by Dan Simmons
“No. There was no need. We have few visitors, and the scholars who do come do not mind the walk of a few blocks.”
“Where’s the private farcaster that you think I might be able to use?”
“Here,” said the archivist. We dropped out of the flyway and circled a low building, no more than thirty stories, and settled onto an extruded landing flange just where the Glennon-Height Period Deco flanges grew out of stone and plasteel. “My order keeps its residence here,” he said. “I belong to a forgotten branch of Christianity called Catholicism.” He looked embarrassed. “But you are a scholar, M. Severn. You must know of our Church from the old days.”
“I know of it from more than books,” I said. “Is there an order of priests here?”
Tynar smiled. “Hardly priests, M. Severn. There are eight of us in the lay order of Historical and Literary Brethren. Five serve at the Reichs University. Two are art historians, working on the restoration of Lutzchendorf Abbey. I maintain the literary archives. The Church has found it cheaper to allow us to live here than to commute daily from Pacem.”
We entered the apartment hive—old even by Old Web standards: retrofitted lighting in corridors of real stone, hinged doors, a building that did not even challenge or welcome us as we entered. On an impulse, I said, “I’d like to ’cast to Pacem.”
The archivist looked surprised. “Tonight? This moment?”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. I realized that to this man, the hundred-mark farcaster fee would represent several weeks’ pay.
“Our building has its own portal,” he said. “This way.”
The central staircase was faded stone and corroded wrought iron with a sixty-meter drop in the center. From somewhere down a darkened corridor came the wail of an infant, followed by a man’s shouting and a woman’s crying.
“How long have you lived here, M. Tynar?”
“Seventeen local years, M. Severn. Ah … thirty-two standard, I believe. Here it is.”
The farcaster portal was as ancient as the building, its translation frame surrounded by gilded bas-relief gone green and gray.
“There are Web restrictions on travel tonight,” he said. “Pacem should be accessible. Some two hundred hours remain before the barbarians … whatever they’re called … are scheduled to reach there. Twice the time left to Renaissance Vector.” He reached out and grasped my wrist. I could feel his tension as a slight vibration through tendon and bone. “M. Severn … do you think they will burn my archives? Would even they destroy ten thousand years of thought?” His hand dropped away.
I was not sure who the “they” were—Ousters? Shrike Cult saboteurs? Rioters? Gladstone and the Hegemony leaders were willing to sacrifice these “first-wave” worlds. “No,” I said, extending my hand to shake his. “I don’t believe they’ll allow the archives to be destroyed.”
M. Ewdrad B. Tynar smiled and stood back a step, embarrassed at showing emotion. He shook hands. “Good luck, M. Severn. Wherever your travels take you.”
“God bless you, M. Tynar.” I had never used that phrase before, and it shocked me that I had spoken it now. I looked down, fumbled out Gladstone’s override card, and tapped the three-digit code for Pacem. The portal apologized, said that it was not possible at the moment, finally got it through its microcephalic processors that this was an override card, and hummed into existence.
I nodded at Tynar and stepped through, half expecting that I was making a serious mistake not going straight home to TC2.
It was night on Pacem, much darker than Renaissance Vector’s urban glow, and it was raining to boot. Raining hard with that fist-on-metal pounding violence that makes one want to curl up under thick blankets and wait for morning.
The portal was under cover in some half-roofed courtyard but outside enough for me to feel the night, the rain, and the cold. Especially the cold. Pacem’s air was half as thick as Web standard, its single habitable plateau twice as high as Renaissance V’s sea-level cities. I would have turned back then rather than step into that night and downpour, but a FORCE Marine stepped out of the shadows, multipurpose assault rifle slung but ready to swivel, and asked me for my ID.
I let him scan the card, and he snapped to attention. “Yes, sir!”
“Is this the New Vatican?”
“Yes, sir.”
I caught a glimpse of illuminated dome through the downpour. I pointed over the courtyard wall. “Is that St. Peter’s?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would Monsignor Edouard be found there?”
“Across this courtyard, left at the plaza, the low building to the left of the cathedral, sir!”
“Thank you, Corporal.”
“It’s Private, sir!”
I pulled my short cape around me, ceremonial and quite useless against such a rain as it was, and ran across the courtyard.
A human … perhaps a priest, although he wore no robe or clerical collar … opened the door to the residential hall. Another human behind a wooden desk told me that Monsignor Edouard was in residence and was awake, despite the late hour. Did I have an appointment?
No, I did not have an appointment but wished to speak to the Monsignor. It was important.
On what topic? the man behind the desk politely but firmly asked. He had not been impressed by my override card. I suspected that I was speaking to a bishop.
On the topic of Father Paul Duré and Father Lenar Hoyt, I told him.
The gentleman nodded, whispered into a bead mike so small that I had not noticed it on his collar, and led me into the residential hall.
This place made the old tower that M. Tynar lived in look like a sybarite’s palace. The corridor was absolutely featureless except for the rough plaster walls and even rougher wooden doors. One of the doors was open, and as we passed, I glimpsed a chamber more prison cell than sleeping room: low cot, rough blanket, wooden kneeling stool, an unadorned dresser holding a pitcher of water and simple basin; no windows, no media walls, no holo pit, no data access deck. I suspected the room wasn’t even interactive.
From somewhere there echoed voices rising in a chanting/ singing so elegant and atavistic that it made the hair on my neck tingle. Gregorian. We passed through a large eating area as simple as the cells had been, through a kitchen that would have been familiar to cooks in John Keats’s day, down a worn stone staircase, through an ill-lighted corridor, and up another, narrower staircase. The other man left me, and I stepped into one of the most beautiful spaces I had ever seen.
Although part of me realized that the Church had moved and reconstructed St. Peter’s Basilica, down to transplanting the bones believed to be those of Peter himself to their new burial beneath the altar, another part of me felt that I had been transported back to the Rome I had first seen in mid-November of 1820: the Rome I had seen, stayed in, suffered in, and died in.
This space was more beautiful and elegant than any mile-high office spire on Tau Ceti Center could ever hope to be; St. Peter’s Basilica stretched more than six hundred feet into shadows, was four hundred and fifty feet wide where the “cross” of the transept intersected the nave, and was capped by the perfection of Michelangelo’s dome, rising almost four hundred feet above the altar. Bernini’s bronze baldachin, the ornate canopy supported by twisting, Byzantine columns, capped the main altar and gave the immense space the human dimension necessary for perspective on the intimate ceremonies conducted there. Soft lamp- and candlelight illuminated discrete areas of the basilica, gleamed on smooth travertine stone, brought gold mosaics into bold relief, and picked out the infinite detail painted, embossed, and raised on the walls, columns, cornices, and grand dome itself. Far above, the continuous flash of lightning from the storm poured thickly through yellow stained-glass windows and sent columns of violent light slanting toward Bernini’s “Throne of St. Peter.”
I paused there, just beyond the apse, afraid that my footsteps in such a space would be a desecration and that even my breathing would send echoes th
e length of the basilica. In a moment, my eyes adjusted to the dim light, compensated for the contrasts between the storm light above and candlelight below, and it was then I realized that there were no pews to fill the apse or long nave, no columns here beneath the dome, only two chairs set near the altar some fifty feet away. Two men sat talking in these chairs, close together, both leaning forward in apparent urgency to communicate. Lamplight and candlelight and the glow from a large mosaic of Christ on the front of the dark altar illuminated bits and fragments of the men’s faces. Both were elderly. Both were priests, the white bands of their collars glowing in the dimness. With a start of recognition, I realized that one was Monsignor Edouard.
The other was Father Paul Duré.
They must have been alarmed at first—looking up from their whispered conversation to see this apparition, this short shadow of a man emerge from the darkness, calling their names … crying Duré’s name in loud amazement … babbling at them about pilgrimages and pilgrims, Time Tombs and the Shrike, AIs and the death of gods.
The Monsignor did not call security; neither he nor Duré fled; together they calmed this apparition, tried to glean some sense from his excited babblings, and turned this strange confrontation into sane conversation.
It was Paul Duré. Paul Duré and not some bizarre Doppelganger or android duplicate or cybrid reconstruction. I made sure of that by listening to him, quizzing him, by looking into his eyes … but mostly by shaking his hand, touching him, and knowing that it was indeed Father Paul Duré.
“You know … incredible details of my life … our time on Hyperion, at the Tombs … but who did you say you are?” Duré was saying.
It was my turn to convince him. “A cybrid reconstruction of John Keats. A twin to the persona Brawne Lamia carried with her on your pilgrimage.”
“And you were able to communicate … to know what happened to us because of that shared persona?”
I was on one knee between them and the altar. I lifted both hands in frustration. “Because of that … because of some anomaly in the megasphere. But I have dreamt your lives, heard the tales the pilgrims told, listened to Father Hoyt speak of the life and death of Paul Duré … of you.” I reached out to touch his arm through the priestly garments. Actually being in the same space and time with one of the pilgrims made me a bit light-headed. “Then you know how I got here,” said Father Duré.
“No. I last dreamed that you were entering one of the Cave Tombs. There was a light. I know nothing since then.”
Duré nodded. His face was more patrician and more weary than my dreams had prepared me for. “But you know the fate of the others?”
I took a breath. “Some. The poet Silenus is alive but impaled on the Shrike’s tree of thorns. I last saw Kassad attacking the Shrike with his bare hands. M. Lamia had traveled the megasphere to the TechnoCore periphery with my Keats counterpart …”
“He survived in that … Schrön loop … whatever it was called?” Duré seemed fascinated.
“No longer,” I said. “The AI personality called Ummon killed him … destroyed the persona. Brawne was returning. I don’t know if her body survives.”
Monsignor Edouard leaned toward me. “And what of the Consul and the father and child?”
“The Consul tried to return to the capital by hawking mat,” I said, “but crashed some miles north. I don’t know his fate.”
“Miles,” said Duré, as if the word brought back memories.
“I’m sorry.” I gestured at the basilica. “This place makes me think in the units of my … previous life.”
“Go on,” said Monsignor Edouard. “The father and child.”
I sat on the cool stone, exhausted, my arms and hands shaking with fatigue. “In my last dream, Sol had offered Rachel to the Shrike. It was Rachel’s request. I could not see what happened next. The Tombs were opening.”
“All of them?” asked Duré.
“All I could see.”
The two men looked at one another.
“There’s more,” I said, and told them about the dialogue with Ummon. “Is it possible that a deity could … evolve from human consciousness like that without humanity being aware of it?”
The lightning had ceased but now the rain fell so violently that I could hear it on the great dome far above. Somewhere in the darkness, a heavy door squeaked, footsteps echoed and then receded. Votive candles in the dim recesses of the basilica flickered red light against walls and draperies.
“I taught that St. Teilhard said that it was possible,” Duré said tiredly, “but if that God is a limited being, evolving in the same way all we other limited beings have done, then no … it is not the God of Abraham and Christ.”
Monsignor Edouard nodded. “There is an ancient heresy …”
“Yes,” I said. “The Socinian Heresy. I heard Father Duré explain it to Sol Weintraub and the Consul. But what difference does it make how this … power … evolved, and whether it’s limited or not. If Ummon is telling the truth, we’re dealing with a force that uses quasars for energy sources. That’s a God who can destroy galaxies, gentlemen.”
“That would be a god who destroys galaxies,” said Duré. “Not God.”
I heard his emphasis clearly. “But if it’s not limited,” I said. “If it’s the Omega Point God of total consciousness you’ve written about, if it’s the same Trinity your church has argued for and theorized about since before Aquinus … but if one part of that Trinity has fled backward through time to here … to now … then what?”
“But fled from what?” Duré asked softly. “Teilhard’s God … the Church’s God … our God, would be the Omega Point God in whom the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal … what Teilhard called the En Haut and the En Avant, are perfectly joined. There could be nothing so threatening that any element of that deity’s personality would flee. No Antichrist, no theoretical satanic power, no ‘counter-God’ could possibly threaten such a universal consciousness. What would this other god be?”
“The God of machines?” I said, so softly that even I was not sure that I had spoken aloud.
Monsignor Edouard clasped both hands in what I thought was a preparation for prayer but which turned out to be a gesture of deep thought and deeper agitation. “But Christ had doubts,” he said. “Christ sweated blood in the garden and asked that this cup should be taken from him. If there was some second sacrifice pending, something even more terrible than the crucifixion … then I could imagine the Christ-entity of the Trinity passing through time, walking through some fourth-dimensional garden of Gethsemane to gain a few hours … or years … of time to think.”
“Something more terrible than the crucifixion,” repeated Duré in a hoarse whisper.
Both Monsignor Edouard and I stared at the priest. Duré had crucified himself on a high-voltage tesla tree on Hyperion rather than submit to his cruciform parasite’s control. Through that creature’s ability to resurrect, Duré had suffered the agonies of crucifixion and electrocution many times.
“Whatever the En Haut consciousness flees,” whispered Duré, “it is most terrible.”
Monsignor Edouard touched his friend’s shoulder. “Paul, tell this man about your voyage here.”
Duré returned from whatever distant place his memories had taken him and focused on me. “You know all of our stories … and the details of our stay in the Valley of the Tombs on Hyperion?”
“I believe so. Up to the point you disappeared.”
The priest sighed and touched his forehead with long, slightly trembling fingers. “Then perhaps,” he said, “just perhaps you can make some sense of how I got here … and what I saw along the way.”
“I saw a light in the third Cave Tomb,” said Father Duré. “I stepped inside. I confess that thoughts of suicide had been in my mind … what is left of my mind after the cruciform’s brutal replication … I will not dignify that parasite’s function with the term resurrection.
“I saw a light and thought that it
was the Shrike. It was my feeling that my second meeting with that creature—the first encounter was years ago in the labyrinth beneath the Cleft, when the Shrike annointed me with my unholy cruciform—the second meeting was long overdue.
“When we had searched for Colonel Kassad on the previous day, this Cave Tomb had been short, featureless, with a blank rock wall stopping us after thirty paces. Now that wall was gone and in its place was a carving not unlike the mouth of the Shrike, stone extended in that blend of the mechanical and organic, stalactites and stalagmites as sharp as calcium carbonate teeth.
“Through the mouth there was a stone stairway descending. It was from those depths that the light emanated, glowing pale white one moment, dark red the next. There was no noise except for the sigh of wind, as if the rock there were breathing.
“I am no Dante. I sought no Beatrice. My brief bout of courage—although fatalism is a more accurate term—had evaporated with the loss of daylight. I turned and almost ran the thirty paces to the opening of the cave.
“There was no opening. The passage merely ended. I had heard no sound of cave-in or avalanche, and besides, the rock where the entrance should have been looked as ancient and undisturbed as the rest of that cavern. For half an hour I searched for an alternate exit, finding none, refusing to return to the staircase, finally sitting for some hours where the Cave Tomb entrance once had been. Another Shrike trick. Another cheap theatrical stunt by this perverse planet. Hyperion’s idea of a joke. Ha ha.
“After several hours of sitting there in semidarkness, watching the light at the far end of the cave pulse soundlessly, I realized that the Shrike was not going to come to me here. The entrance would not magically reappear. I had the choice of sitting there until I died of starvation—or thirst, more likely, since I was already dehydrated—or of descending the damned staircase.
“I descended.
“Years ago, literally lifetimes ago, when I visited the Bikura near the Cleft on the Pinion Plateau, the labyrinth where I had encountered the Shrike had been three kilometers below the canyon wall. That was close to the surface; most of the labyrinths on most of the labyrinthine worlds are at least ten klicks beneath the crust. I had no doubt that this endless staircase … a steep and twisting spiral of stone stairs wide enough for ten priests to descend to hell abreast … would end up in the labyrinth. The Shrike had first cursed me with immortality there. If the creature or the power that drove it had any sense of irony at all, it would be fitting that both my immortality and mortal life ended there.
