by Dan Simmons
Sometime before dawn, the clouds parted and the sky became visible, the thickly clustered stars almost painful in their clarity. For a while, the only signs of the great fleets warring there were the occasional fusion trails, narrow diamond-scratches on the pane of night, but then the blossoms of distant explosions began to unfurl again, and within the hour the glow of the Tombs had been dimmed by the violence above.
“Who do you think will win?” asked Father Duré. The two men sat with their backs to the stone wall of the Sphinx, faces raised to the cusp of sky revealed between the tomb’s forward-curved wings.
Sol was rubbing Rachel’s back as she slept on her stomach, rear end raised under the thin blankets. “From what the others say, it seems preordained that the Web must suffer a terrible war.”
“So you believe the AI Advisory Council’s predictions?”
Sol shrugged in the darkness. “I really know nothing about politics … or the Core’s accuracy in predicting things. I’m a minor scholar from a small college on a backwater world. But I have the feeling that something terrible is in store for us … that some rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.”
Duré smiled. “Yeats,” he said. The smile faded. “I suspect that this place is the new Bethlehem.” He looked down the valley toward the glowing Tombs. “I spent a lifetime teaching about St. Teilhard’s theories of evolution toward the Omega Point. Instead of that, we have this. Human folly in the skies, and a terrible Antichrist waiting to inherit the rest.”
“You think that the Shrike is the Antichrist?”
Father Duré set his elbows on his raised knees and folded his hands. “If it’s not, we’re all in trouble.” He laughed bitterly. “It wasn’t long ago that I would have been delighted to discover an Antichrist … even the presence of some antidivine power would have served to shore up my failing belief in any form of divinity.”
“And now?” Sol asked quietly.
Duré spread his fingers. “I too have been crucified.”
Sol thought of the images from Lenar Hoyt’s story about Duré; the elderly Jesuit nailing himself to a tesla tree, suffering the years of pain and rebirth rather than surrender to the cruciform DNA parasite which even now burrowed under the flesh of his chest.
Duré lowered his face from the sky. “There was no welcome from a heavenly Father,” he said softly. “No reassurance that the pain and sacrifice had been worth anything. Only pain. Pain and darkness and then pain again.”
Sol’s hand stopped moving on his infant’s back. “And that made you lose your faith?”
Duré looked at Sol. “On the contrary, it made me feel that faith is all the more essential. Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level … that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.”
Sol nodded slowly. “I had a dream during Rachel’s long battle with Merlin’s sickness … my wife Sarai had the same dream … that I was being called to sacrifice my only daughter.”
“Yes,” said Duré. “I listened to the Consul’s summary on disk.”
“Then you know my response,” said Sol. “First, that Abraham’s path of obedience can no longer be followed, even if there is a God demanding such obedience. Second, that we have offered sacrifices to that God for too many generations … that the payments of pain must stop.”
“Yet you are here,” said Duré, gesturing toward the valley, the Tombs, the night.
“I’m here,” agreed Sol. “But not to grovel. Rather to see what response these powers have to my decision.” He touched his daughter’s back again. “Rachel is a day and a half old now and growing younger each second. If the Shrike is the architect of such cruelty, I want to face him, even if he is your Antichrist. If there is a God and he has done this thing, I will show the same contempt to him.”
“Perhaps we’ve all shown too much contempt as it is,” mused Duré.
Sol looked up as a dozen pinpoints of fierce light expanded into ripples and shock waves of plasma explosions far out in space. “I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones, “To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”
Father Duré raised one eyebrow and then smiled slightly. “I know the anger you feel.” The priest gently touched Rachel’s head. “Let’s try to get some sleep before sunrise, shall we?”
Sol nodded, lay next to his child, and pulled the blanket up to his cheek. He heard Duré whispering something that might have been a soft good night, or perhaps a prayer.
Sol touched his daughter, closed his eyes, and slept.
The Shrike did not come in the night. Nor did it come the next morning as sunlight painted the southwestern cliffs and touched the top of the Crystal Monolith. Sol awoke as sunlight crept down the valley; he found Duré sleeping next to him, Masteen and Brawne still unconscious. Rachel was stirring and fussing. Her cry was that of a hungry newborn. Sol fed her with one of the last nursing paks, pulling the heating tab and waiting a moment for the milk to reach body temperature. Cold had settled in the valley overnight, and frost glinted on the steps to the Sphinx.
Rachel ate greedily, making the soft mewling and sucking sounds that Sol remembered from more than fifty years earlier as Sarai had nursed her. When she finished, Sol burped her and left her on his shoulder as he rocked gently to and fro.
A day and a half left.
Sol was very tired. He was growing old despite the single Poulsen treatment a decade earlier. At the time he and Sarai would normally have been freed of parental duties—their only child in graduate school and off on an archaelogical dig in the Outback—Rachel had fallen prey to Merlin’s sickness, and parenthood had soon descended upon them once again. The curve of those duties rose as Sol and Sarai grew older—then Sol alone, after the air crash on Barnard’s World—and now he was very, very tired. But despite that, despite everything, Sol was interested to note that he did not regret a single day of caring for his daughter.
A day and a half left.
Father Duré awoke after a bit, and the two men made breakfast from the various canned goods Brawne had brought back with her. Het Masteen did not awaken, but Duré applied the next-to-last medpak, and the Templar began receiving fluids and I.V. nutrient.
“Do you think M. Lamia should have the last medpak applied?” asked Duré.
Sol sighed and checked her comlog monitors again. “I don’t think so, Paul. According to this, blood sugar is high … nutrient levels check out as if she had just eaten a decent meal.”
“But how?”
Sol shook his head. “Perhaps that damned thing is some sort of umbilical.” He gestured toward the cable attached to the point in her skull where the neural shunt socket had been.
“So what do we do today?”
Sol peered at a sky already fading to the green and lapis dome they had grown used to on Hyperion. “We wait,” he said.
Het Masteen awoke in the heat of the day, shortly before the sun reached the zenith. The Templar sat straight up and said, “The Tree!”
Duré hurried up the steps from where he had been pacing below. Sol lifted Rachel from where she lay in shadow near the wall and moved to Masteen’s side. The Templar’s eyes were focused on something above the level of the cliffs. Sol glanced up but could see only the paling sky.
“The Tree!” cried the Templar again, and lifted one roughened hand.
Duré restrained the man. “He’s hallucinating. He thinks he see the Yggdrasill, his treeship.”
Het Masteen struggled against their hands. “No, not the Yggdrasill,” he gasped through parched lips, “the Tree. The Final Tree. The Tree of Pain!”
Both men looked up then, but the sky was clear except for wisps of clouds blowing in from the southwest. At that moment, there was a surge of time tides, and both Sol and the priest
bowed their heads in sudden vertigo. It passed.
Het Masteen was trying to get to his feet. The Templar’s eyes were still focused on something far away. His skin was so hot that it burned Sol’s hands.
“Get the final medpak,” snapped Sol. “Program the ultramorph and antifever agent.” Duré hurried to comply.
“The Tree of Pain!” managed Het Masteen. “I was meant to be its Voice! The erg is meant to drive it through space and time! The Bishop and the Voice of the Great Tree have chosen me! I cannot fail them.” He strained against Sol’s arms a second, then collapsed back to the stone porch. “I am the True Chosen,” he whispered, energy leaving him like air from an emptying balloon, “I must guide the Tree of Pain during the time of Atonement.” He closed his eyes.
Duré attached the final medpak, made sure the monitor was set for Templar quirks in metabolism and body chemistry, and triggered the adrenaline and painkillers. Sol huddled over the robed form.
“That’s not Templar terminology or theology,” said Duré. “He’s using Shrike Cult language.” The priest caught Sol’s eye. “That explains some of the mystery … especially from Brawne’s tale. For some reason, the Templars have been in collusion with the Church of the Final Atonement … the Shrike Cult.”
Sol nodded, slipped his own comlog on Masteen’s wrist and adjusted the monitor.
“The Tree of Pain must be the Shrike’s fabled tree of thorns,” muttered Duré, glancing up at the empty sky where Masteen had been staring. “But what does he mean that he and the erg were chosen to drive it through space and time? Does he really think he can pilot the Shrike’s tree the way the Templars do the treeships? Why?”
“You’ll have to ask him in the next life,” said Sol tiredly. “He’s dead.”
Duré checked the monitors, added Lenar Hoyt’s comlog to the array. They tried the medpak revival stimulants, CPR, and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The monitor telltales did not waver. Het Masteen, Templar True Voice of the Tree and Shrike Pilgrim, was indeed dead.
They waited an hour, suspicious of all things in this perverse valley of the Shrike, but when the monitors began showing rapid decomposition of the corpse, they buried Masteen in a shallow grave fifty meters up the trail toward the entrance to the valley. Kassad had left behind a collapsible shovel—labeled “entrenching tool” in FORCE jargon—and the men took turns digging while the other watched over Rachel and Brawne Lamia.
The two men, one cradling a child, stood in the shadow of a boulder while Duré said a few words before the soil was dropped onto the makeshift fiberplastic shroud.
“I did not truly know M. Masteen,” said the priest. “We were not of the same faith. But we were of the same profession; Voice of the Tree Masteen spent much of his life doing what he understood to be God’s work, pursuing God’s will in the writings of the Muir and the beauties of nature. His was the true faith—tested by difficulties, tempered by obedience, and, in the end, sealed by sacrifice.”
Duré paused and squinted into a sky that had faded to gunmetal glare. “Please accept your servant, O Lord. Welcome him into your arms as you will someday welcome us, your other searchers who have lost their way. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.”
Rachel began to cry. Sol walked her around as Duré shoveled the earth onto the man-shaped bundle of fiberplastic.
They returned to the porch of the Sphinx and gently moved Brawne into what little shade remained. There was no way to shield her from the late afternoon sun unless they carried her into the tomb itself, and neither man wanted to do that.
“The Consul must be more than halfway to the ship by now,” said the priest after taking a long drink of water. The man’s forehead was sunburned and filmed with sweat.
“Yes,” said Sol.
“By this time tomorrow, he should be back here. We’ll use laser cutters to free Brawne, then set her in the ship surgery. Perhaps Rachel’s reverse aging can be arrested in cryogenic storage, despite what the doctors said.”
“Yes.”
Duré lowered the water bottle and looked at Sol. “Do you believe that is what will happen?”
Sol returned the other man’s gaze. “No.”
Shadows stretched from the southwestern cliff walls. The day’s heat coalesced into a solid thing, then dissipated a bit. Clouds moved in from the south.
Rachel slept in the shadows near the doorway. Sol walked up to where Paul Duré stood staring down the valley and set a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “What are you thinking about, my friend?”
Duré did not turn. “I am thinking that if I did not truly believe that suicide was a mortal sin, that I would end things to allow young Hoyt a chance at life.” He looked at Sol and showed a hint of smile. “But is it suicide when this parasite on my chest … on his chest then … would someday drag me kicking and screaming to my own resurrection?”
“Would it be a gift to Hoyt,” asked Sol quietly, “to bring him back to this?”
Duré said nothing for a moment. Then he clasped Sol’s upper arm. “I think that I shall take a walk.”
“Where?” Sol squinted out at the thick heat of the desert afternoon. Even with the low cloud cover, the valley was an oven.
The priest made a vague gesture. “Down the valley. I will be back before too long.”
“Be careful,” said Sol. “And remember, if the Consul runs across a patrol skimmer along the Hoolie, he might be back as early as this afternoon.”
Duré nodded, went over to pick up a water bottle and to touch Rachel gently, and then he went down the long stairway of the Sphinx, picking his way slowly and carefully, like an old, old man.
Sol watched him leave, becoming a smaller and smaller figure, distorted by heat waves and distance. Then Sol sighed and went back to sit near his daughter.
Paul Duré tried to keep to the shadows, but even there the heat was oppressive, weighing on him like a great yoke on his shoulders. He passed the Jade Tomb and followed the path toward the northern cliffs and the Obelisk. That tomb’s thin shadow painted darkness on the roseate stone and dust of the valley floor. Descending again, picking his way through the rubble surrounding the Crystal Monolith, Duré glanced up as a sluggish wind moved shattered panes and whistled through cracks high up on the face of the tomb. He saw his reflection in the lower surfaces and remembered hearing the organ song of the evening wind rising from the Cleft when he had found the Bikura high on the Pinion Plateau. That seemed like lifetimes ago. It was lifetimes ago.
Duré felt the damage the cruciform reconstruction had done to his mind and memory. It was sickening—the equivalent of suffering a stroke with no hope of recovery. Reasoning that once would have been child’s play to him now required extreme concentration or was simply beyond his ability. Words eluded him. Emotions tugged at him with the same sudden violence as the time tides. Several times he had had to leave the other pilgrims while he wept in solitude for no reason he could understand.
The other pilgrims. Now only Sol and the child remained. Father Duré would gladly surrender his own life if those two could be spared. Was it a sin, he wondered, to plan deals with the Antichrist?
He was far down the valley now, almost to the point where it curved eastward into the widening cul-de-sac where the Shrike Palace threw its maze of shadows across the rocks. The trail wound close to the northwest wall as it passed the Cave Tombs. Duré felt the cool air from the first tomb and was tempted to enter just to recover from the heat, close his eyes, and take a nap.
He continued walking.
The entrance to the second tomb had more baroque carvings in the stone, and Duré was reminded of the ancient basilica he had discovered in the Cleft—the huge cross and altar where the retarded Bikura had “worshiped.” It had been the obscene immortality of the cruciform they had been worshiping, not the chance of true Resurrection promised by the Cross. But what was the difference? Duré shook his head, trying to clear the fog and cynicism that clouded every thought. The pat
h wound higher here past the third Cave Tomb, the shortest and least impressive of the three.
There was a light in the third Cave Tomb.
Duré stopped, took a breath, and glanced back down the valley. The Sphinx was quite visible almost a kilometer away, but he could not quite make out Sol in the shadows. For a moment Duré wondered if it had been the third tomb they had sheltered in the day before … if one of them had left a lantern there.
It had not been the third tomb. Except for the search for Kassad, no one had entered this tomb in three days.
Father Duré knew that he should ignore the light, return to Sol, keep the vigil with the man and his daughter.
But the Shrike came to each of the others separately. Why should I refuse the summons?
Duré felt moisture on his cheek and realized that he was weeping soundlessly, mindlessly. He roughly wiped the tears away with the back of his hand and stood there clenching his fists.
My intellect was my greatest vanity. I was the intellectual Jesuit, secure in the tradition of Teilhard and Prassard. Even the theology I pushed on the Church, on the seminarians, and on those few faithful still listening had emphasized the mind, that wonderful Omega Point of consciousness. God as a clever algorithm.
Well, some things are beyond intellect, Paul.
Duré entered the third Cave Tomb.
• • •
Sol awoke with a start, sure that someone was creeping up on him.
He jumped to his feet and looked around. Rachel was making soft sounds, awakening from her nap at the same time as her father. Brawne Lamia lay motionless where he had left her, med telltales still glowing green, brain activity readout a flat red.
He had slept for at least an hour; the shadows had crept across the valley floor, and only the top of the Sphinx was still in sunlight as the sun broke free of the clouds. Shafts of light slanted through the valley entrance and illuminated the cliff walls opposite. The wind was rising.
But nothing moved in the valley.
Sol lifted Rachel, rocked her as she cried, and ran down the steps, looking behind the Sphinx and toward the other Tombs.