The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  “Yes, M. Silenus.”

  “Well?” said the poet.

  “Well what, sir?” said A. Raddik.

  “Well, any sign of him having done any of the things he’s promised, Raddik?”

  “We know from the Pax transmissions nine years and eight months ago that he and the Consul’s ship escaped Hyperion,” said the android. “We can hope that the child Aenea is still safe and well.”

  “Yes, yes,” muttered Silenus, waving his hand feebly, “but is the Pax toppled?”

  “Not that we can notice, M. Silenus,” said Raddik. “There were the mild troubles I mentioned earlier, and offworld, born-again tourism here on Hyperion is down a bit, but …”

  “And the sodding Church is still in the zombie business?” demanded the poet, his thin voice stronger now.

  “The Church remains ascendant,” said A. Raddik. “More of the moor people and the mountain people accept the cruciform every year.”

  “Bugger all,” said the poet. “And I don’t suppose that Earth has returned to its proper place.”

  “We have not heard of that improbability occurring,” said A. Raddik. “Of course, as I mentioned, our electronic eavesdropping is restricted to in-system transmissions these days, and since the Consul’s ship left with M. Endymion and M. Aenea almost ten years ago, our decryption capabilities have not been …”

  “All right, all right,” said the old man, sounding terribly tired again. “Get me into my hoverchair.”

  “Not for another two days, at least, I am afraid,” repeated the android, her voice gentle.

  “Piss up a rope,” said the ancient figure floating amid tubes and sensor wires. “Can you wheel me over to a window, Raddik? Please? I want to look at the spring chalma trees and the ruins of this old city.”

  “Yes, M. Silenus,” said the android, sincerely pleased to be doing something for the old man besides keeping his body working.

  Martin Silenus watched out the window for one full hour, fighting the tides of reawakening pain and the terrible sleepy urge to return to fugue state. It was morning light. His audio implants relayed the birdsong to him. The old poet thought of his adopted young niece, the child who had decided to call herself Aenea … he thought of his dear friend, Brawne Lamia, Aenea’s mother … how they had been enemies for so long, had hated each other during parts of that last great Shrike Pilgrimage so long ago … about the stories they had told one another and the things they had seen … the Shrike in the Valley of the Time Tombs, its red eyes blazing … the scholar … what was his name?… Sol … Sol and his little swaddled brat aging backward to nothing … and the soldier … Kassad … that was it … Colonel Kassad. The old poet had never given a shit about the military … idiots, all of them … but Kassad had told an interesting tale, lived an interesting life … the other priest, Lenar Hoyt, had been a prig and an asshole, but the first one … the one with the sad eyes and the leather journal … Paul Duré … there had been a man worth writing about …

  Martin Silenus drifted back to sleep with the light of morning flooding in on him, illuminating his countless wrinkles and translucent, parchment flesh, his blue veins visible and pulsing weakly in the rich light. He did not dream … but part of his poet’s mind was already outlining the next sections of his never-finished Cantos.

  • • •

  Sergeant Gregorius had not been exaggerating. Father Captain de Soya had been terribly battered and burned in the last battle of his ship, the Raphael, and was near death.

  The sergeant had led A. Bettik, Aenea, and me into the temple. The structure was as strange as this encounter—outside there was a large, blank stone tablet, a smooth-faced monolith—Aenea mentioned briefly that it had been brought from Old Earth, had stood outside the original Temple of the Jade Emperor, and had never been inscribed during its thousands of years on the pilgrims’ trail—while inside the sealed and pressurized courtyard of the echoing temple itself, a stone railing ran around a boulder that was actually the summit of T’ai Shan, the sacred Great Peak of the Middle Kingdom. There were small sleeping and eating rooms for pilgrims in the back of the huge temple, and it was in one of these that we found Father Captain de Soya and the other two survivors. Besides Gregorius and the dying de Soya, there were two other men—Carel Shan, a Weapons Systems Officer, now terribly burned and unconscious, and Hoagan Liebler, introduced by Sergeant Gregorius as the “former” Executive Officer of the Raphael. Liebler was the least injured of the four—his left forearm had been broken and was in a sling, but he had no burns or other impact bruises—but there was something quiet and withdrawn about the thin man, as if he were in shock or mulling something over.

  Aenea’s attention went immediately to Captain Federico de Soya.

  The priest-captain was on one of the uncomfortable pilgrim cots, either stripped to the waist by Gregorius or he had lost all of his upper uniform in the blast and reentry. His trousers were shredded. His feet were bare. The only place on his body where he had not been terribly burned was the parasite cruciform on his chest—it was a healthy, sickening pink. De Soya’s hair had been burned away and his face was splashed with liquid metal burns and radiation slashes, but I could see that he had been a striking man, mostly because of his liquid, troubled brown eyes, not dulled even by the pain that must be overwhelming him at this moment. Someone had applied burn cream, temporary dermheal, and liquid disinfectant all over the visible portions of the dying priest-captain’s body—and started a standard lifeboat medkit IV drip—but this would have little effect on the outcome. I had seen combat burns like this before, not all from starship encounters. Three friends of mine during the Iceshelf fighting had died within hours when we had not been able to medevac them out. Their screams had been horrible to the point of unendurable.

  Father Captain de Soya was not screaming. I could see that he was straining not to cry out from the pain, but he remained silent, his eyes focused only on the terrible concentration to silence until Aenea knelt by his side.

  At first he did not recognize her. “Bettz?” he mumbled. “VIRO Argyle? No … you died at your station. The others too … Pol Denish … Elijah trying to free the aft boat … the young troopers when the starboard hull failed … but you look … familiar.”

  Aenea started to take his hand, saw that three of de Soya’s fingers were missing, and set her own hand on the stained blanket next to his. “Father Captain,” she said very softly.

  “Aenea,” said de Soya, his dark eyes really looking at her for the first time. “You’re the child … so many months, chasing you … looked at you when you stepped out of the Sphinx. Incredible child. So glad you survived.” His gaze moved to me. “You are Raul Endymion. I saw your Home Guard dossier. Almost caught up to you on Mare Infinitus.” A wave of pain rolled over him and the priest-captain closed his eyes and bit into his burned and bloodied lower lip. After a moment, he opened his eyes and said to me, “I have something of yours. Personal gear on the Raphael. The Holy Office let me have it after they ended their investigation. Sergeant Gregorius will give it to you after I am dead.”

  I nodded, having no idea what he was talking about.

  “Father Captain de Soya,” whispered Aenea, “Federico … can you hear and understand me?”

  “Yes,” murmured the priest-captain. “Painkillers … said no to Sergeant Gregorius … didn’t want to slip away forever in my sleep. Not go gently.” The pain returned. I saw that much of de Soya’s neck and chest had cracked and opened, like burned scales. Pus and fluid flowed down to the blankets beneath him. The man closed his eyes until the tide of agony receded; it took longer this time. I thought of how I had folded up under just the pain of a kidney stone and tried to imagine this man’s torment. I could not.

  “Father Captain,” said Aenea, “there is a way for you to live …”

  De Soya shook his head vigorously, despite the pain that must have caused. I noticed that his left ear was little more than carbon. Part of it flaked off on the pillow as I watche
d. “No!” he cried. “I told Gregorius … no partial resurrection … idiot, sexless idiot …” A cough that might have been a laugh from behind scorched teeth. “Had enough of that as a priest. Anyway … tired … tired of …” His blackened stubs of fingers on his right hand batted at the pink double cross on his flaked and oozing chest. “Let the thing die with me.”

  Aenea nodded. “I didn’t mean be reborn, Father Captain. I meant live. Be healed.”

  De Soya was trying to blink, but his eyelids were burned ragged. “Not a prisoner of the Pax …” he managed, finding the air to speak only each time he exhaled with a wracking gasp. “Will … execute … me. I deserve … it. Killed many innocent … men … women … in defense of … friends.”

  Aenea leaned closer so that he could focus on her eyes. “Father Captain, the Pax is still after us as well. But we have a ship. It has an autosurgeon.”

  Sergeant Gregorius stepped forward from where he had been leaning wearily against the wall. The man named Carel Shan remained unconscious. Hoag Liebler, apparently lost in some private misery, did not respond.

  Aenea had to repeat it before de Soya understood.

  “Ship?” said the priest-captain. “The ancient Hegemony ship you escaped in? Not armed, was it?”

  “No,” said Aenea. “It never has been.”

  De Soya shook his head again. “There must have been … fifty archangel-class … ships … jumped us. Got … a few … rest … still there. No chance … get … to … any translation point … before …” He closed his torn eyelids again while the pain washed over him. This time, it seemed, it almost carried him away. He returned as if from a far place.

  “It’s all right,” whispered Aenea. “I’ll worry about that. You’ll be in the doc-in-the-box. But there’s something you would have to do.”

  Father Captain de Soya seemed too tired to speak, but he shifted his head to listen.

  “You have to renounce the cruciform,” said Aenea. “You have to surrender this type of immortality.”

  The priest-captain’s blackened lips pulled back from his teeth. “Gladly …” he rasped. “But sorry … can’t … once accepted … cruciform … can’t be … surrendered.”

  “Yes,” whispered Aenea, “it can. If you choose that, I can make it go away. Our autosurgeon is old. It would not be able to heal you with the cruciform parasite throughout your body. We have no resurrection crèche aboard the ship …”

  De Soya reached for her then, his flaking and three-fingerless hand still gripping tightly the sleeve of her therm jacket. “Doesn’t matter … doesn’t matter if I die … get it off. Get it off. Will die a real … Catholic … again … if you … can help me … get it … OFF!” He almost shouted the final word.

  Aenea turned to the sergeant. “Do you have a cup or glass?”

  “There’s the mug in the medkit,” rumbled the giant, fumbling for it. “But we have no water …”

  “I brought some,” said my friend and removed the insulated bottle from her belt.

  I expected wine, but it was only the water we had bottled up before leaving the Temple Hanging in Air those endless hours ago. Aenea did not bother with alcohol swabs or sterile lancets; she beckoned me closer, removed the hunting knife from my belt, and drew the blade across three of her fingertips in a swift move that made me flinch. Her blood flowed red. Aenea dipped her fingers in the clear plastic drinking mug for just a second, but long enough to send currents of thick crimson spiraling and twisting in the water.

  “Drink this,” she said to Father Captain de Soya, helping to lift the dying man’s head.

  The priest-captain drank, coughed, drank again. His eyes closed when she eased him back onto the stained pillow.

  “The cruciform will be gone within twenty-four hours,” whispered my friend.

  Father Captain de Soya made that rough chuckling sound again. “I’ll be dead within an hour.”

  “You’ll be in the autosurgeon within fifteen minutes,” said Aenea, touching his better hand. “Sleep now … but don’t die on me, Federico de Soya … don’t die on me. We have much to talk about. And you have one great service to perform for me … for us.”

  Sergeant Gregorius was standing closer. “M. Aenea …” he said, halted, shuffled his feet, and tried again. “M. Aenea, may I partake of that … water?”

  Aenea looked at him. “Yes, Sergeant … but once you drink, you can never again carry a cruciform. Never. There will be no resurrection. And there are other … side effects.”

  Gregorius waved away any further discussion. “I have followed my captain for ten years. I will follow him now.” The giant drank deeply of the pinkish water.

  De Soya’s eyes had been closed, and I had assumed that he was asleep or unconscious from the pain, but now he opened them and said to Gregorius, “Sergeant, would you please bring M. Endymion the parcel we dragged from the lifeboat?”

  “Aye, Capt’n,” said the giant and rummaged through the litter of debris in one corner of the room. He handed me a sealed tube, a little over a meter high.

  I looked at the priest-captain. De Soya seemed to be floating between delirium and shock. “I’ll open it when he’s better,” I said to the sergeant.

  Gregorius nodded, carried the glass over to Carel Shan, and poured some water into the unconscious Weapons Officer’s gaping mouth. “Carel may die before your ship arrives,” said the sergeant. He looked up. “Or does the ship have two doc-in-the-boxes?”

  “No,” said Aenea, “but the one we have has three compartments. You can heal your wounds as well.”

  Gregorius shrugged. He went to the man named Liebler and offered the glass. The thin man with the broken arm only looked at it.

  “Perhaps later,” said Aenea.

  Gregorius nodded and handed the glass back to her. “The XO was a prisoner on our ship,” said the sergeant. “A spy. An enemy of the captain. Father-captain still risked his last life to get Liebler out of the brig … got his burns retrieving him. I don’t think Hoag quite understands what’s happened.”

  Liebler looked up then. “I understand it,” he said softly. “I just don’t understand it.”

  Aenea stood. “Raul, I hope you haven’t lost the ship communicator.”

  I fumbled in my pockets only a few seconds before coming up with the com unit/diskey journal. “I’ll go outside and tightbeam visually,” I said. “Use the skinsuit jack. Any instructions for the ship?”

  “Tell it to hurry,” said Aenea.

  It was tricky getting the semiconscious de Soya and the unconscious Carel Shan to the ship. They had no spacesuits and it was still near vacuum outside. Sergeant Gregorius told us that he had used an inflatable transfer ball to drag them from the lifeboat wreckage to the Temple of the Jade Emperor, but the ball itself had been damaged. I had about fifteen minutes to think about the problem before the ship became visible, descending on its EM repellors and blue fusion-flame tail, so when it arrived I ordered it to land directly in front of the temple air lock, to morph its escalator ramp to the airlock door, and to extend its containment field around the door and stairway. Then it was just a matter of getting the float litters from the medbay in the ship and transferring the men to them without hurting them too much. Shan remained unconscious, but some of de Soya’s skin peeled away as we moved him onto the litter. The priest-captain stirred and opened his eyes but did not cry out.

  After months on T’ien Shan, the interior of the Consul’s ship was still familiar, but familiar like a recurring dream one has about a house one has lived in long ago. After de Soya and the Weapons Officer were tucked away in the autosurgeon, it was strange to stand on the carpeted holopit deck with its ancient Steinway piano with Aenea and A. Bettik there as always, but also with a burned giant still holding his assault weapon and the former XO brooding silently on the holopit stairs.

  “Diagnostics completed on the autosurgeons,” said the ship. “The presence of the cross-shaped parasite nodes makes treatment impossible at this time. Shall I
terminate treatment or commence cryogenic fugue?”

  “Cryogenic fugue,” said Aenea. “The doc-in-the-box should be able to operate on them in twenty-four hours. Please keep them alive and in stasis until then.”

  “Affirmative,” said the ship. And then, “M. Aenea? M. Endymion?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you aware that I was tracked by long-range sensors from the time I left the third moon? There are at least thirty-seven Pax warships heading this way as we speak. One is already in parking orbit around this planet and another has just committed the highly unusual tactic of jumping on Hawking drive within the system’s gravity well.”

  “Okay,” said Aenea. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I believe they intend to intercept and destroy us,” said the ship. “And they can do this before we clear atmosphere.”

  “We know,” sighed Aenea. “I repeat, don’t worry about it.”

  “Affirmative,” said the ship in the most businesslike tone I had ever heard from it. “Destination?”

  “The bonsai fissure six kilometers east of Hsuan-k’ung Ssu,” said Aenea. “East of the Temple Hanging in Air. Quickly.” She glanced at her wrist chronometer. “But stay low, Ship. Within the cloud layers.”

  “The phosgene clouds or the water particle clouds?” inquired the ship.

  “The lowest possible,” said my friend. “Unless the phosgene clouds create a problem for you.”

  “Of course not,” said the ship. “Would you like me to plot a course that would take us through the acid seas? It would make no difference to the Pax deep radar, but it could be done with only a small addition of time and …”

  “No,” interrupted Aenea, “just the clouds.”

  We watched on the holopit sphereview as the ship flung itself off Suicide Cliff and dived ten kilometers through gray cloud and then into green clouds. We would be at the fissure within minutes.