by Dan Simmons
When the Bishop rubbed his chin, red and black stones glinted in the evening light. Beyond him, a million leaves rustled in a breeze which brought the scent of rain-moistened vegetation. “The Final Days are here, priest. The prophecies given to us by the Avatar centuries ago are unfolding before our eyes. What you call riots are the first death throes of a society which deserves to die. The Days of Atonement are upon us and the Lord of Pain soon will walk among us.”
“The Lord of Pain,” repeated Duré. “The Shrike.”
The Templar made an ameliorating gesture with one hand, as if he were trying to take some of the edge off the Bishop’s statement. “Father Duré, we are aware of your miraculous rebirth.”
“Not a miracle,” said Duré. “The whim of a parasite called a cruciform.”
Again the gesture with the long, yellow-brown fingers. “However you see it, Father, the Brotherhood rejoices that you are with us once again. Please go ahead with the query you mentioned when you called earlier.”
Duré rubbed his palms against the wood of the chair, glanced at the Bishop sitting across from him in all of his red-and-black bulk. “Your groups have been working together for some time, haven’t they?” said Duré. “The Templar Brotherhood and the Shrike Church.”
“Church of the Final Atonement,” the Bishop said in a bass growl.
Duré nodded. “Why? What brings you together in this?”
The True Voice of the Worldtree leaned forward so that shadow filled his cowl once again. “You must see, Father, that the prophecies of the Church of the Final Atonement touch upon our mission from the Muir. Only these prophecies have held the key to what punishment must befall humankind for killing its own world.”
“Humankind alone didn’t destroy Old Earth,” said Duré. “It was a computer error in the Kiev Team’s attempt to create a mini-black hole.”
The Templar shook his head. “It was human arrogance,” he said softly. “The same arrogance which has caused our race to destroy all species that might even hope to evolve to intelligence someday. The Seneschai Aluit on Hebron, the zeplens of Whirl, the marsh centaurs of Garden and the great apes of Old Earth …”
“Yes,” said Duré. “Mistakes have been made. But that shouldn’t sentence humankind to death, should it?”
“The sentence has been handed down by a Power far greater than ourselves,” rumbled the Bishop. “The prophecies are precise and explicit. The Day of Final Atonement must come. All who have inherited the Sins of Adam and Kiev must suffer the consequences of murdering their homeworld, of extinguishing other species. The Lord of Pain has been freed from the bonds of time to render this final judgment. There is no escaping his wrath. There is no avoiding Atonement. A Power far greater than us has said this.”
“It is true,” said Sek Hardeen. “The prophecies have come to us … spoken to the True Voices over the generations … humankind is doomed, but with their doom will come a new flowering for pristine environments in all parts of what is now the Hegemony.”
Trained in Jesuit logic, devoted to the evolutionary theology of Teilhard de Chardin, Father Paul Duré was nonetheless tempted to say, But who the hell cares if the flowers bloom if no one is around to see them, to smell them? Instead, he said, “Have you considered that these prophecies were not divine revelations, but merely manipulations from sonic secular power?”
The Templar sat back as if slapped, but the Bishop leaned forward and curled two Lusian fists which could have crushed Duré’s skull with a single blow. “Heresy! Whoever dares deny the truth of the revelations must die!”
“What power could do this?” managed the True Voice of the Worldtree. “What power other than the Muir’s Absolute could enter our minds and hearts?”
Duré gestured toward the sky. “Every world in the Web has been joined through the TechnoCore’s datasphere for generations. Most people of influence carry comlog extension implants for ease of accessing … do you not, M. Hardeen?”
The Templar said nothing, but Duré saw the small twitch of fingers, as if the man were going to pat his chest and upper arm where the microimplants had lain for decades.
“The TechnoCore has created a transcendent … Intelligence,” continued Duré. “It taps incredible amounts of energy, is able to move backward and forward in time, and is not motivated by human concerns. One of the goals of a sizeable percentage of the Core personalities was to eliminate humankind … indeed, the Big Mistake of the Kiev Team may have been deliberately executed by the AIs involved in that experiment. What you hear as prophecies may be the voice of this deus ex machina whispering through the datasphere. The Shrike may be here not to make humankind atone for its sins, but merely to slaughter human men, women, and children for this machine personality’s own goals.”
The Bishop’s heavy face was as red as his robe. His fists pummeled the table, and he struggled to his feet. The Templar laid a hand on the Bishop’s arm and restrained him, somehow pulled him back to his seat. “Where have you heard this idea?” Sek Hardeen asked Duré.
“From those on the pilgrimage who have access to the Core. And from … others.”
The Bishop shook a fist in Duré’s direction. “But you yourself have been touched by the Avatar … not once, but twice! He has granted you a form of immortality so you can see what he has in store for the Chosen People … those who prepare Atonement before the Final Days are upon us!”
“The Shrike gave me pain,” said Duré. “Pain and suffering beyond imagination. I have met the thing twice, and I know in my heart that it is neither divine nor diabolical, but merely some organic machine from a terrible future.”
“Bah!” The Bishop made a dismissive gesture, folded his arms, and stared out over the low balcony at nothing.
The Templar appeared shaken. After a moment, he raised his head and said softly, “You had a question for me?”
Duré took a breath. “I did. And sad news, I’m afraid. True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen is dead.”
“We know,” said the Templar.
Duré was surprised. He could not imagine how they could receive that information. But it did not matter now. “What I need to know, is why did he go on the pilgrimage? What was the mission that he did not live to see completed? Each of us told our … our story. Het Masteen did not. Yet somehow I feel that his fate held the key to many mysteries.”
The Bishop looked back at Duré and sneered. “We need tell you nothing, priest of a dead religion.”
Sek Hardeen sat silent a long moment before responding. “M. Masteen volunteered to be the one to carry the Word of the Muir to Hyperion. The prophecy has lain in the roots of our belief for centuries that when the troubled times came, a True Voice of the Tree would be called upon to take a treeship to the Holy World, to see it destroyed there, and then to have it reborn carrying the message of Atonement and the Muir.”
“So Het Masteen knew that the treeship Yggdrasill would be destroyed in orbit?”
“Yes. It was foretold.”
“And he and the single energy-binder erg from the ship were to fly a new treeship?”
“Yes,” said the Templar almost inaudibly. “A Tree of Atonement which the Avatar would provide.”
Duré sat back, nodded. “A Tree of Atonement. The thorn tree. Het Masteen was psychically injured when the Yggdrasill was destroyed. Then he was taken to the Valley of the Time Tombs and shown the Shrike’s thorn tree. But he was not ready or able to do it. The thorn tree is a structure of death, of suffering, of pain … Het Masteen was not prepared to captain it. Or perhaps he refused. In any case, he fled. And died. I thought as much … but I had no idea what fate the Shrike had offered him.”
“What are you talking about?” snapped the Bishop. “The Tree of Atonement is described in the prophecies. It will accompany the Avatar in his final harvest. Masteen would have been prepared and honored to captain it through space and time.”
Paul Duré shook his head.
“We have answered your question?” asked M. H
ardeen.
“Yes.”
“Then you must answer ours,” said the Bishop. “What has happened to the Mother?”
“What mother?”
“The Mother of Our Salvation. The Bride of Atonement. The one you called Brawne Lamia.”
Duré thought back, trying to remember the Consul’s taped summaries of the tales the pilgrims had told on the way to Hyperion. Brawne had been pregnant with the first Keats cybrid’s child. The Shrike Temple on Lusus had saved her from the mob, included her in the pilgrimage. She had said something in her story about the Shrike Cultists treating her with reverence. Duré tried to fit all this into the confused mosaic of what he had already learned. He could not. He was too tired … and, he thought, too stupid after this so-called resurrection. He was not and never would be the intellectual Paul Duré once had been.
“Brawne was unconscious,” he said. “Evidently taken by the Shrike and attached to some … thing. Some cable. Her mental state was the equivalent of brain death, but the fetus was alive and healthy.”
“And the persona she carried?” asked the Bishop, his voice tense.
Duré remembered what Severn had told him about the death of that persona in the megasphere. Evidently these two did not know about the second Keats persona—the Severn personality that at this moment was warning Gladstone about the dangers of the Core proposal. Duré shook his head. He was very tired. “I don’t know about the persona she carried in the Schrön loop,” he said. “The cable … the thing the Shrike attached to her … seemed to plug into the neural socket like a cortical shunt.”
The Bishop nodded, evidently satisfied. “The prophecies proceed apace. You have served your purpose as messenger, Duré. I must leave now.” The big man stood, nodded toward the True Voice of the Worldtree, and swept across the platform and down the stairs toward the elevator and terminex.
Duré sat across from the Templar in silence for several minutes. The sound of leaves blowing and the gentle rocking of the treetop platform was marvelously lulling, inviting the Jesuit to doze off. Above them, the sky was fading through delicate saffron shades as the world of God’s Grove turned into twilight.
“Your statement about a deus ex machina misleading us for generations through false prophecies was a terrible heresy,” the Templar said at last.
“Yes. But terrible heresies have proven to be grim truths many times before in the longer history of my Church, Sek Hardeen.”
“If you were a Templar, I could have you put to death,” the hooded figure said softly.
Duré sighed. At his age, in his situation, and as tired as he was, the thought of death created no fear in his heart. He stood and bowed slightly. “I need to go, Sek Hardeen. I apologize if anything I said offended you. It is a confused and confusing time.” “The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Duré turned and walked to the edge of the platform. And stopped.
The staircase was gone. Thirty vertical meters and fifteen horizontal meters of air separated him from the next lower platform where the elevator waited. The Worldtree dropped away a kilometer or more into leafy depths beneath him. Duré and the True Voice of that Tree were isolated here on the highest platform. Duré walked to a nearby railing, raised his suddenly sweaty face to the evening breeze, and noticed the first of the stars emerging from the ultramarine sky. “What’s going on, Sek Hardeen?”
The robed and cowled figure at the table was wrapped in darkness. “In eighteen minutes, standard, the world of Heaven’s Gate will fall to the Ousters. Our prophecies say that it will be destroyed. Certainly its farcaster will, and its fatline transmitters, and to all intents and purposes, that world will have ceased to exist. Precisely one standard hour later, the skies of God’s Grove will be alight from the fusion fires of Ouster warships. Our prophecies say that all of the Brotherhood who remain—and anyone else, although all Hegemony citizens have long since been evacuated by farcaster—will perish.”
Duré walked slowly back to the table. “It’s imperative that I ’cast to Tau Ceti Center,” he said. “Severn … someone is waiting for me. I have to speak to CEO Gladstone.”
“No,” said True Voice of the Worldtree Sek Hardeen. “We will wait. We will see if the prophecies are correct.”
The Jesuit clenched his fists in frustration, fighting the surge of violent emotion that made him want to strike the robed figure. Duré closed his eyes and said two Hail Marys. It didn’t help.
“Please,” he said. “The prophecies will be confirmed or denied whether I am here or not. And then it will be too late. The FORCE torchships will blow the singularity sphere, and the farcasters will be gone. We’ll be cut off from the Web for years. Billions of lives may depend upon my immediate return to Tau Ceti Center.”
The Templar folded his arms so that his long-fingered hands disappeared in the folds of his robe. “We will wait,” he said. “All things predicted will come to pass. In minutes, the Lord of Pain will be loosed on those in the Web. I do not believe in the Bishop’s faith that those who have sought Atonement will be spared. We are better off here, Father Duré, where the end will be swift and painless.”
Duré searched his tired mind for something decisive to say, to do. Nothing occurred to him. He sat at the table and stared at the cowled and silent figure across from him. Above them, the stars emerged in their fiery multitudes. The world-forest of God’s Grove rustled a final time to the evening breeze and seemed to hold its breath in anticipation.
Paul Duré closed his eyes and prayed.
THIRTY-SEVEN
We walk all day, Hunt and I, and toward evening we find an inn with food set out for us—a fowl, rice pudding, cauliflower, a dish of macaroni, and so forth—although there are no people here, no sign of people other than the fire in the hearth, burning brightly as if just lit, and the food still warm on the stove.
Hunt is unnerved by it; by it and by the terrible withdrawal symptoms he is suffering from the loss of contact with the datasphere. I can imagine his pain. For a person born and raised into a world where information was always at hand, communication with anyone anywhere a given, and no distance more than a farcaster step away, this sudden regression to life as our ancestors had known it would be like suddenly awakening blind and crippled. But after the rantings and rages of the first few hours of walking, Hunt finally settled down into a taciturn gloom.
“But the CEO needs me!” he had shouted that first hour.
“She needs the information I was bringing her,” I said, “but there’s nothing to be done about it.”
“Where are we?” demanded Hunt for the tenth time.
I had already explained about this alternate Old Earth, but I knew he meant something else now.
“Quarantine, I think,” I said.
“The Core brought us here?” demanded Hunt.
“I can only assume.”
“How do we get back?”
“I don’t know. I presume that when they feel it’s safe to allow us out of quarantine, a farcaster portal will appear.”
Hunt cursed softly. “Why quarantine me, Severn?”
I shrugged. I assumed it was because he had heard what I said on Pacem, but I was not certain. I was certain of nothing.
The road led through meadows, vineyards, winding over low hills and twisting through valleys where glimpses of the sea were visible.
“Where does this road go?” Hunt demanded just before we discovered the inn.
“All roads lead to Rome.”
“I’m serious, Severn.”
“So am I, M. Hunt.”
Hunt pried a loose stone from the highway and threw it far into the bushes. Somewhere a thrush called.
“You’ve been here before?” Hunt’s tone was one of accusation, as if I had pirated him away. Perhaps I had.
“No,” I said. But Keats had, I almost added. My transplanted memories surged to the surface, almost overwhelming me with their sense of loss and loomi
ng mortality. So far from friends, so far from Fanny, his one eternal love.
“You’re sure you can’t access the datasphere?” asked Hunt.
“I’m positive,” I answered. He did not ask about the megasphere, and I did not offer the information. I am terrified of entering the megasphere, of losing myself there.
We found the inn just at sunset. It was nestled in a small valley, and smoke rose from the stone chimney.
While eating, darkness pressing against the panes, our only light the flicker of the fire and two candles on a stone mantle, Hunt said, “This place makes me half-believe in ghosts.”
“I do believe in ghosts,” I said.
Night. I awake coughing, feel wetness on my bare chest, hear Hunt fumbling with the candle, and in its light, look down to see blood on my skin, spotting the bedclothes.
“My God,” breathes Hunt, horrified. “What is it? What’s going on?”
“Hemorrhage,” I manage after the next fit of coughing leaves me weaker and spotted with more blood. I start to rise, fall back on the pillow, and gesture toward the basin of water and towel on the nightstand.
“Damn, damn,” mutters Hunt, searching for my comlog to get a med reading. There is no comlog. I had thrown away Hoyt’s useless instrument while we were walking earlier in the day.
Hunt removes his own comlog, adjusts the monitor, and wraps it around my wrist. The readings are meaningless to him, other than to signify urgency and the need for immediate medical care. Like most people of his generation, Hunt had never seen illness or death—that was a professional matter handled out of sight of the populace.
“Never mind,” I whisper, the siege of coughing past but weakness lying on me like a blanket of stones. I gesture toward the towel again, and Hunt moistens it, washes the blood from my chest and arms, helps me sit in the single chair while he removes the spattered sheets and blankets.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he asks, real concern in his voice.
“Yes.” I attempt a smile. “Accuracy. Verisimilitude. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.”
