by Dan Simmons
My last hours were spent pondering the folly of my short, useless life. I regretted nothing but also had little to show for Raul Endymion’s twenty-seven years on Hyperion. The dominant theme of my life seemed to be the same perverse stubbornness that had led me to reject resurrection.
So you owe the Church a lifetime of service, whispered a frenzied voice in the back of my skull, at least you get a lifetime that way! And more lifetimes beyond that! How can you turn down a deal like that? Anything’s better than real death … your rotting corpse being fed to the ampreys, coelacanths, and skarkworms. Think about this! I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep just to flee from the shouts echoing in my own mind.
The night lasted an eternity, but sunrise still seemed to come early. Four guards walked me to the death chamber, strapped me into a wooden chair, and then sealed the steel door. If I looked over my left shoulder, I could see faces peering through the Perspex. Somehow I had expected a priest—maybe not Father Tse again, but a priest, some representative of the Pax—to offer me one final chance at immortality. There was none. Only part of me was glad. I cannot say now whether I would have changed my mind at the last moment.
The method of execution was simple and mechanical—not as ingenious as a Schrödinger cat box, perhaps, but clever nonetheless. A short-range deathwand was set on the wall and aimed at the chair where I sat. I saw the red light click on the small comlog unit attached to the weapon. Prisoners in adjoining cells had gleefully whispered the mechanics of my death to me even before the sentence had been passed. The comlog computer had a random-number generator. When the number generated was a prime smaller than seventeen, the deathwand beam would be activated. Every synapse in the gray lump that was the personality and memory of Raul Endymion would be fused. Destroyed. Melted down to the neuronic equivalent of radioactive slag. Autonomic functions would cease mere milliseconds later. My heart and breathing would stop almost as soon as my mind was destroyed. Experts said that death by deathwand was as painless a way to die as had ever been invented. Those resurrected after deathwand execution usually did not want to talk about the sensation, but the word in the cells was that it hurt like hell—as if every circuit in your brain were exploding.
I looked at the red light of the comlog and the business end of the short deathwand. Some wag had rigged an LED display so that I could see the numerals being generated. They flicked by like floor numbers on an elevator to hell: 26-74-109-19-37 … they had programmed the comlog to generate no numbers larger than 150 … 77-42-12-60-84-129-108-14-
I lost it then. I balled my fists, strained at the unyielding plastic straps, and screamed obscenities at the walls, at the pale faces distorted through the Perspex windows, at the fucking Church and its fucking Pax, at the fucking coward who’d killed my dog, at the goddamned fucking cowards who …
I did not see the low prime number appear on the display. I did not hear the deathwand hum softly as its beam was activated. I did feel something, a sort of hemlock coldness starting at the back of my skull and widening to every part of my body with the speed of nerve conduction, and I felt surprise at feeling something. The experts are wrong and the cons are right, I thought wildly. You can feel your own death by deathwand. I would have giggled then if the numbness had not flowed over me like a wave.
Like a black wave.
A black wave that carried me away with it.
4
I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead. At any rate, I awoke with no more discomfort than a vague tingling in my extremities and lay there watching sunlight crawl across a rough plaster ceiling for a minute or more until an urgent thought shook me full awake.
Wait a minute, wasn’t I … didn’t they … ??
I sat up and looked around. If there was any lingering sense that my execution had been a dream, the prosaic quality of my surroundings dispelled it immediately. The room was pie-shaped with a curved and whitewashed outer stone wall and thick plaster ceilings. The bed was the only piece of furniture, and the heavy off-white linen on it complemented the texture of plaster and stone. There was a massive wooden door—closed—and an arched window open to the elements. One glance at the lapis sky beyond the window told me that I was still on Hyperion. There was no chance that I was still in the Port Romance prison; the stone here was too old, the details of the door too ornamental, the quality of linen too good.
I rose, found myself naked, and walked to the window. The autumn breeze was brisk, but the sun was warm on my skin. I was in a stone tower. Yellow chalma and the thick tangle of low weirwood wove a solid canopy of treetops up hills to the horizon. Everblues grew on granite rock faces. I could see other walls, ramparts, and the curve of another tower stretching away along the ridgeline upon which this tower stood. The walls seemed old. The quality of their construction and the organic feel of their architecture was from an era of skill and taste long predating the Fall.
I guessed at once where I must be: the chalma and weirwood suggested that I was still on the southern continent of Aquila; the elegant ruins spoke of the abandoned city of Endymion.
I had never been to the town from which my family took its surname, but I had heard many descriptions of it from Grandam, our clan storyteller. Endymion had been one of the first Hyperion cities settled after the dropship crash almost seven hundred years earlier. Until the Fall it had been famous for its fine university, a huge, castlelike structure that towered over the old town below it. Grandam’s great-grandfather’s grandfather had been a professor at the university until the Pax troops commandeered the entire region of central Aquila and literally sent thousands of people packing.
And now I had returned.
A bald man with blue skin and cobalt-blue eyes came through the door, set underwear and a simple daysuit of what looked like homespun cotton on the bed, and said, “Please get dressed.”
I admit that I stared silently as the man turned and went out the door. Blue skin. Bright-blue eyes. No hair. He … it … had to be the first android that I had ever seen. If asked, I would have said that there were no androids left on Hyperion. They had been illegal to biofacture since before the Fall, and although they had been imported by the legendary Sad King Billy to build most of the cities in the north centuries ago, I had never heard of one still existing on our world. I shook my head and got dressed. The daysuit fit nicely, despite my rather unusually large shoulders and long legs.
I was back at the window when the android returned. He stood by the open door and gestured with an open hand. “This way please, M. Endymion.”
I resisted the impulse to ask questions and followed him up the tower stairs. The room at the top took up the entire floor. Late-afternoon sunlight streamed in through yellow-and-red stained-glass windows. At least one window was open, and Icould hear the rustle of the leaf canopy far below as a wind came up from the valley.
This room was as white and bare as my cell had been, except for a cluster of medical equipment and communication consoles in the center of the circle. The android left, closing the heavy door behind him, and it took me a second to realize that there was a human being in the locus of all that equipment.
At least I thought it was a human being.
The man was lying on a flowfoam hoverchair bed that had been adjusted to a sitting position. Tubes, IV drips, monitor filaments, and organic-looking umbilicals ran from the equipment to the wizened figure in the chair. I say “wizened,” but in truth the man’s body looked almost mummified, the skin wrinkled like the folds of an old leather jacket, the skull mottled and almost perfectly bald, the arms and legs emaciated to the point of being vestigial appendages. Everything about the old man’s posture made me think of a wrinkled and featherless baby bird that had fallen out of the nest. His parchment skin had a blue cast to it that made me think android for a moment, but then I saw the different shade of blue, the faint glow of the palms, ribs, and forehead, and realized that I was looking at a real human who had enjoyed—
or suffered—centuries of Poulsen treatments.
No one receives Poulsen treatments anymore. The technology was lost in the Fall, as were the raw materials from worlds lost in time and space. Or so I thought. But here was a creature at least many centuries old who must have received Poulsen treatments as recently as decades ago.
The old man opened his eyes.
I have since seen eyes with as much power as his, but nothing in my life to that point had prepared me for the intensity of such a gaze. I think I took a step back.
“Come closer, Raul Endymion.” The voice was like the scraping of a dull blade on parchment. The old man’s mouth moved like a turtle’s beak.
I stepped closer, stopping only when a com console stood between me and the mummified form. The old man blinked and lifted a bony hand that still seemed too heavy for the twig of a wrist. “Do you know who I am?” The scratch of a voice was as soft as a whisper.
I shook my head.
“Do you know where you are?”
I took a breath. “Endymion. The abandoned university, I think.”
The wrinkles folded back in a toothless smile. “Very good. The namesake recognizes the heaps of stone which named his family. But you do not know who I might be?”
“No.”
“And you have no questions about how you survived your execution?”
I stood at parade rest and waited.
The old man smiled again. “Very good, indeed. All things come to him who waits. And the details are not that enlightening … bribes in high places, a stunner substituted for the deathwand, more bribes to those who certify the death and dispose of the body. It is not the ‘how’ we are interested in, is it, Raul Endymion?”
“No,” I said at last. “Why.”
The turtle’s beak twitched, the massive head nodded. I noticed now that even through the damage of centuries, the face was still sharp and angular—a satyr’s countenance.
“Precisely,” he said. “Why? Why go to the trouble of faking your execution and transporting your fucking carcass across half a fucking continent? Why indeed?”
The obscenities did not seem especially harsh from the old man’s mouth. It was as if he had sprinkled his speech with them for so long that they deserved no special emphasis. I waited.
“I want you to run an errand for me, Raul Endymion.” The old man’s breath wheezed. Pale fluid flowed through the intravenous tubes.
“Do I have a choice?”
The face smiled again, but the eyes were as unchanging as the stone in the walls. “We always have choices, dear boy. In this case you can ignore any debt you might owe me for saving your life and simply leave here … walk away. My servants will not stop you. With luck you will get out of this restricted area, find your way back to more civilized regions, and avoid Pax patrols where your identity and lack of papers might be … ah … embarrassing.”
I nodded. My clothes, chronometer, work papers, and Pax ID were probably in Toschahi Bay by now. Working as a hunting guide in the fens made me forget how often the authorities checked IDs in the cities. I would soon be reminded if I wandered back to any of the coastal cities or inland towns. And even rural jobs such as shepherd and guide required Pax ID for tax and tithe forms. Which left hiding in the interior for the rest of my life, living off the land and avoiding people.
“Or,” said the old man, “you can run an errand for me and become rich.” He paused, his dark eyes inspecting me the way I had seen professional hunters inspect pups that might or might not prove to be good hunting dogs.
“Tell me,” I said.
The old man closed his eyes and rattled in a deep breath. He did not bother to open his eyes when he spoke. “Can you read, Raul Endymion?”
“Yes.”
“Have you read the poem known as the Cantos?”
“No.”
“But you have heard some of it? Surely, being born into one of the nomadic shepherd clans of the north, the storyteller has touched on the Cantos?” There was a strange tone in the cracked voice. Modesty, perhaps.
I shrugged. “I’ve heard bits of it. My clan preferred the Garden Epic or the Glennon-Height Saga”
The satyr features creased into a smile. “The Garden Epic. Yes. Raul was a centaur-hero in that, was he not?”
I said nothing. Grandam had loved the character of the centaur named Raul. My mother and I both had grown up listening to tales of him.
“Do you believe the stories?” snapped the old man. “The Cantos tales, I mean.”
“Believe them?” I said. “That they actually happened that way? The pilgrims and the Shrike and all that?” I paused a minute. There were those who believed all the tall tales told in the Cantos. And there were those who believed none of it, that it was all myth and maundering thrown together to add mystery to the ugly war and confusion that was the Fall. “I never really thought about it,” I said truthfully. “Does it matter?”
The old man seemed to be choking, but then I realized that the dry, rattling sounds were chuckles. “Not really,” he said at last. “Now, listen. I will tell you the outline of the … errand. It takes energy for me to speak, so save your questions for when I am finished.” He blinked and gestured with his mottled claw toward the chair covered with a white sheet. “Do you wish to sit?”
I shook my head and remained at parade rest.
“All right,” said the old man. “My story begins almost two hundred seventy-some years ago during the Fall. One of the pilgrims in the Cantos was a friend of mine. Her name was Brawne Lamia. She was real. After the Fall … after the death of the Hegemony and the opening of the Time Tombs … Brawne Lamia gave birth to a daughter. The child’s name was Diana, but the little girl was headstrong and changed her name almost as soon as she was old enough to talk. For a while she was known as Cynthia, then Cate … short for Hecate … and then, when she turned twelve, she insisted that her friends and family call her Temis. When I last saw her, she was called Aenea.…” I heard the name as Ah-nee-a.
The old man stopped and squinted at me. “You think this is not important, but names are important. If you had not been named after this city, which was in turn named after an ancient poem, then you would not have come to my attention and you could not be here today. You would be dead. Feeding the skarkworms in the Great South Sea. Do you understand, Raul Endymion?”
“No,” I said.
He shook his head. “It does not matter. Where was I?”
“The last time you saw the child, she called herself Aenea.”
“Yes.” The old man closed his eyes again. “She was not an especially attractive child, but she was … unique. Everyone who knew her felt that she was different. Special. Not spoiled, despite all the nonsense with the name changes. Just … different.” He smiled, showing pink gums. “Have you ever met someone who is profoundly different, Raul Endymion?”
I hesitated only a second. “No,” I said. It was not quite true. This old man was different. But I knew he was not asking that.
“Cate … Aenea … was different,” he said, eyes closed again. “Her mother knew it. Of course, Brawne knew that the child was special before she was born.…” He stopped and opened his eyes enough to squint at me. “You’ve heard this part of the Cantos?
“Yes,” I said. “It was foretold by a cybrid entity that the woman named Lamia was to give birth to a child known as the One Who Teaches.”
I thought that the old man was going to spit. “A stupid title. No one called Aenea that during the time I knew her. She was simply a child, brilliant and headstrong, but a child. Everything that was unique was unique only in potential. But then …”
His voice trailed off and his eyes seemed to film over. It was as if he had lost track of the conversation. I waited.
“But then Brawne Lamia died,” he said several minutes later, voice stronger, as if there had been no gap in the monologue, “and Aenea disappeared. She was twelve. Technically, I was her guardian, but she did not ask my permission to disappear. On
e day she left and I never heard from her again.” Here the story paused again, as if the old man were a machine that ran down occasionally and required some internal rewinding.
“Where was I?” he said at last.
“You never heard from her again.”
“Yes. I never heard from her, but I know where she went and when she will reappear. The Time Tombs are off-limits now, guarded from public view by the Pax troops stationed there, but do you remember the names and functions of the tombs, Raul Endymion?”
I grunted. Grandam used to grill me on aspects of the oral tales in much this way. I used to think that Grandam was old. Next to this ancient, wizened thing, Grandam had been an infant. “I think I remember the tombs,” I said. “There was the one called the Sphinx, the Jade Tomb, the Obelisk, the Crystal Monolith, where the soldier was buried …”
“Colonel Fedmahn Kassad,” muttered the old man. Then his gaze returned to me. “Go on.”
“The three Cave Tombs …”
“Only the Third Cave Tomb led anywhere,” interrupted the old man again. “To labyrinths on other worlds. The Pax sealed it. Go on.”
“That’s all I can remember … oh, the Shrike Palace.”
The old man showed a turtle’s sharp smile. “One mustn’t forget the Shrike Palace or our old friend the Shrike, must one? Is that all of them?”
“I think so,” I said. “Yes.”
The mummified figure nodded. “Brawne Lamia’s daughter disappeared through one of these tombs. Can you guess which one?”
“No.” I did not know, but I suspected.
“Seven days after Brawne died, the girl left a note, went to the Sphinx in the dead of night, and disappeared. Do you remember where the Sphinx led, boy?”
“According to the Cantos,” I said, “Sol Weintraub and his daughter traveled to the distant future through the Sphinx.”