by Dan Simmons
Suddenly Mother Commander Stone interrupts. “Sir, a Hawking-drive distortion reading up-angle seventy-two, coordinates two-twenty-nine, forty-three, one-oh-five. C-plus exit point at seven-oh-oh-point-five-thousand klicks. Probability of single vehicle, ninety-six percent. Relative velocity unknown.”
“Full battle stations,” says de Soya. He smiles slightly without being aware of doing so. Perhaps the Ousters are rushing to the rescue of their forest. Or perhaps there was a single defender and it has just launched a standoff weapon from somewhere beyond the system’s Oort cloud. Or perhaps it is the vanguard of an entire Swarm of Ouster fighting units and his task force is doomed. Whatever the threat, Father Captain de Soya prefers a fight to this … this vandalism.
“Vehicle is translating,” reports the acquisition officer from his perch above de Soya’s head.
“Very good,” says Father Captain de Soya. He watches displays flicker before his eyes, resets his shunt, and opens several virtual-optic channels. Now the C3 fades away and he stands in space, a giant five million klicks tall, seeing his own ships like specks with flaming tails, the curved column of smoke that is the destroyed forest bending past at belt height, and now this intruder flicking into existence seven hundred thousand klicks and an armreach above the plane of the ecliptic. Red spheres around his ships show external fields at combat strength. Other colors fill space, displaying sensor readings, acquisition pulses, and targeting preparation. Working on the millisecond tactical level, de Soya can launch weapons or unleash energies by pointing and snapping his fingers.
“Transponder beacon,” reports the com officer. “Current codes check. It is a Pax courier. Archangel class.”
De Soya frowns. What can be so important that the Pax Command is sending the Vatican’s fastest vehicle—a craft so swift that it is also the Pax’s greatest secret weapon? De Soya can see the Pax codes surrounding the tiny ship in tactical space. Its fusion flame reaches scores of kilometers. The ship is using almost no energy on internal containment fields, and the gravities involved are beyond raspberry-jam levels.
“Uncrewed?” queries de Soya. He desperately hopes so. Archangel-class ships can travel anywhere in known space within days—real-time days!—rather than the weeks of shiptime and years of real time demanded by all other craft—but no one survives archangel voyages.
Mother Commander Stone steps into the tactical environment with him. Her black tunic is almost invisible against space so that her pale face seems to float above the ecliptic, sunlight from the virtual star illuminating her sharp cheekbones. “No, sir,” she says softly. Her voice can be heard only by de Soya in this mode. “Beacon indicates two members of the crew in fugue.”
“Dear Jesus,” whispers de Soya. It is more prayer than curse. Even in high-g fugue tanks, these two people, already killed during C-plus travel, will now be more a microthin layer of protein paste than healthy raspberry jam. “Prepare the resurrection creches,” he says on the common band.
Mother Commander Stone touches the shunt behind her ear and frowns. “Message embedded in code. Human couriers are to be resurrected priority alpha. Dispensation level Omega.”
Father Captain de Soya’s head snaps around and he stares at his executive officer for a silent moment. The smoke from the burning orbital forest swirls around their waists. Priority resurrection defies the doctrine of the Church and the rules of Pax Command; it is also dangerous—the chances for incomplete reintegration go from near zero at the usual three-day rate, to almost fifty percent at the three-hour level. And priority level Omega means His Holiness on Pacem.
De Soya sees the knowledge in his exec’s eyes. This courier ship is from the Vatican. Either someone there or someone in Pax Command, or both, considered this message important enough to send an irreplaceable archangel courier ship, to kill two high-ranking Pax officers—since no one else would be trusted with an archangel—and to risk incomplete reintegration of those same two officers.
In tactical space de Soya raises his eyebrows in response to his exec’s questioning look. On the command band he says, “Very well, Commander. Instruct all three ships to match velocities. Prepare a boarding party. I want the fugue tanks transferred and the resurrections completed by oh-six-thirty hours. Please give my compliments to Captain Hearn on the Melchior and Mother Captain Boulez on the Gaspar, and ask them to join me on the Balthasar for a meeting with the couriers at oh-seven-hundred. “
Father Captain de Soya steps from tactical space to the reality of the C3. Stone and the others are still looking at him.
“Quickly,” says de Soya, and kicks off from the display rim, flying across the space to his private door and pulling himself through the circular hatch. “Wake me when the couriers are resurrected,” he says to the white faces watching him in the seconds before the door irises shut.
6
I walked the streets of Endymion and tried to come to grips with my life, my death, and my life again.
I should say here that I was not as cool about these things—my trial, my “execution,” my strange meeting with this mythic old poet—as this narrative would suggest. Part of me was shaken to its core. They had tried to kill me! I wanted to blame the Pax, but the courts were not agents of the Pax—not directly. Hyperion had its own Home Rule Council, and the Port Romance courts were set up according to our own local politics. Capital punishment was not an inevitable Pax sentence, especially on those worlds where the Church governed via theocracy, but was a holdover from Hyperion’s old colonial days. My quick trial, its inevitable outcome, and my summary execution were, if anything, more expressions of Hyperion’s and Port Romance’s business leaders’ terror of frightening away Pax offworld tourists than anything else. I was a peasant, a hunting guide who had killed the rich tourist assigned to my care, and an example had been made of me. Nothing more. I should not take it personally.
I took it very personally. Pausing outside the tower, feeling the sun’s heat bounced from the broad paving stones of the courtyard, I slowly raised my hands. They were shaking. Too much had happened too soon, and my enforced calm during the trial and the brief period before my execution had demanded too much from me.
I shook my head and walked slowly through the university ruins. The city of Endymion had been built high on a brow of a hill, and the university had sat even higher along this ridge during colonial days, so the view to the south and east was beautiful. Chalma forests in the valley below glowed bright yellow. The lapis sky was free of contrails or airship traffic. I knew that the Pax cared nothing about Endymion, that it was the Pinion Plateau region to the northeast that their troops still guarded and their robots still mined for the unique cruciform symbiotes, but this entire section of the continent had been offlimits for so many decades that it had a fresh, wilderness feel to it.
Within ten minutes of idle walking, I realized that only the tower where I had awakened and its surrounding buildings seemed occupied. The rest of the university was in absolute ruins—its great halls open to the elements, its physical plant ransacked centuries before, its playing fields overgrown, its observatory dome shattered—and the city farther down the hillside looked even more abandoned. I saw entire city blocks there reclaimed by weirwood tangle and kudzu.
I could see that the university had been beautiful in its day: post-Hegira, neo-Gothic buildings were constructed of the sandstone blocks quarried not far from there in the foothills of the Pinion Plateau. Three years earlier, when I had worked as an assistant to the famous landscape artist Avrol Hume, doing much of the heavy work as he redesigned the First Family estates along the fashionable coast of the Beak, much of the demand then had been for “follies”—ersatz ruins set near ponds or forest or hilltop. I had become somewhat of an expert in setting old stones in artful states of decomposition to simulate ruins—most of them absurdly older than humankind’s history on this Outback world—but none of Hume’s follies had been as attractive as these real ruins. I wandered through the bones of a once-great university
, admired the architecture, and thought of my family.
Adding the name of a local city to our own had been the tradition of most indigenie families—for my family was indeed indigenie, descended from those first seedship pioneers almost seven centuries earlier, third-class citizens on our own world: third now after the Pax offworlders and the Hegira colonists who came centuries after my ancestors. For centuries, then, my people had lived and worked in these valleys and mountains. Mostly, I was sure, my indigenie relatives had labored at menial jobs—much as my father had before his early death, when I was eight, much as my mother had continued to until her death five years later, much as I had until this week. My grandmother had been born the decade after everyone had been removed from these regions by the Pax, but Grandam was old enough actually to remember the days when our clan families roamed as far as the Pinion Plateau and worked on the fiberplastic plantations to the south of here.
I had no sense of homecoming. The cold moors of the area northeast of here were my home. The fens north of Port Romance had been my chosen place to live and work. This university and town had never been part of my life and held no more relevance to me than did the wild stories of the old poet’s Cantos.
At the base of another tower, I paused to catch my breath and consider this last thought. If the poet’s offer was real, the “wild stories” of the Cantos would hold every relevance for me. I thought of Grandam’s recitation of that epic poem—remembered the nights watching the sheep in the north hills, our battery-driven caravans pulled in a protective circle for the night, the low cooking fires doing little to dim the glory of the constellations or meteor showers above, remembered Grandam’s slow, measured tones until she finished each stanza and waited for me to recite the lines back to her, remembered my own impatience at the process—I would much rather have been sitting by lantern reading a book—and smiled to think that this evening I would be dining with the author of those lines. More, the old poet was one of the seven pilgrims whom the poem sang about.
I shook my head again. Too much. Too soon.
There was something odd about this tower. Larger and broader than the one in which I had awakened, this structure had only one window—an open archway thirty meters up the tower. More interestingly, the original doorway had been bricked up. With an eye educated by my seasons as bricklayer and mason under Avrol Hume, I guessed that the door had been closed up before the area had been abandoned a century ago—but not that long before.
To this day I do not know what drew my curiosity to that building when there were so many ruins to explore that afternoon—but curious I was. I remember looking up the steep hillside beyond the tower and noticing the riot of leafy chalma that had wound its way out and around the tower like thick-barked ivy. If one scrambled up the hillside and penetrated the chalma grove just … there … one could crawl out that vining branch and just barely reach the sill of that lone window.…
I shook my head again. This was nonsense. At the least, such a childish expedition would result in torn clothes and skinned hands. At the most, one could easily fall the thirty meters to the flagstones there. And why risk it? What could be in this old bricked-up tower other than spiders and cobwebs?
Ten minutes later I was far out on the curled chalma branch, inching my way along and trying to hang on by finding chinks in the stones or thick-enough branches on the vines above me. Because the branch grew against the stone wall, I could not straddle it. Rather, I had to shuffle along on my knees—the overhanging chalma vine was too low to allow me to stand—and the sense of exposure and of being pushed outward toward the drop was terrifying. Every time the autumn wind came up and shook the leaves and branches, I would stop moving and cling for all I was worth.
Finally I reached the window and began cursing softly. My calculations—so easily made from the pavement thirty meters below—had been off a bit. The chalma branch here was almost three meters below the sill of the open window. There were no usable toeholds or fingerholds in this expanse of stone. If I was to reach the sill, I would have to jump and hope that my fingers found a grasp there. That would be insane. There was nothing in this tower that could justify such a risk.
I waited for the wind to die down, crouched, and leaped. For a sickening second my curved fingers scrabbled backward on crumbling stone and dust, tearing my nails and finding no hold, but then they encountered the rotted remnants of the old windowsill and sank in. I pulled myself up, panting and ripping the shirt fabric over my elbows. The soft shoes A. Bettik had laid out for me scrambled against stone to find leverage.
And then I was up and curling myself onto the window ledge, wondering how in the hell I would get back down to the chalma branch. My concerns in that area were amplified a second later as I squinted into the darkened interior of the tower.
“Holy shit,” I whispered to no one in particular. There was an old wooden landing just below the window ledge on which Iclung, but the tower was essentially empty. The sunlight streaming through the window illuminated bits of a rotting stairway above and below the landing, spiraling around the inside of the tower much as the chalma vines wrapped around the exterior, but the center of the tower was thick with darkness. I glanced up and saw speckles of sunlight through what may have been a temporary wooden roof some thirty meters higher and realized that this tower was little more than a glorified grain silo—a giant stone cylinder sixty meters tall. No wonder it had needed only one window. No wonder the door had been bricked up even before the evacuation of Endymion.
Still maintaining my balance on the windowsill, not trusting the rotted landing inside, I shook my head a final time. My curiosity would get me killed someday.
Then, still squinting into the darkness so different from the rich afternoon sunlight outside, I realized that the interior was too dark. I could not see the wall or spiral staircase across the interior. I realized that scattered sunlight illuminated the stone interior here, I could see a bit of rotted stairway there, and the full cylinder of the inside was visible meters above me—but here, on my level, the majority of the interior was just … gone.
“Christ,” I whispered. Something was filling the bulk of this dark tower.
Slowly, careful to hold most of my weight on my arms still balanced on the sill, I lowered myself to the interior landing. The wood creaked but seemed solid enough. Hands still clutching the window frame, I let some of my weight on my feet and turned to look.
It still took me the better part of a minute to realize what I was looking at. A spaceship filled the inside of the tower like a bullet set into the chamber of an old-fashioned revolver.
Setting all my weight on the landing now, almost not caring if it held me, I stepped forward to see better.
The ship was not tall by spacecraft standards—perhaps fifty meters—and it was slender. The metal of the hull—if metal it was—looked matte black and seemed to absorb the light. There was no sheen or reflection that I could see. I made out the ship’s outline mostly by looking at the stone wall behind it and seeing where the stones and reflected light from them ended.
I did not doubt for an instant that this was a spaceship. It was almost too much a spaceship. I once read that small children on hundreds of worlds still draw houses by sketching a box with a pyramid on top, smoke spiraling from a rectangular chimney—even if the kids in question reside in organically grown living pods high in RNA’d residential trees. Similarly, they still draw mountains as Matterhorn-like pyramids, even if their own nearby mountains more resemble the rounded hills here at the base of the Pinion Plateau. I don’t know what the article said the reason was—racial memory, perhaps, or the brain being hardwired for certain symbols.
The thing I was looking at, peering at, seeing mostly as negative space, was not so much spaceship as SPACESHIP.
I have seen images of the oldest Old Earth rockets—pre-Pax, pre-Fall, pre-Hegemony, pre-Hegira … hell, pre-Everything almost—and they looked like this curved blackness. Tall, thin, graduated on both ends, point
ed on top, finned on the bottom—I was looking at the hardwired, racial-memoried, symbolically perfect image of SPACESHIP.
There were no private or misplaced spaceships on Hyperion. Of this I was sure. Spacecraft, even of the simple interplanetary variety, were simply too expensive and too rare to leave lying around in old stone towers. At one time, centuries ago before the Fall, when the resources of the WorldWeb seemed unlimited, there may have been a plethora of spacecraft—FORCE military, Hegemony diplomatic, planetary government, corporate, foundation, exploratory, even a few private ships belonging to hyperbillionaires—but even in those days only a planetary economy could afford to build a starship. In my lifetime—and the lifetime of my mother and grandmother and their mothers and grandmothers—only the Pax—that consortium of Church and crude interstellar government—could afford spaceships of any sort. And no individual in the known universe—not even His Holiness on Pacem—could afford a private starship.
And this was a starship. I knew it. Don’t ask me how I knew it, but I knew it.
Paying no attention to the terrible condition of the steps, I began descending and ascending the spiral stairway. The hull was four meters from me. The unfathomable blackness of it made me dizzy. Halfway around the interior of the tower and fifteen meters below me, just visible before the curve of blackness blocked it off, a landing extended almost to the hull itself.
I ran down to it. One rotted step actually broke under me, but I was moving so fast that I ignored it.
The landing had no railings here and extended out like a diving board. A fall from it would almost certainly break bones and leave me lying in the blackness of a sealed tower. I gave it no thought at all as I stepped out and set my palm against the hull of the ship.
The hull was warm. It did not feel like metal—more like the smooth skin of some sleeping creature. To add to that illusion, there was the softest movement and vibration from the hull—as if the ship were breathing, as if I could detect a heartbeat beneath my palm.