by Dan Simmons
Father Hoyt smiled without humor. “The Catholic Church ordained me,” he said. “Shrike-worship contradicts everything the Church defends.”
Colonel Kassad shook his head, whether in refusal to respond or to indicate that he was not a member of the Shrike Church, it was not clear.
Martin Silenus made an expansive gesture. “I was baptized a Lutheran,” he said. “A subset which no longer exists. I helped create Zen Gnosticism before any of your parents were born. I have been a Catholic, a revelationist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a Bound Shaker, a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake’s Nada, and a dues-paying subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now, I am happy to say, I am a simple pagan.” He smiled at everyone. “To a pagan,” he concluded, “the Shrike is a most acceptable deity.”
“I ignore religions,” said Brawne Lamia. “I do not succumb to them.”
“My point has been made, I believe,” said Sol Weintraub. “None of us admits to subscribing to the Shrike cult dogma, yet the elders of that perceptive group have chosen us over many millions of the petitioning faithful to visit the Time Tombs … and their fierce god … in what may be the last such pilgrimage.”
The Consul shook his head. “Your point may be made, M. Weintraub,” he said, “but I fail to see it.”
The scholar absently stroked his beard. “It would seem that our reasons for returning to Hyperion are so compelling that even the Shrike Church and the Hegemony probability intelligences agree that we deserve to return,” he said. “Some of these reasons—mine, for instance—may appear to be public knowledge, but I am certain that none are known in their entirety except to the individuals at this table. I suggest that we share our stories in the few days remaining to us.”
“Why?” said Colonel Kassad. “It would seem to serve no purpose.”
Weintraub smiled. “On the contrary, it would—at the very least—amuse us and give at least a glimpse of our fellow travelers’ souls before the Shrike or some other calamity distracts us. Beyond that, it might just give us enough insight to save all of our lives if we are intelligent enough to find the common thread of experience which binds all our fates to the whim of the Shrike.”
Martin Silenus laughed and closed his eyes. He said:
“Straddling each a dolphin’s back
And steadied by a fin,
Those Innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again.”
“That’s Lenista, isn’t it?” said Father Hoyt. “I studied her in seminary.”
“Close,” said Silenus, opening his eyes and pouring more wine. “It’s Yeats. Bugger lived five hundred years before Lenista tugged at her mother’s metal teat.”
“Look,” said Lamia, “what good would telling each other stories do? When we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the wish, and the others die. Correct?”
“So goes the myth,” said Weintraub.
“The Shrike is no myth,” said Kassad. “Nor its steel tree.”
“So why bore each other with stories?” asked Brawne Lamia, spearing the last of her chocolate cheesecake.
Weintraub gently touched the back of his sleeping infant’s head. “We live in strange times,” he said. “Because we are part of that one tenth of one tenth of one percent of the Hegemony’s citizens who travel between the stars rather than along the Web, we represent odd epochs of our own recent past. I, for example, am sixty-eight standard years old, but because of the time-debts my travels could have incurred, I might have spread these threescore and eight years across well more than a century of Hegemony history.”
“So?” said the woman next to him.
Weintraub opened his hand in a gesture which included everyone at the table. “Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.” Weintraub scratched his nose. “It is a mystery,” he said, “and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice.”
“I agree,” said Het Masteen with no emotion. “It had not occurred to me, but I see the wisdom of telling our tales before we confront the Shrike.”
“But what’s to keep us from lying?” asked Brawne Lamia.
“Nothing.” Martin Silenus grinned. “That’s the beauty of it.”
“We should put it to a vote,” said the Consul. He was thinking about Meina Gladstone’s contention that one of the group was an Ouster agent. Would hearing the stories be a way of revealing the spy? The Consul smiled at the thought of an agent so stupid.
“Who decided that we are a happy little democracy?” Colonel Kassad asked dryly.
“We had better be,” said the Consul. “To reach our individual goals, this group needs to reach the Shrike regions together. We require some means of making decisions.”
“We could appoint a leader,” said Kassad.
“Piss on that,” the poet said in a pleasant tone. Others at the table also shook their heads.
“All right,” said the Consul, “we vote. Our first decision relates to M. Weintraub’s suggestion that we tell the stories of our past involvement with Hyperion.”
“All or nothing,” said Het Masteen. “We each share our story or none does. We will abide by the will of the majority.”
“Agreed,” said the Consul, suddenly curious to hear the others tell their stories and equally sure that he would never tell his own. “Those in favor of telling our tales?”
“Yes,” said Sol Weintraub.
“Yes,” said Het Masteen.
“Absolutely,” said Martin Silenus. “I wouldn’t miss this little comic farce for a month in the orgasm baths on Shote.”
“I vote yes also,” said the Consul, surprising himself. “Those opposed?”
“Nay,” said Father Hoyt but there was no energy in his voice.
“I think it’s stupid,” said Brawne Lamia.
The Consul turned to Kassad. “Colonel?”
Fedmahn Kassad shrugged.
“I register four yes votes, two negatives, and one abstention,” said the Consul. “The ayes have it. Who wants to start?”
The table was silent. Finally Martin Silenus looked up from where he had been writing on a small pad of paper. He tore a sheet into several smaller strips. “I’ve recorded numbers from one to seven,” he said. “Why don’t we draw lots and go in the order we draw?”
“That seems rather childish, doesn’t it?” said M. Lamia.
“I’m a childish fellow,” responded Silenus with his satyr’s smile. “Ambassador”—he nodded toward the Consul—“could I borrow that gilded pillow you’re wearing for a hat?”
The Consul handed over his tricorne, the folded slips were dropped in, and the hat passed around. Sol Weintraub was the first to draw, Martin Silenus the last.
The Consul unfolded his slip, making sure that no one else could see it. He was number seven. Tension ebbed out of him like air out of an overinflated balloon. It was quite possible, he reasoned, that events would intercede before he had to tell his story. Or the war would make everything academic. Or the group could lose interest in stories. Or the king could die. Or the horse could die. Or he could teach the horse how to talk.
No more whiskey, thought the Consul.
“Who’s first?” asked Martin Silenus.
In the brief silence, the Consul could hear leaves stirring to unfelt breezes.
“I am,” said Father Hoyt. The priest’s expression showed the same barely submerged acceptance of pain which the Consul had seen on the faces of terminally ill friends. Hoyt held up his slip of paper with a large 1 clearly scrawled on it.
“All right,” said Silenus. “Start.”
“Now?” asked the priest.
“Why not?” said the poet. The only sign that Sil
enus had finished at least two bottles of wine was a slight darkening of the already ruddy cheeks and a somewhat more demonic tilt to the pitched eyebrows. “We have a few hours before planetfall,” he said, “and I for one plan to sleep off the freezer fugue when we’re safely down and settled among the simple natives.”
“Our friend has a point,” Sol Weintraub said softly. “If the tales are to be told, the hour after dinner each day is a civilized time to tell them.”
Father Hoyt sighed and stood. “Just a minute,” he said and left the dining platform.
After some minutes had passed, Brawne Lamia said, “Do you think he’s lost his nerve?”
“No,” said Lenar Hoyt, emerging from the darkness at the head of the wooden escalator which served as the main staircase. “I needed these.” He dropped two small, stained notebooks on the table as he took his seat.
“No fair reading stories from a primer,” said Silenus. “These are to be our own tall tales, Magus!”
“Shut up, damn it!” cried Hoyt. He ran a hand across his face, touched his chest. For the second time that night, the Consul knew that he was looking at a seriously ill man.
“I’m sorry,” said Father Hoyt. “But if I’m to tell my … my tale, I have to tell someone else’s story as well. These journals belong to the man who was the reason for my coming to Hyperion … and why I am returning today.” Hoyt took a deep breath.
The Consul touched the journals. They were begrimed and charred, as if they had survived a fire. “Your friend has old-fashioned tastes,” he said, “if he still keeps a written journal.”
“Yes,” said Hoyt. “If you’re all ready, I will begin.”
The group at the table nodded. Beneath the dining platform, a kilometer of treeship drove through the cold night with the strong pulse of a living thing. Sol Weintraub lifted his sleeping child from the infant carrier and carefully set her on a cushioned mat on the floor near his chair. He removed his comlog, set it near the mat, and programmed the diskey for white noise. The week-old infant lay on her stomach and slept.
The Consul leaned far back and found the blue and green star which was Hyperion. It seemed to grow larger even as he watched. Het Masteen drew his cowl forward until only shadows showed for his face. Sol Weintraub lighted a pipe. Others accepted refills of coffee and settled back in their chairs.
Martin Silenus seemed the most avid and expectant of the listeners as he leaned forward and whispered:
“He seyde, ‘Syn I shal bigynne the game,
What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name!
Now lat us ryde, and herkneth what I seye.’
And with that word we ryden forth oure weye;
And he bigan with right a myrie cheere
His tale anon, and seyde as ye may heere.”
THE PRIEST’S TALE:
“THE MAN WHO CRIED GOD”
“Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,” said Father Lenar Hoyt.
So began the priest’s story. Later, dictating the tale into his comlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the timeless failings of human speech.
Lenar Hoyt had been a young priest, born, raised, and only recently ordained on the Catholic world of Pacem, when he was given his first offworld assignment: he was ordered to escort the respected Jesuit Father Paul Duré into quiet exile on the colony world of Hyperion.
In another time, Father Paul Duré certainly would have become a bishop and perhaps a pope. Tall, thin, ascetic, with white hair receding from a noble brow and eyes too filled with the sharp edge of experience to hide their pain, Paul Duré was a follower of St. Teilhard as well as an archaeologist, ethnologist, and eminent Jesuit theologian. Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what amounted to a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the mainstream of Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite. Nor had Father Duré lost his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church continued to be humankind’s last, best hope for immortality.
To Lenar Hoyt as a boy, Father Duré had been a somewhat godlike figure when glimpsed during his rare visits to the preseminary schools, or on the would-be seminarian’s even rarer visits to the New Vatican. Then, during the years of Hoyt’s study in seminary, Duré had been on an important Church-sponsored archaeological dig on the nearby world of Armaghast. When the Jesuit returned, a few weeks after Hoyt’s ordination, it had been under a cloud. No one outside the highest circles of the New Vatican knew precisely what had happened, but there were whispers of excommunication and even of a hearing before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, dormant the four centuries since the confusion following the death of Earth.
Instead, Father Duré had asked for a posting to Hyperion, a world most people knew of only because of the bizarre Shrike cult which had originated there, and Father Hoyt had been chosen to accompany him. It would be a thankless job, traveling in a role which combined the worst aspects of apprentice, escort, and spy without even the satisfaction of seeing a new world; Hoyt was under orders to see Father Duré down to the Hyperion spaceport and then reboard the same spinship for its return voyage to the Worldweb. What the bishopric was offering Lenar Hoyt was twenty months in cryogenic fugue, a few weeks of in-system travel at either end of the voyage, and a time-debt which would return him to Pacem eight years behind his former classmates in the quest for Vatican careers and missionary postings.
Bound by obedience and schooled in discipline, Lenar Hoyt accepted without question.
Their transport, the aging spinship HS Nadia Oleg, was a pockmarked metal tub with no artificial gravity of any sort when it was not under drive, no viewports for the passengers, and no on-board recreation except for the stimsims piped into the datalink to keep passengers in their hammocks and fugue couches. After awakening from fugue, the passengers—mostly offworld workers and economy-rate tourists with a few cult mystics and would-be Shrike suicides thrown in for good measure—slept in those same hammocks and fugue couches, ate recycled food in featureless mess decks, and generally tried to cope with spacesickness and boredom during their twelve-day, zero-g glide from their spinout point to Hyperion.
Father Hoyt learned little from Father Duré during those days of forced intimacy, nothing at all about the events on Armaghast which had sent the senior priest into exile. The younger man had keyed his comlog implant to seek out as much data as it could on Hyperion and, by the time they were three days out from planetfall, Father Loyt considered himself somewhat of an expert on the world.
“There are records of Catholics coming to Hyperion but no mention of a diocese there,” said Hoyt one evening as they hung talking in their zero-g hammocks while most of their fellow passengers lay tuned into erotic stimsims. “I presume you’re going down to do some mission work?”
“Not at all,” replied Father Duré. “The good people of Hyperion have done nothing to foist their religious opinions on me, so I see no reason to offend them with my proselytizing. Actually, I hope to travel to the southern continent—Aquila—and then find a way inland from the city of Port Romance. But not in the guise of a missionary. I plan to set up an ethnological research station along the Cleft.”
“Research?” Father Hoyt had echoed in surprise. He closed his eyes to key his implant. Looking again at Father Duré, he said, “That section of the Pinion Plateau isn’t inhabited, Father. The flame forests make it totally inaccessible most of the year.”
Father Duré smiled and nodded. He carried no implant and his ancient comlog had been in his luggage for the duration of the trip. “Not quite inaccessible,” he said softly. “And not quite uninhabited. The Bikura live there.”
“Bikura,” Father Hoyt said and closed his eyes. “But they’re just a legend,” he said at last.
“Hmmm,” said Father Duré. “Try cross-indexing through Mamet Spedling.”
Father Hoyt closed his eyes again. General Index told
him that Mamet Spedling had been a minor explorer affiliated with the Shackleton Institute on Renaissance Minor who, almost a standard century and a half earlier, had filed a short report with the Institute in which he told of hacking his way inland from the then newly settled Port Romance, through swamplands which had since been reclaimed for fiberplastic plantations, passing through the flame forests during a period of rare quietude, and climbing high enough on the Pinion Plateau to encounter the Cleft and a small tribe of humans who fit the profile of the legendary Bikura.
Spedling’s brief notes hypothesized that the humans were survivors of a missing seedship colony from three centuries earlier and clearly described a group suffering all of the classic retrograde cultural effects of extreme isolation, inbreeding, and overadaptation. In Spedling’s blunt words, “… even after less than two days here it is obvious that the Bikura are too stupid, lethargic, and dull to waste time describing.” As it turned out, the flame forests then began to show some signs of becoming active and Spedling had not wasted any more time observing his discovery but had rushed to reach the coast, losing four indigenie bearers, all of his equipment and records, and his left arm to the “quiet” forest in the three months it took him to escape.
“My God,” Father Hoyt had said as he lay in his hammock on the Nadia Oleg, “why the Bikura?”
“Why not?” had been Father Duré’s mild reply. “Very little is known about them.”
“Very little is known about most of Hyperion,” said the younger priest, becoming somewhat agitated. “What about the Time Tombs and the legendary Shrike north of the Bridle Range on Equus?” he said. “They’re famous!”
“Precisely,” said Father Duré. “Lenar, how many learned papers have been written on the Tombs and the Shrike creature? Hundreds? Thousands?” The aging priest had tamped in tobacco and now lighted his pipe: no small feat in zero-g, Hoyt observed. “Besides,” said Paul Duré, “even if the Shrike-thing is real, it is not human. I am partial to human beings.”
“Yes,” said Hoyt, ransacking his mental arsenal for potent arguments, “but the Bikura are such a small mystery. At the most you’re going to find a few dozen indigenies living in a region so cloudy and smoky and … unimportant that even the colony’s own mapsats haven’t noticed them. Why choose them when there are big mysteries to study on Hyperion … like the labyrinths!” Hoyt had brightened. “Did you know that Hyperion is one of the nine labyrinthine worlds, Father?”