by Dan Simmons
I pulled off the heavy robe, stood pale and shivering in the morning light, and went to lift the small cruciform from my chest.
It did not come off.
It lay there as if it were part of my flesh. I pulled, scraped, and tore at the thong until it snapped and fell away. I clawed at the cross-shaped lump on my chest. It did not come off. It was as if my flesh had sealed itself around the edges of the cruciform. Except for the scratches from my fingernails, there was no pain or physical sensation in the cruciform or surrounding flesh, only sheer terror in my soul at the thought of this thing attached to me. After the first rush of panic subsided, I sat a minute and then hastily pulled on my robe and ran back to the village.
My knife was gone, my maser, scissors, razor—everything that might have helped me peel back the growth on my chest. My nails left bloody tracks across the red welt and my chest. Then I remembered the medscanner. I passed the transceiver over my chest, read the diskey display, shook my head in disbelief, and then ran an entire body scan. After a while I keyed in a request for hard copies of the scan results and sat motionless for a very long time.
I sit here now holding the image wafers. The cruciform is quite visible on both the sonic and k-cross images … as are the internal fibers that spread like thin tentacles, like roots, throughout my body.
Excess ganglia radiate from a thick nucleus above my sternum to filaments everywhere—a nightmare of nematodes. As well as I can tell with my simple field scanner, the nematodes terminate in the amygdala and other basal ganglia in each cerebral hemisphere. My temperature, metabolism, and lymphocyte level are normal. There has been no invasion of foreign tissue. According to the scanner, the nematodic filaments are the result of extensive but simple metastasis. According to the scanner, the cruciform itself is composed of familiar tissue … the DNA is mine.
I am of the cruciform.
Day 116:
Each day I pace the confines of my cage—the flame forests to the south and east, the forested ravines to the northeast, and the Cleft to the north and west. The Three Score and Ten will not let me descend into the Cleft beyond the basilica. The cruciform will not let me get more than ten kilometers from the Cleft.
At first I could not believe this. I had resolved to enter the flame forests, trusting to luck and to God’s help to see me through. But I had gone no more than two kilometers into the fringes of the forest when pain struck me in the chest and arms and head. I was sure that I was having a massive heart attack. But as soon as I turned back toward the Cleft the symptoms ceased. I experimented for some time and the results were invariably the same. Whenever I ventured deeper into the flame forest, away from the Cleft, the pain would return and increase in severity until I turned back.
I begin to understand other things. Yesterday I happened across the wreckage of the original seedship shuttle as I explored to the north. Only a rusted, vine-enmeshed wreck of metal remains among the rocks at the edge of the flame forest near the ravine. But crouching among the exposed alloy ribs of the ancient craft, I could imagine the rejoicing of the seventy survivors, their short voyage to the Cleft, their eventual discovery of the basilica, and … and what? Conjectures beyond that point are useless, but suspicions remain. Tomorrow I will attempt another physical exam of one of the Bikura. Perhaps now that I am “of the cruciform” they will allow it.
Each day I do a medscan of myself. The nematodes remain—perhaps thicker, perhaps not. I am convinced that they are purely parasitic although my body has shown no signs of this. I peer at my face in the pool near the waterfall and see only the same long, aging countenance that I have learned to dislike in recent years. This morning, while gazing at my image in the water, I opened my mouth wide, half thinking that I would see gray filaments and nematode clusters growing from the roof of my mouth and the back of my throat. There was nothing.
Day 117:
The Bikura are sexless. Not celibate or hermaphroditic or undeveloped—sexless. They are as devoid of external or internal genitalia as a child’s flowfoam doll. There is no evidence that the penis or testes or comparable female organs have atrophied or been surgically altered. There is no sign that they ever existed. Urine is conducted through a primitive urethra terminating in a small chamber contiguous with the anus—a sort of crude cloaca.
Beta allowed the examination. The medscanner confirmed what my eyes would not believe. Del and Theta also agreed to be scanned. I have absolutely no doubt that the rest of the Three Score and Ten are equally sexless. There is no sign that they have been … altered. I would suggest that they had all been born that way but from what kind of parents? And how do these sexless lumps of human clay plan to reproduce? It must be tied in with the cruciform in some way.
When I was finished with their medscans I stripped and studied myself. The cruciform rises from my chest like pink scar tissue, but I am still a man.
For how long?
Day 133:
Alpha is dead.
I was with him three mornings ago when he fell. We were about three kilometers east, hunting for chalma tubers in the large boulders near the edge of the Cleft. It had been raining most of the past two days and the rocks were quite slippery. I looked up from my own scrambling just in time to see Alpha lose his footing and go sliding down a broad slab of stone, over the edge. He did not shout, The only sound was the rasp of his robe against the rock, followed several seconds later by the sickening dropped-melon sound of his body striking a ledge eighty meters below.
It took me an hour to find a route down to him. Even before I began the treacherous descent I knew it was too late to help. But it was my duty.
Alpha’s body was half wedged between two large rocks. He must have died instantly; his arms and legs were splintered and the right side of his skull had been crushed. Blood and brain tissue clung to the wet rock like the refuse of a sad picnic. I wept as I stood over the little body. I do not know why I wept, but I did. And as I wept I administered Extreme Unction and prayed that God would accept the soul of this poor, sexless little person. Later I wrapped the body in vines, laboriously climbed the eighty meters of cliff, and—pausing frequently to pant with exhaustion—pulled the broken corpse up to me.
There was little interest as I carried the body of Alpha into the Bikura village. Eventually Beta and half a dozen others wandered over to stare down indifferently at the corpse. No one asked me how he had died. After a few minutes the small crowd dispersed.
Later I carried Alpha’s body to the promontory where I had buried Tuk so many weeks earlier. I was digging the shallow grave with a flat stone when Gamma appeared. The Bikura’s eyes widened and for a brief second I thought I saw emotion cross those bland features.
“What are you doing?” asked Gamma.
“Burying him.” I was too tired to say more. I leaned against a thick chalma root and rested.
“No.” It was a command. “He is of the cruciform.”
I stared as Gamma turned and walked quickly back to the village. When the Bikura was gone, I pulled off the crude fiber tarp I had draped over the corpse.
Alpha was, without any doubt, truly dead. It no longer mattered to him or the universe whether he was of the cruciform or not. The fall had stripped him of most of his clothes and all of his dignity. The right side of his skull had been cracked and emptied like a breakfast egg. One eye stared sightlessly toward Hyperion’s sky through a thickening film while the other looked out lazily from under a drooping lid. His rib cage had been splintered so thoroughly that shards of bone protruded from his flesh. Both arms were broken and his left leg had been twisted almost off. I had used the med-scanner to perform a perfunctory autopsy and it had revealed massive internal injuries; even the poor devil’s heart had been pulped by the force of the fall.
I reached out and touched the cold flesh. Rigor mortis was setting in. My fingers brushed across the cross-shaped welt on his chest and I quickly pulled my hand away. The cruciform was warm.
“Stand away.”
&n
bsp; I looked up to see Beta and the rest of the Bikura standing there.
I had no doubt that they would murder me in a second if I did not move away from the corpse. As I did so, an idiotically frightened part of my mind noted that the Three Score and Ten were now the Three Score and Nine. It seemed funny at the time.
The Bikura lifted the body and moved back toward the village.
Beta looked at the sky, looked at me, and said:
“It is almost time. You will come.”
We went down into the Cleft. The body was carefully tied into a basket of vines and lowered with us.
The sun was not yet illuminating the interior of the basilica when they set Alpha’s corpse on the broad altar and removed his remaining rags.
I do not know what I expected next—some ritual act of cannibalism perhaps. Nothing would have surprised me. Instead, one of the Bikura raised his arms, just as the first shafts of colored light entered the basilica, and intoned, “You will follow the cross all of your days.”
The Three Score and Ten knelt and repeated the sentence. I remained standing. I did not speak.
“You will be of the cruciform all of your days,” said the little Bikura and the basilica echoed to the chorus of voices repeating the phrase. Light the color and texture of clotting blood threw a huge shadow of the cross on the far wall.
“You will be of the cruciform now and forever and ever,” came the chant as the winds rose outside and the organ pipes of the canyon wailed with the voice of a tortured child.
When the Bikura stopped chanting I did not whisper “Amen.” I stood there while the others turned and left with the sudden, total indifference of spoiled children who have lost interest in their game.
“There is no reason to stay,” said Beta when the others had gone.
“I want to,” I said, expecting a command to leave. Beta turned without so much as a shrug and left me there. The light dimmed. I went outside to watch the sun set and when I returned it had begun.
Once, years ago in school, I saw a time-lapse holo showing the decomposition of a kangaroo mouse. A week’s slow work of nature’s recycling had been accelerated to thirty seconds of horror. There was the sudden, almost comic bloating of the little corpse, then the stretching of flesh into lesions, followed by the sudden appearance of maggots in the mouth, eyes, and open sores, and finally the sudden and incredible corkscrew cleaning of meat from the bones—there is no other phrase that fits the image—as the pack of maggots spiraled right to left, head to tail, in a time-lapsed helix of carrion consumption that left behind nothing but bones and gristle and hide.
Now it was a man’s body I watched.
I stopped and stared, the last of the light fading quickly. There was no sound in the echoing silence of the basilica except for the pounding of my pulse in my own ears. I stared as Alpha’s corpse first twitched and then visibly vibrated, almost levitating off the altar in the spastic violence of sudden decomposition. For a few seconds the cruciform seemed to increase in size and deepen in color, glowing as red as raw meat, and I imagined then that I caught a glimpse of the network of filaments and nematodes holding the disintegrating body together like metal fibers in a sculptor’s melting model. The flesh flowed.
I stayed in the basilica that night. The area around the altar remained lit by the glow of the cruciform on Alpha’s chest. When the corpse moved the light would cast strange shadows on the walls.
I did not leave the basilica until Alpha left on the third day, but most of the visible changes had taken place by the end of that first night. The body of the Bikura I had named Alpha was broken down and rebuilt as I watched. The corpse that was left was not quite Alpha and not quite not Alpha, but it was intact. The face was a flowfoam doll’s face, smooth and unlined, features stamped in a slight smile. At sunrise of the third day, I saw the corpse’s chest begin to rise and fall and I heard the first intake of breath—a rasp like water being poured into a leather pouch. Shortly before noon I left the basilica to climb the vines.
I followed Alpha.
He has not spoken, will not reply. His eyes have a fixed, unfocused look and occasionally he pauses as if he hears distant voices calling.
No one paid attention to us when we returned to the village. Alpha went to a hut and sits there now. I sit in mine. A minute ago I opened my robe and ran my fingers across the welt of the cruciform. It lies benignly under the flesh of my chest. Waiting.
Day 140:
I am recovering from my wounds and the loss of blood. It cannot be cut out with a sharpened stone.
It does not like pain. I lost consciousness long before the pain or loss of blood demanded it. Each time I awoke and resumed cutting, I would be made to pass out. It does not like pain.
Day 158:
Alpha speaks some now. He seems duller, slower, and only vaguely aware of me (or anyone else) but he eats and moves. He appears to recognize me to some extent. The medscanner shows the heart and internal organs of a young man—perhaps of a boy of sixteen.
I must wait about another Hyperion month and ten days—about fifty days in all—until the flame forests become quiet enough for me to try to walk out, pain or no pain. We will see who can stand the most pain.
Day 173:
Another death.
The one called Will—the one with the broken finger—had been missing for a week. Yesterday the Bikura went several kilometers northeast as if following a beacon, and found the remains near the great ravine.
Evidently a branch had snapped while he was climbing to grasp some chalma fronds. Death must have been instantaneous when he broke his neck, but it is where he fell that is important. The body—if one could call it that—was lying between two great mud cones marking the burrows of the large red insects that Tuk called fire mantises. Carpet beetles might have been a more apt phrase. In the past few days the insects had stripped the corpse clean to the bone. Little was left to be found except the skeleton, some random shreds of tissue and tendon, and the cruciform—still attached to the rib cage like some splendid cross packed in the sarcophagus of a long-dead pope.
It is terrible, but I cannot help but feel some small sense of triumph beneath the sadness. There is no way that the cruciform can regenerate something out of these bare bones; even the terrible illogic of this accursed parasite must respect the imperative of the law of conservation of mass. The Bikura I called Will has died the true death. The Three Score and Ten truly are the Three Score and Nine from this time on.
Day 174:
I am a fool.
Today I inquired about Will, about his dying the true death. I was curious at the lack of reaction from the Bikura. They had retrieved the cruciform but left the skeleton lying where they had found it; there was no attempt to carry the remains to the basilica. During the night I had become concerned that I would be made to fill the roll of the missing member of the Three Score and Ten. “It is very sad,” I said, “that one of you has died the true death. What is to become of the Three Score and Ten?”
Beta stared at me. “He cannot die the true death,” said the bald little androgyny. “He is of the cruciform.”
Somewhat later, while continuing my medscans of the tribe, I discovered the truth. The one I have tagged as Theta looks the same and acts the same, but now carries two cruciforms embedded in his flesh. I have no doubt that this is one Bikura who will tend toward corpulence in coming years, swelling and ripening like some obscene E. coli cell in a petri dish. When he/she/it dies, two will leave the tomb and the Three Score and Ten will be complete once more.
I believe I am going mad.
Day 195:
Weeks of studying the damn parasite and still no clue as to how it functions. Worse, I no longer care. What I care about now is more important.
Why has God allowed this obscenity?
Why have the Bikura been punished this way?
Why was I chosen to suffer their fate?
I ask these questions in nightly prayers but I hear no answers, only the
blood song of the wind from the Cleft.
Day 214:
The last ten pages should have covered all of my field notes and technical conjectures. This will be my last entry before attempting the quiescent flame forest in the morning.
There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.
Edouard, I have spent so many hours wrestling with my faith—my lack of faith—but now, in this fearful corner of an all but forgotten world, riddled as I am with this loathsome parasite, I have somehow rediscovered a strength of belief the likes of which I have not known since you and I were boys. I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.
Day after day I have tried to leave the Cleft area and day after day I have suffered pain so terrible that it has become a tangible part of my world, like the too small sun or the green and lapis sky. Pain has become my ally, my guardian angel, my remaining link with humanity. The cruciform does not like pain. Nor do I but, like the cruciform, I am willing to use it to serve my purposes. And I will do so consciously, not instinctively like the mindless mass of alien tissue embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless avoidance of death by any means. I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life. Life is sacred—I still hold to that as a core element of the Church’s thought and teachings these past twenty-eight hundred years when life has been so cheap—but even more sacred is the soul.