by Dan Simmons
“Enough for breakfast,” said Weintraub. “Then a few more meals of cold foodpaks from the Colonel’s extra provisions bag. Then we’ll be eating googlepedes and each other.”
The Consul attempted a smile, set the pipe back in his tunic pocket. “I suggest we walk back to Chronos Keep before we reach that point. We’d used up the freeze-dried foods from the Benares, but there were storerooms at the Keep.”
“I’d be happy to—” began Lamia but was interrupted by a shout from inside the Sphinx.
She was the first to reach the Sphinx, and she had the automatic pistol in her hand before she went through the entrance. The corridor was dark, the sleeping room darker, and it took a second for her to realize that no one was there. Brawne Lamia crouched, swinging the pistol toward the dark curve of corridor even as Silenus’s voice again shouted “Hey! Come here!” from somewhere out of sight.
She looked over her shoulder as the Consul came through the entrance.
“Wait there!” snapped Lamia and moved quickly down the corridor, staying against the wall, pistol extended, propulsion charge primed, safety off. She paused at the open doorway to the small room where Hoyt’s body lay, crouched, swung around and in with weapon tracking.
Martin Silenus looked up from where he crouched by the corpse. The fiberplastic sheet they had used to cover the priest’s body lay crumpled and lifted in Silenus’s hand. He stared at Lamia, looked without interest at the gun, and gazed back at the body. “Do you believe this?” he said softly.
Lamia lowered the weapon and came closer. Behind them, the Consul peered in. Brawne could hear Sol Weintraub in the corridor; the baby was crying.
“My God,” said Brawne Lamia and crouched next to the body of Father Lenar Hoyt. The young priest’s pain-ravaged features had been resculpted into the face of a man in his late sixties: high brow, long aristocratic nose, thin lips with a pleasant upturn at the corners, sharp cheekbones, sharp ears under a fringe of gray hair, large eyes under lids as pale and thin as parchment.
The Consul crouched near them. “I’ve seen holos. It’s Father Paul Duré.”
“Look,” said Martin Silenus. He lowered the sheet further, paused, and then rolled the corpse on its side. Two small cruciforms on this man’s chest pulsed pinkly, just as Hoyt’s had, but his back was bare.
Sol stood by the door, hushing Rachel’s cries with gentle bouncing and whispered syllables. When the infant was silent, he said, “I thought that the Bikura took three days to … regenerate.”
Martin Silenus sighed. “The Bikura have been resurrected by the cruciform parasites for more than two standard centuries. Perhaps it’s easier the first time.”
“Is he …” began Lamia.
“Alive?” Silenus took her hand. “Feel.”
The man’s chest rose and fell ever so slightly. The skin was warm to the touch. Heat from the cruciforms under the skin was palpable. Brawne Lamia snatched her hand back.
The thing that had been the corpse of Father Lenar Hoyt six hours earlier opened its eyes.
“Father Duré?” said Sol, stepping forward.
The man’s head turned. He blinked as though the dim light hurt his eyes, then made an unintelligible noise.
“Water,” said the Consul and reached into his tunic pocket for the small plastic bottle he carried. Martin Silenus held the man’s head while the Consul helped him drink.
Sol came closer, went to one knee, and touched the man’s forearm. Even Rachel’s dark eyes seemed curious. Sol said, “If you can’t speak, blink twice for ‘yes,’ once for ‘no.’ Are you Duré?”
The man’s head swiveled toward the scholar. “Yes,” he said softly, his voice deep, tones cultured, “I am Father Paul Duré.”
Breakfast consisted of the last of the coffee, bits of meat fried over the unfolded heating unit, a scoop of grain mix with rehydrated milk, and the end of their last loaf of bread, torn into five chunks. Lamia thought that it was delicious.
They sat at the edge of shade under the Sphinx’s outflung wing, using a low, flat-topped boulder as their table. The sun climbed toward mid-morning, and the sky remained cloudless. There was no sound except for the occasional klink of a fork or spoon and the soft tones of their conversation.
“You remember … before?” asked Sol. The priest wore an extra set of the Consul’s shipclothes, a gray jumpsuit with the Hegemony seal on the left breast. The uniform was a bit too small.
Duré held the cup of coffee in both hands, as if he were about to lift it for consecration. He looked up, and his eyes suggested depths of intelligence and sadness in equal measure. “Before I died?” said Duré. The patrician lips sketched a smile. “Yes, I remember. I remember the exile, the Bikura …”He looked down. “Even the tesla tree.”
“Hoyt told us about the tree,” said Brawne Lamia. The priest had nailed himself onto an active tesla tree in the flame forests, suffering years of agony, death, resurrection, and death again rather than give in to the easy symbiosis of life under the cruciform.
Duré shook his head. “I thought … in those last seconds … that I had beaten it.”
“You had,” said the Consul. “Father Hoyt and the others found you. You had driven the thing out of your body. Then the Bikura planted your cruciform on Lenar Hoyt.”
Duré nodded. “And there is no sign of the boy?”
Martin Silenus pointed toward the man’s chest. “Evidently the fucking thing can’t defy laws governing conservation of mass. Hoyt’s pain had been so great for so long—he wouldn’t return to where the thing wanted him to go—that he never gained the weight for a … what the hell would you call it? A double resurrection.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Duré. His smile was sad. “The DNA parasite in the cruciform has infinite patience. It will reconstitute one host for generations if need be. Sooner or later, both parasites will have a home.”
“Do you remember anything after the tesla tree?” asked Sol quietly.
Duré sipped the last of his coffee. “Of death? Of heaven or hell?” The smile was genuine. “No, gentlemen and lady, I wish I could say I did. I remember pain … eternities of pain … and then release. And then darkness. And then awakening here. How many years did you say have passed?”
“Almost twelve,” said the Consul. “But only about half that for Father Hoyt. He spent time in transit.”
Father Duré stood, stretched, and paced back and forth. He was a tall man, thin but with a sense of strength about him, and Brawne Lamia found herself impressed by his presence, by that strange, inexplicable charisma of personality which had cursed and bestowed power upon a few individuals since time immemorial. She had to remind herself that, first, he was a priest of a cult that demanded celibacy from its clerics, and, second, an hour earlier he had been a corpse. Lamia watched the older man pace up and down, his movements as elegant and relaxed as a cat’s, and she realized that both observations were true but neither could counteract the personal magnetism the priest radiated. She wondered if the men sensed it.
Duré sat on a boulder, stretched his legs straight ahead of him, and rubbed at his thighs as if trying to get rid of a cramp. “You’ve told me something about who you are … why you are here,” he said. “Can you tell me more?”
The pilgrims glanced at one another.
Duré nodded. “Do you think that I’m a monster myself? Some agent of the Shrike? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“We don’t think that,” said Brawne Lamia. “The Shrike needs no agents to do his bidding. Besides, we know you from Father Hoyt’s story about you and from your journals.” She glanced at the others. “We found it … difficult … to tell our stories of why we have come to Hyperion. It would be all but impossible to repeat them.”
“I made notes on my comlog,” said the Consul. “They’re very condensed, but it should make some sense out of our histories … and the history of the last decade of the Hegemony. Why the Web is at war with the Ousters. That sort of thing. You’re welcome t
o access it if you wish. It shouldn’t take more than an hour.”
“I would appreciate it,” said Father Duré and followed the Consul back into the Sphinx.
Brawne Lamia, Sol, and Silenus walked to the head of the valley. From the saddle between the low cliffs, they could see the dunes and barrens stretching toward the mountains of the Bridle Range, less than ten klicks to the southwest. The broken globes, soft spires, and shattered gallerias of the dead City of Poets were visible only two or three klicks to their right, along a broad ridge which the desert was quietly invading.
“I’ll walk back to the Keep and find some rations,” said Lamia.
“I hate to split up the group,” said Sol. “We could all return.”
Martin Silenus folded his arms. “Somebody should stay here in case the Colonel returns.”
“Before anyone leaves,” said Sol, “I think we should search the rest of the valley. The Consul didn’t check far beyond the Monolith this morning. ”
“I agree,” said Lamia. “Let’s get to it before it gets too late I want to get provisions at the Keep and return before nightfall ”
They had descended to the Sphinx when Duré and the Consul emerged. The priest held the Consul’s spare comlog in one hand. Lamia explained the plan for a search, and the two men agreed to join them.
Once again they walked the halls of the Sphinx, the beams from their hand torches and pencil lasers illuminating sweating stone and bizarre angles. Emerging into noontime sunlight, they made the three-hundred-meter hike to the Jade Tomb. Lamia found herself shivering as they entered the room where the Shrike had appeared the night before. Hoyt’s blood had left a rust-brown stain on the green ceramic floors. There was no sign of the transparent opening to the labyrinth below. There was no sign of the Shrike.
The Obelisk had no rooms, merely a central shaft in which a spiral ramp, too steep for human comfort, twisted upward between ebony walls. Even whispers echoed here, and the group kept talk to a minimum There were no windows, no view, at the top of the ramp, fifty meters above the stone floor, and their torch beams illuminated only blackness as the roof curved in above them. Fixed ropes and chains leftover from two centuries of tourism allowed them to descend without undue fear of a slip and fall that would end in death below. As they paused at the entrance, Martin Silenus called Kassad’s name a final time, and the echoes followed them into sunlight.
They spent half an hour or more inspecting the damage near the Crystal Monolith. Puddles of sand turned to glass, some five to ten meters across, prismed the noonday light and reflected heat in their faces. The broken face of the Monolith, pocked now with holes and still-dangling strands of melted crystal, looked like the target of an act of mindless vandalism, but each knew that Kassad must have been fighting for his life. There was no door, no opening to the honeycomb maze within. Instruments told them that the interior was as empty and unconnected as it always had been. They left reluctantly, climbing the steep trails to the base of the north cliffs where the Cave Tombs lay separated by less than a hundred meters each.
“Early archaeologists thought that these were the oldest of the Tombs because of their crudeness,” said Sol as they entered the first cave, sent flashlight beams playing across stone carved in a thousand indecipherable patterns. None of the caves was deeper than thirty or forty meters. Each ended in a stone wall that no amount of probing or radar imaging had ever discovered an extension to.
Upon exiting the third Cave Tomb, the group sat in what little shade they could find and shared water and protein biscuits from Kassad’s extra field rations. The wind had risen, and now it sighed and whispered through fluted rock high above them.
“We’re not going to find him,” said Martin Silenus. “The fucking Shrike took him.”
Sol was feeding the baby with one of the last nursing paks. The top of her head had been turned pink by the sun despite Sol’s every effort to shield her as they walked outside. “He could be in one of the Tombs we were in,” he said, “if there are sections out of time-phase with us. That’s Arundez’s theory. He sees the Tombs as four-dimensional constructs with intricate folds through space-time.”
“Great,” said Lamia. “So even if Fedmahn Kassad is there, we won’t see him.”
“Well,” said the Consul, getting to his feet with a tired sigh, “let’s at least go through the motions. One tomb left.”
The Shrike Palace was a kilometer farther down the valley, lower than the others and hidden by a bend in the cliff walls. The structure was not large, smaller than the Jade Tomb, but its intricate construction—flanges, spires, buttresses, and support columns arching and arcing in controlled chaos—made it seem larger than it was.
The interior of the Shrike Palace was one echoing chamber with an irregular floor made up of thousands of curving, jointed segments which reminded Lamia of the ribs and vertebrae of some fossilized creature. Fifteen meters overhead, the dome was crisscrossed by dozens of the chrome “blades” which continued through walls and each other to emerge as steel-tipped thorns above the structure. The material of the dome itself was slightly opaque, giving a rich, milky hue to the vaulted space.
Lamia, Silenus, the Consul, Weintraub, and Duré all began to shout for Kassad, their voices echoing and resonating to no avail.
“No sign of Kassad or Het Masteen,” said the Consul as they emerged. “Perhaps this will be the pattern … each of us disappearing until only one remains.”
“And does that final one get his or her wish as the Shrike Cult legends foretell?” asked Brawne Lamia. She sat on the rocky hearth to the Shrike Palace, her short legs dangling in air.
Paul Duré raised his face to the sky. “I can’t believe that it was Father Hoyt’s wish that he would die so that I could live again.”
Martin Silenus squinted up at the priest “So what would your wish be, Padre?”
Duré did not hesitate. “I would wish … pray … that God will lift the scourge of these twin obscenities—the war and the Shrike—from mankind once and for all.”
There was a silence in which the early afternoon wind inserted its distant sighs and moans. “In the meantime,” said Brawne Lamia, “we’ve got to get some food or learn how to subsist on air.”
Duré nodded. “Why did you bring so little with you?”
Martin Silenus laughed and said loudly:
Ne cared he for wine, or half-and-half,
Ne cared he for fish or flesh or fowl,
And sauces held he worthless as the chaff;
He ‘sdained the swine-herd at the wassail-bowl,
Ne with lewd ribbalds sat he cheek by jowl,
Ne with sly Lemans in the scorner’s chair,
But a fier water-brooks this Pilgrim’s soul
Panted, and all his food was woodland air
Though he would oft-times feast on gillyflowers rare.
Duré smiled, obviously still puzzled.
“We all expected to triumph or die the first night,” said the Consul. “We hadn’t anticipated a long stay here.”
Brawne Lamia stood and brushed off her trousers. “I’m going,” she said. “I should be able to carry back four or five days’ rations if they’re field foodpaks or the bulk-stored items we saw.”
“I’ll go too,” said Martin Silenus.
There was a silence. During the week of their pilgrimage, the poet and Lamia had almost come to blows half a dozen times. Once she had threatened to kill the man. She looked at him for a long moment. “All right,” she said at last. “Let’s stop by the Sphinx to get our packs and water bottles.”
The group moved up the valley as the shadows began to grow from the western walls.
SEVENTEEN
Twelve hours earlier. Colonel Fedmahn Kassad stepped off the spiral staircase onto the highest remaining level of the Crystal Monolith. Flames rose on all sides. Through gaps he had inflicted on the crystal surface of the structure, Kassad could see darkness. The storm blew vermilion dust through the apertures until it filled th
e air like powdered blood. Kassad pulled his helmet on.
Ten paces in front of him, Moneta awaited.
She was nude under the energy skinsuit, and the effect was of quicksilver poured directly on flesh. Kassad could see the flames reflected in the curves of breast and thigh, the bend of light into the hollow of throat and navel. Her neck was long, her face chrome-carved in perfect smoothness. Her eyes held twin reflections of the tall shadow that was Fedmahn Kassad.
Kassad raised the assault rifle and clicked the selector manually to full-spectrum fire. Inside his activated impact armor, his body clenched in anticipation of attack.
Moneta moved her hand, and the skinsuit faded from the crown of her head to her neck. She was vulnerable now. Kassad felt that he knew every facet of that face, every pore and follicle. Her brown hair was cut short, falling softly to the left. The eyes were the same, large, curious, startling in their green depths. The small mouth with the full underlip still hesitated on the edge of a smile. He noted the slightly inquisitive arch of eyebrows, the small ears he had kissed and whispered in so many times. The soft throat where he had lain his cheek to listen to her pulse.
Kassad raised the rifle and aimed it at her.
“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was as soft and sensual as he remembered, the slight accent as elusive.
His finger on the trigger, Kassad paused. They had made love scores of times, known each other for years in his dreams and their lovers’ landscape of the military simulations. But if she were truly moving backward in time …
“I know,” she said, her voice calm, apparently unaware of the pressure he had already begun to exert on the trigger, “you are the one whom the Lord of Pain has promised.”
Kassad was gasping for air. When he spoke, his voice was raw and very strained. “You don’t remember me?”
“No.” She cocked her head to look at him quizzically. “But the Lord of Pain has promised a warrior. We were destined to meet.”
“We met long ago,” managed Kassad. The rifle would automatically aim for the face, shifting wavelengths and frequencies every microsecond until the skinsuit defenses were defeated. Along with the hellwhip and laser beams, fléchettes and pulse bolts would be fired an instant later.