by Dan Simmons
“I understand,” says the Jesuit, and bows his head in compliance.
THE ARCHANGEL-CLASS COURIER SHIP HAS NO name. De Soya had never considered torchships beautiful—gourd-shaped, the command and weapons mod dwarfed by the huge Hawking drive and in-system fusion-thrust sphere—but the archangel is actively ugly in comparison. The courier ship is a mass of asymmetrical spheres, dodecahedrons, lash-ons, structural cables, and Hawking-drive mounts, with the passenger cabin the merest of afterthoughts in the center of all that junk.
De Soya had met briefly with Hearn, Boulez, and Stone, explained only that he had been called away, and transferred command to the new—and amazed—task force and Balthasar captains, then took a one-person transfer pod to the archangel. De Soya tried not to look back at his beloved Balthasar, but at the last moment before attaching to the courier, he turned and looked longingly at the torchship, sunlight painting its curved flank into a crescentlike sunrise over some lovely world, then turned resolutely away.
He sees upon entering that the archangel has only the crudest virtual tactical command, manual controls, and bridge. The interior of the command pod is not much larger than de Soya’s crowded cubby on the Balthasar; although this space is crowded with cables, fiber-optic leads, tech diskeys, and two acceleration couches. The only other space is the tiny navigation room-cum-wardrobe cubby.
No, de Soya sees at once, the acceleration couches are not standard. These are unpadded steel trays in human form, more like autopsy slabs than couches. The trays have a lip—to keep fluid from sloshing under high-g, he is sure—and he realizes that the only compensating containment field in the ship would be around these couches—to keep the pulverized flesh, bone, and brain matter from floating away in the zero-g intervals after final deceleration. De Soya can see the nozzles where water or some cleansing solution had been injected at high speed to clean the steel. It had not been totally successful.
“Acceleration in two minutes,” says a metallic voice. “Strap in now.”
No niceties, thinks de Soya. Not even a “please.”
“Ship?” he says. He knows that no true AIs are allowed on Pax ships—indeed, no AIs are allowed anywhere in Pax-controlled human space—but he thinks that the Vatican might have made an exception on one of its archangel-class courier ships.
“One minute thirty seconds until initial acceleration,” comes the metallic voice, and de Soya realizes that he is talking to an idiot machine. He hurries to strap himself in. The bands are broad, thick, and almost surely for show. The containment field will hold him—or his remains—in place.
“Thirty seconds,” says the idiot voice. “Be advised that the C-plus translation will be lethal.”
“Thanks,” says Father Captain Federico de Soya. His heart is pounding so fiercely that he can hear it in his ears. Lights flicker in the various instruments. Nothing here is meant for human override, so de Soya ignores them.
“Fifteen seconds,” says the ship. “You might wish to pray now.”
“Fuck you,” says de Soya. He has been praying since he left the courier’s recovery room. Now he adds a final prayer for forgiveness for the obscenity.
“Five seconds,” comes the voice. “There will be no further communications. May God bless you and speed your resurrection, in Christ’s name.”
“Amen,” says Father Captain de Soya. He closes his eyes as acceleration commences.
8
Evening came early in the ruined city of Endymion. I watched the last of the autumn light dim and die from my vantage point in the tower where I had awakened earlier on this endless day. A. Bettik had led me back, shown me to my room, where stylish but simple evening clothes—tan cotton trousers tightening just below the knees, white flax blouse with a hint of ruffled sleeves, black leather vest, black stockings, soft black leather boots, and a gold wristband—were still laid out on the bed. The android also showed me to the toilet and bathing facilities a floor below and told me that the thick cotton robe hanging on the door was for my use. I thanked him, bathed, dried my hair, dressed in everything that had been laid out except for the gold band, and waited at the window while the light grew more golden and horizontal and shadows crept down from the hills above the university. When the light had died to the point where shadows had fled and the brightest stars in the Swan were visible above the mountains to the east, A. Bettik returned.
“Is it time?” I asked.
“Not quite, sir,” replied the android. “Earlier you requested that I return so that we might talk.”
“Ahh, yes,” I said, and gestured toward the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room. “Have a seat.”
The blue-skinned man stood where he was by the door. “I am comfortable standing, sir.”
I folded my arms and leaned against the windowsill. The air coming in the open window was cool and smelled of chalma. “You don’t have to call me sir,” I said. “Raul will do.” I hesitated. “Unless you’re programmed to talk to … ah …” I was about to say “humans,” but did not want to make it seem as if I thought A. Bettik was not human. “… to talk to people that way,” I finished lamely.
A. Bettik smiled. “No, sir. I am not programmed at all … not like a machine. Except for several synthetic prostheses—to augment strength, for instance, or to provide resistance to radiation—I have no artificial parts. I was merely taught deference to fulfill my role. I could call you M. Endymion, if that would be preferable.”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I’m so ignorant about androids.”
A. Bettik’s thin-lipped smile returned. “There is no need to apologize, M. Endymion. Very few human beings now alive have seen one of my race.”
My race. Interesting. “Tell me about your race,” I said. “Wasn’t the biofacture of androids illegal in the Hegemony?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. I noticed that he stood at parade rest, and wondered idly if he had ever served in a military capacity. “Biofacture of androids was illegal on Old Earth and many of the Hegemony homeworlds even before the Hegira, but the All Thing allowed biofacture of a certain number of androids for use in the Outback. Hyperion was part of the Outback in those days.”
“It still is,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
“When were you biofactured? Which worlds did you live on? What were your duties?” I asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Not at all, M. Endymion,” he said softly. The android’s voice had the hint of a dialect that was new to me. Offworld. Ancient. “I was created in the year 26 A.D.C. by your calendar.”
“In the twenty-fifth century, A.D.,” I said. “Six hundred ninety-four years ago.”
A. Bettik nodded and said nothing.
“So you were born … biofactured … after Old Earth was destroyed,” I said, more to myself than to the android.
“Yes, sir.”
“And was Hyperion your first … ah … work destination?”
“No, sir,” said A. Bettik. “For the first half century of my existence, I worked on Asquith in the service of His Royal Highness, King Arthur the Eighth, sovereign lord of the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile, and also in the service of his cousin, Prince Rupert of Monaco-in-Exile. When King Arthur died, he willed me to his son, His Royal Highness, King William the Twenty-third.”
“Sad King Billy,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And did you come to Hyperion when Sad King Billy fled Horace Glennon-Height’s rebellion?”
“Yes,” said A. Bettik. “Actually, my android brothers and I were sent ahead to Hyperion some thirty-two years before His Highness and the other colonists joined us. We were dispatched here after General Glennon-Height won the Battle of Fomalhaut. His Highness thought it wise if an alternate site for the kingdoms-in-exile were prepared.”
“And that’s when you met M. Silenus,” I prompted, pointing toward the ceiling, imagining the old poet up there within his web of life-support umbilicals.
“No,” said
the android. “My duties did not bring me into contact with M. Silenus during the years when the Poet’s City was occupied. I had the pleasure of meeting M. Silenus later, during his pilgrimage to the Valley of the Time Tombs two and a half centuries after the death of His Highness.”
“And you’ve been on Hyperion since,” I said. “More than five hundred years on this world.”
“Yes, M. Endymion.”
“Are you immortal?” I asked, knowing the question was impertinent but wanting the answer.
A. Bettik showed his slight smile. “Not at all, sir. I will die from accident or injury that is too serious for me to be repaired. It is just that when I was biofactured, my cells and systems were nanoteched with an ongoing form of Poulsen treatments so that I am essentially resistant to aging and disease.”
“Is that why androids are blue?” I asked.
“No, sir,” said A. Bettik. “We are blue because no known race of humankind was blue at the time of my biofacture, and my designers felt it imperative to keep us visually separate from humans.”
“You do not consider yourself human?” I asked.
“No, sir,” said A. Bettik. “I consider myself android.”
I smiled at my own naïveté. “You still act in a service capacity,” I said. “Yet use of slave android labor was outlawed throughout the Hegemony centuries ago.”
A. Bettik waited.
“Don’t you wish to be free?” I said at last. “To be an independent person in your own right?”
A. Bettik walked to the bed. I thought that he was going to sit down, but he only folded and stacked the shirt and trousers I had been wearing earlier. “M. Endymion,” he said, “I should point out that although the laws of the Hegemony died with the Hegemony, I have considered myself a free and independent person for some centuries now.”
“Yet you and the others work for M. Silenus here, in hiding,” I persisted.
“Yes, sir, but I have done so from my own free choice. I was designed to serve humanity. I do it well. I take pleasure in my work.”
“So you’ve stayed here by your own free will,” I perseverated.
A. Bettik nodded and smiled briefly. “Yes, for as much as any of us has a free will, sir.”
I sighed and pushed myself away from the window. It was full dark out now. I presumed that I would be summoned to the old poet’s dinner party before long. “And you will continue staying here and caring for the old man until he finally dies,” I said.
“No, sir,” said A. Bettik. “Not if I am consulted on the matter.”
I paused, my eyebrows lifting. “Really?” I said. “And where will you go if you are consulted on the matter?”
“If you choose to accept this mission which M. Silenus has offered you, sir,” said the blue-skinned man, “I would choose to go with you.”
WHEN I WAS LED UPSTAIRS, I DISCOVERED THAT the top floor was no longer a sickroom; it had been transformed into a dining room. The flowfoam hoverchair was gone, the medical monitors were gone, the communication consoles were absent, and the ceiling was open to the sky. I glanced up and located the constellations of the Swan and the Twin Sisters with the trained eye of a former shepherd. Braziers on tall tripods sat in front of each of the stained-glass windows, their flames adding both warmth and light to the room. In the center of the room, the com consoles had been replaced with a three-meter-long dining table. China, silver, and crystal glimmered in the light of candles flickering from two ornate candelabra. A place had been set at each end of the table. At the far end, Martin Silenus awaited, already seated in a tall chair.
The old poet was hardly recognizable. He seemed to have shed centuries in the hours since I had last seen him. From being a mummy with parchment skin and sunken eyes, he had transformed into just another old man at a dining table—a hungry old man from the look in his eyes. As I approached the table, I noticed the subtle IV drips and monitor filaments snaking under the table, but otherwise the illusion of someone restored to life from the dead was almost perfect.
Silenus chuckled at my expression. “You caught me at my worst this afternoon, Raul Endymion,” he rasped. The voice was still harsh with age, but much more forceful than before. “I was still recovering from my cold sleep.” He gestured me to my place at the other end of the table.
“Cryogenic fugue?” I said stupidly, unfurling the linen napkin and dropping it to my lap. It had been years since I had eaten at a table this fancy—the day that I had demobilized from the Home Guard, I had gone straight to the best restaurant in the port city of Gran Chaco on South Talon Peninsula and ordered the finest meal on the menu, blowing my last month’s pay in the process. It had been worth it.
“Of course cryogenic fucking fugue,” said the old poet. “How else do you think I pass these decades?” He chuckled again. “It merely takes me a few days to get up to speed again after defrosting. I’m not as young as I used to be.”
I took a breath. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” I said, “how old are you?”
The poet ignored me and beckoned to the waiting android—not A. Bettik—who nodded toward the stairwell. Other androids began carrying up the food in silence. My water glass was filled. I watched as A. Bettik showed a bottle of wine to the poet, waited for the old man’s nod, and then went through the ritual, offering him the cork and a sample to taste. Martin Silenus sloshed the vintage wine around in his mouth, swallowed, and grunted. A. Bettik took this for assent and poured the wine for each of us.
The appetizers arrived, two for each of us. I recognized the charbroiled chicken yakitori and the tender Mane-raised beef carpaccio arugula. In addition, Silenus helped himself to the sautéed foie gras wrapped in mandrake leaves that had been set near his end of the table. I lifted the ornamented skewer and tried the yakitori. It was excellent.
Martin Silenus might be eight or nine hundred years old, perhaps the oldest human alive, but the codger had an appetite. I saw the gleam of perfect white teeth as he attacked the beef carpaccio, and I wondered if these new additions were dentures or Arnied substitutes. Probably the latter.
I realized that I was ravenous. Evidently either my pseudo-resurrection or the exercise involved in climbing to the ship had instilled an appetite in me. For several minutes there was no conversation, only the soft sound of the serving androids’ footsteps on stones, the crackle of flames in the braziers, an occasional hint of night breeze overhead, and the sounds of our chewing.
As the androids removed our appetizer plates and brought in bowls of steaming black mussel bisque, the poet said, “I understand that you met our ship today.”
“Yes,” I said. “It was the Consul’s private ship?”
“Of course.” Silenus gestured to an android, and bread was brought still hot from the oven. The smell of it mingled with the rising vapors from the bisque and the hint of autumn foliage on the breeze.
“And this is the ship you expect me to use to rescue the girl?” I said. I expected the poet to ask for my decision then.
Instead, he said, “What do you think of the Pax, M. Endymion?”
I blinked, the spoon of bisque halfway to my mouth. “The Pax?”
Silenus waited.
I set the spoon back and shrugged. “I don’t think much of it, I guess.”
“Not even after one of its courts sentenced you to death?”
Instead of sharing what I had been thinking earlier—how it had not been the Pax influence that sentenced me, but Hyperion’s brand of frontier justice—I said, “No. The Pax has been mostly irrelevant to my life.”
The old poet nodded and sipped his bisque. “And the Church?”
“What about it, sir?”
“Has it been largely irrelevant to your life?”
“I guess so.” I realized that I was sounding like a tongue-tied adolescent, but these questions seemed less important than the question he was supposed to ask me, and the decision I was supposed to give him.
“I remember the first time we heard of the Pax,”
he said. “It was only a few months after Aenea disappeared. Church ships arrived in orbit, and troops seized Keats, Port Romance, Endymion, the university, all of the spaceports and important cities. Then they lifted off in combat skimmers, and we realized that they were after the cruciforms on the Pinion Plateau.”
I nodded. None of this was new information. The occupation of the Pinion Plateau and search for cruciforms had been the last great gamble of a dying Church, and the beginning of the Pax. It had been almost a century and a half before real Pax troops had arrived to occupy all of Hyperion and to order the evacuation of Endymion and other towns near the Plateau.
“But the ships which put in here during the expansion of the Pax,” continued the poet, “what tales they brought! The Church’s expansion from Pacem through the old Web worlds, then the Outback colonies …”
The androids removed the bisque bowls and returned with plates of carved fowl with pommery mustard sauce and a gratin of Kans River manta with caviar mousseline.
“Duck?” I said.
The poet showed his reconstituted teeth. “It seemed appropriate after your … ah … trouble of the last week.”
I sighed and touched the slice of fowl with my fork. Moist vapors rose to my cheek and eyes. I thought of Izzy’s eagerness as the ducks approached the open water. It seemed a lifetime ago. I looked at Martin Silenus and tried to imagine having centuries of memories to contend with. How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind? The old poet was grinning at me in that wild way of his, and once again I wondered if he was sane.
“So we heard about the Pax and wondered what it would be like when it truly arrived,” he continued, chewing while he spoke. “A theocracy … unthinkable during the centuries of the Hegemony. Religion then was, of course, purely personal choice—I belonged to a dozen religions and started more than one of my own during my days as a literary celebrity.” He looked at me with bright eyes. “But of course you know that, Raul Endymion. You know the Cantos.”
I tasted the manta and said nothing.