by Dan Simmons
I had figured out a perfect plan while flying the mat over here: create a diversion—the reason I had brought the detonators and plastique, small explosives but capable of starting a fire at least—steal one of the dragonflies, and either fly through the portal with it if we were being pursued, or just use it to drag the raft through at high speed.
It was a good plan except for one flaw: I had no idea how to fly a thopter. That never happened in the holodramas I’d watched in Port Romance theaters or in the Home Guard rec rooms. The heroes in those things could fly anything they could steal—skimmers, EMVs, thopters, copters, rigid airships, spaceships. Evidently I had missed Hero Basic Training; if I managed to get into one of those things, I’d probably still be chewing my thumbnail and staring at the controls when the Pax guards grabbed me. It must have been easier being a Hero back during Hegemony days—the machines were smarter then, which made up for hero stupidity. As it was—although I would hate to admit it to my traveling companions—there weren’t many vehicles that I could drive. A barge. A basic groundcar, if it was one of the truck models the Hyperion Home Guard had used. As for piloting something myself … well, I had been glad when the spaceship hadn’t had a control room.
I shook myself out of this reverie on my heroic shortcomings and concentrated on closing the last few hundred meters to the platform. I could see the lights quite clearly now: aircraft beacons on the towers near the landing decks, a flashing green light on each of the ship docks, and lighted windows. Lots of windows. I decided to try to land on the darkest part of the platform, directly under the radar tower on the east side, and took the mat around in a long, slow, wave-hugging arc to approach from that direction. Looking back over my shoulder, I half expected to see the raft closing on me, but it was still invisible out toward the horizon.
I hope it’s invisible to these guys. I could hear voices and laughter now: men’s voices, deep laughter. It sounded like a lot of the offworld hunters I’d guided, filled with booze and bonhomie. But it also sounded like the dolts I’d served with in the Guard. I concentrated on keeping the mat low and dry and sneaking up on the platform.
“I’m about there,” I subvocalized on the comlink.
“Okay,” was Aenea’s whispered reply in my ear. We had agreed that she would only reply to my calls unless there were an emergency on their end.
Hovering, I saw a maze of beams, girders, subdecks, and catwalks under the main platform on this side. Unlike the well-lighted stairs on the north and west sides, these were dark—inspection catwalks, maybe—and I chose the lowest and darkest of them to land the carpet on. I killed the flight threads, rolled the little rug up, and lashed it in place where two beams met, cutting the cord I’d brought with a sweep of my knife. Setting the blade back in its sheath and tugging my vest over it, I had the sudden image of having to stab someone with that knife. The thought made me shudder. Except for the accident when M. Herrig attacked me, I had never killed anyone in hand-to-hand combat. I prayed to God that I would never have to again.
The stairs made noises under my soft boots, but I hoped that the occasional squeak wouldn’t be heard over the sound of the waves against the pylons and the laughter from above. I crept up two flights of stairs, found a ladder, and followed it up to a trapdoor. It was not locked. I slowly raised it, half expecting to tumble an armed guard on his ass.
Raising my head slowly, I saw that this was part of the flight deck on the seaward side of the tower. Ten meters above, I could see the turning radar antenna slicing darkness out of the brilliant Milky Way with each revolution.
I pulled myself to the deck, defeated the urge to tiptoe, and walked to the corner of the tower. Two huge skimmers were tied down to the flight deck here, but they looked dark and empty. On the lower flight decks I could see starlight on the multiple insect-wings of the thopters. The light from our galaxy gleamed in their dark observation blisters. The flesh between my shoulder blades was crawling with the sense of being observed as I walked out on the upper deck, applied plastic explosive to the belly of the closest skimmer, set a detonator in place, which I could trigger with the appropriate frequency code from my com unit, went down the ladder to the closest thopter deck, and did the same there. I was sure that I was being observed from one of the lighted windows or ports on this side, but no outcry went up. As casually as I could, I went soundlessly up the catwalk from the lower thopter deck and peered around the corner of the tower.
Another stairway led down from the tower module to one of the main levels. The windows were very bright there and covered only with screens now, their storm shields up. I could hear more laughter, some singing, and the sound of pots and pans.
Taking a breath, I moved down the stairs and across the deck, following another catwalk to keep me away from the doorway. Ducking under lighted windows, I tried to catch my breath and slow my pounding heart. If someone came out of that first doorway now, they would be between me and the way back to the hawking mat. I touched the grip of the .45 under my vest and the flap of the holster and tried to think brave thoughts. Mostly I was thinking about wanting to be back on the raft. I had planted the diversion explosives … what else did I want? I realized that I was more than curious: if these were not Pax troops, I did not want to set off the plastique. The rebels I had signed up to fight on the Claw Iceshelf had used bombs as their weapon of choice—bombs in the villages, bombs in Home Guard barracks, masses of explosives in snowmobiles and small ships targeted against civilians as well as Guard troops—and I had always considered this cowardly and detestable. Bombs were totally nondiscriminating weapons, killing the innocent as surely as the enemy soldier. It was silly to moralize this way, I knew, but even though I hoped that the small charges would do no more than set empty aircraft ablaze here, I was not going to detonate those charges unless I absolutely had to. These men—and women, probably, and perhaps children—had done nothing to us.
Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, absurdly slowly, I raised my head and peered in the closest window. One glimpse and I ducked down out of sight. The pots-and-pans noises were coming from a well-lighted kitchen area—galley, I corrected myself, since this was a ship, sort of. At any rate, there had been half a dozen people there, all men, all of military age but not in uniform except for undershirts and aprons, cleaning, stacking, and washing dishes. Obviously I’d come too late for dinner.
Staying next to the wall, I duck-walked the length of this catwalk, slid down another stairway, and stopped at a longer bank of windows. Here, in the shadows of a corner where two modules came together, I could see in some of the windows along this west-facing wall without lifting my face to one. It was a mess hall—or a dining room of some sort. About thirty men—all men!—were sitting over cups of coffee. Some were smoking recom-cigarettes. At least one man appeared to be drinking whiskey: or at least amber fluid from a bottle. I would not have minded some of whatever it was.
Many of the men were in khaki, but I couldn’t tell if these were some sort of local uniform, or just the traditional garb of sports fishermen. I didn’t see any Pax uniforms, which was definitely good. Perhaps this was just a fishing platform now, a hotel for rich offworld jerks who didn’t mind paying years of time-debt—or having their friends and families back home pay it, actually—for the thrill of killing something big or exotic. Hell, I might know some of those guys: fishermen now, duck hunters when they visited Hyperion. I did not want to go in to find out.
Feeling more confident now, I moved down the long walkway, the light from the windows falling on me. There did not seem to be any guards. No sentries. Maybe we would not need a diversion—just sail the raft right past these guys, moonlight or no moonlight. They’d be sleeping, or drinking and laughing, and we’d just follow the current right into the farcaster portal that I could see less than two klicks to the northeast now, the faintest of dark arches against the starry sky. When we got to the portal, I would send a prearranged frequency shift that would not detonate the plastique I’d hidden but would dis
arm the detonators.
I was looking at the portal when I moved around the corner and literally bumped into a man leaning against the wall there. There were two others standing at the railing. One of them was holding night-vision binoculars and looking off to the north. Both of the men at the railing had weapons.
“Hey!” yelled the men I’d bumped into.
“Sorry,” I said. I definitely had never seen this scene in a holodrama.
The two men at the railing were carrying flechette miniguns on slings and were resting their forearms on them with that casual arrogance that military types had practiced for countless centuries. Now one of these two shifted the gun so that its barrel was aimed in my direction. The man I bumped into had been in the process of lighting a cigarette. Now he shook out the match flame, removed the lighted cigarette from his mouth, and glared at me.
“What are you doing out here?” he demanded. The man was younger than I—perhaps early twenties, standard—and I could see now that he was wearing a variation on the Pax Groundforces uniform with the lieutenant’s bar I’d learned to salute on Hyperion. His dialect was pronounced, but I couldn’t place it.
“Getting some air,” I said lamely. Part of me was thinking that a real Hero would have had his pistol out, blazing away. The smarter part of me did not even consider it.
The other Pax trooper also shifted the sling of his flechette auto. I heard the click of a safety. “You are with the Klingman group?” he asked in the same thick dialect. “Or the Otters?” I heard Oor dey autors? I didn’t know if he was saying “others” or “otters” or, perhaps, “authors.” Maybe this was a seaborne concentration camp for bad writers. Maybe I was trying too hard to be mentally flippant when my heart was pounding so fiercely that I was afraid I was going to have a heart attack right in front of these two.
“Klingman,” I said, trying to be as terse as possible. Whatever dialect I should have, I was sure I did not.
The Pax lieutenant jerked a thumb toward the doorway beyond him. “You know the rules. Curfew after dark.” Yewe knaw dey rues. Cufue affa dok.
I nodded, trying to look contrite. My overvest was hanging down over the top of the holster on my hip. Perhaps they hadn’t seen the pistol.
“Come,” said the lieutenant, jerking his thumb again but turning to lead the way. Comb! The two enlisted types still had their hands on the flechette guns. At that distance, if they fired, there wouldn’t be enough of me left intact to bury in a boot.
I followed the lieutenant down the catwalk, through the door, and into the brightest and most crowded room I had ever entered.
32
They grow weary of death. After eight star systems in sixty-three days, eight terrible deaths and eight painful resurrections for each of the four men, Father Captain de Soya, Sergeant Gregorius, Corporal Kee, and Lancer Rettig are weary of death and rebirth. Each time now upon his resurrection, de Soya stands naked in front of a mirror, seeing his skin raw and glistening like someone who has been flayed alive, gingerly touching the now-livid, now-crimson cruciform under the flesh of his chest. In the days following each resurrection, de Soya is distracted, his hands shaking a bit more each time. Voices come to him from afar, he cannot seem to concentrate totally, whether his interlocutor is a Pax Admiral or a planetary Governor or a parish priest.
De Soya begins dressing like a parish priest, trading his trim Pax priest-captain uniform for the cassock and collar. He has a rosary on his belt-thong and says it almost constantly, working it like Arabic worry beads: prayer calms him, brings his thoughts to order. Father Captain de Soya no longer dreams of Aenea as his daughter; he no longer dreams of Renaissance Vector and his sister Maria. He dreams of Armageddon—terrible dreams of burning orbital forests, of worlds aflame, of deathbeams walking over fertile farming valleys and leaving only corpses.
He knows after their first River Tethys world that he has miscalculated. Two standard years to cover two hundred worlds, he had said in Renaissance System, figuring three days’ resurrection in each system, a warning, and then translation to the next. It does not work that way.
His first world is Tau Ceti Center, former administrative capital of the far-flung Hegemony WorldWeb. Home to tens of billions during the days of the Web, surrounded by an actual ring of orbital cities and habitats, served by space elevators, farcasters, the River Tethys, the Grand Concourse, the fatline, and more—center to the Hegemonic datumplane megasphere and home of Government House, site of Meina Gladstone’s death by infuriated mobs after the destruction of the Web farcasters by FORCE ships on her command, TC2 was hard hit by the Fall. Floating buildings crashed as the power grid went down. Other urban spires, some many hundreds of stories tall, were served only by farcasters and lacked stairs or elevators. Tens of thousands starved or perished from falls before they could be lifted out by skimmer. The world had no agriculture of its own, bringing in its food from a thousand worlds via planet-based farcasters and great orbital spaceborne portals. The Starvation Riots lasted fifty local years on TC2, over thirty standard, and when they were finished, billions had died from human hands, to add to the total of billions dead from hunger.
Tau Ceti Center had been a sophisticated, wanton world during the days of the Web. Few religions had taken hold there except the most self-indulgent or violent ones—the Church of the Final Atonement—the Shrike Cult—had been popular among the bored sophisticates. But during the centuries of Hegemony expansion, the only true object of worship on TC2 had been power: the pursuit of power, the proximity to power, the preservation of power. Power had been the god of billions, and when that god failed—and pulled down billions of its worshipers in its failure—the survivors cursed the memories of power amid their urban ruins, scratching out a peasant’s living in the shadows of the rotting skyscrapers, pulling their own plows through weeded lots between the abandoned highways and fly-ways and the skeleton of old Grand Concourse malls, fishing for carp where the River Tethys had carried thousands of elaborate yachts and pleasure-barges each day.
Tau Ceti Center had been ripe for born-again Christianity, for the New Catholicism, and when the Church missionaries and Pax police had arrived sixty standard years after the Fall, conversion of the few billion planet’s survivors was sincere and universal. The tall, ruined, but still-white spires of business and government during the Web were finally torn down, their stone and smart glass and plasteel recycled into massive cathedrals, raised by the hands of the new Tau Ceti born-again, filled each day of the week by the thankful and faithful.
The Archbishop of Tau Ceti Center became one of the most important and—yes—powerful humans in the reemerging human domain now known as Pax Space, rivaling His Holiness on Pacem in influence. This power grew, found boundaries that could not be overstepped without incurring papal wrath—the excommunication of His Excellency, Klaus Cardinal Kronenberg in the Year of Our Lord 2978, or 126 After the Fall, helped settle those boundaries—and it continued to grow within those bounds.
So Father Captain de Soya discovers on his first jump from Renaissance space. Two years, he had anticipated, approximately six hundred days and two hundred self-imposed deaths to cover all of the former River Tethys worlds.
He and his Swiss Guard troopers are on Tau Ceti Center for eight days. The Raphael enters the system with its automatic beacon pulsing in code; Pax ships respond and rendezvous within fourteen hours. It takes another eight hours to decelerate into TC2 orbital traffic, and another four to transfer the bodies to a formal resurrection creche in the planetary capital of St. Paul. One full day is thus lost.
After three days of formal resurrection and another day of enforced rest, de Soya meets with the Archbishop of TC2, Her Excellency Achilla Silvaski, and must endure another full day of formalities. De Soya carries the papal diskey, an almost unheard of delegation of power, and the court of the Archbishop must sniff out the reason and projected results of that power like hunting dogs on a scent. Within hours de Soya gets the slightest hint of the layers of intrigu
e and complexity within this struggle for provincial power: Archbishop Silvaski can not aspire to become Cardinal, for after the Kronenberg excommunication, no spiritual leader of TC2 can rise to a rank higher than Archbishop without transfer to Pacem and the Vatican, but her current power in this sector of the Pax far outweighs that of most cardinals and the temporal subset of that power puts Pax Fleet admirals in their place. She must understand this delegation of papal authority that de Soya carries, and render it harmless to her ends.
Father Captain de Soya does not give a damn about Archbishop Silvaski’s paranoia or the Church politics on TC2. He cares only about stopping up the escape route of the farcaster portals there. On the fifth day after his translation to Tau Ceti space, he makes the five hundred meters from St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Archbishop’s palace to the river—just part of a minor tributary channeled into a canal flowing through the city, but once part of the Tethys.
The huge farcaster portals, still extant because any attempt to dismantle them had promised a thermonuclear explosion according to engineers, have long since been draped over by Church banners, but they are close together here—the Tethys had meandered only two kilometers from portal to portal, past the busy Government House and the formal Deer Park gardens. Now Father Captain de Soya, his three troopers, and the scores of watchful Pax troops loyal to Archbishop Silvaski who accompany them, can stand at the first portal and look down the grassy banks at a thirty-meter-long tapestry—showing the martyrdom of St. Paul—hanging from the second portal, clearly visible beyond the blooming peach trees of the bishopric palace gardens.
Because this section of the former Tethys is now within Her Excellency’s private gardens, guards are posted along the length of the canal and on all bridges crossing it. While there is no special attention to the ancient artifacts that were once farcaster portals, the officers of the palace guard assure de Soya that no vessels or unauthorized individuals have passed through those portals, nor been seen along the banks of the canal.