by Dan Simmons
I nodded, feeling like a swine and a voyeur for asking. There was an actual pain in my chest, much as I had imagined angina from hearing about it. I could not stop. “Did you love … him?” How did I know it was a he? Theo … Rachel … she surrounds herself with women. My own thoughts made me sick of myself.
“I love you, Raul,” she whispered.
It was only the second time she had said this, the first being when we had said good-bye on Old Earth more than five and a half years earlier. My heart should have soared at the words. But it hurt too much. There was something important here that I did not understand.
“But there was a man,” I said, the words like pebbles in my mouth. “You loved him …” Only one? How many? I wanted to scream at my thoughts to shut up.
Aenea put her finger on my lips. “I love you, Raul, remember that as I tell you these things. Everything is … complicated. By who I am. By what I must do. But I love you … I have loved you since the first time I saw you in the dreams of my future. I loved you when we met in the dust storm on Hyperion, with the confusion and shooting and the Shrike and the hawking mat. Do you remember how I squeezed my arms around you when we were flying on the mat, trying to escape? I loved you then …”
I waited in silence. Aenea’s finger moved from my lips to my cheek. She sighed as if the weight of the worlds were on her shoulders. “All right,” she said softly. “There was someone. I’ve made love before. We …”
“Was it serious?” I said. My voice sounded strange to me, like the ship’s artificial tones.
“We were married,” said Aenea.
Once, on the River Kans on Hyperion, I’d gotten into a fistfight with an older bargeman who was half again my weight with infinitely more experience in fighting. With no warning he had clipped me under the jaw with a single blow that had blacked out my vision, buckled my knees, and sent me reeling back over the barge railing into the river. The man had held no grudge and had personally dived in to fish me out. I’d regained consciousness in a minute or two, but it was hours before I could shake the ringing out of my head and truly focus my eyes.
This was worse than that. I could only lie there and look at her, at my beloved Aenea, and feel her fingers against my cheek as strange and cold and alien as a stranger’s touch. She moved her hand away.
There was something worse.
“The twenty-three months, one week, and six hours that were unaccounted for,” she said.
“With him?” I could not remember forming the two words but I heard them spoken in my voice.
“Yes.”
“Married …” I said and could not go on.
Aenea actually smiled, but it was the saddest smile I think I had ever seen. “By a priest,” she said. “The marriage will be legal in the eyes of the Pax and the Church.”
“Will be?”
“Is.”
“You are still married?” I wanted to get up then and be sick over the edge of the platform, but I could not move.
For a second Aenea seemed confused, unable to answer. “Yes …” she said, her eyes gleaming with tears. “I mean, no … I’m not married now … you … dammit, if I could only …”
“But the man’s still alive?” I interrupted, my voice as flat and emotionless as a Holy Office Inquisition interrogator’s.
“Yes.” She put her hand on her own cheek. Her fingers were trembling.
“Do you love him, kiddo?”
“I love you, Raul.”
I pulled away slightly, not consciously, not deliberately, but I could not stay in physical contact with her while we had this discussion.
“There’s something else …” she said.
I waited.
“We had … I’ll … I had a child, a baby.” She looked at me as if trying to force understanding of all this through her gaze directly into my mind. It did not work.
“A child,” I repeated stupidly. My dear friend … my child friend turned woman turned lover … my beloved had a child. “How old is it?” I said, hearing the banality like the thunder rumbling closer.
Again she seemed confused, as if uncertain of facts. Finally she said, “The child is … nowhere I can find it now.”
“Oh, kiddo,” I said, forgetting everything but her pain. I folded her against me as she wept. “I’m so sorry, kiddo … I’m so sorry,” I said as I patted her head.
She pulled back, wiping away tears. “No, Raul, you don’t understand. It’s all right … it’s not … that part’s all right …”
I pulled away from her and stared. She was distraught, sobbing. “I understand,” I lied.
“Raul …” Her hand felt for mine.
I patted her hand but got out of the bedclothes, pulled on my clothes, and grabbed my climbing harness and pack from their place by the door.
“Raul …”
“I’ll be back before dawn,” I said, facing in her general direction but not looking at her. “I’m just going for a walk.”
“Let me go with you,” she said, standing with the sheet around her. Lightning flashed behind her. Another storm was coming in.
“I’ll be back before dawn,” I said and went out the door before she could dress or join me.
It was raining—a cold, sleety rain. The platforms were quickly coated and made slick. I hurtled down ladders and jogged down the vibrating staircases, seeing my way by the occasional lightning flash, not slowing until I was several hundred meters down the east ledge walk headed toward the fissure where I had first landed in the ship. I did not want to go there.
Half a klick from the Temple were fixed lines rising to the top of the ridge. The sleet was pounding on the cliff face now, the red and black lines were coated with a layer of ice. I clipped carabiners onto the line and harness, pulling the powered ascenders from the pack and attaching them without double-checking the connections, then began jumaring up the icy ropes.
The wind came up, whipping my jacket and pushing me away from the rock wall. Sleet pounded at my face and hands. I ignored it and ascended, sometimes sliding back three or four meters as the jumar clamps failed on the icy line, then recovering and climbing again. Ten meters below the razor’s-edge summit of the ridgeline, I emerged from the clouds like a swimmer coming up out of the water. The stars still burned coldly up there, but the billowing cloud masses were piling against the north wall of the ridge and rising like a white tide around me.
I slid the ascenders higher and jumared until I reached the relatively flat area where the fixed lines were attached. Only then did I notice that I had not tied on the safety line.
“Fuck it,” I said and began walking northeast along the fifteen-centimeter-wide ridgeline. The storm was rising around me to the north. The drop to the south was kilometers of empty, black air. There were patches of ice here and it was beginning to snow.
I broke into a trot, running east, jumping icy spots and fissures, not giving a good goddamn about anything.
While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe. On Hyperion, when I was a boy, news filtered slowly from the interstellar Pax to our moving caravans on the moors: an important event on Pacem or Renaissance Vector or wherever would, of necessity, be many weeks or months old from Hawking-drive time-debt, with additional weeks of transit from Port Romance or another major city to our provincial region. I was used to not paying attention to events elsewhere. The lag in news had lessened, of course, when I was guiding offworld hunters in the Fens and elsewhere, but it was still old news and of little importance to me. The Pax held no fascination for me, although offworld travel certainly had. Then there had been almost ten years of disconnection during our Old Earth hiatus and my five years of time-debt Odyssey. I was not used to thinking of events elsewhere except where they affected me, such as the Pax’s obsession with finding us.
But this would soon change.
That night on T’ien Shan, the Mountains of Heaven, as I ran foolishly through sleet and fog down the narrow ridgelin
e, these were some of the events happening elsewhere:
On the lovely world of Maui-Covenant, where the long chain of events culminating with my presence here with Aenea could be said to have begun with the courtship of Siri and Merin some four centuries ago, rebellion raged. The rebels on the motile isles had long since become followers of Aenea’s philosophy, had drunk of her communion wine, had rejected the Pax and the cruciform forever, and were waging a war of sabotage and resistance while trying not to harm or kill the Pax soldiers occupying the world. For the Pax, Maui-Covenant offered special problems because it was primarily a vacation world—hundreds of thousands of wealthy born-again Christians traveled there via Hawking drive every standard year to enjoy the warm seas, the beautiful beaches of the Equatorial Archipelago isles, and the dolphin/motile isles migrations. The Pax also benefited from the hundreds of oil-drilling platforms around the mostly ocean world, situated out of sight of tourist areas but vulnerable to attack from motile isles or rebel submersibles. Now many of the Pax tourists themselves were—inexplicably—rejecting the cruciform and becoming followers of Aenea’s teachings. Rejecting immortality. The planetary governor, the resident archbishop, and the Vatican officials called in for the crisis could not understand it.
On cold Sol Draconi Septem, where most of the atmosphere was frozen into a single giant glacier, there were no tourists, but the Pax attempt at colonization there over the past ten years had turned into a nightmare.
The gentle bands of Chitchatuk whom Aenea, A. Bettik, and I had befriended some nine and a half years ago had turned into implacable foes of the Pax. The skyscraper frozen into the atmospheric ice where Father Glaucus had welcomed all travelers still blazed with light despite that kind man’s murder at the hand of Rhadamanth Nemes. The Chitchatuk kept the place alight like a shrine. Somehow they knew who had murdered the harmless blind man and Cuchiat’s tribe—Cuchiat, Chiaku, Aichacut, Cuchtu, Chithticia, Chatchia—all of those whom Aenea, A. Bettik, and I had known by name. The other Chitchatuk blamed the Pax, who were attempting to colonize the temperate bands along the equator where the air was gaseous and the great glacier melted down to the ancient permafrost.
But the Chitchatuk, not having heard of Aenea’s communion and tasted the empathy of it, descended on the Pax like a Biblical plague. Having preyed upon—and been preyed upon by—the terrible snow wraiths for millennia, the Chitchatuk now drove the tunneling white beasts south to the equatorial regions, unleashing them on the Pax colonists and missionaries. The toll was frightful. Pax military units brought in to kill the primitive Chitchatuk sent patrols out onto and into the planet glacier and never saw them again.
On the city-planet of Renaissance Vector, Aenea’s word of the Void Which Binds had spread to millions of followers. Thousands of Pax faithful took communion from the changed ones every day, their cruciforms dying and falling off within twenty-four hours, sacrificing immortality for … what? The Pax and Vatican did not understand and at that time neither did I.
But the Pax knew that it had to contain the virus. Troopers kicked in doors and crashed through windows every day and night, usually in the poorer, old-industrial sections of the planet-wide city. These people who had rejected the cruciform did not strongly resist—they would fight fiercely, but refused to kill if there was any way to avoid it. The Pax troopers did not mind killing to carry out their orders. Thousands of Aenea’s followers died the true death—former immortals who would never see resurrection again—and tens of thousands were taken into custody and sent to detention centers, where they were placed into cryogenic fugue lockers so that their blood and philosophy could not contaminate others. But for every one of Aenea’s adherents killed or arrested, dozens—hundreds—stayed safe in hiding, passing along Aenea’s teachings, offering communion of their own changed blood, and providing largely nonviolent resistance at every turn. The great industrial machine that was Renaissance Vector had not yet broken down, but it was lurching and grinding in a way not seen in all the centuries since the Hegemony established the world as the Web’s industrial nexus.
The Vatican sent more troops and debated as to how to respond.
On Tau Ceti Center, once the political center of the WorldWeb but now just a heavily populated and popular garden planet, the rebellion took a different shape. While offworld visitors had brought Aenea’s anti-cruciform contagion, the bulk of the problem there for the Vatican centered on the Archbishop Achilla Silvaski, a scheming woman who had taken over the role of governor and autocrat on TC2 more than two centuries earlier. It was Archbishop Silvaski who had attempted to over-throw the reelection of the permanent pope through intrigue among the cardinals and now, having failed at that, she simply staged her own planet-wide version of the pre-Hegira Reformation, announcing that the Catholic Church on Tau Ceti Center would henceforth recognize her as pontiff and be forever separated from the “corrupt” interstellar Church of the Pax. Because she had carefully formed an alliance with the local bishops in charge of resurrection ceremonies and machineries, she could control the Sacrament of Resurrection—and thus the local Church. More importantly, the Archbishop had wooed the local Pax military authorities with land, wealth, and power until an unprecedented event occurred—a Pax Fleet, Pax military coup that overthrew most senior officers in Tau Ceti System and replaced them with New Church advocates. No archangel star-ships were seized this way, but eighteen cruisers and forty-one torchships committed themselves to defending the New Church on TC2 and its new pontiff.
Tens of thousands of faithful Church members on the planet protested. They were arrested, threatened with excommunication—i.e. immediate revocation of their cruciforms—and released on probation under the watchful eye of the Archbishop’s—new pope’s—New Church Security Force. Several priestly orders, most notably the Jesuits on Tau Ceti Center, refused to comply. Most were quietly arrested, excommunicated, and executed. Some hundreds escaped, however, and used their network to offer resistance to the new order—at first nonviolent, then increasingly severe. Many of the Jesuits had served as priest-officers in the Pax military before returning to civilian clerical life, and they used their military skills to create havoc in and around the planet.
Pope Urban XVI and his Pax Fleet advisors looked at their options. Already the crushing blow in the great Crusade against the Ousters had been delayed and derailed by Captain de Soya’s continued harassing attacks, by the need to send Fleet units to a score of worlds to quell the Aenea contagion rebellions, by the logistical requirements for the ambush in T’ien Shan System, and now by this and other unrelated rebellions. Over Admiral Marusyn’s advice to ignore the Archbishop’s heresy until after other political/military goals were reached, Pope Urban XVI and his Secretary of State Lourdusamy decided to divert twenty archangels, thirty-two old-style cruisers, eight transport ships, and a hundred torchships to Tau Ceti System—although it would be many weeks of time-debt before the old Hawking-drive ships could arrive. Once formed up in that system, the task force’s orders were to overcome all resistance by rebellious spacecraft, establish orbit around TC2, demand the Archbishop’s immediate surrender and the surrender of all those who supported her, and—failing compliance with that order—to slag as much of the planet as it took to destroy the New Church’s infrastructure. After that, tens of thousands of Marines would drop to the planet to occupy the remaining urban centers and to reestablish the rule of the Pax and the Holy Mother Church.
On Mars, in Old Earth System, the rebellion had worsened, despite years of Pax bombardment from space and constant military incursions from orbit. Two standard months earlier, Governor Clare Palo and Archbishop Robeson had both died the true death in a nuclear suicide attack on their palace-in-exile on Phobos. The Pax response had been terrifying—asteroids diverted from the nearby belt and dropped on Mars, carpet plasma bombing, and nightly lance attacks that sliced through the new planetary dust storm kicked up by the asteroid bombardment like so many deadly searchlights crisscrossing the frozen desert. Deathbeams w
ould have been more efficient, but the Pax Fleet planners wanted to make an example of Mars, and wanted it to be a visible example.
The results were not exactly what the Pax had hoped for. The Martian terraforming environment, already precarious after years of poor maintenance, collapsed. Breathable atmosphere on the world was now restricted to Hellas Basin and a few other low pockets. The oceans were gone, boiled away as the pressure dropped or frozen back in the poles and permafrost subcrust. The last large plants and trees died off until only the original brandy cactus and bradberry orchards were left clinging to life in the near vacuum. The dust storms would last for years, making Pax Marine patrols on the Red Planet all but impossible.
But the Martians, especially the militant Palestinian Martians, were adapted to such a life and ready for this contingency. They hunkered down, killed the Pax troopers when they landed, and waited. Templar missionaries among the other Martian colonies urged the final nanotech adaptation to the original planetary conditions. Thousands and thousands took the gamble, allowing the molecular machines to alter their bodies and DNA to the planet.
More disturbingly to the Vatican, space battles broke out as ships once belonging to the presumably defunct Martian War Machine came out of hiding in the distant Kuiper Belt and began a series of hit-and-run attacks on the Pax Fleet convoys in Old Earth System. The kill ratio in these attacks was five to one in favor of Pax Fleet, but the losses were unacceptable and the cost of maintaining the Mars operation was frightful.
Admiral Marusyn and the Joint Chiefs advised His Holiness to cut his losses and leave Old Earth System to fester for the time being. The Admiral assured the Pope that nothing would be allowed out of the system. He pointed out that there was nothing of real value in Old Earth System any longer, now that Mars was untenable. The Pope listened but refused to authorize the pullout. At each conference, Cardinal Lourdusamy stressed the symbolic importance of keeping Old Earth’s system within the Pax. His Holiness decided to wait to make his decision. The hemorrhage of ships, men, money, and materiel went on.
