by Dan Simmons
I questioned them subtly, carefully, cautiously, and with the professional calm of a trained ethnologist. I asked the simplest, most factual questions possible to make sure that the comlog was functioning properly. It was. But the sum total of the answers left me almost as ignorant as I had been twenty-some hours before.
Finally, tired in body and spirit, I abandoned professional subtlety and asked the group I was sitting with, “Did you kill my companion?”
My three interlocutors did not look up from the weaving they were doing on a crude loom. “Yes,” said the one I have come to think of as Alpha because he had been the first to approach me in the forest, “we cut your companion’s throat with sharpened stones and held him down and silent while he struggled. He died the true death.”
“Why?” I asked after a moment. My voice sounded as dry as a corn husk crumbling.
“Why did he die the true death?” said Alpha, still not looking up. “Because all of his blood ran out and he stopped breathing.”
“No,” I said. “Why did you kill him?”
Alpha did not respond, but Betty—who may or may not be female and Alpha’s mate—looked up from her loom and said simply, “To make him die.”
“Why?”
The responses invariably came back and just as invariably failed to enlighten me one iota. After much questioning, I had ascertained that they had killed Tuk to make him die and that he had died because he had been killed.
“What is the difference between death and true death?” I asked, not trusting the comlog or my temper at this point.
The third Bikura, Del, grunted a response that the comlog interpreted as, “Your companion died the true death. You did not.”
Finally, in frustration far too close to rage, I snapped, “Why not? Why didn’t you kill me?”
All three stopped in the middle of their mindless weaving and looked at me. “You cannot be killed because you cannot die,” said Alpha. “You cannot die because you belong to the cruciform and follow the way of the cross.”
I had no idea why the damn machine would translate cross as “cross” one second and as “cruciform” the next. Because you belong to the cruciform.
A chill went through me, followed by the urge to laugh. Had I stumbled into that old adventure holo cliché—the lost tribe that worshiped the “god” that had tumbled into their jungle until the poor bastard cuts himself shaving or something, and the tribespeople, assured and a bit relieved at the obvious mortality of their visitor, offer up their erstwhile deity as a sacrifice?
It would have been funny if the image of Tuk’s bloodless face and raw-rimmed, gaping wound was not so fresh.
Their reaction to the cross certainly suggested that I had encountered a group of survivors of a once Christian colony—Catholics?—even though the data in the comlog insisted that the dropship of seventy colonists who had crashed on this plateau four hundred years ago had held only Neo-Kerwin Marxists, all of whom should have been indifferent if not openly hostile to the old religions.
I considered dropping the matter as being far too dangerous to pursue, but my stupid need to know drove me on. “Do you worship Jesus?” I asked.
Their blank expressions left no need for a verbal negative.
“Christ?” I tried again. “Jesus Christ? Christian? The Catholic Church?”
No interest.
“Catholic? Jesus? Mary? St. Peter? Paul? St Teilhard?”
The comlog made noises but the words seemed to have no meaning for them.
“You follow the cross?” I said, flailing for some last contact.
All three looked at me. “We belong to the cruciform,” said Alpha.
I nodded, understanding nothing.
This evening I fell asleep briefly just before sunset and when I awoke it was to the organ-pipe music of the Cleft’s nightfall winds. It was much louder here on the village ledges. Even the hovels seemed to join the chorus as the rising gusts whistled and whined through stone gaps, flapping fronds, and crude smokeholes.
Something was wrong. It took me a groggy minute to realize that the village was abandoned. Every hut was empty. I sat on a cold boulder and wondered if my presence had sparked some mass exodus. The wind music had ended and meteors were beginning their nightly show through cracks in low clouds when I heard a sound behind me and turned to find all seventy of the Three Score and Ten behind me.
They walked past without a word and went to their huts. There were no lights. I imagined them sitting in their hovels, staring.
I stayed outside for some time before returning to my own hut. After a while I walked to the edge of the grassy shelf and stood where rock dropped away into the abyss. A cluster of vines and roots clung to the cliff face but appeared to end a few meters into space and hang there above emptiness. No vine could have been long enough to offer a way to the river two kilometers below.
But the Bikura had come from this direction.
Nothing made sense. I shook my head and went back to my hut.
Sitting here, writing by the light of the comlog diskey, I try to think of precautions I can take to insure that I will see the sunrise.
I can think of none.
Day 103:
The more I learn, the less I understand.
I have moved most of my gear to the hut they leave empty for me here in the village.
I have taken photographs, recorded video and audio chips, and imaged a full holoscan of the village and its inhabitants. They do not seem to care. I project their images and they walk right through them, showing no interest. I play back their words to them and they smile and go back into their hovels to sit for hours, doing nothing, saying nothing. I offer them trade trinkets and they take them without comment, check to see if they are edible, and then leave them lying. The grass is littered with plastic beads, mirrors, bits of colored cloth, and cheap pens.
I have set up the full medical lab but to no avail; the Three Score and Ten will not let me examine them, will not let me take blood samples, even though I have repeatedly shown them that it is painless, will not let me scan them with the diagnostic equipment—will not, in short, cooperate in any way. They do not argue. They do not explain. They simply turn away and go about their nonbusiness.
After a week I still cannot tell the males from the females. Their faces remind me of those visual puzzles that shift forms as you stare; sometimes Betty’s face looks undeniably female and ten seconds later the sense of gender is gone and I think of her (him?) as Beta again. Their voices undergo the same shift. Soft, well-modulated, sexless … they remind me of the poorly programmed homecomps one encounters on backward worlds.
I find myself hoping to catch a glimpse of a naked Bikura. This is not easy for a Jesuit of forty-eight standard years to admit. Still, it would not be an easy task even for a veteran voyeur. The nudity taboo seems absolute. They wear the long robes while awake and during their two-hour midday nap. They leave the village area to urinate and defecate, and I suspect that they do not remove the loose robes even then. They do not seem to bathe. One would suspect that this would cause olfactory problems, but there is no odor about these primitives except for the slight, sweet smell of chalma. “You must undress sometimes,” I said to Alpha one day, abandoning delicacy in favor of information. “No,” said Al and went elsewhere to sit and do nothing while fully dressed.
They have no names. I found this incredible at first, but now I am sure.
“We are all that was and will be,” said the shortest Bikura, one I think of as female and call Eppie. “We are the Three score and Ten.”
I searched the comlog records and confirmed what I suspected: in more than sixteen thousand known human societies, none are listed where there are no individual names at all. Even in the Lusus hive societies, individuals respond to their class category followed by a simple code.
I tell them my name and they stare. “Father Paul Duré, Father Paul Duré,” repeats the comlog translator but there is no attempt at even simple repetition.
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Except for their mass disappearances each day before sunset and their common two-hour sleep time, they do very little as a group. Even their lodging arrangements appear random. A! will spend one naptime with Betty, the next with Gam, and the third with Zelda or Pete. No system or schedule is apparent. Every third day the entire group of seventy goes into the forest to forage and returns with berries, chalma roots and bark, fruit, and whatever else might be edible. I was sure they were vegetarians until I saw Del munching on the cold corpse of an infant arboreal. The little primate must have fallen from the high branches. It seems then that the Three Score and Ten do not disdain meat; they simply are too stupid to hunt and kill it.
When the Bikura are thirsty they walk almost three hundred meters to a stream that cascades into the Cleft. In spite of this inconvenience, there are no signs of water skins, jugs, or any type of pottery. I keep my reserve of water in ten-gallon plastic containers but the villagers take no notice; In my plummeting respect for these people, I do not find it unlikely that they have spent generations in a village with no handy water source.
“Who built the houses?” I ask. They have no word for village.
“The Three Score and Ten,” responds Will. I can tell him from the others only by a broken finger that did not mend well. Each of them has at least one such distinguishing feature, although sometimes I think it would be easier to tell crows apart.
“When did they build them?” I ask, although I should know by now that any question that starts with “when” will not receive an answer.
I receive no answer.
They do go into the Cleft each evening. Down the vines. On the third evening, I tried to observe this exodus but six of them turned me back from the edge and gently but persistently brought me back to my but. It was the first observable action of the Bikura that had hinted at aggression and I sat in some apprehension after they had gone.
The next evening as they departed I went quietly to my hut, not even peering out, but after they returned I retrieved the imager and its tripod from where I had left them near the edge. The timer had worked perfectly. The holos showed the Bikura grabbing the vines and scrambling down the cliff face as nimbly as the little arboreals that fill the chalma and weirwood forests. Then they disappeared under the overhang.
“What do you do when you go down the cliff each evening?” I asked Al the next day.
The native looked at me with the seraphic, Buddha smile I have learned to hate. “You belong to the cruciform,” he said as if that answered everything.
“Do you worship when you go down the cliff?” I asked.
No answer.
I thought a minute. “I also follow the cross,” I said, knowing that it would be translated as “belong to the cruciform.” Any day now I will not need the translator program. But this conversation was too important to leave to chance. “Does this mean that I should join you when you go down the cliff face?”
For a second I thought that Al was thinking. His brow furrowed and I realized that it was the first time that I had seen one of the Three Score and Ten come close to frowning. Then he said, “You cannot. You belong to the cruciform but you are not of the Three Score and Ten.”
I realized that it had taken every neuron and synapse in his brain to frame that distinction.
“What would you do if I did go down the cliff face?” I asked, expecting no response. Hypothetical questions almost always had as much luck as my time-based queries.
This time he did respond. The seraphic smile and untroubled countenance returned and Alpha said softly, “If you try to go down the cliff we will hold you down on the grass, take sharpened stones, cut your throat, and wait until your blood stops flowing and your heart stops beating.”
I said nothing. I wondered if he could hear the pounding of my heart at that moment. Well, I thought, at least you don’t have to worry any longer that they think you are a god.
The silence stretched. Finally Al added one more sentence that I have been thinking about ever since. “And if you did it again,” he said, “we would have to kill you again.”
We stared at each other for some time after that; each convinced, I am sure, that the other was a total idiot.
Day 104:
Each new revelation adds to my confusion.
The absence of children here has bothered me since my first day in the village. Looking back through my notes, I find frequent mention of it in the daily observations I have dictated to my comlog, but no record of it in the personal mishmash here that I call a journal. Perhaps the implications were too frightening.
To my frequent and clumsy attempts at piercing this mystery, the Three Score and Ten have offered their usual enlightenment. The person questioned smiles beatifically and responds in some non sequitur that would make the babble of the Web’s worst village idiot seem like sage aphorisms in comparison. More often than not, they do not answer at all.
One day I stood in front of the one I have tagged as Del, stayed there until he had to acknowledge my presence, and asked, “Why are there no children?”
“We are the Three Score and Ten,” he said softly.
“Where are the babies?”
No response. No sense of evading the question, merely a blank stare.
I took a breath. “Who is the youngest among you?”
Del appeared to be thinking, wrestling with the concept. He was overmatched. I wondered if the Bikura had lost their time sense so completely that any such question was doomed. After a minute of silence, however, Del pointed to where Al was crouched in the sunlight, working with his crude hand loom, and said, “There is the last one to return.”
“To return?” I said. “From where?”
Del stared at me with no emotion, not even impatience. “You belong to the cruciform,” he said. “You must know the way of the cross.”
I nodded. I knew enough to recognize that in this direction lay one of the many conversational illogic-loops that usually derailed our dialogues. I hunted for some way to keep a grasp of the thin thread of information. “Then Al,” I said and pointed, “is the last to be born. To return. But others will … return?”
I was not sure that I understood my own question. How does one inquire about birth when the interviewee has no word for child and no concept of time? But Del seemed to understand. He nodded.
Encouraged, I asked, “Then when will the next of the Three Score and Ten be born? Return?”
“No one can return until one dies,” he said.
Suddenly I thought I understood. “So no new children … no one will be returned until someone dies,” I said. “You replace the missing one with another to keep the group at Three Score and Ten?”
Del responded with the type of silence I had come to interpret as assent.
The pattern seemed clear enough. The Bikura were quite serious about their Three Score and Ten. They kept the tribal population at seventy—the same number recorded on the passenger list of the dropship that crashed here four hundred years ago. Little chance of coincidence there. When someone died, they allowed a child to be born to replace the adult. Simple.
Simple but impossible. Nature and biology do not work that neatly. Besides the problem of minimum-herd population, there were other absurdities. Even though it is difficult to tell the ages of these smooth-skinned people, it is obvious that no more than ten years separates the oldest from the youngest. Although they act like children, I would guess their average age to be in the late thirties or mid-forties in standard years. So where are the very old? Where are the parents, aging uncles, and unmarried aunts? At this rate, the entire tribe will enter old age at approximately the same time. What happens when they all pass beyond childbearing age and it comes time to replace members of the tribe?
The Bikura lead dull, sedentary lives. The accident rate—even while living on the very edge of the Cleft—must be low. There are no predators. The seasonal variations are minimal and the food supply almost certainly remains stable. But, granted all th
is, there must have been times in the four-hundred-year history of this baffling group when disease swept the village, when more than the usual number of vines gave way and dropped citizens into the Cleft, or when something caused that abnormal cluster of sudden deaths that insurance companies have dreaded since time immemorial.
And then what? Do they breed to make up the difference and then revert to their current sexless behavior? Are the Bikura so different from every other recorded human society that they have a rutting period once every few years—once a decade?—once in a lifetime? It is doubtful.
I sit here in my hut and review the possibilities. One is that these people live very long lifetimes and can reproduce during most of that time, allowing for simple replacement of tribal casualties. Only this does not explain their common ages. And there is no mechanism to explain any such longevity. The best anti-aging drugs the Hegemony has to offer only manage to extend an active lifetime a bit over the hundred standard-year mark. Preventive health measures have spread the vitality of early middle age well into the late sixties—my age—but except for clonal transplants, bioengineering, and other perqs for the very rich, no one in the Worldweb can expect to begin planning a family when they are seventy or expect to dance at their hundred-and-tenth birthday party. If eating chalma roots or breathing the pure air of the Pinion Plateau had a dramatic effect on retarding aging, it would be a sure bet that everyone on Hyperion would be living here munching chalma, that this planet would have had a farcaster centuries ago, and that every citizen of the Hegemony who has a universal card would be planning to spend vacations and retirement here.
No, a more logical conclusion is that the Bikura live normal-length lives, have children at a normal rate, but kill them unless a replacement is required. They may practice abstinence or birth control—other than slaughtering the newborn—until the entire band reaches an age where new blood will soon be needed. A mass-birthing time explains the apparent common age of the members of the tribe.
But who teaches the young? What happens to the parents and other older people? Do the Bikura pass along the rudiments of their crude excuse for a culture and then allow their own deaths? Would this be a “true death”—the rubbing out of an entire generation? Do the Three Score and Ten murder individuals at both ends of the bell-shaped age curve?