by Dan Simmons
“The staircase twisted downward; the light grew brighter … now a roseate glow; ten minutes later, a heavy red; half an hour lower than that, a flickering crimson. It was far too Dante-esque and cheap fundamentalist staging for my tastes. I almost laughed aloud at the thought of a little devil appearing, tail and trident and cloven hooves intact, pencil-thin mustache twitching.
“But I did not laugh when I reached depths where the cause of the light became evident: cruciforms, hundreds and then thousands of them, small at first, clinging to the rough walls of the staircase like rough-hewn crosses left by some subterranean conquistadors, then larger ones and more of them until they almost overlapped, coral-pink, raw-flesh flushed, blood-red bioluminescent.
“It made me ill. It was like entering a shaft lined with bloated, pulsing leeches, although these were worse. I have seen the medscanner sonic and k-cross imaging of myself with only one of these things on me: excess ganglia infiltrating my flesh and organs like gray fibers, sheaths of twitching filaments, clusters of nematodes like terrible tumors which will not grant even the mercy of death. Now I had two on me: Lenar Hoyt’s and my own. I prayed that I would die rather than suffer another.
“I continued lower. The walls pulsed with heat as well as light, whether from the depths or the crowding of the thousands of cruciforms, I do not know. Eventually I reached the lowest step, the staircase ended, I turned a final twisting of stone, and was there.
“The labyrinth. It stretched away as I had seen it in countless holos and once in person: smooth tunneled, thirty meters to a side, carved out of Hyperion’s crust more than three-quarters of a million years ago, crossing and crisscrossing the planet like catacombs planned by some insane engineer. Labyrinths can be found on nine worlds, five in the Web, the rest, like this one, in the Outback: all are identical, all were excavated at the same time in the past, none surrender any clues as to the reason for their existence. Legends abound about the Labyrinth Builders, but the mythical engineers left no artifacts, no hints of their methods or alien makeup, and none of the theories about the labyrinths give a sensible reason for what must have been one of the largest engineering projects the galaxy has ever seen.
“All of the labyrinths are empty. Remotes have explored millions of kilometers of corridors cut from stone, and except where time and cave-in have altered the original catacombs, the labyrinths are featureless and empty.
“But not where I now stood.
“Cruciforms lighted a scene from Hieronymus Bosch as I gazed down an endless corridor, endless but not empty … no, not empty.
“At first I thought they were crowds of living people, a river of heads and shoulders and arms, stretching on for the kilometers I could see, the current of humanity broken here and there by the presence of parked vehicles all of the same rust-red color. As I stepped forward, approaching the wall of jam-packed humanity less than twenty meters from me, I realized that they were corpses. Tens, hundreds of thousands of human corpses stretching as far down the corridor as I could see; some sprawled on the stone floor, some crushed against walls, but most buoyed up by the pressure of other corpses so tightly were they jammed in this particular avenue of the labyrinth.
“There was a path; cutting its way through the bodies as if some machine with blades had mulched its way through. I followed it—careful not to touch an outspread arm or emaciated ankle.
“The bodies were human, still clothed in most cases, and mummified over eons of slow decomposing in this bacteria-free crypt. Skin and flesh had been tanned, stretched, and torn like rotten cheesecloth until it covered nothing but bone, and frequently not even that. Hair remained as tendrils of dusty tar, stiff as varnished fiberplastic. Blackness stared out from under opened eyelids, between teeth. Their clothing which must once have been a myriad of colors now was tan or gray or black, brittle as garments sculpted from thin stone. Time-melted plastic lumps on their wrists and necks might have been comlogs or their equivalent.
“The large vehicles might once have been EMVs but now were heaps of pure rust. A hundred meters in, I stumbled, and rather than fall off the meter-wide path into the field of bodies, I steadied myself on a tall machine all curves and clouded blisters. The pile of rust collapsed inward on itself.
“I wandered, Virgil-less, following the terrible path gnawed out of decayed human flesh, wondering why I was being shown all this, what it meant. After an indeterminable time of walking, staggering between piles of discarded humanity, I came to an intersection of tunnels; all three corridors ahead were filled with bodies. The narrow path continued in the labyrinth to my left. I followed it.
“Hours later, perhaps longer, I stopped and sat on the narrow stone walk which wound among the the horror. If there were tens of thousands of corpses in this small stretch of tunnel, Hyperion’s labyrinth must contain billions. More. The nine labyrinthine worlds together must be a crypt for trillions.
“I had no idea why I was being shown this ultimate Dachau of the soul. Near where I sat, the mummified corpse of a man still sheltered a woman’s corpse with the curve of his bone-bare arm. In her arms was a small bundle with short black hair. I turned away and wept.
“As an archaeologist I had excavated victims of execution, fire, flood, earthquake, and volcano. Such family scenes were not new to me; they were the sine qua non of history. But somehow this was much more terrible. Perhaps it was the numbers; the dead in their holocaust millions. Perhaps it was the soul-stealing glow of the cruciforms which lined the tunnels like thousands of blasphemous bad jokes. Perhaps it was the sad crying of the wind moving through endless corridors of stone.
“My life and teachings and sufferings and small victories and countless defeats had brought me here—past faith, past caring, past simple, Miltonic defiance. I had the sense that these bodies had been here half a million years or more, but that the people themselves were from our time or, worse yet, our future. I lowered my face to my hands and wept.
“No scraping or actual noise warned me, but something, something, a movement of air perhaps … I looked up and the Shrike was there, not two meters distant. Not on the path but in among the bodies: a sculpture honoring the architect of all this carnage.
“I got to my feet. I would not sit or kneel before this abomination.
“The Shrike moved toward me, gliding more than walking, sliding as if it were on frictionless rails. The blood light of the cruciforms spilled over its quicksilver carapace. Its eternal, impossible grin—steel stalactites, stalagmites.
“I felt no violence toward the thing. Only sadness and a terrible pity. Not for the Shrike—whatever the hell it was—but for all the victims who, alone and ungirded by even the flimsiest of faiths, have had to face the terror-in-the-night which that thing embodies.
“For the first time, I noticed that up close, less than a meter away, there was a smell around the Shrike—a stench of rancid oil, overheated bearings, and dried blood. The flames in its eyes pulsed in perfect rhythm with the rise and fall of the cruciform glow.
“I did not believe years ago that this creature was supernatural, some manifestation of good or evil, merely an aberration of the universe’s unfathomable and seemingly senseless unfoldings: a terrible joke of evolution. St. Teilhard’s worst nightmare. But still a thing, obeying natural laws, no matter how twisted, and subject to some rules of the universe somewhere, somewhen.
“The Shrike lifted its arms toward me, around me. The blades on its four wrists were much longer than my own hands; the blade on its chest, longer than my forearm. I stared up into its eyes as one pair of its razorwire and steel-spring arms surrounded me while the other pair came slowly around, filling the small space between us.
“Fingerblades uncurled. I flinched but did not step back as those blades lunged, sank into my chest with a pain like cold fire, like surgical lasers slicing nerves.
“It stepped back, holding something red and reddened further with my blood. I staggered, half expecting to see my heart in the monster’s hands: the f
inal irony of a dead man blinking in surprise at his own heart in the seconds before blood drains from a disbelieving brain.
“But it was not my heart. The Shrike held the cruciform I had carried on my chest, my cruciform, that parasitic depository of my slow-to-die DNA. I staggered again, almost fell, touched my chest. My fingers came away coated with blood but not with the arterial surges that such crude surgery deserved; the wound was healing even while I watched. I knew that the cruciform had sent tubers and filaments throughout my body. I knew that no surgical laser had been able to separate those deadly vines from Father Hoyt’s body—nor from mine. But I felt the contagion healing, the internal fibers drying and fading to the faintest hint of internal scar tissue.
“I still had Hoyt’s cruciform. But that was different. When I died, Lenar Hoyt would rise from this re-formed flesh. I would die. There would be no more poor duplicates of Paul Duré, duller and less vital with each artifical generation.
“The Shrike had granted me death without killing me.
“The thing cast the cooling cruciform into the heaps of bodies and took my upper arm in his hand with an effortless cutting of three layers of fabric, an instant flow of blood from my biceps at the slightest contact with those scalpels.
“He led the way through bodies toward the wall. I followed, trying not to step on corpses, but in my haste not to have my arm severed, I was not always successful. Bodies crumpled to dust. One received my footprint in the collapsing cavity of its chest.
“Then we were at the wall, at a section suddenly cleared of cruciforms, and I realized that it was some energy-shielded opening … the wrong size and shape to be a standard farcaster portal, but similar in its opaque buzz of energy. Anything to get me out of this storage place of death.
“The Shrike shoved me through.”
“Zero gravity. A maze of shattered bulkheads, tangles of wiring floating like some giant creature’s entrails, red lights flashing—for a second, I thought there were cruciforms here too but then realized that these were emergency lights in a dying spacecraft—then recoiling, tumbling in unaccustomed zero-g as more corpses tumbled by: not mummies here, but fresh dead, newly killed, mouths agape, eyes distended, lungs exploded, trailing clouds of gore as they simulated life in their slow, necrotic response to each random current of air and surge of the shattered FORCE spacecraft.
“It was a FORCE spacecraft, I was sure. I saw the FORCE:space uniforms on the young corpses. I saw the military-jargon lettering on the bulkheads and blown hatches, the useless instructions on the worse-than-useless emergency lockers with their skinsuits and still-uninflated pressure balls folded away on shelves. Whatever had destroyed this ship had done so with the suddenness of a plague in the night.
“The Shrike appeared next to me.
“The Shrike … in space! Free of Hyperion and the bonds of the time tides! There were farcasters on many of these ships!
“There was a farcaster portal not five meters down the corridor from me. One body tumbled toward it, the young man’s right arm passing through the opaque field as if he were testing the water of the world on the other side. Air was screaming out of this shaft in a rising whine. Go! I urged the corpse, but the pressure differential blew him away from the portal, his arm surprisingly intact, recovered, although his face was an anatomist’s mask.
“I turned toward the Shrike, the movement making me spin half a revolution in the other direction.
“The Shrike lifted me, blades tearing skin, and passed me down the corridor toward the farcaster. I could not have changed trajectories if I had wanted to. In the seconds before I passed through the humming, sputtering portal, I imagined vacuum on the other side, drops from great heights, explosive decompression, or—worst of all—a return to the labyrinth.
“Instead, I tumbled half a meter to a marble floor. Here, not two hundred meters from this spot, in the private chambers of Pope Urban XVI—who, it so happens, had died of old age not three hours before I fell through his private farcaster. The “Pope’s Door” the New Vatican calls it. I felt the pain-punishment from being so far from Hyperion—so far from the source of the cruciforms—but pain is an old ally now and no longer holds sway over me.
“I found Edouard. He was kind enough to listen for hours as I told a story no Jesuit has ever had to confess. He was even kinder to believe me. Now you have heard it. That is my story.”
· · ·
The storm had passed. The three of us sat by candlelight beneath the dome of St. Peter’s and said nothing at all for several moments.
“The Shrike has access to the Web,” I said at last.
Duré’s gaze was level. “Yes.”
“It must have been some ship in Hyperion space …”
“So it would seem.”
“Then we might be able to get back there. Use the … the Pope’s Door?… to return to Hyperion space.”
Monsignor Edouard raised an eyebrow. “You wish to do this, M. Severn?”
I chewed on a knuckle. “It’s something I’ve considered.”
“Why?” the Monsignor asked softly. “Your counterpart, the cybrid personality Brawne Lamia carried on her pilgrimage, found only death there.”
I shook my head, as if trying to clear the jumble of my thoughts through that simple gesture. “I’m a part of this. I just don’t know what part to play … or where to play it.”
Paul Duré laughed without humor. “All of us have known that feeling. It is like some poor playwright’s treatise on predestination. Whatever happened to free will?”
The Monsignor glanced sharply at his friend. “Paul, all of the pilgrims … you yourself … have been confronted with choices you made with your own will. Great powers may be shaping the general turn of events, but human personalities still determine their own fate.”
Duré sighed. “Perhaps so, Edouard. I do not know. I am very tired.”
“If Ummon’s story is true,” I said. “If the third part of this human deity fled to our time, where and who do you think it is? There are more than a hundred billion human beings in the Web.”
Father Duré smiled. It was a gentle smile, free of irony. “Have you considered that it might be yourself, M. Severn?”
The question struck me like a slap. “It can’t be,” I said. “I’m not even … not even fully human. My consciousness floats somewhere in the matrix of the Core. My body was reconstituted from remnants of John Keats’s DNA and biofactured like an android’s. Memories were implanted. The end of my life … my ‘recovery’ from consumption … were all simulated on a world built for that purpose.”
Duré was still smiling. “So? Does any of this preclude you from being this Empathy entity?”
“I don’t feel like a part of some god,” I said sharply. “I don’t remember anything, understand anything, or know what to do next.”
Monsignor Edouard touched my wrist. “Are we so sure that Christ always knew what to do next? He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I don’t even know what has to be done.”
The Monsignor’s voice was quiet. “I believe that what Paul is saying is that if the spirit creature you say is hiding here in our time, it may well not know its own identity.”
“That’s insane,” I said.
Duré nodded. “Much of the events on and around Hyperion have seemed insane. Insanity seems to be spreading.”
I looked closely at the Jesuit. “You would be a good candidate for the deity,” I said. “You’ve lived a life of prayer, contemplating theologies, and honoring science as an archaeologist. Plus, you’ve already been crucified.”
Duré’s smile was gone. “Do you hear what we’re saying? Do you hear the blasphemy in what we’re saying? I’m no candidate for the Godhead, Severn. I’ve betrayed my Church, my science, and now, by disappearing, my friends on the pilgrimage. Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and cur
iosity.”
“Enough,” commanded Monsignor Edouard. “If the identity of this Empathy part of some future, manufactured deity is the mystery, think of the candidates just in the immediate troupe of your little Passion Play, M. Severn. The CEO, M. Gladstone, carrying the weight of the Hegemony on her shoulders. The other members of the pilgrimage … M. Silenus who, according to what you told Paul, even now suffers on the Shrike’s tree for his poetry. M. Lamia, who has risked and lost so much for love. M. Weintraub, who has suffered Abraham’s dilemma … even his daughter, who has returned to the innocence of childhood. The Consul, who—”
“The Consul seems more Judas than Christ,” I said. “He betrayed both the Hegemony and the Ousters, who thought he was working for them.”
“From what Paul tells me,” said the Monsignor, “the Consul was true to his convictions, faithful to the memory of his grandmother Siri.” The older man smiled. “Plus, there are a hundred billion other players in this play. God did not choose Herod or Pontius Pilate or Caesar Augustus as His instrument. He chose the unknown son of an unknown carpenter in one of the least important stretches of the Roman Empire.”
“All right,” I said, standing and pacing before the glowing mosaic below the altar. “What do we do now? Father Duré, you need to come with me to see Gladstone. She knows about your pilgrimage. Perhaps your story can help avert some of the bloodbath which seems so imminent.”
Duré stood also, folding his arms and staring toward the dome as if the darkness high above held some instructions for him. “I’ve thought of that,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s my first obligation. I need to go to God’s Grove to speak to their equivalent of the Pope—the True Voice of the Worldtree.”
