by Dan Simmons
Tuk joined me as I stood on the edge of the Cleft. I was naked, rinsing the ash smell from my traveling clothes and cassock. I splashed cold water over my pale flesh and laughed out loud as the echoes of Tuk’s shouts came back from the North Wall two thirds of a kilometer away. Because of the nature of the crust collapse, Tuk and I stood far out on an overhang that hid the South Wall below us. Although perilously exposed, we assumed that the rocky cornice which had defied gravity for millions of years would last a few more hours as we bathed, relaxed, shouted echoing hallos until we were hoarse, and generally acted like children liberated from school. Tuk confessed that he had never penetrated the full width of the flame forest—nor known anyone who had in this season—and announced that, now that the tesla trees were becoming fully active, he would have at least a three-month wait until he could return. He did not seem too sorry and I was glad to have him with me.
In the afternoon we transported my gear in relays, setting up camp near the stream a hundred meters back from the cornice and stacking my flowfoam boxes of scientific gear for further sorting in the morning.
It was cold this evening. After dinner, just before sunset, I pulled on my thermal jacket and walked alone to a rocky ledge southwest of where I had first encountered the Cleft. From my vantage point far out over the river, the view was memorable. Mists rose from unseen waterfalls tumbling to the river far below, spray rising in shifting curtains of mist to multiply the setting sun into a dozen violet spheres and twice that many rainbows. I watched as each spectrum was born, rose toward the darkening dome of sky, and died. As the cooling air settled into the cracks and caverns of the plateau and the warm air rushed skyward, pulling leaves, twigs, and mist upward in a vertical gale, a sound ebbed up out of the Cleft as if the continent itself was calling with the voices of stone giants, gigantic bamboo flutes, church organs the size of palaces, the clear, perfect notes ranging from the shrillest soprano to the deepest bass. I speculated on wind vectors against the fluted rock walls, on caverns far below venting deep cracks in the motionless crust, and on the illusion of human voices that random harmonics can generate. But in the end I set aside speculation and simply listened as the Cleft sang its farewell hymn to the sun.
I walked back to our tent and its circle of bioluminescent lantern light as the first fusillade of meteor showers burned the skies overhead and distant explosions from the flame forests rippled along the southern and western horizons like cannon fire from some ancient war on pre-Hegira Old Earth.
Once in the tent I tried the long-range comlog bands but there is nothing but static. I suspect that even if the primitive comsats that serve the fiberplastic plantations were ever to broadcast this far east, anything but the tightest laser or fatline beams would be masked by the mountains and tesla activity. On Pacem, few of us at the monastery wore or carried personal comlogs, but the datasphere was always there if we needed to tap into it. Here there is no choice.
I sit and listen to the last notes from the canyon wind die, watch the skies simultaneously darken and blaze, smile at the sound of Tuk’s snoring from his bedroll outside the tent, and I think to myself, If this is exile, so be it.
Day 88:
Tuk is dead. Murdered.
I found his body when I left the tent at sunrise. He had been sleeping outside, not more than four meters from me. He had said that he wished to sleep under the stars.
The murderers cut his throat while he slept. I heard no cry. I did dream, however: dreams of Semfa ministering to me during my fever. Dreams of cool hands touching my neck and chest, touching the crucifix I have worn since childhood. I stood over Tuk’s body, staring at the wide, dark circle where his blood had soaked into Hyperion’s uncaring soil, and I shivered at the thought that the dream had been more than a dream—that hands had touched me in the night.
I confess that I reacted more like a frightened old fool than as a priest. I did administer Extreme Unction, but then the panic struck me and I left my poor guide’s body, desperately searched through the supplies for a weapon, and took away the machete I had used in the rain forest and the low-voltage maser with which I had planned to hunt small game. Whether I would have used a weapon on a human being, even to save my own life, I do not know. But, in my panic, I carried the machete, the maser, and the powered binoculars to a high boulder near the Cleft and searched the region for any signs of the murderers. Nothing stirred except the tiny arboreals and gossamers we had seen flitting through the trees yesterday. The forest itself seemed abnormally thick and dark. The Cleft offered a hundred terraces, ledges, and rock balconies to the northeast for entire bands of savages. An army could have hidden there in the crags and ever present mists.
After thirty minutes of fruitless vigilance and foolish cowardice, I returned to the campsite and prepared Tuk’s body for burial. It took me well over two hours to dig a proper grave in the rocky soil of the plateau. When it was filled and the formal service was finished, I could think of nothing personal to say about the rough, funny little man who had been my guide. “Watch over him, Lord,” I said at last, disgusted at my own hypocrisy, sure in my heart that I was mouthing words only to myself. “Give him safe passage. Amen.”
This evening I have moved my camp half a kilometer north. My tent is pitched in an open area ten meters away but I am wedged with my back against the boulder, sleeping robes pulled around, the machete and maser nearby. After Tuk’s funeral I went through the supplies and boxes of equipment. Nothing had been taken except for the few remaining arrestor rods. Immediately I wondered if someone had followed us through the flame forest in order to kill Tuk and strand me here, but I could think of no motive for such an elaborate action. Anyone from the plantations could have killed us as we slept in the rain forest or—better yet from a murderer’s point of view—deep in the flame forest where no one would wonder at two charred corpses. That left the Bikura. My primitive charges.
I considered returning through the flame forest without the rods but soon abandoned the idea. It is probable death to stay and certain death to go.
Three months before the teslas become dormant. One hundred twenty of the twenty-six-hour local days. An eternity.
Dear Christ, why has this come to me? And why was I spared last night if I am merely to be offered up this night … or next?
I sit here in the darkening crag and I listen to the suddenly ominous moaning rising with the night wind from the Cleft and I pray as the sky lights with the blood-red streaks of meteor trails.
Mouthing words to myself.
Day 95:
The terrors of the past week have largely abated. I find that even fear fades and becomes commonplace after days of anticlimax.
I used the machete to cut small trees for a lean-to, covering the roof and side with gamma-cloth and caulking between the logs with mud. The back wall is the solid stone of the boulder. I have sorted through my research gear and set some of it out, although I suspect that I will never use it now.
I have begun foraging to supplement my quickly diminishing cache of freeze-dried food. By now, according to the absurd schedule drawn up so long ago on Pacem, I was to have been living with the Bikura for some weeks and trading small goods for local food. No matter. Besides my diet of bland but easily boiled chalma roots, I have found half a dozen varieties of berries and larger fruits that the comlog assures me are edible; so far only one has disagreed with me enough to keep me squatting all night near the edge of the nearest ravine.
I pace the confines of the region as restlessly as one of those caged pelops that were so prized by the minor padishahs on Armaghast. A kilometer to the south and four to the west, the flame forests are in full form. In the morning, smoke vies with the shifting curtains of mist to hide the sky. Only the near-solid breaks of bestos, the rocky soil here on the summit plateau, and the hogback ridges running like armor-plated vertebrae northeast from here keep the teslas at bay.
To the north, the plateau widens out and the undergrowth becomes denser near the Cleft fo
r some fifteen kilometers until the way is blocked by a ravine a third as deep and half as wide as the Cleft itself. Yesterday I reached this northernmost point and stared across the gaping barrier with some frustration. I will try again someday, detouring to the east to find a crossing point, but from the telltale signs of phoenix across the chasm and the pall of smoke along the northeastern horizon, I suspect I will find only the chalma-filled canyons and steppes of flame forest that are roughed in on the orbital survey map I carry.
Tonight I visited Tuk’s rocky grave as the evening wind began to wail its aeolian dirge. I knelt there and tried to pray but nothing came.
Edouard, nothing came. I am as empty as those fake sarcophagi that you and I unearthed by the score from the sterile desert sands near Tarum bel Wadi.
The Zen Gnostics would say that this emptiness is a good sign; that it presages openness to a new level of awareness, new insights, new experiences.
Merde.
My emptiness is only … emptiness.
Day 96:
I have found the Bikura. Or, rather, they have found me. I will write what I can before they come to rouse me from my “sleep.”
Today I was doing some detail mapping a mere four kilometers north of camp when the mists lifted in the midday warmth and I noticed a series of terraces on my side of the Cleft that had been hidden until then. I was using my powered glasses to inspect the terraces—actually a series of laddered ledges, spires, shelves, and tussocks extending far out onto the overhang—when I realized that I was staring at man-made habitations. The dozen or so huts were crude—rough hovels of heaped chalma fronds, stones, and spongeturf—but they were unmistakably of human origin.
I was standing there irresolute, binoculars still lifted, trying to decide whether to climb down to the exposed ledges and confront the inhabitants or to retreat to my camp, when I felt that lifting chill along the back and neck that tells one with absolute certainty that he is no longer alone. I lowered the binoculars and turned slowly. The Bikura were there, at least thirty of them, standing in a semicircle that left me no retreat to the forest.
I do not know what I expected; naked savages, perhaps, with fierce expressions and necklaces of teeth. Perhaps I had half expected to find the kind of bearded, wild-haired hermits that travelers sometimes encountered in the Moshé Mountains on Hebron. Whatever I had held in mind, the reality of the Bikura did not fit the template.
The people who had approached me so silently were short—none came higher than my shoulder—and swathed in roughly woven dark robes that covered them from neck to toe. When they moved, as some did now, they seemed to glide over the rough ground like wraiths. From a distance, their appearance reminded me of nothing so much as a gaggle of diminutive Jesuits at a New Vatican enclave.
I almost giggled then, but realized that such a response might well be a sign of rising panic. The Bikura showed no outward signs of aggression to cause such a panic; they carried no weapons, their small hands were empty. As empty as their expressions.
Their physiognomy is hard to describe succinctly. They are bald. All of them. That baldness, the absence of any facial hair, and the loose robes that fell in a straight line to the ground, all conspired to make it very difficult to tell the men from the women. The group now confronting me—more than fifty by this time—looked to be all of roughly the same age: somewhere between forty and fifty standard years. Their faces were smooth, the skin tinged with a yellowish cast that I guessed might be associated with generations of ingesting trace minerals in the chalma and other local plant life.
One might be tempted to describe the round faces of the Bikura as cherubic until, upon closer inspection, that impression of sweetness fades and is replaced by another interpretation—placid idiocy. As a priest, I have spent enough time on backward worlds to see the effects of an ancient genetic disorder variously called Down’s syndrome, mongolism, or generation-ship legacy. This, then, was the overall impression created by the sixty or so dark-robed little people who had approached me—I was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.
I reminded myself that these were almost certainly the same group of “smiling children” who had slit Tuk’s throat while he slept and left him to die like a butchered pig.
The closest Bikura stepped forward, stopped five paces from me, and said something in a soft monotone.
“Just a minute,” I said and fumbled out my comlog. I tapped in the translator function.
“Beyetet ota menna lot cresfem ket?” asked the short man in front of me.
I slipped on the hearplug just in time to hear the comlog’s translation. There was no lag time. The apparently foreign language was a simple corruption of archaic seedship English not so far removed from the indigene argot of the plantations. “You are the man who belongs to the cross shape/cruciform,” interpreted the comlog, giving me two choices for the final noun.
“Yes,” I said, knowing now that these were the ones who had touched me the night I slept through Tuk’s murder. Which meant that these were the ones who had murdered Tuk.
I waited. The hunting maser was in my pack. The pack was set against a small chalma not ten paces from me. Half a dozen Bikura stood between me and it. It did not matter. I knew at that instant that I would not use a weapon against another human being, even a human being who had murdered my guide and might well be planning to murder me at any second. I closed my eyes and said a silent Act of Contrition. When I opened my eyes, more of the Bikura had arrived. There was a cessation of movement, as if a quorum had been filled, a decision reached.
“Yes,” I said again into the silence, “I am the one who wears the cross.” I heard the comlog speaker pronounce the last word “cresfem.”
The Bikura nodded in unison and—as if from long practice as altar boys—all went to one knee, robes rustling softly, in a perfect genuflection.
I opened my mouth to speak and found that I had nothing to say. I closed my mouth.
The Bikura stood. A breeze moved the brittle chalma fronds and leaves together to make a dry, end-of-summer sound above us. The Bikura nearest to me on the left stepped closer, grasped my forearm with a touch of cool, strong fingers, and spoke a soft sentence that my comlog translated as, “Come. It is time to go to the houses and sleep.”
It was midafternoon. Wondering if the comlog had translated the word “sleep” properly or if it might be an idiom or metaphor for “die,” I nodded and followed them toward the village at the edge of the Cleft.
Now I sit in the hut and wait. There are rustling sounds. Someone else is awake now. I sit and wait.
Day 97:
The Bikura call themselves the “Three Score and Ten.”
I have spent the past twenty-six hours talking to them, observing, making notes when they take their two-hour, midafternoon “sleep,” and generally trying to record as much data as I can before they decide to slit my throat.
Except now I am beginning to believe that they will not hurt me.
I spoke to them yesterday after our “sleep.” Sometimes they do not respond to questions and when they do the responses are little better than the grunts or divergent answers one receives from slow children. After their initial question and invitation at our first encounter, none of them originated a single query or comment my way.
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 sharpen
ed 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.
