by Dan Simmons
Aenea pauses for a moment and in the silence we can all hear thunder rumbling somewhere beyond the ridge. The monsoon is holding off a few days, but its arrival is imminent. I try to imagine these buildings, mountains, ridges, cables, bridges, walkways, and scaffolds covered with ice and shrouded by fog. The thought makes me shiver.
“The Buddha understood that we could sense the Void Which Binds by silencing the din of the everyday,” says Aenea at last. “In that sense, satori is a great and satisfying silence after listening to a neighbor’s blasting sound system for days or months on end. But the Void Which Binds is more than silence … it is the beginning of hearing. Learning the language of the dead is the first task of those who enter the Void medium.
“Jesus of Nazareth entered the Void Which Binds. We know that. His voice is among the clearest of those who speak in the language of the dead. He stayed long enough to move to the second level of responsibility and effort—of learning the language of the dead. He learned well enough to hear the music of the spheres. He was able to ride the surging probability waves far enough to see his own death and was brave enough not to avoid it when he could. And we know that—at least on one occasion while dying on the cross—he learned to take that first step—to move through and across the space/time web of the Void Which Binds, appearing to his friends and disciples several paces into the future from where he hung dying on that cross.
“And, liberated from the restrictions of his time by his glimpse of the timelessness on the Void Which Binds, Jesus realized that it was he who was the key—not his teachings, not Scriptures based on his ideas, not groveling adulation to him or the suddenly evolving Old Testament God in which he solidly believed—but him, Jesus, a human man whose cells carried the decryption code to unlock the portal. Jesus knew that his ability to open that door lay not in his mind or soul but in his skin and bones and cells … literally in his DNA.
“When, during the Last Supper, Jesus of Nazareth asked his followers to drink of his blood and eat of his body, he was not speaking in parable or asking for magical transubstantiation or setting the place for centuries of symbolic reenactment. Jesus wanted them to drink of his blood … a few drops in a great tankard of wine … and to eat of his body … a few skin scrapings in a loaf of bread. He gave of himself in the most literal terms, knowing that those who drank of his blood would share his DNA, and be able to perceive the power of the Void Which Binds the universe.
“And so it was for some of his disciples. But, confronted with perceptions and impressions far beyond their power to absorb or to set in context—all but driven mad by the unceasing voices of the dead and their own reactions to the language of the living—and unable to transmit their own blood music to others—these disciples turned to dogma, reducing the inexpressible into rough words and turgid sermons, tight rules and fiery rhetoric. And the vision paled, then failed. The portal closed.”
Aenea pauses again and sips water from a wooden mug. I notice for the first time that Rachel and Theo and a few others are weeping. I swivel where I am sitting on the fresh tatami and look behind me. A. Bettik is standing in the open doorway, his ageless blue face serious and intent on our young friend’s words. The android is holding his shortened forearm with his good right hand. Does it pain him? I wonder.
Aenea speaks again. “Strangely enough, the first children of Old Earth to rediscover the key to the Void Which Binds were the TechnoCore. The autonomous intelligences, attempting to guide their own destiny through forced evolution at a million times the rate of biological humankind, found the DNA keycode to seeing the Void … although ‘seeing’ is not the correct word, of course. Perhaps ‘resonating’ better expresses the meaning.
“But while the Core could feel and explore the outlines of the Void medium, send their probes into the multidimensional post-Hawking reality of it, they could not understand it. The Void Which Binds demands a level of sentient empathy which the Core had never bothered evolving. The first step toward true satori in the Void is learning the language of the beloved dead—and the Core has no beloved dead. The Void Which Binds was like a beautiful painting to a blind man who chooses to burn it like firewood, or like a Beethoven symphony to a deaf man who feels the vibration and builds a stronger floor to damp it out.
“Instead of using the Void Which Binds as the medium it is, the TechnoCore tore bits of it loose and offered it to humankind as clever technologies. The so-called Hawking drive did not truly evolve from the ancient master Stephen Hawking’s work as the Core said, but was a perversion of his findings. The Hawking-drive ships that wove the WorldWeb and allowed the Hegemony to exist functioned by tearing small holes in the nonfabric at the edge of the Void—a minor vandalism, but vandalism nonetheless. Farcasters were a different thing. Here my similes will fail us, my friends … for learning to step across the medium of the Void Which Binds is a bit like learning to walk on water, if you will pardon the scriptural hubris, while the TechnoCore’s farcaster burrows were more like draining the oceans so as to build highways across the seabed. Their farcaster tunneling through the boundaries of the Void was harming several billion years of organic growth there. It was the equivalent of paving great swaths through a vital, green forest—although that comparison also fails, because the forest would have to be made out of the memories and voices of the millions we have loved and lost—and the paved highways thousands of kilometers wide—for you to understand even a hint of the damage done.
“The so-called fatline which allowed for instantaneous communication across the Hegemony was also a perversion of the Void Which Binds. Again, my similes are clumsy and inept, but imagine some human aborigines discovering a working electromagnetic telecommunications grid—studios, holocameras, sound equipment, generators, transmitters, relay satellites, receivers, and projectors—and then tearing down and tearing up everything they can reach so that they can use the junk as signal flags. It is worse than that. It is worse than pre-Hegira days on Old Earth when humanity’s giant oil tankers and ocean going ships deafened the world’s whales by filling their seas with mechanical noise, thus drowning out their Life Songs—destroying a million years of evolving song history before human beings even knew it was being sung. The whales all decided to die out after that; it was not the hunting of them for food and oil that killed them, but the destruction of their songs.”
Aenea takes a breath. She flexes her fingers as if her hands are cramping. When she looks around the room, her gaze touches each of us.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m wandering. Suffice it to say, that with the Fall of the Farcasters, the other races using the Void decided to stop the vandalism of the fatline. These other races had long since sent observers to live among us …”
There is a sudden whispering and murmuring in the room. Aenea smiles and waits for it to subside.
“I know,” she says. “The idea surprised me, as well, even though I knew this before I was born. These observers have an important function … to decide if humanity can be trusted to join them in the Void Which Binds medium, or if we are only vandals. It was one of these observers among us who recommended that Old Earth be transported away before the Core could destroy it. And it was one of these observers who designed the tests and simulations carried out on Old Earth during the last three centuries of its exile in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to better explain our species to them and measure the empathy of which we are capable.
“These other races also sent their observers—spies, if you will—to dwell among the elements of the Core. They knew that it had been the Core tampering which had damaged the boundaries of the Void, but they also know that we created the Core. Many of the … residents is not quite the right word—collaborators? cocreators?—on the Void Which Binds are ex-silicon constructs, nonorganic autonomous intelligences in their own right. But not of the variety which rules the TechnoCore today. No sentient race can appreciate the Void medium without having evolved empathy.”
Aenea raises her knees a bit and sets
her elbows on them, leaning forward now as she speaks.
“My father—the John Keats cybrid—was created for this reason,” she says, and although her voice is level, I can hear the subtext of emotion there. “As I have explained before, the Core is in a constant state of civil war, with almost every entity there fighting for itself and for no one else. It is a case of hyper-hyper-hyperparasitism to the tenth degree. Their prey—other Core elements—are not so much killed as absorbed, their coded genetic materials, memories, softwares, and reproductive sequences cannibalized. The cannibalized Core element still ‘lives’ but as a subcomponent of the victorious element or elements, which soon enough turn on one another for parts. Alliances are temporary. There are no philosophies, creeds, or ultimate goals—only contingency arrangements to optimize survival strategies. Every action in the Core is a result of the zero-sum game that has been playing there since the Core elements evolved into sentience. Most elements of the Core are capable of dealing with humankind in only those zero-sum terms … optimizing their parasite strategy in relation to us. Their gain, our loss. Our gain, their loss.
“Over the centuries, however, some of these Core elements have come to understand the true potential of the Void Which Binds. They understand that their empathy-free species of intelligence can never be part of that amalgam of living and past races. They have come to understand that the Void Which Binds was not so much constructed as evolved, like a coral reef, and that they will never find shelter there unless they change some of the parameters of their own existence.
“Thus evolved some members of the Core—not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.
“The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: that evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe. For that evolution to ‘succeed’ for these elements of the Core, they would have to abandon zero-sum parasitism and discover true symbiosis. They would have to enter into honest co-evolution with our human race.
“First the renegade Core elements continued cannibalizing to evolve more empathy-prone Core elements. They rewrote their own code as far as they were able. Then they created the John Keats cybrid—a full attempt at simulating an empathic organism with the body and DNA of a human being, and the Core-stored memories and personality of a cybrid. Opposing elements destroyed the first Keats cybrid. The second one was created in the first’s image. It hired my mother—a private detective—to help him unravel the mystery of the first cybrid’s death.”
Aenea is smiling and for a moment she seems oblivious of us or even of her own storytelling. She seems to be reliving old memories. I remember then what she once casually mentioned during our trip from Hyperion in the Consul’s old ship—“Raul, I had my mother’s and father’s memories poured into me before I was born … before I’d become a real fetus even. Can you imagine anything more destructive to a child’s personality than to be inundated with someone else’s lives even before you’ve begun your own? No wonder I’m a screwed-up mess.”
She does not look or act like a screwed-up mess to me at this moment. But then I love her more than life.
“He hired my mother to solve the mystery of his own persona’s death,” she continues softly, “but in truth he knew what had happened to his former self. His real reason for hiring my mother was to meet my mother, to be with my mother, to become my mother’s lover.” Aenea stops for a moment and smiles, her eyes seeing distant things. “My Uncle Martin never got that part right in his muddled-up Cantos. My parents were married and I don’t think Uncle Martin ever told of that … married by the Bishop at the Shrike Temple on Lusus. It was a cult, but a legal one, and my parents’ marriage would have been legal on two hundred worlds of the Hegemony.” She smiles again, looking across the crowded room directly at me. “I can be a bastard, you know, but I wasn’t born one.
“So they were married, I was conceived—probably before that ceremony—and then Core-backed elements murdered my father before my mother could begin the Shrike pilgrimage to Hyperion. And that should have been the end of any contact between my father and me except for two things—his Core persona was captured in a Schrön Loop implanted behind my mother’s ear. For some months she was pregnant with two of us—me in her womb and my father, the second John Keats persona, in the Schrön Loop. His persona could not communicate directly to my mother while imprisoned in its endless-cycle Schrön Loop, but it communicated with me easily enough. The hard part was defining what ‘me’ was at that point. My father helped by entering the Void Which Binds and taking the fetal ‘me’ with him. I saw what was to be—who I would be—even how I would die—before my fingers were fully formed.
“And there was one other detail which Uncle Martin left out of his Cantos. On the day that they had gunned down my father on the steps of the Shrike Temple in the Lusian Concourse Mall, my mother was covered with his blood—the reconstructed, Core-augmented DNA of John Keats. What she did not fully understand at the time was that his blood was literally the most precious resource in the human universe at that moment. His DNA had been designed to infect others with his single gift—access to the Void. Mixed with fully human DNA in the right way, it would offer the gift of blood that would open the portal to the Void Which Binds to the entire human race.
“I am that mix. I bring the genetic ability to access the Void from the TechnoCore and the too-seldom-used human ability to perceive the universe through empathy. For better or worse, those who drink of my blood shall never see the world or the universe the same again.”
So saying, Aenea rises to her knees on the tatami mat. Theo brings a white linen cloth. Rachel pours red wine from a vase into seven large goblets. Aenea takes a small packet from her sweater—I recognize it as a ship’s medkit—and removes a sterile lancet and an antiseptic swab. She pauses before using the lancet and sweeps her gaze across the crowd. There is no sound—it is as if the more than hundred people there are holding their breath.
“There is no guarantee of happiness, wisdom, or long life if you drink of me this evening,” she says, very softly. “There is no nirvana. There is no salvation. There is no afterlife. There is no rebirth. There is only immense knowledge—of the heart as well as the mind—and the potential for great discoveries, great adventures, and a guarantee of more of the pain and terror that make up so much of our short lives.”
She looks from face to face, smiling as she meets the gaze of the eight-year-old Dalai Lama. “Some of you,” she says, “have attended all of our discussion sessions over the past standard year. I have told you what I know about learning the language of the dead, learning the language of the living, learning to hear the music of the spheres, and learning how to take a first step.”
She looks at me. “Some of you have heard only some of these discussions. You were not here when I discussed the real function of the Church’s cruciform or the real identity of the Shrike. You have not heard the details of learning the language of the dead or the other burdens of entering the Void Which Binds. For those of you with doubts or hesitation, I urge you to wait. For the rest of you, I say again—I am not a messiah … but I am a teacher. If what I have taught you these months sounds like truth, and if you wish to take this chance, drink of me this night. Be warned, that the DNA which allows us to perceive the medium of the Void Which Binds cannot coexist with the cruciform. That parasite will wither and die within twenty-four hours of the time you drink of my blood. It will never grow within you again. If you seek resurrection through the cruciform cross, do not drink the blood of my body in this wine.
“And be warned that you will become, like me, the despised and sought-out enemy of the Pax. Your blood will be contagious. Tho
se with whom you share it—those who choose to find the Void Which Binds via your shared DNA—will become despised in turn.
“And finally, be warned that, once having drunk this wine, your children will be born with the ability to enter the Void Which Binds. For better or worse, your children and their children will be born knowing the language of the dead, the language of the living, hearing the music of the spheres, and knowing that they can take a first step across the Void Which Binds.”
Aenea touches her finger with the razor edge of the lancet. A tiny drop of blood is visible in the lantern light. Rachel holds a goblet up as the tiny drop of blood is squeezed into the large volume of wine. Then again with the next goblet, and so on until each of the seven cups has been … contaminated? Transubstantiated? My mind is reeling. My heart is pounding in something like alarm. This seems like some wild parody of the Catholic Church’s Holy Communion. Has my young friend, my dear lover, my beloved … has she gone insane? Does she truly believe that she is a messiah? No, she said that she is not. Do I believe that I will be transformed forever by drinking of wine that is one part per million my beloved’s blood? I do not know. I do not understand.
About half of the people there move forward to line up and sip from one of the large goblets. Chalices? This is blasphemy. It’s not right. Or is it? One sip is all they take, then return to their places on the tatami mats. No one seems especially energized or enlightened. No horns of light shine from anyone’s forehead after they partake of the wine. No one levitates or speaks in tongues. They each take a sip and sit down.
