The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  Peering through the ancient, mottled plastic and plastiglass at these things made me think that we were passing through some terrestrial aquarium of death. Finally we came to a red wall at right angles to a lower wall of faded, mottled blue with the remnants of graffiti in Latin still visible. Here the sheet of plastic was newer, fresher, and the small container of bones within quite visible. The skull had been set atop the neat pile of bones and seemed to be regarding us with some interest.

  Father de Soya went to his knees in the dust, crossed himself, and bent his head in prayer. Aenea and I stood back and watched with the quiet embarrassment common to the unbeliever in the presence of any true faith.

  When the priest arose, his eyes were moist. “According to Church history and Father Baggio, the workers uncovered these poor bones in 1949 A.D. Later analysis showed that they belong to a robust man who died sometime in his sixties. We are directly under the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, which was built here because of the legend that St. Peter had been interred secretly at just this spot. In 1968 A.D., Pope Paul VI announced that the Vatican was convinced that these were indeed the bones of the fisherman, the same Peter who walked with Jesus and was the Rock upon which Christ built his Church.”

  We looked at the silent heap of bones and then back at the priest.

  “Federico, you know that I am not trying to bring down the Church,” Aenea said. “Only this current aberration of it.”

  “Yes,” said Father de Soya, wiping his eyes roughly, leaving muddy streaks there. “I know that, Aenea.” He looked around, went to a door, opened it. A metal staircase led upward.

  “There will be guards,” I whispered.

  “I think not,” said Aenea. “The Vatican has spent eight hundred years fearing attack from space … from above. I do not believe they give much thought to their catacombs.” She stepped in front of the priest and started quickly but quietly up the metal steps. I hurried to follow her. I saw Father de Soya glance back toward the dim grotto, cross himself a final time, and follow us up toward St. Peter’s Basilica.

  The light in the main basilica, although softened by evening, stained glass, and candlelight, was all but blinding after the catacombs.

  We had climbed up through the subterranean shrine, up past a memorial basilica marked in stone as the Trophy of Gaius, through side corridors and service entrances, through the anteroom to the sacristy, past standing priests and craning altar boys, and out into the echoing expanse at the rear of the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica. Here were scores of dignitaries not important enough to have been awarded a place in the pews but still honored by being allowed to stand in the rear of the Basilica to witness this important celebration. It took only a glance to see that there were Swiss Guard and security people at all the entrances to the Basilica and in all the outer rooms with exits. Here at the back of the congregation, we were inconspicuous for the moment, just another priest and two somewhat under-dressed parishioners allowed to crane their necks to see the Holy Father on Holy Thursday.

  Mass was still being celebrated. The air smelled of incense and candlewax. Hundreds of brightly robed bishops and VIPs lined the gleaming rows of pews. At the marble altar rail before the baroque splendor canopy of the Throne of St. Peter, the Holy Father himself knelt to finish his menial work of washing the feet of twelve seated priests—eight men and four women. An unseen but large choir was singing—

  O Holy Ghost, through Thee alone

  Know we the Father and the Son;

  Be this our firm unchanging creed.

  That Thou dost from them both proceed.

  That Thou dost from them both proceed.

  “Praise be the Lord, Father and Son

  And Holy Spirit with them one;

  And may the Son on us bestow.

  All gifts that from the Spirit flow.

  All gifts that from the Spirit flow.”

  I hesitated then, wondering what we were doing here, why this endless battle of Aenea’s had brought us to the center of these people’s faith. I believed everything she had taught us, valued everything she had shared with us, but three thousand years of tradition and faith had formed the words of this beautiful song and had built the walls of this mighty cathedral. I could not help but remember the simple wooden platforms, the firm but inelegant bridges and stairways of Aenea’s rebuilt Temple Hanging in Air. What was it … what were we … compared to this splendor and humility? Aenea was an architect, largely self-trained except for her adolescent years with the cybrid Mr. Wright, building stone walls out of desert rock and mixing concrete by hand. Michelangelo had helped to design this Basilica.

  The Mass was almost over. Some of the standing crowd in the rear of the longitudinal nave were beginning to leave, walking lightly so as not to interrupt the end of the service with their footfalls, whispering only when they reached the stairs to the piazza outside. I saw that Aenea was whispering in Father de Soya’s ear and I leaned against them to hear, afraid that I might miss some vital instruction.

  “Will you do me one final great service, Father?” she asked.

  “Anything,” whispered the sad-eyed priest.

  “Please leave the Basilica now,” Aenea whispered in his ear. “Please go now, quietly, with these others. Leave now and lose yourself in Rome until the day comes to cease being lost.”

  Father de Soya pulled his head back in shock, looking at Aenea from half a meter away with an expression of someone who has been abandoned. He leaned close to her ear. “Ask anything else of me, Teacher.”

  “This is all I ask, Father. And I ask it with love and respect.”

  The choir began singing another hymn. Above the heads in front of me, I could see the Holy Father completing the washing of the priests’ feet and moving back to the altar under the gilded canopy. Everyone in the pews stood in anticipation of the closing litanies and final benediction.

  Father de Soya gave his own benediction of my friend, turned, and left the Basilica with a group of monks whose beads rattled as they walked.

  I stared at Aenea with enough intensity to set wood aflame, trying to send her the mental message DO NOT ASK ME TO LEAVE!

  She beckoned me close and whispered in my ear, “Do one final thing for me, Raul, my love.”

  I almost shouted “No, goddammit!” at the top of my lungs in the echoing nave of St. Peter’s Basilica during the holiest moments of Holy Thursday’s High Mass. Instead I waited.

  Aenea rumbled in the pockets of her vest and came out with a small vial. The liquid in it was clear but somehow looked heavier than water. “Would you drink this?” she whispered and handed me the vial.

  I thought of Romeo and Juliet, Caesar and Cleopatra, Abe-lard and Heloise, George Wu and Howard Sung. All star-crossed lovers. Suicide and poison. I drank down the potion in one gulp, setting the empty vial in my own shirt pocket, waiting for Aenea to take out and drink a similar potion. She did not.

  “What was it?” I whispered, not fearing any answer.

  Aenea was watching the final moments of the Mass. She leaned very close to whisper. “Antidote to the Pax’s birth control medication that you took when you joined the Home Guard.”

  What the hell!!??!! I came close to shouting over the Holy Father’s closing words. You’re worried about family planning NOW?? Are you out of your goddamn MIND???

  She leaned back, her breath warm on my neck as she whispered again. “Thank God, I’ve been carrying that for two days and almost forgot it. Don’t worry, it’ll take about three weeks to take effect. Then you’ll never be shooting blanks again.”

  I blinked at her. Was this blasphemy in St. Peter’s Basilica or just extraordinarily bad taste? Then my mind shifted into high gear—This is wonderful news … whatever happens next, Aenea sees a future for us … for herself … wants to have a child with me. But what about her first child? And why do I assume she’s doing this so that she and I can … why would she … perhaps it’s her idea of a farewell present … why would she … why …
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br />   “Kiss me, Raul,” she whispered, loud enough to make the elderly nun standing in front of us turn around with a severe expression.

  I did not question her. I kissed her. Her lips were soft and slightly moist, just as they were the first time we had kissed standing on the bank of the Mississippi River at a place called Hannibal. The kiss seemed to last a long time. She touched the back of my neck with her cool fingers before our lips parted.

  The Pope was moving to the front of the apse, facing each of the two arms of the transept, then the short nave, and finally the longitudinal nave as he gave his final benediction.

  Aenea walked out into the main aisle, pushing people gently aside until she was in the open space and striding toward the distant altar. “Lenar Hoyt!” she shouted, and her voice echoed the hundred meters to the dome above. It was more than 150 meters from where we had been standing to where the Pope now paused in his benediction, and I knew Aenea had no chance of making that distance before being intercepted, but I hurried to catch up to her.

  “Lenar Hoyt!” she shouted again and hundreds of heads turned in her direction. I saw movement in the arched shadows along the sides of the nave as Swiss Guard leaped into action. “Lenar Hoyt, I am Aenea, daughter of Brawne Lamia who traveled to Hyperion with you to face the Shrike. I am the daughter of the John Keats cybrid whom your Core masters have twice killed in the flesh!”

  The Pope stood as if transfixed, one bony finger raised in benediction a moment before now pointing, shaking as if palsied. His other hand clutched his vestments above his chest. His miter trembled as his head bobbed back and forth. “You!” he cried, his voice high, thin, and weak. “The Abomination!”

  “You are the abomination,” shouted Aenea, she was running now, shrugging off dark-robed figures that rose from the pews to grab at her. I pulled two men from her back and she ran on. I leaped over a lunging figure and ran at her side, watching the Swiss Guard shoving through the crowd, energy pikes aimed but hesitant to fire with so many Vatican and Mercantilus dignitaries in the line of fire. I knew that they would not hesitate if she got within ten meters of the Pope. “You are the abomination,” she shouted again, running hard now, dodging grasping hands and lunging arms. “You are the Judas of the Catholic Church, Lenar Hoyt, selling its sacred history to the …”

  A heavy man in a Pax Fleet admiral’s uniform pulled a ceremonial sword from his scabbard and swung it at my beloved’s head. She ducked. I blocked the Admiral’s arm, broke it, kicked the sword aside, and threw him halfway down the length of the pew into his subordinates.

  Colonel Kassad had said that after learning the language of the living, that he had felt the pain he administered to others. I experienced that now, feeling the torn nerves and muscle and shattered bone of my forearm and the collision of my body as the Admiral struck his men. But when I looked down, my forearm was firm and the only penalty was pain. I did not care about the pain.

  A cordon of priests, monks, and bishops put themselves between Aenea and the Pope. I saw the Pontiff clutch his chest more tightly and fall, but several of the deacons standing near him caught him, carried him back under the canopy of Bernini’s throne. Swiss Guardsmen hurtled into the space at the end of the aisle, blocking Aenea’s way with their pikes and bodies. More filled the space behind us, roughly shoving away the onlookers with brutal swings of their pikes. Pax security in black armor and compact repulsor flying belts came hurtling in ten meters above the heads of the congregation. Laser dots danced on Aenea’s face and chest.

  I threw myself between her and the imminent energy bolts and flechette clouds. The laser beam blinded my right eye as the target dot swept across it. I threw my arms wide and bellowed something … a challenge perhaps … defiance certainly.

  “No! Keep them alive!” It was a huge cardinal shouting in a bass rumble like the voice of God.

  A Swiss Guardsman rushed at Aenea with his pike raised to stun her with a blow to the head. She threw herself down, slid across the tile, clipped him at his knees, and sent him sprawling toward me. I kicked him in the head and turned to wrestle the pike out of another Guardsman’s hands, knocking him backward into the crowd and swinging the long weapon at the five Guardsmen rushing us from the rear. They gave way.

  A flying security trooper fired two darts into my left shoulder. I presumed they were tranquilizers, but I ripped them away, threw them at the flying form, and felt nothing. Two guards—a large man and a larger woman—grabbed my arms. I swung them through the air until their skulls collided and dropped them onto tile. “Aenea!”

  She was on her feet again, pulling free of one Guardsman only to have two forms in black armor block her way. The congregation was screaming. The great cathedral organ suddenly screamed like a woman in labor. A security man shot her at five-meter range. Aenea spun around. A woman in black armor clubbed my darling down, straddling her and pulling her arms behind her.

  I used my forearm to swat the Pax security bitch five meters backward through the air. A Guardsman clubbed me in the stomach with his pike. A flying security shape zapped me with a neural stunner. Stunners are supposed to work instantly, guaranteed to work instantly, but I had time to close my hands on the nearest Guardsman’s throat before they stunned me again, and then a third time. My body spasmed and fell and I pissed my pants as all voluntary functions ceased, my last conscious sensation being the cold flow of urine down my pant leg onto the perfect tiles of St. Peter’s Basilica.

  I was not really aware of the dozen heavy forms landing on my back, pinning my arms, pulling me away. I did not really hear or feel the crack of my forehead striking tile or the rip it opened from my brow to hairline.

  In the last three or four seconds of semiconsciousness, I saw black feet, combat boots, a fallen Swiss Guardsman’s cap, more feet. I knew that Aenea had fallen to my left but I could not turn my head to see her one last time.

  They dragged me away, leaving a trail of blood, urine, and saliva as they did so. I was far beyond caring.

  And so ends my tale.

  I was conscious but restrained with neural locks during my “trial,” a ten-minute appearance before the black-robed judges of the Holy Office. I was condemned to death. No human being would sully his or her soul by executing me; I was to be transferred to a Schrödinger cat box in orbit around the quarantined labyrinth world of Armaghast. The immutable laws of physics and quantum chance would execute the sentence.

  As soon as the trial ended they shipped me via a Hawking-drive, high-g, robot torchship to Armaghast System—a two-month time-debt. Wherever Aenea was, whatever had happened to her, I was already two months too late to help her when I awoke just as they finished sealing the fused-energy shell of my prison.

  And for uncounted days … perhaps months, I went insane. And then for more uncounted days, certainly more months, I have been using the ’scriber they included in my tiny egg of a cell to tell this tale. They must have known that the ’scriber would be an additional punishment as I waited to die, writing my story on my few pages of recycled microvellum like the snake devouring its own tail, knowing that no one will ever access the story in the memory chip.

  I said at the beginning of all this that you, my impossible reader, were reading it for the wrong reason. I said at the beginning that if you were reading this to discover her fate, or my own, that you were reading the wrong document. I was not with her when her fate was played out, and my own is closer now to its final act than when I first wrote these words.

  I was not with her.

  I was not with her.

  Oh, Jesus God, God of Moses, Allah, dear Buddha, Zeus, Muir, Elvis, Christ … if any of you exist or ever existed or retain a shred of power in your dead gray hands … please let me die now. Now. Let the particle be detected and the gas released. Now.

  I was not with her.

  31

  I lied to you.

  I said at the beginning of this narrative that I was not with her when Aenea’s fate was played out—implying that I did
not know what that fate might be—and I repeated it some sleep periods ago when I ’scribed what I was sure must be the last installment of that same narrative.

  But I lied by omission, as some priest of the Church might say.

  I lied because I did not want to discuss it, to describe it, to relive it, to believe it. But I know now that I must do all of these things. I have relived it every hour of my incarceration here in this Schrödinger cat box prison. I have believed it since the moment I shared the experience with my dear friend, my dear Aenea.

  I knew before they shipped me out of Pacem System what the fate of my dear girl had been. Having believed it and relived it, I owe it to the truth of this narrative and to the memory of our love to discuss it and describe it.

  All this came to me while I was drugged and docile, tethered in a high-g tank aboard the robot shuttle an hour after my ten-minute trial in front of the Inquisition on a Pax base asteroid ten light-minutes from Pacem. I knew as soon as I heard and felt and saw these things that they were real, that they were happening at the moment I shared them, and that only my closeness to Aenea and my slow progress in learning the language of the living had allowed such a powerful sharing. When the sharing was over, I began screaming in my high-g tank, ripping at life-support umbilicals and banging the bulkhead with my head and fists, until the water-filled tank was swirling with my blood. I tried tearing at the osmosis mask that covered my face like some parasite sucking away my breath; it would not tear. For a full three hours I screamed and protested, battering myself into a state of semiconsciousness at best, reliving the shared moments with Aenea a thousand times and screaming in agony a thousand times, and then the robot ship injected sleep drugs through the leechlike umbilicals, the high-g tank drained, and I drifted away into cryogenic fugue as the torch-ship reached the translation point for the jump to nearby Armaghast System.