by Dan Simmons
The other was Father Paul Duré.
They must have been alarmed at first—looking up from their whispered conversation to see this apparition, this short shadow of a man emerge from the darkness, calling their names … crying Duré’s name in loud amazement … babbling at them about pilgrimages and pilgrims, Time Tombs and the Shrike, AIs and the death of gods.
The Monsignor did not call security; neither he nor Duré fled; together they calmed this apparition, tried to glean some sense from his excited babblings, and turned this strange confrontation into sane conversation.
It was Paul Duré. Paul Duré and not some bizarre Doppelganger or android duplicate or cybrid reconstruction. I made sure of that by listening to him, quizzing him, by looking into his eyes … but mostly by shaking his hand, touching him, and knowing that it was indeed Father Paul Duré.
“You know … incredible details of my life … our time on Hyperion, at the Tombs … but who did you say you are?” Duré was saying.
It was my turn to convince him. “A cybrid reconstruction of John Keats. A twin to the persona Brawne Lamia carried with her on your pilgrimage.”
“And you were able to communicate … to know what happened to us because of that shared persona?”
I was on one knee between them and the altar. I lifted both hands in frustration. “Because of that … because of some anomaly in the megasphere. But I have dreamt your lives, heard the tales the pilgrims told, listened to Father Hoyt speak of the life and death of Paul Duré … of you.” I reached out to touch his arm through the priestly garments. Actually being in the same space and time with one of the pilgrims made me a bit light-headed. “Then you know how I got here,” said Father Duré.
“No. I last dreamed that you were entering one of the Cave Tombs. There was a light. I know nothing since then.”
Duré nodded. His face was more patrician and more weary than my dreams had prepared me for. “But you know the fate of the others?”
I took a breath. “Some. The poet Silenus is alive but impaled on the Shrike’s tree of thorns. I last saw Kassad attacking the Shrike with his bare hands. M. Lamia had traveled the megasphere to the TechnoCore periphery with my Keats counterpart … ”
“He survived in that … Schrön loop … whatever it was called?” Duré seemed fascinated.
“No longer,” I said. “The Al personality called Ummon killed him … destroyed the persona. Brawne was returning. I don’t know if her body survives.”
Monsignor Edouard leaned toward me. “And what of the Consul and the father and child?”
“The Consul tried to return to the capital by hawking mat,” I said, “but crashed some miles north. I don’t know his fate.”
“Miles,” said Duré, as if the word brought back memories.
“I’m sorry.” I gestured at the basilica. “This place makes me think in the units of my … previous life.”
“Go on,” said Monsignor Edouard. “The father and child.”
I sat on the cool stone, exhausted, my arms and hands shaking with fatigue. “In my last dream, Sol had offered Rachel to the Shrike. It was Rachel’s request. I could not see what happened next. The Tombs were opening. ”
“All of them?” asked Duré.
“All I could see.”
The two men looked at one another.
“There’s more,” I said, and told them about the dialogue with Ummon. “Is it possible that a deity could … evolve from human consciousness like that without humanity being aware of it?”
The lightning had ceased but now the rain fell so violently that I could hear it on the great dome far above. Somewhere in the darkness, a heavy door squeaked, footsteps echoed and then receded. Votive candles in the dim recesses of the basilica flickered red light against walls and draperies.
“I taught that St. Teilhard said that it was possible,” Duré said tiredly, “but if that God is a limited being, evolving in the same way all we other limited beings have done, then no … it is not the God of Abraham and Christ.”
Monsignor Edouard nodded. “There is an ancient heresy … ”
“Yes,” I said. “The Socinian Heresy. I heard Father Duré explain it to Sol Weintraub and the Consul. But what difference does it make how this … power … evolved, and whether it’s limited or not. If Ummon is telling the truth, we’re dealing with a force that uses quasars for energy sources. That’s a God who can destroy galaxies, gentlemen.”
“That would be a god who destroys galaxies,” said Duré. “Not God.”
I heard his emphasis clearly. “But if it’s not limited,” I said. “If it’s the Omega Point God of total consciousness you’ve written about, if it’s the same Trinity your church has argued for and theorized about since before Aquinus … but if one part of that Trinity has fled backward through time to here … to now … then what?”
“But fled from what?” Duré asked softly. “Teilhard’s God … the Church’s God … our God, would be the Omega Point God in whom the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal … what Teilhard called the En Haut and the En Avant, are perfectly joined. There could be nothing so threatening that any element of that deity’s personality would flee. No Antichrist, no theoretical satanic power, no ‘counter-God’ could possibly threaten such a universal consciousness. What would this other god be?”
“The God of machines?” I said, so softly that even I was not sure that I had spoken aloud.
Monsignor Edouard clasped both hands in what I thought was a preparation for prayer but which turned out to be a gesture of deep thought and deeper agitation. “But Christ had doubts,” he said. “Christ sweated blood in the garden and asked that this cup should be taken from him. If there was some second sacrifice pending, something even more terrible than the crucifixion … then I could imagine the Christentity of the Trinity passing through time, walking through some fourth-dimensional garden of Gethsemane to gain a few hours … or years … of time to think.”
“Something more terrible than the crucifixion,” repeated Duré in a hoarse whisper.
Both Monsignor Edouard and I stared at the priest. Duré had crucified himself on a high-voltage tesla tree on Hyperion rather than submit to his cruciform parasite’s control. Through that creature’s ability to resurrect, Duré had suffered the agonies of crucifixion and electrocution many times.
“Whatever the En Haut consciousness flees,” whispered Duré, “it is most terrible.”
Monsignor Edouard touched his friend’s shoulder. “Paul, tell this man about your voyage here.”
Duré returned from whatever distant place his memories had taken him and focused on me. “You know all of our stories … and the details of our stay in the Valley of the Tombs on Hyperion?”
“I believe so. Up to the point you disappeared.”
The priest sighed and touched his forehead with long, slightly trembling fingers. “Then perhaps,” he said, “just perhaps you can make some sense of how I got here … and what I saw along the way.”
“I saw a light in the third Cave Tomb,” said Father Duré. “I stepped inside. I confess that thoughts of suicide had been in my mind … what is left of my mind after the cruciform’s brutal replication … I will not dignify that parasite’s function with the term resurrection.
“I saw a light and thought that it was the Shrike. It was my feeling that my second meeting with that creature—the first encounter was years ago in the labyrinth beneath the Cleft, when the Shrike annointed me with my unholy cruciform—the second meeting was long overdue.
“When we had searched for Colonel Kassad on the previous day, this Cave Tomb had been short, featureless, with a blank rock wall stopping us after thirty paces. Now that wall was gone and in its place was a carving not unlike the mouth of the Shrike, stone extended in that blend of the mechanical and organic, stalactites and stalagmites as sharp as calcium carbonate teeth.
“Through the mouth there was a stone stairway descending. It was from those depths that the light
emanated, glowing pale white one moment, dark red the next. There was no noise except for the sigh of wind, as if the rock there were breathing.
“I am no Dante. I sought no Beatrice. My brief bout of courage—although fatalism is a more accurate term—had evaporated with the loss of daylight. I turned and almost ran the thirty paces to the opening of the cave.
“There was no opening. The passage merely ended. I had heard no sound of cave-in or avalanche, and besides, the rock where the entrance should have been looked as ancient and undisturbed as the rest of that cavern. For half an hour I searched for an alternate exit, finding none, refusing to return to the staircase, finally sitting for some hours where the Cave Tomb entrance once had been. Another Shrike trick. Another cheap theatrical stunt by this perverse planet. Hyperion’s idea of a joke. Ha ha.
“After several hours of sitting there in semidarkness, watching the light at the far end of the cave pulse soundlessly, I realized that the Shrike was not going to come to me here. The entrance would not magically reappear. I had the choice of sitting there until I died of starvation—or thirst, more likely, since I was already dehydrated—or of descending the damned staircase.
“I descended.
“Years ago, literally lifetimes ago, when I visited the Bikura near the Cleft on the Pinion Plateau, the labyrinth where I had encountered the Shrike had been three kilometers below the canyon wall. That was close to the surface; most of the labyrinths on most of the labyrinthine worlds are at least ten klicks beneath the crust. I had no doubt that this endless staircase … a steep and twisting spiral of stone stairs wide enough for ten priests to descend to hell abreast … would end up in the labyrinth. The Shrike had first cursed me with immortality there. If the creature or the power that drove it had any sense of irony at all, it would be fitting that both my immortality and mortal life ended there.
“The staircase twisted downward; the light grew brighter … now a roseate glow; ten minutes later, a heavy red; half an hour lower than that, a flickering crimson. It was far too Dante-esque and cheap fundamentalist staging for my tastes. I almost laughed aloud at the thought of a little devil appearing, tail and trident and cloven hooves intact, pencil-thin mustache twitching.
“But I did not laugh when I reached depths where the cause of the light became evident: cruciforms, hundreds and then thousands of them, small at first, clinging to the rough walls of the staircase like rough-hewn crosses left by some subterranean conquistadors, then larger ones and more of them until they almost overlapped, coral-pink, raw-flesh flushed, blood-red bioluminescent.
“It made me ill It was like entering a shaft lined with bloated, pulsing leeches, although these were worse I have seen the medscanner sonic and k-cross imaging of myself with only one of these things on me: excess ganglia infiltrating my flesh and organs like gray fibers, sheaths of twitching filaments, clusters of nematodes like terrible tumors which will not grant even the mercy of death. Now I had two on me: Lenar Hoyt’s and my own. I prayed that I would die rather than suffer another.
“I continued lower. The walls pulsed with heat as well as light, whether from the depths or the crowding of the thousands of cruciforms, I do not know. Eventually I reached the lowest step, the staircase ended, I turned a final twisting of stone, and was there.
“The labyrinth. It stretched away as I had seen it in countless holos and once in person: smooth tunneled, thirty meters to a side, carved out of Hyperion’s crust more than three-quarters of a million years ago, crossing and crisscrossing the planet like catacombs planned by some insane engineer. Labyrinths can be found on nine worlds, five in the Web, the rest, like this one, in the Outback: all are identical, all were excavated at the same time in the past, none surrender any clues as to the reason for their existence. Legends abound about the Labyrinth Builders, but the mythical engineers left no artifacts, no hints of their methods or alien makeup, and none of the theories about the labyrinths give a sensible reason for what must have been one of the largest engineering projects the galaxy has ever seen.
“All of the labyrinths are empty. Remotes have explored millions of kilometers of corridors cut from stone, and except where time and cave-in have altered the original catacombs, the labyrinths are featureless and empty.
“But not where I now stood.
“Cruciforms lighted a scene from Hieronymus Bosch as I gazed down an endless corridor, endless but not empty … no, not empty.
“At first I thought they were crowds of living people, a river of heads and shoulders and arms, stretching on for the kilometers I could see, the current of humanity broken here and there by the presence of parked vehicles all of the same rust-red color. As I stepped forward, approaching the wall of jam-packed humanity less than twenty meters from me, I realized that they were corpses. Tens, hundreds of thousands of human corpses stretching as far down the corridor as I could see; some sprawled on the stone floor, some crushed against walls, but most buoyed up by the pressure of other corpses so tightly were they jammed in this particular avenue of the labyrinth.
“There was a path; cutting its way through the bodies as if some machine with blades had mulched its way through. I followed it—careful not to touch an outspread arm or emaciated ankle.
“The bodies were human, still clothed in most cases, and mummified over eons of slow decomposing in this bacteria-free crypt. Skin and flesh had been tanned, stretched, and torn like rotten cheesecloth until it covered nothing but bone, and frequently not even that. Hair remained as tendrils of dusty tar, stiff as varnished fiberplastic. Blackness stared out from under opened eyelids, between teeth. Their clothing which must once have been a myriad of colors now was tan or gray or black, brittle as garments sculpted from thin stone. Time-melted plastic lumps on their wrists and necks might have been comlogs or their equivalent.
“The large vehicles might once have been EMVs but now were heaps of pure rust. A hundred meters in, I stumbled, and rather than fall off the meter-wide path into the field of bodies, I steadied myself on a tall machine all curves and clouded blisters. The pile of rust collapsed inward on itself.
“I wandered, Virgil-less, following the terrible path gnawed out of decayed human flesh, wondering why I was being shown all this, what it meant. After an indeterminable time of walking, staggering between piles of discarded humanity, I came to an intersection of tunnels; all three corridors ahead were filled with bodies. The narrow path continued in the labyrinth to my left. I followed it.
“Hours later, perhaps longer, I stopped and sat on the narrow stone walk which wound among the the horror. If there were tens of thousands of corpses in this small stretch of tunnel, Hyperion’s labyrinth must contain billions. More. The nine labyrinthine worlds together must be a crypt for trillions.
“I had no idea why I was being shown this ultimate Dachau of the soul. Near where I sat, the mummified corpse of a man still sheltered a woman’s corpse with the curve of his bone-bare arm In her arms was a small bundle with short black hair. I turned away and wept.
“As an archaeologist I had excavated victims of execution, fire, flood, earthquake, and volcano. Such family scenes were not new to me; they were the sine qua non of history. But somehow this was much more terrible. Perhaps it was the numbers; the dead in their holocaust millions. Perhaps it was the soul-stealing glow of the cruciforms which lined the tunnels like thousands of blasphemous bad jokes. Perhaps it was the sad crying of the wind moving through endless corridors of stone.
“My life and teachings and sufferings and small victories and countless defeats had brought me here—past faith, past caring, past simple, Miltonic defiance. I had the sense that these bodies had been here half a million years or more, but that the people themselves were from our time or, worse yet, our future. I lowered my face to my hands and wept.
“No scraping or actual noise warned me, but something, something, a movement of air perhaps … I looked up and the Shrike was there, not two meters distant. Not on the path but in among the bodies: a sculptur
e honoring the architect of all this carnage.
“I got to my feet. I would not sit or kneel before this abomination.
“The Shrike moved toward me, gliding more than walking, sliding as if it were on frictionless rails. The blood light of the cruciforms spilled over its quicksilver carapace. Its eternal, impossible grin—steel stalactites, stalagmites.
“I felt no violence toward the thing. Only sadness and a terrible pity. Not for the Shrike—whatever the hell it was—but for all the victims who, alone and ungirded by even the flimsiest of faiths, have had to face the terror-in-the-night which that thing embodies.
“For the first time, I noticed that up close, less than a meter away, there was a smell around the Shrike—a stench of rancid oil, overheated bearings, and dried blood. The flames in its eyes pulsed in perfect rhythm with the rise and fall of the cruciform glow.
“I did not believe years ago that this creature was supernatural, some manifestation of good or evil, merely an aberration of the universe’s unfathomable and seemingly senseless unfoldings: a terrible joke of evolution. St. Teilhard’s worst nightmare. But still a thing, obeying natural laws, no matter how twisted, and subject to some rules of the universe somewhere, somewhen.
“The Shrike lifted its arms toward me, around me. The blades on its four wrists were much longer than my own hands; the blade on its chest, longer than my forearm. I stared up into its eyes as one pair of its razorwire and steel-spring arms surrounded me while the other pair came slowly around, filling the small space between us.
“Fingerblades uncurled. I flinched but did not step back as those blades lunged, sank into my chest with a pain like cold fire, like surgical lasers slicing nerves.
“It stepped back, holding something red and reddened further with my blood. I staggered, half expecting to see my heart in the monster’s hands: the final irony of a dead man blinking in surprise at his own heart in the seconds before blood drains from a disbelieving brain.
“But it was not my heart. The Shrike held the cruciform I had carried on my chest, my cruciform, that parasitic depository of my slow-to-die DNA. I staggered again, almost fell, touched my chest. My fingers came away coated with blood but not with the arterial surges that such crude surgery deserved; the wound was healing even while I watched. I knew that the cruciform had sent tubers and filaments throughout my body. I knew that no surgical laser had been able to separate those deadly vines from Father Hoyt’s body—nor from mine. But I felt the contagion healing, the internal fibers drying and fading to the faintest hint of internal scar tissue.