earlier, and called the poet's name.

The only answer to him was echoes from the corridors and dark banquet halls within the castle.The Consul clung to the edge of the falcon's magic carpet, feeling the height and the danger of being exposed so close to the upright cliff.He was relieved when he turned the flying carpet away from Time Fort.He flew higher and higher, climbing towards the tops of the mountains that shone under the snow-covered stars. He climbed along the cable car track until he was close to a 9,000-meter peak, and then went down a mountain in the vast mountain range. It was very cold at such a height, and the consul was very glad that he wore an extra casa De's thermal cloak, he huddled in the cloak, trying not to expose the skin of his hands and cheeks to the cold.The infiltration mask was pressed against his face, like a small hungry symbiont, desperately sucking in the oxygen it could find.

That's enough, the Consul took a slow, deep breath, and flew ten meters above the icy track, the pressurized cable cars didn't start, and the glaciers, peaks, and shadowed valleys were all painfully desolate. .The Consul was glad he had made it this far, if only to appreciate the beauty of Hyperion that had not been destroyed by the Thorn Demon God or the Ouster invasion for the last time. It took them twelve hours to ride the cable car from south to north, although the flight speed of the Falcon Magic Carpet was as slow as twenty kilometers per hour.The consul also crossed the mountains in a six-hour period.The sun came out when he was still on the peak. He woke up with a start, and was surprised to find that he had fallen into sleep just now, and the falcon magic carpet was flying towards a mountain that was five meters higher than his flying height. The consul saw a bird fifty meters away. Places of huge gravel and snow.A big black bird with wings stretching three meters wide is a local bird called the Precognition Bird, which flew out of its cold nest, flew in the thin air, and stared back at it with those small black eyes like beans. Seeing him turn sharply to the left, he felt that something was loose in the flying device of the Falcon Magic Carpet. After a straight descent of 30 meters, the flight line finally found a point of strength, and the flying carpet regained its stability.

The Consul's fingers were crooked as he gripped the edge of the blanket, but the straps of his duffel bag were fastened to his belt, otherwise the bag would have rolled down into a glacier deep below. He could see no trace of the cable cars.The Consul apparently slept so long that the Falcon Magic Carpet flew off course, and for a moment he panicked and let the carpet swerve sharply, desperately trying to find a way out among the fang-like peaks around him. .Then he saw the early morning sun gilding a hillside ahead to his right and shadows across the glaciers and high tundra behind him to his left, and knew he was still on the right course.Beyond the last peaks are the hills in the south, and beyond When the Consul tapped the flight pattern to make the magic carpet fly higher, the Falcon Magic Carpet seemed to hesitate, but he climbed up little by little, and finally passed the last 9,000-meter peak. The lower mountains gradually dwindled to a hill of 3,000 meters above sea level, and the consul descended happily. He found the tramway glistening in the sun, just eight kilometers south of his departure from the Horseshoe Mountains.The cable car hangs silently around the west end cable car station.Below is the village called the Pilgrim's Resting Pavilion. Those sparse houses are the same as they saw a few days ago, and they seem to be empty.You can't see the sailboat driving out from the low pier leading to the shallow grass sea outside. The Consul landed near the pier, closed the Falcon Magic Carpet, stretched his legs in pain, and rolled up the flying carpet for safety.He found a toilet in an empty house near the pier.By the time he came out, the sunlight had climbed down the hill, obliterating the last shadows at the foot of the hill.As far as he could see, the south and west were boundless seas of grass.The flat top like a table top is only flawed because of the occasional breeze blowing, which makes the surface wavy, temporarily revealing the reddish brown and dark blue stems underneath, and the grass waves above are like waves, which makes people think it will be seen. To the white waves and leaping fish. There are no fish in the sea of ​​grass, but there are grass vipers twenty meters long. If something happens to the Consul's falcon magic carpet in the sea of ​​grass, even if he can land safely, he will not survive for long. The Consul unfolded the rolled up flying carpet, put the travel bag behind his back, and started the flying carpet.His flying altitude has always been kept very low, about twenty-five meters above the sea, but not so low that the prairie adder would mistake him for a low-flying meal.It took them a whole day in Hyperion local time to cross the Sea of ​​Grass in the sailboat, but there was a constant wind blowing from the northeast, which made the sailboat back and forth a bit.The Consul believed he could fly across the narrowest part of the Grass Sea in less than fifteen hours.He tapped the control pattern forward, and the Falcon Carpet picked up speed. In less than twenty minutes, the mountains had been left far behind, and the foot of the mountain disappeared in the distant smoke. In less than an hour, the peak of the mountain began to shrink because the bottom of the mountain was covered by the horizon.Two hours later, the Consul saw only the tallest peaks, rising from the mist like vague shadows. Then there is a sea of ​​grass in all directions, and nothing changes except for occasional waves caused by the breeze.It is much warmer here than in the northern highlands of the Horseshoe Mountains.The consul took off his thermal cloak first, then his overcoat, and then his sweater. At such a height, the sun was shining so fiercely. The consul rummaged through his travel bag to find the one he was wearing proudly two days ago. The crepe and old three-cornered hat was worn on the head for shade.His forehead and balding head were sunburned. About four hours later he ate his first meal on the road, eating bland rations instead of filet mignon.The water was the tastiest part of the meal, and the Consul had to restrain himself from drinking all the bottles in one sitting. The sea of ​​grass stretched below, behind and in front of him.The Consul dozed off, waking up every time he felt like he was falling, his hands gripping the edge of the rigid Falcon Rug.He knew which piece of rope he should use to tie himself up in the duffel bag.But he didn't want to land on a blade of grass that was sharp and higher than his head.Although he didn't see the V-shaped traces that the prairie vipers would appear when they walked away, he was not sure if they were lying down and waiting. He wondered nonchalantly where the sailboat had gone.That thing has always been fully automatic, and it is said that the operating program is set by the Jing Demon God Church, because Zhao Chaosheng is sponsored by them.What other responsibility does that thing have?The Consul shook his head, sat up straight, and pinched his cheek.He was half asleep even when he was thinking about the sailboat.Fifteen hours seemed like a short enough time when he spoke in Tokizukadani.He looked at the comm recorder, only five hours had passed. The Consul raised the flying carpet to a height of 200 meters, carefully searched for signs of prairie pit vipers, and then adjusted the flying carpet back to fly five meters above the grass.He carefully removed the rope, made a loop, moved to the front of the flying carpet, and looped the rope around the blanket a few times, leaving enough room for him to slide his body in first before pulling the knot taut . If the flying carpet fell, the tied rope might be worse than useless, but the few loops of rope wrapped around him gave him a sense of security as he leaned forward to push the flying carpet again, and he Let the flying carpet rise to forty meters, lie down and put his cheek on the warm blanket, the sun shines through his fingers, and he finds that his bare arms will be severely sunburned. But he was too tired to sit up and put his rolled up sleeves down. A breeze blew, and the Consul heard a rustling sound below. He didn't know if it was the waves of the grass, or something big was passing through the grass. He was too tired to care.The Consul closed his eyes and fell asleep in less than thirty seconds. The Consul dreamed of his home. His real home was in Maui︱Covenant's home, and the dream was full of colors: bottomless blue sky, vast South Sea, where the equatorial shoals begin, dark blue turns green, grazed by dolphins To those automatic islands to the north the amazing green, yellow and orchid-red dolphins were extinct in the Consul's childhood by the invasion of the Balian, but were alive and well in his dreams, leaping through the water and sparking a thousand points of light Flying in the pure air. In his dream, the Consul was a child again.Standing on the top floor of a treehouse on their first family island.Next to him was Grandmother Celie, not the imposing lady he had known, but the beautiful young woman his grandfather had met and fallen in love with.The sails of the trees fluttered, and the south wind blew, making the group of automatic islands in neat formation across the strait from the shallows.Just on the northern horizon, he could see the green fields of the first Equatorial Islands jutting out against the night sky. Celie patted him on the shoulder, pointing to the west. The islands were burning and sinking, their keel roots writhing in agony.The dolphin herder is gone.It was raining heavily.The Consul saw the tens of millions of volts of light spearing into the air, leaving blue-gray afterimages on his retinas.The underwater explosion lit up the sea and brought thousands of fish and tiny sea creatures to the surface in a death struggle. why?asked Grandmother Celie, but her voice was the soft whisper of a girl. The Consul tried to answer, but could not speak, tears blurring his vision.He reached for her hand, but she was gone, and the thought that she was gone forever, that he could never atone again, hurt him so much that he couldn't breathe.His throat was clogged with emotion.Then he realized that the smoke had hurt his eyes and filled his lungs; the family island was on fire. The child-to-be-consul staggered along in the blue-black darkness, looking blindly for someone to hold his hand and reassure him. A hand took his.That was not Celie's hand.That hand was extremely hard when it was squeezed tightly, and the fingers were like blades. The Consul woke up gasping. It was pitch black and he had slept at least seven hours.He struggled out of the rope and sat up, staring at his glowing comlog display. twelve hours.He slept twelve hours. When he leaned forward and peeked down, every muscle in his body ached. The Falcon Magic Carpet kept flying at a height of forty meters, but he didn't know where he was.The hills below are high and low, and the flying carpet must have flown only two or three meters higher than the hills; the orange grass and overgrown moss grew quite thick. Sometime and somewhere in the last few hours they had crossed the southern shore of the Sea of ​​Grass, missing the small port of Edge City and the wharf of the Huli River, where their floating yacht, the Benaris, was moored. The Consul didn't have a compass. The compass didn't work on Hyperion and his commlog wasn't set up for navigation.His original plan to find his way back to Keats was to follow the Hooli River south and west, retracing their laborious upstream voyage, only to reach the bend in the river. Now he is lost. The Consul let the falcon magic carpet land on a low mountain top, let out a painful groan, walked from the flying carpet to solid ground, and shut down the function of the flying carpet.He knew that at least one-third of the electricity in the flight line had been used up, maybe more, and he didn't know how much the effectiveness of this flying carpet had been lost due to the age. The hills in this area are like wild land in the southwest of Caohai, but the river can't be seen anywhere. His comm recorder tells him that it has just been dark for an hour or two, but the consul can't see the west at all. There was no afterglow of any sunset, and the clouds were so thick that one couldn't see any starlight or the flames of a space war. Damn it, the Consul whispered.He walked around and waited until his blood circulation returned to normal. After urinating while standing on the edge of a small cliff, he returned to the flying carpet and took a bottle of water to drink. (Think about it.) He originally set the direction of the magic carpet to the southwest, and he should be at the port of Edge City or there when he left Caohai. If he just flew over Edge City and the river while he was asleep, then the river should be in Somewhere south of him.But if he had set the wrong direction when he left the Pilgrim's Rest, a few degrees to the left, then the river would turn northeast and be somewhere on his right.Even if he went the wrong way, he would eventually find a landmark if nothing, at least the North Horsehair Coast, but such a delay could take him a whole day. The Consul kicked off the next rock and folded his arms across his chest.After the heat of the day, the air is very cool.A shudder made him realize that he was seriously ill from sunburn.He put his hands on his head, cursed again and took his fingers away. (where is it?) The wind whistled through the low sage and thick moss, and the Consul felt that he was far away from the threat of the time mound and the thorn demon, but felt that Sol and Doohey and Hayt.Musting and Braun and the missing Cerenos and Kassad were all urgent and heavy pressures on his shoulders.The Consul's admission to the pilgrimage was only a final act of nihilism, an unjustifiable suicide, to end his own misery, which even the memory of his wife and son who died in the hegemonic plot to take Brescia The pain that has been lost.And the pain of knowing his terrible betrayal of the government he had served for nearly forty years, and of the Ousters who had trusted him. Sitting on a rock, the Consul felt his needless self-hatred subside at the thought of Thor and his little baby still waiting in the valley of the grave.He thought of Braun, that brave woman, the embodiment of energy, lying helpless now, with the evil extension of the Thorn God growing out of her skull like a leech. He sat down, activated the flying carpet, and ascended to 800 meters. The clouds above his head were so close that he could touch them with his hands. The clouds on the far left of him parted a bit, revealing a little shimmer, and the Huli River was about five kilometers to the south. The Consul turned the Falcon Carpet sharply to the left, feeling the feeble control field trying to press him against it, but felt much safer with the ropes still attached.Ten minutes later, high above the water, he swooped down to make sure it was the broad Huli River and not a tributary. That is indeed the Huli River.Radiating cobwebs shone in the low, damp areas of the shore.The tall, holey anthills looked like ghostly shadows against a sky that was only a little darker than the ground. The consul rose to twenty meters, took a sip of water from his water bottle, and then went down the river at full speed. By the time the sun came out he was south of the village of Dukopol Bush, almost at the Kalla Lock, where the Royal Canal cut west to the northern Horsehair Coast.The consul knew that the distance from here to the capital was less than 150 kilometers, but judging by the slow speed of Falcon Magic Carpet, it would take another seven hours that would drive people crazy.He really hoped that during this Zhao trip, he would encounter a patrolling military floater, a passenger spaceship from Nader Bush, or even a speedboat that he could command at this place.But there are no people on both sides of the Huli River, only occasionally a house on fire, or an oil lamp in a distant window.There are no ships at the gate.The dam above the gate is empty, the gates open to the river, and below, where the river becomes twice as wide as upstream, there are no boats. The Consul cursed and continued to fly forward. It was a beautiful morning, the rising sun lighting up the low clouds and making all the shrubs and trees more alive in the low, horizontal light.The Consul felt as though he hadn't seen a real plant in months.On the far escarpments weirwoods and half-oaks towered enormously, while on the floodplain the bright light saw the green shoots of a million periscope beans sticking out of the fields where they had been planted.The banks are covered with mangroves and fire ferns.Every twig and whisker was distinct in the glare of the rising sun. Clouds engulfed the sun and it began to rain.The consul put on his worn-out three-cornered hat tightly, huddled himself under Kassad's thermal cloak, and flew south at a speed of 100 meters per hour. The Consul tried to recall, (How long is that child named Rachel?) Even though he had slept so much the previous day, the Consul was mentally exhausted. (Rachel was four days old when they reached the valley, and that was already four days ago.) The Consul rubbed his face and reached for a water bottle, only to find that all the water bottles were empty.He could easily have reached down and filled those water bottles in the river, but he didn't want to spend the time.Rain dripped from his cloak, and he shivered with pain from the sunburn. (Sol says as long as he goes back before dark it's fine, Rachel was born after midnight in Hyperion time. If true, if there's no mistake, her deadline is 8 o'clock tonight The Consul wiped the water off his cheeks and eyebrows. If it's another seven hours to Keats, and an hour or two to get the boat lifted, Theo can help. He's Governor now, and I can convince him to fight Gray Shi Dong’s order to arrest the ship is for the good of Balian. If necessary, I can tell him that she ordered me to conspire with the Ouster and betray Wanxing.com.) (If say, ten hours plus fifteen minutes flight time of the spaceship, there should be one hour before sunset, and Rachel will be only a few minutes old, but what should we do? In addition to freezing the fugue chest, we also have What can be done? Nothing. Only that. Despite the doctor's warning that it might kill the child, it was always Thor's last chance. But then, what about Braun?) The consul was thirsty, and he pulled back his cloak, but now the rain was light enough to drizzle, just enough to wet his lips and make him thirstier.Maybe he could just lean over to the river and spend a little time filling his water bottle. The falcon magic carpet stopped flying at a height of thirty meters above the river.One second it was slowly falling, and it was placed smoothly on the slightly inclined glass plate, and the next second, it rolled and fell completely out of control. A two-meter-long blanket and a frightened Man, as if thrown out of the window of a tenth-floor building. The Consul screamed and tried to jump away, but the rope binding him to the blanket and the duffel straps to his belt both entangled him in the magic carpet of the flying falcon, and he twisted along the way. Rolling and falling twenty meters into the Huli River waiting below.