The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  I blink. “There are other startrees?”

  Kee nods.

  “How did all these worlds … share that moment?” I ask, seeing the answer even as I pose the question.

  “Yes,” murmurs the former Corporal Kee. “All of the places Aenea visited, often with you. All of the worlds where she left disciples who had partaken of communion and renounced the cruciform. Her Shared Moment … the hour of her death … was like a signal broadcast and rebroadcast through all of these worlds.”

  I rub my face. It feels numb. “So only those who had already taken communion or studied with Aenea shared in that moment?” I say.

  Kee is shaking his head. “No … they were the transponders, the relay stations. They pulled the Shared Moment from the Void Which Binds and rebroadcast it to everyone.”

  “Everyone?” I repeat stupidly. “Even those tens and hundreds of billions in the Pax who wear the cross?”

  “Who wore the cross,” amends Bassin Kee. “Many of those faithful have since decided not to carry a Core parasite in their bodies.”

  I begin to understand then. Aenea’s last shared moments had been more than words and torture and pain and horror—I had sensed her thoughts, shared her understanding of the Core’s motives, of the true parasitism of the cruciform, of the cynical use of human death to tweak their neural networks, of Lourdusamy’s lust for power and Mustafa’s contusion and Albedo’s absolute inhumanity … If everyone had shared the same Shared Moment that I had screamed and fought my way through in the high-g tank on the outward-bound robot prison torchship, then it had been a bright and terrible moment for the human race. And every living human being must have heard her final I love you, Raul as the flames swept high.

  The sun is setting. Rays of gold light shine through the ruins on the west side of the river and throw a maze of shadows across the east bank. The molten mass of Castel Sant’ Angelo runs down toward us like a mountain of melted glass. She asked me to spread her ashes on Old Earth. And I can’t even do that for her. I fail her even in death.

  I look up at Bassin Kee. “On Pacem?” I say. “She had no disciples on Pacem when … Oh.” She had sent Father de Soya away immediately before our doomed charge up the aisle in St. Peter’s Basilica, asking him to leave with the monks and blend into the city he knew so well, to avoid the Pax whatever else happened. When he had argued, Aenea’s words had been—“This is all I ask, Father. And I ask it with love and respect.” And Father de Soya had gone out into the rain. And he had been the broadcast relay, carrying my darling girl’s last agony and insight to several billion people on Pacem.

  “Oh,” I say, still looking at Kee. “But the last time I saw you … through the Void … you were being kept captive in cryogenic fugue there in that …” I sweep my hand in disgust toward the melted heap of Castel Sant’ Angelo.

  Kee nods again. “I was in cryogenic fugue, Raul. I was stored like a sleeping slab of meat in a cold locker in a basement dungeon not far from where they murdered Aenea. But I felt the Shared Moment. Every human alive did—whether sleeping or drunk or dying or lost in madness.”

  I can only stare at the man, my heart breaking again in understanding. Eventually I say, “How did you get out? Away from there?” We are both looking at the ruins of the Holy Office headquarters now.

  Kee sighs. “There was a revolution very soon after the Shared Moment. Many people—the majority here on Pacem—no longer wanted anything to do with the cruciforms and the betrayed Church which had implanted them. Some still were cynical enough to make that trade with the devil in exchange for physical resurrection, but millions … hundreds of millions … sought out communion and freedom from the Core cross just in the first week. The Pax loyalists attempted to stop them. There was fighting … revolution … civil war.”

  “Again,” I say. “Just like the Fall of the Farcasters three centuries ago.”

  “No,” says Kee. “Nothing that bad. Remember, once one has learned the language of the dead and the living, it’s painful to hurt someone else. The Pax loyalists did not have that restraint, but then, they were in the minority everywhere.”

  I gesture toward the world of ruins. “You call this restraint? You call this not so bad?”

  “The revolution against the Vatican and the Pax and the Holy Office did not do this,” says Kee grimly. “That was relatively bloodless. The loyalists fled in archangel starships. Their New Vatican is on a world called Madhya … a real shithole of a planet, guarded now by half the old fleet and several million loyalists.”

  “Who then?” I say, still looking at the devastation everywhere around us.

  “The Core did this,” says Kee. “The Nemes-things destroyed the city and then seized four archangel ships. Slagged us from space after the loyalists left. The Core was pissed off. Probably still is. We don’t care.”

  I carefully set the ’scriber down on the white stone and look around. More men and women are coming out of the ruins, staying a respectful distance from us but watching with great interest. They are dressed in work clothes and hunting garb, but not in bearskins or rags. These are obviously people living in a rough place during a hard time, but not savages. A young blond boy waves at me shyly. I wave back.

  “I never really answered your question,” says Kee. “The guards released me … released all of the prisoners … during the confusion in the week after the Shared Moment. A lot of prisoners around this arm of the galaxy found doors opening that week. After communion … well, it’s hard to imprison or torture someone else when you end up sharing half their pain through the Void Which Binds. And the Ousters have been busy since the Shared Moment reviving the billions of Jews and Muslims and others kidnapped by the Core … and ferrying them home from the Labyrinthine planets to their homeworlds.”

  I think about this for a minute. Then I say, “Did Father de Soya survive?”

  Kee grins even more broadly. “I guess you can say he survived. He’s our priest in the parish of St. Anne’s. Come on, I’ll take you to him. He knows you’re here by now. It’s only a five-minute walk.”

  De Soya hugs me so fiercely that my ribs ache for an hour. The priest is wearing a plain black cassock and Roman collar. St. Anne’s is not the large parish church we had glimpsed in the Vatican, but a small brick and adobe chapel set in a cleared area on the east bank. It seems that the parish consists of about a hundred families who make their livelihood hunting and farming in what had been a large park on this side of the spaceport. I am introduced to most of these hundred families as we eat outside in the lighted space near the foyer of the church and it seems that they all know of me—they act as if they know me personally, and all seem sincerely grateful that I am alive and returned to the world of the living.

  As night deepens, Kee, de Soya, and I adjourn to the priest’s private quarters: a spartan room adjoining the back of the church. Father de Soya brings out a bottle of wine and pours a full glass for each of us.

  “One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”

  Kee lifts his glass as if in toast and then hesitates. “To Aenea?” he suggests.

  “To Aenea,” say Father de Soya and I. We drain our glasses and the priest pours more.

  “How long was I gone?” I ask. The wine makes my face flush, as it always does. Aenea used to kid me about it.

  “It has been thirteen standard months since the Shared Moment,” says de Soya.

  I shake my head. I must have spent the time writing the narrative and waiting to die in work sessions of thirty hours or more, interspersed with a few hours of sleep, then another thirty or forty hours straight. I had been doing what sleep scientists call free-running: losing all connection to circadian rhythm.

  “Do you have any contact with the other worlds?” I ask. I look at Kee and answer my own question. “You must. Bassin was telling me about the reaction to the Shared Moment o
n other worlds and the return of the kidnapped billions.”

  “A few ships set in here,” says de Soya, “but with the archangel ships gone, travel takes time. The Templars and Ousters use their treeships to ferry the refugees home, but the rest of us hate to use the Hawking drive now that we realize how harmful it is to the Void medium. And as hard as everyone works to learn it, very few have learned how to hear the music of the spheres well enough to take that first step.”

  “It is not so hard,” I say and chuckle to myself as I sip the smooth wine. “It’s goddamn hard,” I add. “Sorry, Father.”

  De Soya nods his indulgence. “It is goddamn hard. I feel that I’ve come close a hundred times, but always lose the focus at the last moment.”

  I look at the little priest. “You’ve stayed Catholic,” I say at last.

  Father de Soya sips the wine out of an old glass. “I haven’t just stayed Catholic, Raul. I’ve rediscovered what it means to be Catholic. To be a Christian. To be a believer.”

  “Even after Aenea’s Shared Moment?” I say. I am aware of Corporal Kee watching us from the end of the table. Shadows from the oil lights dance on the warm earth walls.

  De Soya nods. “I already understood the corruption of the Church in its pact with the Core,” he says very softly. “Aenea’s shared insights only underlined what it meant for me to be human … and a child of Christ.”

  I am thinking about this a minute later when Father de Soya adds, “There is talk of making me a bishop, but I am quelling that. It is why I have stayed in this region of Pacem even though most of the viable communities are away from the old urban areas. One look at the ruins of our beautiful tradition across the river reminds me of the folly of staking too much on hierarchy.”

  “So there’s no pope?” I say. “No holy father?”

  De Soya shrugs and pours us all more wine. After thirteen standard months of recycled food and no alcohol, the wine is going straight to my head. “Monsignor Lucas Oddi escaped both the revolution and the Core attack and has established the papacy in exile on Madhya,” the priest says with a sharp tone in his voice. “I don’t believe that anyone in the former Pax except his immediate defenders and followers in that system honor him as a real pope.” He sips his wine. “It is not the first time that the Mother Church has had an antipope.”

  “What about Pope Urban XVI?” I say. “Did he die of his heart attack?”

  “Yes,” says Kee, leaning forward and setting his strong forearms on the table.

  “And was resurrected?” I say.

  “Not exactly,” says Kee.

  I look at the former corporal, waiting for an explanation, but none is forthcoming.

  “I’ve sent word across the river,” says Father de Soya. “Bassin’s comment should be explained any minute.”

  Indeed, a minute later the curtains at the entrance to de Soya’s comfortable little alcove are pulled back and a tall man in a black cassock enters. It is not Lenar Hoyt. It is a man I have never met but whom I feel that I know well—his elegant hands, long face, large, sad eyes, broad forehead, and thinning silver hair. I stand to shake his hand, to bow, to kiss his ring … something.

  “Raul, my boy, my boy,” says Father Paul Duré. “What a pleasure to meet you. How thrilled we all are that you have returned.”

  The older priest shakes my hand with a firm grip, hugs me for good measure, and then goes to de Soya’s cupboard as if he is familiar with it, finds a jar, pumps water into the sink, washes the jar, pours wine for himself, and sits in the chair opposite Kee at the end of the table.

  “We’re catching Raul up on what has happened in the past year and a month of his absence,” says Father de Soya.

  “It feels like a century,” I say. My eyes are focused on something far beyond the table and this room.

  “It was a century for me,” says the older Jesuit. His accent is quaint and somehow charming—a French-speaking Outback world, perhaps? “Almost three centuries, actually.”

  “I saw what they did to you when you were resurrected,” I say with the brazenness of the wine in me. “Lourdusamy and Albedo murdered you so that Hoyt would be reborn again from your shared cruciforms.”

  Father Duré has not actually tasted his wine, but he stares down into the glass as if waiting for it to transubstantiate. “Time and time again,” he says in a tone that seems more wistful than anything else. “It is a strange life, being born just to be murdered.”

  “Aenea would agree,” I say, knowing that these men are friends and good men but not feeling especially friendly to the Church in general.

  “Yes,” says Paul Duré and holds up his glass in a silent toast. He drinks.

  Bassin Kee fills the vacuum of silence. “Most of the faithful left on Pacem would have Father Duré as our true pope.”

  I look at the elderly Jesuit. I have been through enough that it does not make me all tingly to be in the presence of a legend, someone who was central to the Cantos. As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth. In this case, it is the soft tufts of gray hair growing in the priest’s large ears.

  “Teilhard the Second?” I say, remembering that the man had reportedly been a fine pope as Teilhard I 279 years ago—for a short period before he was murdered for the first time.

  Duré accepts more wine from Father de Soya and shakes his head. I can see that the sadness behind those large eyes is the same as de Soya’s—earned and heartfelt, not assumed for character effect. “No more papacy for me,” he says. “I will spend the rest of my years attempting to learn from Aenea’s teachings—listening very hard for the voices of the dead and the living—while reacquainting myself with Our Lord’s lessons on humility. For years I played the archaeologist and intellectual. It is time to rediscover myself as a simple parish priest.”

  “Amen,” says de Soya and hunts in his cupboard for another bottle. The former Pax starship captain sounds a bit drunk.

  “You don’t wear the cruciform any longer?” I say, addressing myself to all three men while looking at Duré.

  All three of them look shocked. Duré says, “Only the fools and ultimately cynical still wear the parasite, Raul. Very few on Pacem. Very few on any of the worlds where Aenea’s Shared Moment was heard.” He touches his thin chest as if remembering. “It was not a choice for me, actually. I was reborn in one of the Vatican resurrection crèches at the height of the fighting. I waited for Lourdusamy and Albedo to visit me as always … to murder me as always. Instead, this man …” He extends his long fingers toward Kee, who bows slightly and pours himself a bit more wine. “This man,” continues the former Pope Teilhard, “came crashing in with his rebels, all combat armor and ancient rifles. He brought me a chalice of wine. I knew what it was. I had shared in the Shared Moment.”

  I stare at the old priest. Even dormant in the bubble-memory matrix of the extra cruciform, even while being resurrected? I thought.

  As if reading my gaze, Father Duré nods. “Even there,” he says. Looking directly at me, he says, “What will you do now, Raul Endymion?”

  I hesitate only a second. “I came to Pacem to find Aenea’s ashes … she asked me … she once asked …”

  “We know, my son,” says Father de Soya quietly.

  “Anyway,” I go on when I can, “there’s no chance of that in what’s left of Castel Sant’ Angelo, so I’ll continue with my other priority.”

  “Which is?” says Father Duré with infinite gentleness. Suddenly, in this dim room with the rough table and the old wine and the male smell of clean sweat all around, I can see in the old Jesuit the powerful reality behind Uncle Martin’s mythic Cantos. I realize without doubt that this was indeed the man of faith who had crucified himself not once but repeated times on the lightning-filled tesla tree rather than submit to the false cross of the cruciform. This was a true defender of the faith. This was a man whom Aenea would have loved to
have met and talked with and debated with. At that moment I feel her loss with such renewed pain that I have to look down into my wine to hide my eyes from Duré and the others.

  “Aenea once told me that she had given birth to a child,” I manage to say and then stop. I cannot remember if this fact had been in the gestalt of memories and thoughts that was transmitted in Aenea’s Shared Moment. If so, they know all about this. I glance at them, but both priests and the corporal are waiting politely. They had not known this.

  “I’m going to find that child,” I say. “Find it and help raise it, if I am allowed.”

  The priests look at one another in something like wonderment. Kee is looking at me. “We did not know this,” says Federico de Soya. “I am amazed. I would have wagered everything I know about human nature to say that you were the only man in her life … the only love. I have never seen two young people so happy.”

  “There was someone else,” I say, raising my glass almost violently to swig down the last of the wine only to find the glass empty. I set it carefully on the table. “There was someone else,” I say again, less miserably and emphatically this time. “But that’s not important. The baby … the child … is important. I want to find it if I can.”

  “Do you have any idea where the child is?” says Kee.

  I sigh and shake my head. “None. But I’ll ’cast to every world in the old Pax and Outback, to every world in the galaxy if I have to. Beyond the galaxy …” I stop. I am drunk and this is too important to talk about when drunk. “Anyway, that’s where I’ll be going in a few minutes.”

  Father de Soya shakes his head. “You’re exhausted, Raul. Spend the night here. Bassin has an extra cot in his house next door. We will all sleep tonight and see you off in the morning.”