by Dan Simmons
“Most people I knew were Zen Christians,” he continued. “More Zen than Christian, of course, but not too much of either, actually. Personal pilgrimages were fun. Places of power, finding one’s Baedecker point, all of that crap …” He chuckled. “The Hegemony would never have dreamed of getting involved with religion, of course. The very thought of mixing government and religious opinion was barbaric … something one found on Qom-Riyadh or somesuch Outback desert world. And then came the Pax, with its glove of velvet and its cruciform of hope.…”
“The Pax doesn’t rule,” I said. “It advises.”
“Precisely,” agreed the old man, pointing his fork at me while A. Bettik refilled his wineglass. “The Pax advises. It does not rule. On hundreds of worlds the Church administers to the faithful and the Pax advises. But, of course, if you are a Christian who wishes to be born again, you will not ignore the advice of the Pax or the whispers of the Church, will you?”
I shrugged again. The influence of the Church had been a constant of life as long as I had been alive. There was nothing strange about it to me.
“But you are not a Christian who wishes to be born again, are you, M. Endymion?”
I looked at the old poet then, and a terrible suspicion formed in the back of my mind. He somehow finessed my fake execution and transported me here when I should have been buried at sea by the authorities. He has clout with the Port Romance authorities. Could he have dictated my conviction and sentencing? Was all this some sort of test?
“The question is,” he continued, ignoring my basilisk stare, “why are you not a Christian? Why do you not wish to be born again? Don’t you enjoy life, Raul Endymion?”
“I enjoy life,” I said tersely.
“But you have not accepted the cross,” he continued. “You have not accepted the gift of extended life.”
I put down my fork. An android servant interpreted that as a sign that I was finished and removed the plate of untouched duckling. “I have not accepted the cruciform,” I snapped. How to explain the suspicion bred into my nomadic clan through generations of being the expatriates, the outsiders, the unsettled indigenies? How to explain the fierce independence of people like Grandam and my mother? How to explain the legacy of philosophical rigor and inbred skepticism passed on to me by my education and upbringing? I did not try.
Martin Silenus nodded as if I had explained. “And you see the cruciform as something other than a miracle offered the faithful through the miraculous intercession of the Catholic Church?”
“I see the cruciform as a parasite,” I said, surprising myself by the vehemence in my voice.
“Perhaps you are afraid of losing … ah … your masculinity,” rasped the poet.
The androids brought in two swans sculpted of mocha chocolate and filled with highland branch-truffles and set them at our places. I ignored mine. In the Cantos the priest pilgrim—Paul Duré—tells his tale of discovering the lost tribe, the Bikura, and learning how they had survived centuries by a cruciform symbiote offered to them by the legendary Shrike. The cruciform resurrected them much as it did today, in the era of the Pax, only in the priest’s tale the side effects included irreversible brain damage after several resurrections and the disappearance of all sexual organs and impulses. The Bikura were retarded eunuchs—all of them.
“No,” I said. “I know that the Church has somehow solved that problem.”
Silenus smiled. He looked like a mummified satyr when he did that. “If one has taken Communion and if one is resurrected under the auspices of the Church,” he rasped. “Otherwise, even if one has somehow stolen a cruciform, his fate remains that of the Bikura.”
I nodded. Generations had attempted to steal immortality. Before the Pax sealed off the Plateau, adventurers smuggled out cruciforms. Other symbiotes had been stolen from the Church itself. The result had always been the same—idiocy and sexless-ness. Only the Church held the secret of successful resurrection.
“So?” I said.
“So why has allegiance to the Church and a tithing of every tenth year of service to the Church been too high a price for you, my boy? Billions have opted for life.”
I sat in silence for a moment. Finally I said, “Billions can do what they want. My life is important to me. I want to keep it … mine.”
This made no sense even to me, but the poet once again nodded as if I had explained matters to his satisfaction. He ate his chocolate swan while I watched. The androids removed our plates and filled our cups with coffee.
“All right,” the poet said, “have you thought about my proposition?”
The question was so absurd that I had to stifle the urge to laugh. “Yes,” I said at last. “I’ve thought about it.”
“And?”
“And I have a few questions.”
Martin Silenus waited.
“What is in this for me?” I asked. “You talk about the difficulty of my going back to a life here on Hyperion—lack of papers and all that—but you know I’m comfortable in the wilderness. It would be a hell of a lot easier for me to take off for the fens and avoid the Pax authorities than it would be to chase across space with your kid-friend in tow. Besides, to the Pax, I’m dead. I could go home to the moors and stay with my clan with no problem.”
Martin Silenus nodded.
After another moment of silence I said, “So why should I even consider this nonsense?”
The old man smiled. “You want to be a hero, Raul Endymion.”
I blew out my breath in derision and set my hands on the tablecloth. My fingers looked blunt and clumsy there, out of place against the fine linen.
“You want to be a hero,” he repeated. “You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I did, of course, but there was no way he could know me that well.
“I do know you that well,” said Martin Silenus, seemingly responding to my thought rather than my last statement.
I should say here that I did not think for a second that the old man was telepathic. First of all, I do not believe in telepathy—or, rather, I did not at that time—and secondly, I was more intrigued by the potential of a human being who had lived almost a thousand standard years. Why, even if he were insane, I thought, it was possible that he had learned to read facial expressions and physical nuance to the point where the effect would be almost indistinguishable from telepathy!
Or perhaps it was just a lucky guess.
“I don’t want to be a hero,” I said flatly. “I saw what happens to heroes when my brigade was sent to fight the rebels on the southern continent.”
“Ahh, Ursus,” he muttered. “The south polar bear. Hyperion’s most useless mass of ice and mud. I remember some rumors of a disturbance there.”
The war there had lasted eight Hyperion years and killed thousands of us local boys who were stupid enough to enlist in the Home Guard to fight there. Perhaps the old poet wasn’t as astute as I was making him out to be.
“I don’t mean hero as in the fools who throw themselves on plasma grenades,” he continued, licking his thin lips with a lizard’s flick of tongue. “I mean hero as in he whose prowess and beneficence is so legendary that he comes to be honored as a divinity. I mean hero in the literary sense, as in central protagonist given to forceful action. I mean hero as in he whose tragic flaws will be his undoing.” The poet paused and looked expectantly at me, but I stared back in silence.
“No tragic flaws?” he said at last. “Or not given to forceful action?”
“I don’t want to be a hero,” I said again.
The old man hunched over his coffee. When he looked up, his eyes held a mischievous glint. “Where do you get your hair cut, boy?”
“Pardon me?”
He licked his lips again. “You heard me. Your hair is long, but not wild. Where do you get it cut?”
I sighed and said, “Sometimes, when I w
as in the fens for a long period, I’d cut it myself, but when I’m in Port Romance, I go to a little shop on Datoo Street.”
“Ahhhh,” said Silenus, settling back in his tall-backed chair. “I know Datoo Street. It’s in the Night District. More of an alley than a street. The open market there used to sell ferrets in gilded cages. There were street barbers, but the best barbershop there belonged to an old man named Palani Woo. He had six sons, and as each came of age, he would add another chair to the shop.” The old eyes raised to look at me, and once again I was struck by the power of personality there. “That was a century ago,” he said.
“I get my hair cut at Woo’s,” I said. “Palani Woo’s great-grandson, Kalakaua, owns the shop now. There are still six chairs.”
“Yes,” said the poet, nodding to himself. “Not too much changes on our dear Hyperion, does it, Raul Endymion?”
“Is that your point?”
“Point?” he said, opening his hands as if showing that he had nothing so sinister as a point to hide. “No point. Conversation, my boy. It amuses me to think of World Historical Figures, much less heroes of future myths, paying to get their hair cut. I thought of this centuries ago, by the way … this strange disconnection between the stuff of myth and the stuff of life. Do you know what ‘Datoo’ means?”
I blinked at this sudden change of direction. “No.”
“A wind out of Gibraltar. It carried a beautiful fragrance. Some of the artists and poets who founded Port Romance must have thought that the chalma and weirwood forests which covered the hills above the bog there must have smelled nice. Do you know what Gibraltar is, boy?”
“No.”
“A big rock on Earth,” rasped the old man. He showed his teeth again. “Notice that I didn’t say Old Earth.”
I had noticed.
“Earth is Earth, boy. I lived there before it disappeared, so I should know.”
The thought still made me dizzy.
“I want you to find it,” said the poet, his eyes gleaming.
“Find … it?” I repeated. “Old Earth? I thought you wanted me to travel with the girl … Aenea.”
His bony hands waved away my sentence. “You go with her and you’ll find Earth, Raul Endymion.”
I nodded, all the while pondering the wisdom of explaining to him that Old Earth had been swallowed by the black hole dropped into its guts during the Big Mistake of ’08. But, then, this ancient creature had fled from that shattered world. It made little sense to contradict his delusions. His Cantos had mentioned some plot by the warring AI TechnoCore to steal Old Earth—to spirit it away to either the Hercules Cluster or the Magellanic Clouds, the Cantos were inconsistent—but that was fantasy. The Magellanic Cloud was a separate galaxy … more than 160,000 light-years from the Milky Way, if I remembered correctly … and no ship, neither Pax nor Hegemony, had ever been sent farther than our small sphere in one spiral arm of our galaxy—and even with the Hawking-drive exclusion to Einsteinian realities, a trip to the Large Magellanic Cloud would take many centuries of shiptime and tens of thousands of years’ time-debt. Even the Ousters who savored the dark places between the stars would not undertake a voyage like that.
Besides, planets are not kidnapped.
“I want you to find Earth and bring it back,” continued the old poet. “I want to see it again before I die. Will you do that for me, Raul Endymion?”
I looked the old man in the eye. “Sure,” I said. “Save this child from the Swiss Guard and the Pax, keep her safe until she becomes the One Who Teaches, find Old Earth and bring it back so you can see it again. Easy. Anything else?”
“Yes,” said Martin Silenus with the tone of absolute solemnity that comes with dementia, “I want you to find out what the fuck the TechnoCore is up to and stop it.”
I nodded again. “Find the missing TechnoCore and stop the combined power of thousands of godlike AIs from doing whatever they’re planning to do,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my tongue. “Check. Will do. Anything else?”
“Yes. You are to talk with the Ousters and see if they can offer me immortality … true immortality, not this born-again Christian bullshit.”
I pretended to write this on an invisible notepad. “Ousters … immortality … not Christian bullshit. Can do. Check. Anything else?”
“Yes, Raul Endymion. I want the Pax destroyed and the Church’s power toppled.”
I nodded. Two or three hundred known worlds had willingly joined the Pax. Trillions of humans had willingly been baptized in the Church. The Pax military was stronger than anything Hegemony Force had ever dreamed of at the height of its power. “OK,” I said. “I’ll take care ofthat. Anything else?”
“Yes. I want you to stop the Shrike from hurting Aenea or wiping out humanity.”
I hesitated at this. According to the old man’s own epic poem, the Shrike had been destroyed by the soldier Fedmahn Kassad in some future era. Knowing the futility of projecting logic into a demented conversation, I still mentioned this.
“Yes!” snapped the old poet. “But that is then. Millennia from now. I want you to stop the Shrike now.”
“All right,” I said. Why argue?
Martin Silenus slumped back in his chair, his energy seemingly dissipated. I glimpsed the animated mummy again in the folds of skin, the sunken eyes, the bony fingers. But those eyes still blazed with intensity. I tried to imagine the force of this man’s personality when he’d been in his prime: I could not.
Silenus nodded and A. Bettik brought two glasses and poured champagne.
“Then you accept, Raul Endymion?” asked the poet, his voice strong and formal. “You accept this mission to save Aenea, travel with her, and accomplish these other things?”
“With one condition,” I said.
Silenus frowned and waited.
“I want to take A. Bettik with me,” I said. The android still stood by the table. The champagne bottle was in his hand. His gaze was aimed straight forward, and he did not turn to look at either of us or register any emotion.
The poet showed surprise. “My android? Are you serious?”
“I am serious.”
“A. Bettik has been with me since before your great-great-grandmother had tits,” rasped the poet. His bony hand slammed down on the table hard enough to make me worry about brittle bones. “A. Bettik,” he snapped. “You wish to go?”
The blue-skinned man nodded without turning his head.
“Fuck it,” said the poet. “Take him. Do you want anything else, Raul Endymion? My hoverchair, perhaps? My respirator? My teeth?”
“Nothing else,” I said.
“And so, Raul Endymion,” said the poet, his voice formal once again, “do you accept this mission? Will you save, serve, and protect the child Aenea until her destiny is fulfilled … or die trying?”
“I accept,” I said.
Martin Silenus lifted his wineglass and I matched the motion. Too late, I thought that the android should be drinking with us, but by then the old poet was giving his toast.
“To folly,” he said. “To divine madness. To insane quests and messiahs crying from the desert. To the death of tyrants. To confusion to our enemies.”
I started to raise the glass to my lips, but the old man was not done.
“To heroes,” he said. “To heroes who get their hair cut.” He drank the champagne in one gulp.
And so did I.
9
Born again, seeing—literally—with the wondering eyes of a child, Father Captain Federico de Soya crosses the Piazza San Pietro between the elegant arcs of Bernini’s colonnade and approaches St. Peter’s Basilica. The day is beautiful with cold sunlight, pale-blue skies, and a chill in the air—Pacem’s single inhabitable continent is high, fifteen hundred meters above standard sea level, and the air is thin but absurdly rich in oxygen—and everything de Soya sees is bathed in rich afternoon light that creates an aura around the stately columns, around the heads of the hurrying people; light that bathes the marble statues
in white and brings out the brilliance of the red robes of bishops and the blue, red, and orange stripes of the Swiss Guard troopers standing at parade rest; light that paints the tall obelisk in the center of the plaza, the fluted pilasters of the Basilica’s facade, and ignites into brilliance the great dome itself, rising more than a hundred meters above the level of the plaza. Pigeons take wing and catch this rich, horizontal light as they wheel above the plaza, their wings now white against the sky, now dark against the glowing dome of St. Peter’s. Throngs move by on either side, simple clerics in black cassocks with pink buttons, the bishops in white with red trimming, cardinals in blood-scarlet and deep magenta, citizens of the Vatican in their ink-black doublets, hose, and white ruffs, nuns in rustling habits and soaring white gull wings, male and female priests in simple black, Pax officers in dress uniforms of scarlet and black such as de Soya himself wears this day, and a scattering of lucky tourists or civilian guests—privileged to attend a papal Mass—dressed in their finest clothes, most in black, but all of a richness in cloth that makes even the blackest fiber gleam and shimmer in the light. The multitudes move toward the soaring Basilica of St. Peter’s, their conversation muted, their demeanor excited but somber. A papal Mass is a serious event.
With Father Captain de Soya this day—only four days after his fatal leave-taking from Task Force MAGI and one day after his resurrection—are Father Baggio, Captain Marget Wu, and Monsignor Lucas Oddi: Baggio, plump and pleasant, is de Soya’s resurrection chaplain; Wu, lean and silent, is aide-de-camp to Pax Fleet Admiral Marusyn; and Oddi, eighty-seven standard years old but still healthy and alert, is the factotum and Undersecretary to the powerful Vatican Secretary of State, Simon Augustino Cardinal Lourdusamy. It is said that Cardinal Lourdusamy is the second most powerful human being in the Pax, the only member of the Roman Curia to have the ear of His Holiness, and a person of frightening brilliance. The Cardinal’s power is reflected in the fact that he also acts as Prefect for the Sacra Congregatio pro Gentium Evangelizatione se de Propaganda Fide—the legendary Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, or De Propaganda Fide.