by Dan Simmons
“Have to go now,” I say and start to rise, to show them my ability to think straight and act decisively. The room tilts as if the ground has subsided suddenly on the south side of Father de Soya’s little house. I grab the table for support, almost miss it, and hang on.
“Perhaps the morning would be best,” says Father Duré, standing and putting a strong hand on my shoulder.
“Yes,” I say, standing again and finding the ground tremors subsiding slightly. “T’morrow’s better.” I shake all of their hands again. Twice. I am desperately close to crying again, not from grief this time, although the grief is there, always in the background like the symphony of the spheres, but out of sheer relief at their company. I have been alone for so long now.
“Come, friend,” says former Corporal Bassin Kee of the Pax Marines and the Corps Helvetica, putting his hand on my other shoulder and walking with the former Pope Teilhard and me to his little room, where I collapse onto one of the two cots there. I am drifting away when I feel someone pulling off my boots. I think it is the former Pope.
I had forgotten that Pacem has only a nineteen-standard-hour day. The nights are too short. In the morning I am still suffused with the exhilaration of my freedom, but my head hurts, my back hurts, my stomach aches, my teeth hurt, my hair hurts, and I am sure that a pack of small, fuzzy creatures has taken up residence in the back of my mouth.
The village beyond the chapel is bustling with early morning activity. All of it too loud. Cook fires simmer. Women and children go about chores while the men emerge from the simple homes with the same stubbled, red-eyed, roadkill expression that I know I am giving to the world.
The priests are in good form, however. I watch a dozen or so parishioners leave the chapel and realize that both de Soya and Duré have celebrated an early Mass while I was snoring. Bassin Kee comes by, greets me in much too loud a voice, and shows me a small structure that is the men’s washhouse. Plumbing consists of cold water pumped to an overhead reservoir that one can spill onto oneself in one quick, bone-marrow-freezing second of shower. The morning is Pacem-cool, much like mornings at the eight-thousand-meter altitude on T’ien Shan, and the shower wakes me up very quickly. Kee has brought clean new clothes for me—softened corduroy work trousers, a finely spun blue wool shirt, thick belt, and sturdy shoes that are infinitely more comfortable than the boots I have stubbornly worn for more than a standard year in the Schrödinger cat box. Shaven, clean, wearing different clothes, holding a steaming mug of coffee that Kee’s young bride has handed me, the ’scriber hanging from a strap over my shoulder, I feel like a new man. My first thought at this swell of well-being is, Aenea would love this fresh morning and the clouds obscure the sunlight for me again.
Fathers Duré and de Soya join me on a large rock overlooking the absent river. The rubble of the Vatican looks like a ruin from ancient days. I see the windshields of moving groundcars glinting in the sharp morning light and catch a glimpse of the occasional EMV flying high above the wrecked city and realize again that this is not another Fall—even Pacem has not been dropped back into barbarism. Kee had explained that the morning coffee had been shipped in by transport from the largely untouched agricultural cities in the west. The Vatican and the ruins of the administrative cities here are more of a localized disaster area: rather like survivors choosing to rebuild in the wake of a regional earthquake or hurricane.
Kee joins us again with several warm breakfast rolls and the four of us eat in agreeable silence, occasionally brushing crumbs away and sipping our coffee as the sun rises higher behind us, catching the many columns of smoke from campfires and cookstoves.
“I’m trying to understand this new way of looking at things,” I say at last. “You’re isolated here on Pacem compared to the days of the Pax empire, but you’re still aware of what’s going on elsewhere … on other worlds.”
Father de Soya nods. “Just as you can touch the Void to listen to the language of the living, so can we reach out to those we know and care for. For instance, this morning I touched the thoughts of Sergeant Gregorius on Mare Infinitus.”
I had also heard Gregorius’s distinctive thoughts while listening to the imusic of the spheres before freecasting, but I say, “Is he well?”
“He is well,” says de Soya. “The poachers and smugglers and deep-sea rebels on that world quickly isolated the few Pax loyalists, although the fighting between various Pax outposts did much damage to many of the civilian platforms. Gregorius has become sort of a local mayor or governor for the midlattoral region. Quite in opposition to his wishes, I might add. The sergeant was never interested in command … he would have been an officer many years ago if he had been.”
“Speaking of command,” I say, “who’s in charge of … all this?” I gesture at the ruins, the distant highway with its moving vehicles, the EMV transport coming in toward the east bank.
“Actually the entire Pacem System is under the temporary governorship of a former Pax Mercantilus CEO named Kenzo Isozaki,” says Father de Soya. “His headquarters is in the ruins of the old Torus Mercantilus, but he visits the planet frequently.”
I show my surprise at this. “Isozaki?” I say. “The last I saw of him in preparing my narrative, he was involved in the attack on the Startree Biosphere.”
“He was,” agrees de Soya. “But that attack was still under way when the Shared Moment occurred. There was much confusion. Elements of the Pax Fleet rallied to Lourdusamy and his ilk, while other elements—some led by Kenzo Isozaki who held the title of Commander of the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem—fought to stop the carnage. The loyalists kept most of the archangel starships, since they could not be used without resurrection. Isozaki brought more than a hundred of the older Hawking-drive starships back to Pacem System and drove off the last of the Core attackers.”
“Is he a dictator?” I ask, not caring too much if he is. It is not my problem.
“Not at all,” says Kee. “Isozaki is running things temporarily with the help of elected governing councils from each of the Pacem cantons. He’s excellent at arranging logistics … which we need. In the meantime, the local areas are running things fairly well. It’s the first time there has ever been a real democracy in this system. It’s sloppy, but it works. I think that Isozaki is helping to shape a sort of capitalist-with-a-conscience trading system for the days when we begin moving freely through old Pax space.”
“By freecasting?” I say.
All three of the men nod.
I shake my head again. It is hard to imagine the near future: billions … hundreds of billions … of people free to move from world to world without spacecraft or farcaster. Hundreds of billions able to contact each other by touching the Void with their hearts and minds. It will be like the height of the Hegemony WorldWeb days without the Core fačade of farcaster portals and fatline transmitters. No, I realize at once, it will not be like the Hegemony days at all. It will be something completely different. Something unprecedented in human experience. Aenea has changed everything forever.
“Are you leaving today, Raul?” asks Father Duré in his soft French accent.
“As soon as I finish this fine coffee.” The sun is growing warm on my bare arms and neck.
“Where will you go?” asks Father de Soya.
I start to answer and then stop. I realize that I have no idea. Where do I look for Aenea’s child? What if the Observer has taken the boy or girl to some distant system that I cannot reach by ’casting? What if they have returned to Old Earth … can I actually freecast one hundred and sixty thousand light-years? Aenea did. But she may have had the help of the Lions and Tigers and Bears. Will I someday be able to hear those voices in the complex chorus of the Void? It all seems too large and vague and irrelevant to me.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” I hear myself saying in the voice of a lost boy. “I was going to Old Earth because of Aenea’s wish that I … her ashes … but …” Embarrassed at showing emotion again, I wave at the mountain of mel
ted stone that had been Castel Sant’ Angelo. “Maybe I’ll go back to Hyperion,” I say. “See Martin Silenus.” Before he dies, I add silently.
All of us stand on the boulder, pouring out the last drops of cold coffee from the mugs and brushing away the last crumbs from the delicious rolls. I am suddenly struck by an obvious thought. “Do any of you want to come with me?” I say. “Or go anywhere else, for that matter. I think that I will remember how to freecast … and Aenea took us with her just by holding the person’s hand. No, she freecast the entire Yggdrasill with her just by willing it.”
“If you are going to Hyperion,” says Father de Soya, “I may wish to accompany you. But first I have something to show you. Excuse us, Father Duré. Bassin.”
I follow the short priest back to the village and into his little church. In the tiny sacristy, barely large enough for a wooden wardrobe cupboard for vestments and the small secondary altar in which to store the sacramental hosts and wine, de Soya pushes back a curtain on a small alcove and removes a short metal cylinder, smaller than a coffee thermos. He holds it out to me and I am reaching for it, my fingers just centimeters away, when suddenly I freeze in midmotion, unable to touch it.
“Yes,” says the priest. “Aenea’s ashes. What we could recover. Not much, I am afraid.”
My fingers trembling, still unable to touch the dull metal cylinder, I stammer, “How? When?”
“Before the final Core attack,” de Soya says softly. “Some of us who liberated the prisoners thought it prudent to remove our young friend’s cremated remains. There are actually those who wanted to find them and hold them as holy relics … the start of another cult. I felt strongly that Aenea would not have wished that. Was I correct, Raul?”
“Yes,” I say, my hand shaking visibly now. I am still unable to touch the cylinder and almost unable to speak. “Yes, absolutely, completely,” I say vehemently. “She would have hated that. She would have cursed at the thought. I can’t tell you how many times she and I discussed the tragedy of Buddha’s followers treating him like a god and his remains as relics. The Buddha also asked that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered so that …” I have to stop there.
“Yes,” says de Soya. He pulls a black canvas shoulder bag from his cupboard and sets the cylinder in it. He shoulders the bag. “If you would like, I could bring this with us if we are to travel together.”
“Thank you,” is all I can say. I cannot reconcile the life and energy and skin and flashing eyes and clean, female scent of Aenea, her touch and laugh and voice and hair and ultimate physical presence with that small metal cylinder. I lower my hand before the priest can see how badly it is shaking.
“Are you ready to go?” I say at last.
De Soya nods. “Please allow me to tell a few of my village friends that I will be absent for a few days. Would it be possible for you to drop me off here later on your way … wherever you go?”
I blink at that. Of course it will be possible. I had thought of my leave-taking today as final, an interstellar voyage. But Pacem … as everywhere else in the known universe … will never be farther than a step away for me as long as I live. If I remember how to hear the music of the spheres and freecast again. If I can take someone with me. If it was not a onetime gift which I have lost without knowing it. Now my entire frame is shaking. I tell myself it is just too much coffee and say raggedly, “Yeah, no problem. I’ll go chat with Father Duré and Bassin until you’re ready.”
The old Jesuit and the young soldier are at the edge of a small cornfield, arguing about whether it is the optimum time to pick the ears. I can hear Paul Duré admitting that much of his opinion to pick immediately is swayed by his love of corn on the cob. They smile at me as I approach. “Father de Soya is accompanying you?” says Duré.
I nod.
“Please give my warmest regards to Martin Silenus,” says the Jesuit. “He and I shared some interesting experiences in a roundabout way, long ago and worlds away. I have heard of his so-called Cantos, but I confess that I am loath to read them.” Duré grins. “I understand that the Hegemony libel laws have lapsed.”
“I think he’s fought to stay alive this long to finish those Cantos,” I say softly. “Now he never will.”
Father Duré sighs. “No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.”
“How so?” I ask, but before Duré can answer, Father de Soya and several of the villagers come up and there is a buzz of discussion and farewells and invitations for me to return. I look at the black shoulder bag and see that the priest has filled it with other things as well as the canister holding Aenea’s ashes.
“A fresh cassock,” says de Soya, seeing the direction of my glance. “Some clean underwear. Socks. A few peaches. My Bible and missal and the essentials for saying Mass. I am not sure when I will be back.” He gestures toward the others crowding in. “I forget exactly how this is done. Do we need more room?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “You and I should be in physical contact, maybe. At least for this first try.” I turn and shake hands with Kee and Duré. “Thank you,” I say.
Kee grins and steps back as if I’m going to rise on a rocket exhaust and he does not want to get burned. Father Duré clasps my shoulder a final time. “I think that we will see each other again, Raul Endymion,” he says. “Although perhaps not for two years or so.”
I do not understand. I’ve just promised to return Father de Soya within a few days. But I nod as if I do comprehend, shake the priest’s hand a second time, and move away from his touch.
“Shall we hold hands?” says de Soya.
I put my hand on the smaller priest’s shoulder much as Duré had gripped mine a second earlier and check to make sure that my ’scriber is secure on its strap. “This should do it,” I say.
“Homophobia?” says de Soya with a mischievous boy’s grin.
“A reluctance to look silly more often than I have to,” I say and close my eyes, quite certain that the music of the spheres will not be there this time, that I will have forgotten completely how to take that step through the Void. Well, I think, at least the coffee and conversation are good here if I have to stay forever.
The white light surrounds and subsumes us.
34
I had assumed that the priest and I would step out of the light into the abandoned city of Endymion, probably right next to the old poet’s tower, but when we blinked away the glare of the Void, it was quite dark and we were on a rolling plain with wind whistling through grass that came to my knees and to Father de Soya’s cassocked thighs.
“Did we do it?” asked the Jesuit in excited tones. “Are we on Hyperion? It doesn’t look familiar, but then I saw only portions of the northern continent more than eleven standard years ago. Is this right? The gravity feels as I remember it. The air is … sweeter.”
I let my eyes adapt to the night for a moment. Then I said, “This is right.” I pointed skyward. “Those constellations? That’s the Swan. Over there are the Twin Archers. That one is actually called the Water Bearer, but Grandam always used to kid that it was named Raul’s Caravan after a little cart I used to pull around.” I took a breath and looked at the rolling plain again. “This was one of our favorite camping spots,” I said. “Our nomad caravan’s. When I was a child.” I went to one knee to study the ground in the starlight. “Still rubber tire marks. A few weeks old. The caravans still come this way, I guess.”
De Soya’s cassock made rustling sounds in the grass as he strode back and forth, as restless as a penned night hunter. “Are we close?” he asked. “Can we walk to Martin Silenus’s place from here?”
“About four hundred klicks,” I said. “We’re on the eastern expanse of the moors, south of the Beak. Uncle Martin is in the foothills of the Pinion Plateau.” I winced inwardly when I realized that I had used Aenea’s pet name for the old poet.
“Whatever,” said the priest impatiently. “In which direction shall we set out?”
The Jesuit was actually ready to start walking, but I put my hand back on his shoulder to stop him. “I don’t think we’ll have to hike,” I said softly. Something was occluding the stars to the southeast and I picked up the high hum of turbofans above the wind whistle. A minute later we could see the blinking red and green navigation lights as the skimmer turned north across the grassland and obscured the Swan.
“Is this good?” asked de Soya, his shoulder tensing slightly under my palm.
I shrugged. “When I lived here it wouldn’t be,” I said. “Most of the skimmers belonged to the Pax. To Pax Security, to be exact.”
We waited only another moment. The skimmer landed, the fans hummed down and died, and the left bubble at the front hinged open. The interior lights came on. I saw the blue skin, the blue eyes, the missing left hand, the blue right hand raised in greeting.
“It’s good,” I said.
“How is he?” I asked A. Bettik as we flew southeast at three thousand meters. From the paling above the Pinions on the horizon, I guessed that it was about an hour before dawn.
“He’s dying,” said the android. For a moment then we flew in silence.
A. Bettik had seemed delighted to see me again, although he stood awkwardly when I hugged him. Androids were never comfortable with such shows of emotion between servants and the humans they had been biofactured to serve. I asked as many questions as I could in the short flight time we had.
He had immediately expressed his regrets about Aenea’s death, which gave me the opportunity to ask the question uppermost in my mind. “Did you feel the Shared Moment?”
“Not exactly, M. Endymion,” said the android, which did not serve to enlighten me at all. But then A. Bettik was catching us up with the last standard year and month on Hyperion since that Moment.
Martin Silenus had been, just as Aenea had known he would be, the beacon relay for the Shared Moment. Everyone on my homeworld had felt it. The majority of the born-again and Pax military had deserted outright, seeking out communion to rid themselves of the cruciform parasites and shunning the Pax loyalists. Uncle Martin had supplied the wine and blood, both out of his personal stock. He had been hoarding the wine for decades and drawing off blood since his communion with the 10-year-old Aenea 250 years earlier.
