by Dan Simmons
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?”
“Of course,” said Duré. A rough hemisphere of smoke expanded from him until air currents broke it into tendrils and tributaries. “But the labyrinths have their researchers and admirers throughout the Web, Lenar, and the tunnels have been there—on all nine worlds—for how long? Half a million standard years? Closer to three quarters of a million, I believe. Their secret will last. But how long will the Bikura culture last before they’re absorbed into modern colonial society or, more likely, are simply wiped out by circumstances?”
Hoyt shrugged. “Perhaps they’re already gone. It’s been a long time since Spedling’s encounter with them and there haven’t been any other confirmed reports. If they are extinct as a group, then all of your time-debt and labor and pain of getting there will be for nothing.”
“Precisely,” was all that Father Paul Duré had said and puffed calmly on his pipe.
It was in their last hour together, during the dropship ride down, that Father Hoyt had gained the slightest glimpse into his companion’s thoughts. The limb of Hyperion had been glowing white and green and lapis above them for hours when suddenly the old dropship. had cut into the upper layers of atmosphere, flame had briefly filled the window, and then they were flying silently some sixty kilometers above dark cloud masses and starlit seas with the hurtling terminator of Hyperion’s sunrise rushing toward them like a spectral tidal wave of light.
“Marvelous,” Paul Duré had whispered, more to himself than to his young companion. “Marvelous. It is at times like this that I have the sense … the slightest sense … of what a sacrifice it must have been for the Son of God to condescend to become the Son of Man.”
Hoyt had wanted to talk then, but Father Duré had continued to stare out the window, lost in thought. Ten minutes later they had landed at Keats Interstellar, Father Duré was soon swept into the whirlpool of customs and luggage rituals, and twenty minutes after that a thoroughly disappointed Lenar Hoyt was rising toward space and the Nadia Oleg once again.
“Five weeks later of my time, I returned to Pacem,” said Father Hoyt. “I had mislaid eight years but for some reason my sense of loss ran deeper than that simple fact. Immediately upon my return, the bishop informed me that there had been no word from Paul Duré during the four years pf his stay on Hyperion. The New Vatican had spent a fortune on fatline inquiries, but neither the colonial authorities nor the consulate in Keats had been able to locate the missing priest.”
Hoyt paused to sip from his water glass and the Consul said, “I remember the search. I never met Duré, of course, but we did our best to trace him. Theo, my aide, spent a lot of energy over the years trying to solve the case of the missing cleric. Other than a few contradictory reports of sightings in Port Romance, there was no trace of him. And those sightings went back to the weeks right after his arrival, years before. There were hundreds of plantations out there with no radios or comlines, primarily because they were, harvesting bootleg drugs as well as fiberplastic. I guess we never talked to the people at the right plantation. At least I know Father Duré’s file was still open when I left.”
Father Hoyt nodded. “I landed in Keats a month after your replacement had taken over at the consulate. The bishop had been astonished when I volunteered to return. His Holiness himself granted me an audience. I was on Hyperion less than seven of its local months. By the time I left to return to the Web, I had discovered the fate of Father Duré.” Hoyt tapped the two stained leather books on the table. “If I am to complete this,” he said, his voice thick, “I must read excerpts from these.”
The treeship Yggdrasill had turned so the bulk of the tree had blocked the sun. The effect was to plunge the dining platform and the curved canopy of leaves beneath it into night, but instead of a few thousand stars dotting the sky, as would have been the case from a planets surface, literally a million suns blazed above, beside, and beneath the group at the table. Hyperion was a distinct sphere now, hurtling directly at them like some deadly missile.
“Read,” said Martin Silenus.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF
FATHER PAUL DURÉ:
Day 1:
So begins my exile.
I am somewhat at a loss as to how to date my new journal. By the monastic calendar on Pacem, it is the seventeenth day of Thomasmonth in the Year of Our Lord 2732. By Hegemony Standard, it is October 12, 589 P.C. By Hyperion reckoning, or so I am told by the wizened little clerk in the old hotel where I am staying, it is the twenty-third day of Lycius (the last of their seven forty-day months), either 426 A.D.C. (after dropship crash!) or the hundred and twenty-eighth year of the reign of Sad King Billy, who has not reigned for at least a hundred of those years.
To hell with it. I’ll call it Day 1 of my exile.
Exhausting day. (Strange to be tired after months of sleep, but that is said to be a common reaction after awakening from fugue. My cells feel the fatigue of these past months of travel even if I do not remember them. I don’t remember feeling this tired from travel when I was younger.
I felt bad about not getting to know young Hoyt b
etter. He seems a decent sort, all proper catechism and bright eyes. It’s no fault of youngsters like him that the Church is in its final days. It’s just that his brand of happy naivete can do nothing to arrest that slide into oblivion which the Church seems destined for.
Well, my contributions have not helped either.
Brilliant view of my new world as the dropship brought us down. I was able to make out two of the three continents—Equus and Aquila. The third one, Ursa, was not visible.
Planetfall at Keats and hours of effort getting through customs and taking ground transit into the city. Confused images: the mountain range to the north with its shifting, blue haze, foothills forested with orange and yellow trees, pale sky with its green-blue under-coating, the sun too small but more brilliant than Pacem’s. Colors seem more vivid from a distance, dissolving and scattering as one approaches, like a pointillist’s palette. The great sculpture of Sad King Billy which I had heard so much about was oddly disappointing. Seen from the highway, it looked raw and rough, a hasty sketch chiseled from the dark mountain, rather than the regal figure I had expected. It does brood over this ramshackle city of half a million people in a way that the neurotic poet-king probably would have appreciated.
The town itself seems to be separated into the sprawling maze of slums and saloons which the locals call Jacktown and Keats itself, the so-called Old City although it dates back only four centuries, all polished stone and studied sterility. I will take the tour soon.
I had scheduled a month in Keats but already I am eager to press on. Oh, Monsignor Edouard, if you could see me now. Punished but still unrepentant. More alone than ever but strangely satisfied with my new exile. If my punishment for past excesses brought about by my zeal is to be banishment to the seventh circle of desolation, then Hyperion was well chosen. I could forget my self-appointed mission to the distant Bikura (are they real? I think not this night) and content myself with living out the remainder of my years in this provincial capital on this godforsaken backwater world. My exile would be no less complete.
Ah, Edouard, boys together, classmates together (although I was not so brilliant nor so orthodox as you), now old men together. But now you are four years wiser and I am still the mischievous, unrepentant boy you remember. I pray that you are alive and well and praying for me.
Tired. Will sleep. Tomorrow, take the tour of Keats, eat well, and arrange transport to Aquila and points south.
Day 5:
There is a cathedral in Keats. Or, rather, there was one. It has been abandoned for at least two standard centuries. It lies in ruins with its transept open to the green-blue skies, one of its western towers unfinished, and the other tower a skeletal framework of tumbled stone and rusted reinforcement rods.
I stumbled upon it while wandering, lost, along the banks of the Hoolie River in the sparsely populated section of town where the Old City decays into Jacktown amid a jumble of tail warehouses which prevent even a glimpse of the ruined towers of the cathedral until one turns a corner onto a narrow cul-de-sac and there is the shell of the cathedral; its chapter house has half fallen away into the river, its facade is pocked with remnants of the mournful, apocalyptic statuary of the post-Hegira expansionist period.
I wandered through the latticework of shadows and fallen blocks into the nave. The bishopric on Pacem had not mentioned any history of Catholicism on Hyperion, much less the presence of a cathedral. It is almost inconceivable that the scattered seedship colony of four centuries ago could have supported a large enough congregation to warrant the presence of a bishop, much less a cathedral. Yet there it was.
I poked through the shadows of the sacristy. Dust and powdered plaster hung in the air like incense, outlining two shafts of sunlight streaming down from narrow windows high above. I stepped out into a broader patch of sunlight and approached an altar stripped of all decoration except for chips and cracks caused by falling masonry. The great cross which had hung on the east wall behind the altar had also fallen and now lay in ceramic splinters among the heap of stones there. Without conscious thought I stepped behind the altar, raised my arms, and began the celebration of the Eucharist. There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring ritual of that celebration.
It was with some shock that I realized I had a congregation. The old woman was kneeling in the fourth row of pews. The black of her dress and scarf blended so perfectly with the shadows there that only the pale oval of her face was visible, lined and ancient, floating disembodied in the darkness. Startled, I stopped speaking the litany of consecration. She was looking at me but something about her eyes, even at a distance, instantly convinced me that she was blind. For a moment I could not speak and stood there mute, squinting in the dusty light bathing the altar, trying to explain this spectral image to myself while at the same time attempting to frame an explanation of my own presence and actions.
When I did find my voice and called to her—the words echoing in the great hall—I realized that she had moved. I could hear her feet scraping on the stone floor. There was a rasping sound and then a brief flare of light illuminated her profile far to the right of the altar. I shielded my eyes from the shafts of sunlight and began picking my way over the detritus where the altar railing had once stood. I called to her again, offered reassurances, and told her not to be afraid, even though it was I who had chills coursing up my back. I moved quickly but when I reached the sheltered corner of the nave she was gone. A small door led to the crumbling chapter house and the riverbank. There was no sight of her. I returned to the dark interior and would have gladly attributed her appearance to my imagination, a waking dream after so many months of enforced cryogenic dreamlessness, but for a single, tangible proof of her presence. There in the cool darkness burned a lone red votive candle, its tiny flame flickering to unseen drafts and currents.
I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet’s world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy. There are three Zen Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim mosques in the town, but the real houses of worship are the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling the fiberplastic shipments from the south, and the Shrike Cult temples where lost souls hide their suicidal hopelessness behind a shield of shallow mysticism. The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.
To hell with it.
Tomorrow I head south. There are skimmers and other aircraft on this absurd world but, for the Common Folk, travel between these accursed island continents seems restricted to boat—which takes forever, I am told—or one of the huge passenger dirigibles which departs from Keats only once a week.
I leave early tomorrow by dirigible.
Day 10:
Animals.
The firstdown team for this planet must have had a fixation on animals. Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we were creeping down the east coast of Equus over an irregular coastline called the Mane. We’ve spent the last day making the crossing of a short span of the Middle Sea to a large island called Cat Key. Today we are offloading passengers and freight at Felix, the “major city” of the island. From what I can see from the observation promenade and the mooring tower, there can’t be more than five thousand people living in that random collection of hovels and barracks.
Next the ship will make its eight-hundred-kilometer crawl down a series of smaller islands called the Nine Tails and then take a bold leap across seven hundred kilometers of open sea and the equator. The next land we see then is the northwest coast of Aquila, the so-called Beak.
Animals.
To call this conveyance a “passenger dirigible” is an exercise in creative semantics. It is a huge lifting device with cargo holds large enough to carry the town of
Felix out to sea and still have room for thousands of bales of fiberplastic. Meanwhile, the less important cargo—we passengers—make do where we can. I have set up a cot near the aft loading portal and made a rather comfortable niche for myself with my personal luggage and three large trunks of expedition gear. Near me is a family of eight—indigenie plantation workers returning from a biannual shopping expedition of their own to Keats—and although I do not mind the sound or scent of their caged pigs or the squeal of their food hamsters, the incessant, confused crowing of their poor befuddled rooster is more than I can stand some nights.
Animals!
Day 11:
Dinner tonight in the salon above the promenade deck with Citizen Heremis Denzel, a retired professor from a small planters’ college near Endymion. He informed me that the Hyperion first-down team had no animal fetish after all; the official names of the three continents are not Equus, Ursa, and Aquila, but Creighton, Allensen, and Lopez. He went on to say that this was in honor of three middle-level bureaucrats in the old Survey Service. Better the animal fetish!
It is after dinner. I am alone on the outside promenade to watch the sunset. The walkway here is sheltered by the forward cargo modules so the wind is little more than a salt-tinged breeze. Above me curves the orange and green skin of the dirigible. We are between islands; the sea is a rich lapis shot through with verdant undertones, a reversal of sky tones. A scattering of high cirrus catches the last light of Hyperion’s too small sun and ignites like burning coral. There is no sound except for the faintest hum of the electric turbines. Three hundred meters below, the shadow of a huge, mantalike undersea creature keeps pace with the dirigible. A second ago an insect or bird the size and color of a hummingbird but with gossamer wings a meter across paused five meters out to inspect me before diving toward the sea with folded wings.