by Dan Simmons
Father Captain de Soya was not screaming. I could see that he was straining not to cry out from the pain, but he remained silent, his eyes focused only on the terrible concentration to silence until Aenea knelt by his side.
At first he did not recognize her. “Bettz?” he mumbled. “VIRO Argyle? No … you died at your station. The others too … Pol Denish … Elijah trying to free the aft boat … the young troopers when the starboard hull failed … but you look … familiar.”
Aenea started to take his hand, saw that three of de Soya’s fingers were missing, and set her own hand on the stained blanket next to his. “Father Captain,” she said very softly.
“Aenea,” said de Soya, his dark eyes really looking at her for the first time. “You’re the child … so many months, chasing you … looked at you when you stepped out of the Sphinx. Incredible child. So glad you survived.” His gaze moved to me. “You are Raul Endymion. I saw your Home Guard dossier. Almost caught up to you on Mare Infinitus.” A wave of pain rolled over him and the priest-captain closed his eyes and bit into his burned and bloodied lower lip. After a moment, he opened his eyes and said to me, “I have something of yours. Personal gear on the Raphael. The Holy Office let me have it after they ended their investigation. Sergeant Gregorius will give it to you after I am dead.”
I nodded, having no idea what he was talking about.
“Father Captain de Soya,” whispered Aenea, “Federico … can you hear and understand me?”
“Yes,” murmured the priest-captain. “Painkillers … said no to Sergeant Gregorius … didn’t want to slip away forever in my sleep. Not go gently.” The pain returned. I saw that much of de Soya’s neck and chest had cracked and opened, like burned scales. Pus and fluid flowed down to the blankets beneath him. The man closed his eyes until the tide of agony receded; it took longer this time. I thought of how I had folded up under just the pain of a kidney stone and tried to imagine this man’s torment. I could not.
“Father Captain,” said Aenea, “there is a way for you to live …”
De Soya shook his head vigorously, despite the pain that must have caused. I noticed that his left ear was little more than carbon. Part of it flaked off on the pillow as I watched. “No!” he cried. “I told Gregorius … no partial resurrection … idiot, sexless idiot …” A cough that might have been a laugh from behind scorched teeth. “Had enough of that as a priest. Anyway … tired … tired of …” His blackened stubs of fingers on his right hand batted at the pink double cross on his flaked and oozing chest. “Let the thing die with me.”
Aenea nodded. “I didn’t mean be reborn, Father Captain. I meant live. Be healed.”
De Soya was trying to blink, but his eyelids were burned ragged. “Not a prisoner of the Pax …”he managed, finding the air to speak only each time he exhaled with a wracking gasp. “Will … execute … me. I deserve … it. Killed many innocent … men … women … in defense of … friends.”
Aenea leaned closer so that he could focus on her eyes. “Father Captain, the Pax is still after us as well. But we have a ship. It has an autosurgeon.”
Sergeant Gregorius stepped forward from where he had been leaning wearily against the wall. The man named Carel Shan remained unconscious. Hoag Liebler, apparently lost in some private misery, did not respond.
Aenea had to repeat it before de Soya understood.
“Ship?” said the priest-captain. “The ancient Hegemony ship you escaped in? Not armed, was it?”
“No,” said Aenea. “It never has been.”
De Soya shook his head again. “There must have been … fifty archangel-class … ships … jumped us. Got … a few … rest … still there. No chance … get … to … any translation point … before …” He closed his torn eyelids again while the pain washed over him. This time, it seemed, it almost carried him away. He returned as if from a far place.
“It’s all right,” whispered Aenea. “I’ll worry about that. You’ll be in the doc-in-the-box. But there’s something you would have to do.”
Father Captain de Soya seemed too tired to speak, but he shifted his head to listen.
“You have to renounce the cruciform,” said Aenea. “You have to surrender this type of immortality.”
The priest-captain’s blackened lips pulled back from his teeth. “Gladly …” he rasped. “But sorry … can’t … once accepted … cruciform … can’t be … surrendered.”
“Yes,” whispered Aenea, “it can. If you choose that, I can make it go away. Our autosurgeon is old. It would not be able to heal you with the cruciform parasite throughout your body. We have no resurrection crèche aboard the ship …”
De Soya reached for her then, his flaking and three-fingerless hand still gripping tightly the sleeve of her therm jacket. “Doesn’t matter … doesn’t matter if I die … get it off. Get it off. Will die a real … Catholic … again … if you … can help me … get it … OFF!” He almost shouted the final word.
Aenea turned to the sergeant. “Do you have a cup or glass?”
“There’s the mug in the medkit,” rumbled the giant, fumbling for it. “But we have no water …”
“I brought some,” said my friend and removed the insulated bottle from her belt.
I expected wine, but it was only the water we had bottled up before leaving the Temple Hanging in Air those endless hours ago. Aenea did not bother with alcohol swabs or sterile lancets; she beckoned me closer, removed the hunting knife from my belt, and drew the blade across three of her fingertips in a swift move that made me flinch. Her blood flowed red. Aenea dipped her fingers in the clear plastic drinking mug for just a second, but long enough to send currents of thick crimson spiraling and twisting in the water.
“Drink this,” she said to Father Captain de Soya, helping to lift the dying man’s head.
The priest-captain drank, coughed, drank again. His eyes closed when she eased him back onto the stained pillow.
“The cruciform will be gone within twenty-four hours,” whispered my friend.
Father Captain de Soya made that rough chuckling sound again. “I’ll be dead within an hour.”
“You’ll be in the autosurgeon within fifteen minutes,” said Aenea, touching his better hand. “Sleep now … but don’t die on me, Federico de Soya … don’t die on me. We have much to talk about. And you have one great service to perform for me … for us.”
Sergeant Gregorius was standing closer. “M. Aenea …” he said, halted, shuffled his feet, and tried again. “M. Aenea, may I partake of that … water?”
Aenea looked at him. “Yes, Sergeant … but once you drink, you can never again carry a cruciform. Never. There will be no resurrection. And there are other … side effects.”
Gregorius waved away any further discussion. “I have followed my captain for ten years. I will follow him now.” The giant drank deeply of the pinkish water.
De Soya’s eyes had been closed, and I had assumed that he was asleep or unconscious from the pain, but now he opened them and said to Gregorius, “Sergeant, would you please bring M. Endymion the parcel we dragged from the lifeboat?”
“Aye, Capt’n,” said the giant and rummaged through the litter of debris in one corner of the room. He handed me a sealed tube, a little over a meter high.
I looked at the priest-captain. De Soya seemed to be floating between delirium and shock. “I’ll open it when he’s better,” I said to the sergeant.
Gregorius nodded, carried the glass over to Carel Shan, and poured some water into the unconscious Weapons Officer’s gaping mouth. “Carel may die before your ship arrives,” said the sergeant. He looked up. “Or does the ship have two doc-in-the-boxes?”
“No,” said Aenea, “but the one we have has three compartments. You can heal your wounds as well.”
Gregorius shrugged. He went to the man named Liebler and offered the glass. The thin man with the broken arm only looked at it.
“Perhaps later,” said Aenea.
Gregorius nodded and
handed the glass back to her. “The XO was a prisoner on our ship,” said the sergeant. “A spy. An enemy of the captain. Father-captain still risked his last life to get Liebler out of the brig … got his burns retrieving him. I don’t think Hoag quite understands what’s happened.”
Liebler looked up then. “I understand it,” he said softly. “I just don’t understand it.”
Aenea stood. “Raul, I hope you haven’t lost the ship communicator.”
I fumbled in my pockets only a few seconds before coming up with the com unit/diskey journal. “I’ll go outside and tightbeam visually,” I said. “Use the skinsuit jack. Any instructions for the ship?”
“Tell it to hurry,” said Aenea.
IT WAS TRICKY GETTING THE SEMICONSCIOUS DE Soya and the unconscious Carel Shan to the ship. They had no spacesuits and it was still near vacuum outside. Sergeant Gregorius told us that he had used an inflatable transfer ball to drag them from the lifeboat wreckage to the Temple of the Jade Emperor, but the ball itself had been damaged. I had about fifteen minutes to think about the problem before the ship became visible, descending on its EM repellors and blue fusion-flame tail, so when it arrived I ordered it to land directly in front of the temple air lock, to morph its escalator ramp to the airlock door, and to extend its containment field around the door and stairway. Then it was just a matter of getting the float litters from the medbay in the ship and transferring the men to them without hurting them too much. Shan remained unconscious, but some of de Soya’s skin peeled away as we moved him onto the litter. The priest-captain stirred and opened his eyes but did not cry out.
After months on T’ien Shan, the interior of the Consul’s ship was still familiar, but familiar like a recurring dream one has about a house one has lived in long ago. After de Soya and the Weapons Officer were tucked away in the autosurgeon, it was strange to stand on the carpeted holopit deck with its ancient Steinway piano with Aenea and A. Bettik there as always, but also with a burned giant still holding his assault weapon and the former XO brooding silently on he holopit stairs.
“Diagnostics completed on the autosurgeons,” said the ship. “The presence of the cross-shaped parasite nodes makes treatment impossible at this time. Shall I terminate treatment or commence cryogenic fugue?”
“Cryogenic fugue,” said Aenea. “The doc-in-the-box should be able to operate on them in twenty-four hours. Please keep them alive and in stasis until then.”
“Affirmative,” said the ship. And then, “M. Aenea? M. Endymion?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you aware that I was tracked by long-range sensors from the time I left the third moon? There are at least thirty-seven Pax warships heading this way as we speak. One is already in parking orbit around this planet and another has just committed the highly unusual tactic of jumping on Hawking drive within the system’s gravity well.”
“Okay,” said Aenea. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I believe they intend to intercept and destroy us,” said the ship. “And they can do this before we clear atmosphere.”
“We know,” sighed Aenea. “I repeat, don’t worry about it.”
“Affirmative,” said the ship in the most businesslike tone I had ever heard from it. “Destination?”
“The bonsai fissure six kilometers east of Hsuan-k’ung Ssu,” said Aenea. “East of the Temple Hanging in Air. Quickly.” She glanced at her wrist chronometer. “But stay low, Ship. Within the cloud layers.”
“The phosgene clouds or the water particle clouds?” inquired the ship.
“The lowest possible,” said my friend. “Unless the phosgene clouds create a problem for you.”
“Of course not,” said the ship. “Would you like me to plot a course that would take us through the acid seas? It would make no difference to the Pax deep radar, but it could be done with only a small addition of time and …”
“No,” interrupted Aenea, “just the clouds.”
We watched on the holopit sphereview as the ship flung itself off Suicide Cliff and dived ten kilometers through gray cloud and then into green clouds. We would be at the fissure within minutes.
We all sat on the carpeted holopit steps then. I realized that I still had the sealed tube that de Soya had given me. I rotated it through my hands.
“Go ahead and open it,” said Sergeant Gregorius. The big man was slowly removing the outer layers of his scarred combat armor. Lance burns had melted the lower layers. I was afraid to see his chest and left arm.
I hesitated. I had said that I’d wait until the priest-captain had recovered.
“Go ahead,” Gregorius said again. “The Captain’s been waiting to give this back to you for nine years.”
I had no idea what it could be. How could this man have known he would see me someday? I owned nothing … how could he have something of mine to return?
I broke the seal on the tube and looked within. Some sort of tightly rolled fabric. With a slow realization, I pulled the thing out and unrolled it on the floor.
Aenea laughed delightedly. “My God,” she said. “In all my various dreams about this time, I never foresaw this. How wonderful.”
It was the hawking mat … the flying carpet that had carried Aenea and me from the Valley of the Time Tombs almost ten years earlier. I had lost it … it took me a second or two to remember. I had lost it on Mare Infinitus nine years ago when the Pax lieutenant I had been fighting had pulled a knife, cut me, pushed me off the mat into the sea. What had happened next? The lieutenant’s own men on the floating sea platform had mistakenly killed him with a cloud of flechette darts, the dead man had fallen into the violet sea, and the hawking mat had flown on … no, I remembered that someone on the platform had intercepted it.
“How did the father-captain get it?” I asked, knowing the answer as soon as I articulated the question. De Soya had been our relentless pursuer then.
Gregorius nodded. “The Father-Captain used it to find your blood and DNA samples. It’s how we got your Pax service record from Hyperion. If we’d had pressure suits, I would have used the damn thing to get us off that airless mountain.”
“You mean it works?” I tapped the flight threads. The hawking mat—more tattered than I remembered it—hovered ten centimeters off the floor. “I’ll be damned,” I said.
“We’re rising to the fissure at the coordinates you gave me,” came the ship’s voice.
The holopit view cleared and showed the Jo-kung ridge rushing past. We slowed and hovered a hundred meters out. We had returned to the same forested valley fissure where the ship had dropped me more than three months earlier. Only now the green valley was filled with people. I saw Theo, Lhomo, many of the others from the Temple Hanging in Air. The ship floated lower, hovered, and waited for directions.
“Lower the escalator,” said Aenea. “Let them all aboard.”
“May I remind you,” said the ship, “that I have fugue couches and life support for a maximum of six people for an extended interstellar jump? There are at least fifty people there on the …”
“Lower the escalator and let them all aboard,” commanded Aenea. “Immediately.”
The ship did as it was told without another word. Theo led the refugees up the ramp and the circular stairs to where we waited.
Most of those who had stayed behind at the Temple Hanging in Air were there: many of the temple monks, the Tromo Trochi of Dhornu, the ex-soldier Gyalo Thondup, Lhomo Dondrub—we were delighted to see that his paraglider had brought him safely back, and from his grins and hugs, the delight was reciprocated—Abbot Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi, Chim Din, Jigme Taring, Kuku and Kay, George and Jigme, the Dalai Lama’s brother Labsang, the brickworkers Viki and Kim, Overseer Tsipon Shakabpa, Rimsi Kyipup—less dour than I had ever seen him—and high riggers Haruyuki and Kenshiro, as well as the bamboo experts Voytek and Janusz, even the Mayor of Jo-kung, Charles Chi-kyap Kempo. But no Dalai Lama. And the Dorje Phamo was also missing.
“Rachel went back to fetch them,” said T
heo, the last to come aboard. “The Dalai Lama insisted on being the last to leave and the Sow stayed behind to keep him company until it was time to go. But they should have been back by now. I was just ready to go back along the ledge to check …”
Aenea shook her head. “We’ll all go.”
There was no way to get everyone seated or situated. People milled on the stairways, stood around the library level, had wandered up to the bedroom at the apex of the ship to look outside via the viewing walls, while others were on the fugue cubby level and down in the engine room.
“Let’s go, Ship,” said Aenea. “The Temple Hanging in Air. Make a direct approach.”
For the ship, a direct approach was a burst of thruster fire, a lob fifteen klicks into the atmosphere, and then a vertical drop with repellors and main engine burning at the last second. The entire process took about thirty seconds, but while the internal containment field kept us from being smashed to jelly, the view through the clear apex walls must have been disorienting for those watching upstairs. Aenea, A. Bettik, Theo, and I were watching the holopit and even that small view almost sent me to clutching the bulkheads- or clinging to the carpet. We dropped lower and hovered fifty meters above the temple complex.
“Ah, damn,” said Theo.
The view had shown us a man falling to his death in the clouds below. There was no possibility of swooping down to catch him. One second he was freefalling, the next he had been swallowed by the clouds.