by Dan Simmons
I am writing this in a Schrödinger cat box in high orbit around the quarantined world of Armaghast. The cat box is not much of a box, more of a smooth-hulled ovoid a mere six meters by three meters. It will be my entire world until the end of my life. Most of the interior of my world is a spartan cell consisting of a black-box air and waste recycler, my bunk, the food synthesizer unit, a narrow counter that serves as both my dining table and writing desk, and finally the toilet, sink, and shower, which are set behind a fiberplastic partition for reasons of propriety that escape me. No one will ever visit me here. Privacy seems a hollow joke.
I have a text slate and stylus. When I finish each page, I transfer it to hard copy on microvellum produced by the recycler. The low accretion of wafer-thin pages is the only visible change in my environment from day to day.
The vial of poison gas is not visible. It is set in the static-dynamic shell of the cat box, linked to the air filtration unit in such a way that to attempt to fiddle with it would trigger the cyanide, as would any attempt to breech the shell itself. The radiation detector, its timer, and the isotope element are also fused into the frozen energy of the shell. I never know when the random timer activates the detector. I never know when the same random timing element opens the lead shielding to the tiny isotope. I never know when the isotope yields a particle.
But I will know when the detector is activated at the instant the isotope yields a particle. There should be the scent of bitter almonds in that second or two before the gas kills me.
I hope that it will be only a second or two.
Technically, according to the ancient enigma of quantum physics, I am now neither dead nor alive. I am in the suspended state of overlapping probability waves once reserved for the cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Because the hull of the cat box is little more than position-fused energy ready to explode at the slightest intrusion, no one will ever look inside to see if I am dead or alive. Theoretically, no one is directly responsible for my execution, since the immutable laws of quantum theory pardon or condemn me from each microsecond to the next. There are no observers.
But I am an observer. I am waiting for this particular collapse of probability waves with something more than detached interest. In the instant after the hissing of cyanide gas begins but before it reaches my lungs and heart and brain, I will know which way the universe has chosen to sort itself out.
At least I will know so far as I am concerned. Which, when it comes right down to it, is the only aspect of the universe’s resolution with which most of us are concerned.
And in the meantime, I eat and sleep and void waste and breathe and go through the full daily ritual of the ultimately forgettable. Which is ironic, since right now I live—if live is the correct word—only to remember. And to write about what I remember.
If you are reading this, you are almost certainly reading it for the wrong reason. But as with so many things in our lives, the reason for doing something is not the important thing. It is the fact of doing that remains. Only the immutable facts that I have written this and you are reading it remain important in the end.
Where to begin? With her? She is the one you want to read about and the one person in my life whom I wish to remember above everything and everyone else. But perhaps I should begin with the events which led me to her and then to here by way of much of this galaxy and beyond.
I believe that I shall begin with the beginning—with my first death sentence.
TWO
My name is Raul Endymion. My first name rhymes with Paul. I was born on the world of Hyperion in the year 693 ADC on our local calendar, or 3099 ad, pre-Hegira reckoning, or, as most of us figure time in the era of the Pax, 247 years after the Fall.
It was said about me when I traveled with the One Who Teaches that I had been a shepherd, and this was true. Almost. My family had made its living as itinerant shepherds in the moors and meadows of the remoter regions on the continent of Aquila where I was raised, and I sometimes tended sheep as a child. I remember those calm nights under the starry skies of Hyperion as a pleasant time. When I was sixteen (by Hyperion’s calendar) I ran away from home and enlisted as a soldier of the Pax-controlled home guard. Most of those three years I remember only as a dull routine of boredom with the unpleasant exception of the four months when I was sent to the Claw Iceshelf to fight indigenies during the Ursus uprising. After being mustered out of the home guard, I worked as a bouncer and blackjack dealer in one of the rougher Nine Tails casinos, served as a bargemaster on the upper reaches of the Kans for two rainy seasons, and then trained as a gardener on some of the Beak estates under the landscape artist Avrol Hume. But “shepherd” must have sounded better to the chroniclers of the One Who Teaches when it came time to list the former occupation of her closest disciple. “Shepherd” has a nice biblical ring to it.
I do not object to the title of shepherd. But in this tale, I will be seen as a shepherd whose flock consisted of one infinitely important sheep. And I lost her more than I found her.
At the time my life changed forever and this story really begins, I was twenty-seven years old, tall for a Hyperion-born, notable for little except for the thickness of calluses on my hands and my love of quirky ideas, and was then working as a hunter’s guide in the fens above Toschahi Bay a hundred kilometers north of Port Romance. By that time in my life I had learned a little bit about sex and much about weapons, had discovered firsthand the power greed has in the affairs of men and women, had learned how to use my fists and modest wits in order to survive, was curious about a great many things, and felt secure only in the knowledge that the remainder of my life would almost certainly hold no great surprises.
I was an idiot.
Most of what I was that autumn of my twenty-seventh year might be described in negatives. I had never been off Hyperion and never considered that I might travel offworld. I had been in Church cathedrals, of course—even in the remote regions where my family had fled after the sacking of the city of Endymion a century ago, the Pax had extended its civilizing influence—but I had accepted neither the catechism nor the cross. I had been with women, but I had never been in love. Except for my grandmother’s tutelage, my education had been self-directed and acquired through books. I read voraciously. At age twenty-seven, I thought that I knew everything.
I knew nothing.
So it was that in the early autumn of my twenty-seventh year, content in my ignorance and stolid in my conviction that nothing of importance would ever change, I committed the act that would earn me a death sentence and begin my real life;
The fens above Toschahi Bay are dangerous and unhealthy, unchanged since long before the Fall, but hundreds of wealthy hunters—many from offworld—come there every year for the ducks. Most of the proto-mallards died off quickly after their regeneration and release from the seedship seven centuries earlier, either unable to adapt to Hyperion’s climate or stalked by its indigenie predators, but a few ducks survived in the fens of north-central Aquila. And the hunters came. And I guided them.
Four of us worked out of an abandoned fiberplastic plantation set on a narrow thumb of shale and mud between the fens and a tributary to the Kans River. The other three guides concentrated on fishing and big-game hunting, but I had the plantation and most of the fens to myself during duck season. The fens are a semi-tropical marsh area consisting mostly of thick chalma growth, weirwood forest, and more temperate stands of giant Prometheus in the rocky areas above the flood plain, but during the crisp, dry cold snap of early autumn, the mallards pause there on their migration from the southern islands to their lakes in the remotest regions of the Pinion Plateau.
I woke the four “hunters” an hour and a half before dawn. I had fixed a breakfast of jambon, toast, and coffee, but the four overweight businessmen grumbled and cursed as they wolfed it down. I had to remind them to check and clean their weapons: three carried shotguns and the fourth was foolish enough to bring an antique energy rifle. As they grumbled and ate, I we
nt out behind the shack and sat with Izzy, the Labrador retriever I’d had since she was a pup. Izzy knew that we were going hunting and I had to stroke her head and neck to calm her down.
First light was coming up just as we left the overgrown plantation grounds and poled off in a flat-bottomed skiff. Radiant gossamers visible flitting through dark tunnels of branches above the trees. The hunters—M. Rolman, M. Herrig, M. Rushomin, and M. Poneascu—sat forward on the thwarts while I poled. Izzy and I were separated from them by the heap of floatblinds stacked between us, the curved bottoms of the disks still showing the rough matting of the fiberplastic husk. Rolman and Herrig were wearing expensive chameleon-cloth ponchos, although they did not activate the polymer until we were deep in the swamp. I asked them to quit talking so loudly as we approached the freshwater fens where the mallards would be setting in. All four men glared at me, but they lowered their voices and soon fell silent.
The light was almost strong enough to read by when I stopped the skiff just outside the shooting fen and floated their blinds. I hitched up my well-patched waterproofs and slid into the chest-deep water. Izzy leaned over the side of the skiff, eyes bright, but I flashed a hand signal to restrain her from jumping in. She quivered but sat back.
“Give me your gun, please,” I said to M. Poneascu, the first man. These once-a-year hunters had enough trouble just keeping their balance while getting into the small floatblinds; I did not trust them to hang on to their shotguns. I had asked them to keep the chamber empty and the safety on, but when Poneascu handed his weapon over, the chamber indicator glowed red for loaded and the safety was off. I ejected the shell, clicked the safety on, set the gun in the waterproof carrier strapped across my shoulders, and steadied the floatblind while the heavy-set man stepped from the skiff.
“Ill be right back,” I said softly to the other three and began wading through chalma fronds, pulling the blind along by the harness strap. I could have had the hunters pole their floatblinds to a place of their own choosing, but the fen was riddled with quickmud cysts that would pull down both pole and poler, populated by dracula ticks the size of blood-filled balloons that like to drop on moving objects from overhead branches, decorated with hanging ribbon snakes which looked precisely like chalma fronds to the unwary, and rife with fighting gar that could bite through a finger. There were other Surprises for first-time visitors. Besides, I’d learned from experience that most of these weekend hunters would position their floats so that they would be shooting at each other as soon as the first flight of mallards appeared. It was my job to keep that from happening.
I parked Poneascu in a concealing curl of fronds with a good view from the south mudbank of the largest body of open water, showed him where I was going to place the other floatblinds, told him to watch from within the slit of the floatblind canvas and not to begin shooting until everyone was placed, and then went back for the other three. I placed Rushomin about twenty meters to the first man’s right, found a good place closer to the inlet for Rolman, and then went back for the man with the idiot energy weapon. M. Herrig.
The sun would be up in another ten minutes.
“About crossdamned time you fucking remembered me,” snapped the fat man as I waded back to him. He’d already gotten onto his float; his chameleon cloth trousers were wet. Methane bubbles between the skiff and the mouth of the inlet indicated a large mudcyst, so I had to work my way close to the mudflat each time I came or went.
“We’re not paying you to waste your crossdamn time like this,” he growled from around a thick cigar.
I nodded, reached up, plucked the lighted cigar from beneath his teeth, and tossed it away from the cyst. We were lucky that the bubbles had not ignited. “Ducks can smell the smoke,” I said, ignoring his gaping mouth and reddening face.
I slipped into the harness and pulled his float into the open fen, my chest cutting a path through the red and orange algae that had covered the surface again since my last trip.
M. Herrig fondled his expensive and useless energy rifle and glared at me. “Boy, you watch your crossdamn mouth or I’ll crossdamn watch it for you,” he said. His poncho and chameleon cloth hunting blouse were unsealed enough from me to see the gleam of a gold pax double-cross hanging around his neck and the red welt of the actual cruciform on his upper chest. M. Herrig was a born-again Christian.
I said nothing until I had his float positioned properly to the left of the inlet. All four of these experts could fire out toward the pond now without fear of hitting one another. “Pull your canvas around and watch from the slit,” I said, untying the line from my harness and securing it around a chalma root.
M. Herrig made a noise but left the camouflage canvas still furled on the dome wands.
“Wait until I’ve got the decoys out before shooting,” I said. I pointed out the other shooting positions. “And don’t fire toward the inlet. I’ll be there in the skiff.”
M. Herrig did not answer.
I shrugged and waded back to the skiff. Izzy was sitting where I had commanded her to stay, but I could see from her straining muscles and gleaming eyes that in spirit she was bounding back and forth like a puppy. Without climbing into the skiff, I rubbed her neck. “Just a few minutes now, girl,” I whispered. Released from her stay command, she ran to the bow as I began dragging the skiff toward the inlet.
The radiant gossamers had disappeared and the sky-streaks of meteor showers were fading as the predawn light solidified into a milky glow. The symphony of insect sounds and the croak of amphisbands along the mudflats were giving way to morning bird calls and the occasional gronk of a gar inflating its challenge sac. The sky was deepening to its daytime lapis in the east.
I pulled the skiff under fronds, gestured for Izzy to stay in the bow, and pulled four of the decoys out from under the thwarts. There was the slightest film of ice along the shoreline here, but the center of the fen was clear and I began positioning the decoys, activating each one as I left it. The water was never deeper than my chest.
I had just returned to the skiff and lay down next to Izzy under the concealing fronds when the ducks arrived. Izzy heard them first. Her entire body went rigid and her nose came up as if she could sniff them on the wind. A second later there came the whisper of wings. I leaned forward and peered through the brittle foliage.
In the center of the pond, the decoys were swimming and preening. One of them arched its neck and called just as the real mallards became visible above the treeline to the south. A flight of three ducks swept out of their pattern, extended wings to brake, and came sliding down invisible rails toward the fen.
I felt the usual thrill I always encounter at such moments: my throat tightens and my heart pounds, seems to stop for a moment, and then palpably aches. I had spent most of my life in remote regions, observing nature, but confrontation with such beauty always touched something so deep in me that I had no words for it. Beside me, Izzy was as still and rigid as an ebony statue.
The gunfire started then. The three with shotguns opened up at once and kept firing as quickly as they could eject shells. The energy rifle sliced its beam across the fen, the narrow shaft of violet light clearly visible in the morning mists.
The first duck must have been hit by two or three patterns at once: it flew apart in an explosion of feathers and viscera. The second one’s wings folded and it dropped, all grace and beauty blasted out of it. The third mallard slipped to its right, recovered just above the water, and beat its wings for altitude. The energy beam slashed after it, slicing through leaves and branches like a silent scythe. Shotguns roared again, but the mallard seemed to anticipate their aim. The bird dove toward the lake, banked hard right, and flew straight toward the inlet.
Straight toward Izzy and me.
The bird was no more than two meters above the water. Its wings were beating strongly, its entire form was bent to the purpose of escape, and I realized that it was going to fly under the trees right through the inlet opening. Despite the fact that the bird�
��s unusual flight pattern had taken it between several shooting positions, all four men were still firing.
I used my right leg to push the skiff out of the concealing branches. “Cease fire!” I shouted in a command-voice that I’d acquired during my brief career as a sergeant in the home guard. Two of the men did. One shotgun and the energy rifle continued firing. The mallard never wavered as it passed the skiff a meter to our left.
Izzy’s body quivered and her mouth seemed to drop farther open in surprise as the duck flapped low past us. The shotgun did not fire again, but I could see the violet beam panning toward us through the rising mists. I shouted and pulled Izzy down between the thwarts.
The mallard escaped the tunnel of chalma branches behind us and beat its wings for altitude. Suddenly the air smelled of ozone and a perfectly straight line of flame slashed across the stern of the boat. I threw myself flat against the bottom of the skiff, grabbing Izzy’s collar and tugging her closer as I did so.
The violet beam missed my curled fingers and Izzy’s collar by a millimeter. I saw the briefest glimmer of a quizzical look in Izzy’s excited eyes, and then she tried to lower her head to my chest the way she had as a puppy when she acted penitent. At the movement, her head and the section of neck above her collar separated from her body and went over the side with a soft splash. I still held the collar and her weight was still on me, her forepaws still quivering against my chest. Then blood geysered out over me from arteries in the cleanly severed neck and I rolled aside, pushing the spasming, headless body of my dog away from me. Her blood was warm and it tasted of copper.
The energy beam slashed back again, cut a heavy chalma branch from its trunk a meter away from the skiff, and then switched off as if it had never existed.
I sat up and looked across the pond at M. Herrig. The fat man was lighting a cigar; the energy rifle lay across his knees. The smoke from his cigar mingled with the tendrils of mist still rising from the fen.