by Дэн Симмонс
He turned back and waited while I ran to my small pile of belongings on the lower platform, then jogged back up the steps. “Will you take this?” I said, handing him the leather tube.
“The hawking mat,” said A. Bettik. “Yes, of course, M. Endymion. I will be happy to keep this for you until I see you again.”
“And if we don’t see each other again,” I said and paused. I was about to say, Please give it to Martin Silenus, but I knew from my own waking visions that the old poet was near death.
“If we don’t happen to see each other again, A. Bettik,” I said, “please keep the mat as a memento of our trip together. And of our friendship.”
A. Bettik looked at me for another quiet moment, nodded again, and went into the Consul’s ship. I half expected the ship to say its good-byes, filled with malapropisms and misinformation, but it simply conferred with the treeship’s ergs, rose silently on repellors until it cleared the containment field, and then moved away on low thrusters until it was a safe distance from us. Its fusion tail was so bright that it made my eyes water as I watched it accelerate out and away from Barnard’s World and the Yggdrasill. I wished then with all of my heart and will that Aenea and I were going back to Hyperion with A. Bettik, ready to sleep for days on the large bed at the apex of the ship, then listen to music on the Steinway and swim in a zero-g pool above the balcony—“We have to go,” Aenea said to Het Masteen. “Could you please prepare the ergs for what we are about to encounter.”
“As you wish, Revered One Who Teaches,” said the True Voice of the Tree.
“And Het Masteen…” said Aenea.
The Templar turned and awaited further orders.
“Thank you, Het Masteen,” she said. “On behalf of all of those who traveled with you on this voyage and all those who will tell of your voyage for generations to come, thank you, Het Masteen.”
The Templar bowed and went back to his panels. “Full fusion drive to point nine-two. Prepare for evasive maneuvers. Prepare for Pacem System,” he said to his beloved ergs wrapped around the invisible singularity three quarters of a kilometer below us. “Prepare for Pacem System.”
Father de Soya had been standing quietly nearby, but now he took Aenea’s right hand in his left hand. With his right hand, he gave a quiet benediction in the direction of the Templar and the crew clones—“In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritu Sanctus.”
“Amen,” I said, taking Aenea’s left hand.
“Amen,” said Aenea.
30
They hit us less than two seconds after we ’cast into the system, the torchships and archangels converging fire on us much as the rainbow sharks had once converged on me in the seas of Mare Infinitus.
“Go!” cried the True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen above the torrent of field noise around us. “The ergs are dying! The containment field will drop in seconds. Go! May the Muir guide your thoughts. Go!”
Aenea had had only two seconds to glimpse the yellow star at the center of Pacem System and the smaller star that was Pacem proper, but it was enough. The three of us held hands as we ’cast through light and noise as if rising through the cauldron of lance fire boiling the ship’s fields, spirits rising from Hell’s burning lakes. The light faded and then resumed as diffuse sunlight. It was cloudy above the Vatican, chilly, almost wintry, and a light, cool rain fell on cobblestone streets. Aenea had dressed this day in a soft tan shirt, a brown leather vest, and more formal black trousers than I was used to seeing her wear. Her hair was brushed back and held in place by two tortoiseshell barrettes. Her skin looked fresh and clean and young and her eyes—so tired in recent days—were bright and calm. She still held my hand as the three of us turned to look at the streets and people around us.
We were at the edge of an alley looking onto a wide boulevard. Small groups of people—men and women in formal black, groups of priests, flocks of nuns, a row of children in tow behind two nuns, everywhere black and red umbrellas—moved to and fro on the pedestrian walkways while low, black groundcars glided silently down the streets. I caught a glimpse of bishops and archbishops in the backseats of the groundcars, their visages distorted by beads and rivulets of rain on the cars’ bubble tops. No one seemed to be taking any notice of us or our arrival.
Aenea was looking up toward the low clouds.
“The Yggdrasill just ’cast out of system. Did either of you feel it?”
I closed my eyes to concentrate on the dream flow of voices and images that were ever under the surface there now. There was… an absence. A vision of flame as the outer branches began to burn. “The fields collapsed just as they ’cast away,” I said. “How did they ’cast without you, Aenea?” I saw the answer as soon as I had verbalized the question. “The Shrike,” I said.
“Yes.” Aenea was still holding my hand. The rain was cold on us and I could hear it gurgling down gutters and drainpipes behind us. She spoke very quietly. “The Shrike will carry the Yggdrasill and the True Voice of the Tree away through space and time. To his… destiny.”
I remembered bits of the Cantos. The treeship burning as the pilgrims watched from the Sea of Grass shortly before Het Masteen had mysteriously disappeared with the Shrike during the windwagon crossing. Then the Templar reappearing in the presence of the Shrike some days later near the Valley of the Time Tombs, dying from his wounds shortly after that, his tale the only one of the seven pilgrims’ not to be told on the voyage. The Hyperion pilgrims: Colonel Kassad; the Hegemony Consul, Sol—Rachel’s father; Brawne Lamia—Aenea’s mother; the Templar Het Masteen; Martin Silenus; Father Hoyt—the current Pope; all at a loss to explain events at the time.
For me as a child, just old words from a myth. Verses about strangers. How they must have thought their efforts and adventures over, only to have to pick up their burdens again. How often, I realized now as an adult in my standard thirties, how often that is the case in all of our lives.
“See that church across the street?” said Father de Soya.
I had to shake my head to focus on the now and to ignore the thoughts and voices whispering to me.
“Yeah,” I said, wiping the rain from my brow. “Is that St. Peter’s Basilica?”
“No,” said the priest. “That is St. Anne’s Parish Church and the entrance to the Vatican next to it is the Porta Sant’Anna. The main entrance to St. Peter’s Square is down the boulevard there and around those colonnades.”
“Are we going to St. Peter’s Square?” I asked Aenea. “Into the Vatican?”
“Let’s see if we can,” she said.
We started down the pedestrian walkway, just a man and a younger woman walking with a priest on a cool, rainy day. Across the street from us was a sign indicating that the imposing, windowless structure there was the barracks for the Swiss Guard. Troopers from that barracks in formal, Renaissance-era black cloaks, white ruffled collars, and yellow-and-black leggings stood holding pikes at the Porta Sant’Anna and at the intersections while Pax security police in no-nonsense black impact armor manned roadblocks and floated overhead in black skimmers.
St. Peter’s Square was closed off to foot traffic except for several security gates where guards were carefully checking passes and chipcard ID’s.
“We won’t get through there,” said Father de Soya. It was dark enough that the lights had come on atop Bernini’s colonnade to illuminate statuary and the stone papal coats of arms there. The priest pointed to two windows glowing above the colonnade and to the right of St. Peter’s facade topped by statues of Christ, John the Baptist, and the Apostles. “Those are the Pope’s private offices.”
“Just a rifle shot away,” I said, although I had no thoughts of attacking the Pope.
Father de Soya shook his head. “Class-ten containment field.” He glanced around. Much of the pedestrian traffic had passed through the security gates into St. Peter’s Square and we were becoming more obvious on the street. “We’re going to get our ID checked if we don’t do something,” he said.
“Is
this level of security common?” asked Aenea.
“No,” said Father de Soya. “It may be because of your message that you were coming but it is more probable that it is the usual security when His Holiness is saying a papal Mass. Those bells we heard were a call to an afternoon Mass at which he is presiding.”
“How do you know that?” I said, amazed that he could read so much from the sound of a few bells.
Father de Soya looked surprised. “I know that because it is Holy Thursday,” he said, looking shocked either because we did not know such an elementary fact or because he had managed to forget it until this moment. “This is Holy Week,” he went on, talking softly as if to himself. “All this week His Holiness must carry out both his papal and diocesan duties. Today… this afternoon… certainly at this Mass, he performs the ceremony of washing the feet of twelve priests who symbolize the twelve disciples whose feet Jesus washed at the Last Supper. The ceremony was always held at the Pope’s diocese church, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, which used to be beyond the Vatican walls, but ever since the Vatican was moved to Pacem it’s been held in St. Peter’s Basilica. The Basilica of St. John Lateran was left behind during the Hegira because it had been destroyed during the Seven Nation Wars in the twenty-first century and…” De Soya stopped what I had thought was nervous chatter. His face had gone blank in that way common to mild epileptics or deeply thoughtful people.
Aenea and I waited. I admit that I was glancing with some anxiety toward the patrol of black-armored Pax security men moving toward us down the long boulevard.
“I know how we can get into the Vatican,” said Father de Soya and turned back toward an alley opposite the Vatican Boulevard.
“Good,” said Aenea, following quickly.
The Jesuit stopped suddenly. “I think that I can get us in,” he said. “But I have no idea how to get us out.”
“Just get us in, please,” said Aenea.
The steel door was at the rear of a ruined, windowless stone chapel three blocks from the Vatican. It was locked with a small padlock and a large chain. The sign on the sealed door said TOURS ON ALTERNATE SATURDAYS ONLY: Closed During Holy Week: CONTACT VATICAN TOUR OFFICE 3888 SQUARE OF THE FIRST CHRISTIAN MARTYRS.
“Can you break this chain?” Father de Soya asked me.
I felt the massive chain and the solid padlock. My only tool or weapon was the small hunting knife still in my belt sheath.
“No,” I said. “But maybe I can pick the lock. See if you can find some wire in that garbage module there… baling wire would do.”
We stood there in the drizzle for at least ten minutes, with the light fading around us and the sound of traffic on nearby boulevards seeming to grow louder, waiting every minute for the Swiss Guard or security people to swoop down on us. Everything I had learned about picking locks had come from an old riverboat gambler on the Kans who had turned to gambling after the Port Romance authorities had removed two of his fingers for thieving. As I worked, I thought of the ten years of odyssey for Aenea and me, of Father de Soya’s long voyage to this place, of the hundreds of light-years traveled and tens of thousands of hours of tension and pain and sacrifice and terror. And the goddamn ten-florin lock would not budge.
Finally the point of my knife broke. I cursed, threw the knife away, and slammed the stinking lousy cretinous piece-of-shit lock and chain against the grimy stone wall. The padlock clicked open.
It was dark inside. If there was a light switch, none of us could find it. If there was an idiot AI somewhere controlling the lights, it did not respond to our commands. None of us had brought a light. After carrying a flashlight laser for years, I had left mine behind in my backpack this day. When the time had come to leave the Yggdrasill, I had stepped forward and taken Aenea’s hand without a thought to weapons or other necessary items.
“Is this the Basilica of St. John Lateran?” whispered Aenea. It was impossible to speak in anything above a whisper in the oppressive darkness.
“No, no,” whispered Father de Soya. “Just a tiny memorial chapel built near the original basilica in the twenty-first…” He stopped and I could imagine his thoughtful expression returning. “It is a working chapel, I believe,” he said. “Wait here.”
Aenea and I stood with shoulders touching as we heard Father de Soya moving around the perimeter of the tiny building. Once something heavy fell with the sound of iron on stone and we all stood holding our breath. A minute later we heard the sound of his hands sliding along the inside walls again and the rustle of his cassock. There was a muffled “Ahhh… “and a second later light flared.
The Jesuit was standing less than ten meters from us, holding a lighted match. A box of matches was in his left hand. “A chapel,” he explained. “They still had the stand for votive candles.” I could see that the candles themselves had been melted to uselessness and never replaced, but the tapers and this one box of matches had remained for God knows how long in this dark, abandoned place. We joined him in the small circle of light, waited while he lighted a second match, and followed him to a heavy wooden door set behind rotting curtains. “Father Baggio, my resurrection chaplain, told me about this tour when I was under house arrest near here some years ago,” whispered Father de Soya. This door was not locked, but opened with a squeal of ancient, unoiled hinges. “I believe he thought it would appeal to my sense of the macabre,” went on Father de Soya, leading us down a narrow, spiraling stone stairway not much wider than my shoulders. Aenea followed the priest. I kept close to Aenea.
The stairway continued down, then down some more, and then more. I estimated that we were at least twenty meters beneath street level when the stairway ended and we passed through a series of narrow corridors into a wider, echoing hallway. The priest had gone through a half-dozen matches by this point, dropping each only after it had burned his fingers.
I did not ask him how many matches were left in the small matchbox.
“When the Church decided to move St. Peter’s and the Vatican during the Hegira,” said de Soya, his voice loud enough now to empty in the black space, “they brought it en masse to Pacem using heavy field lifters and tractor-field towers. Since mass was not a problem, they brought half of Rome with them, including the huge Castel Sant’Angelo and everything under the old city down to a depth of sixty meters. This was the twentieth-century subway system.”
Father de Soya began walking down what I realized was an abandoned railway platform. At places the ceiling tiles had fallen in and everywhere except on a narrow pathway there were centuries of dust, fallen rocks, broken plastic, unreadable signs lying in the grime, and shattered benches. We went down several corroded steel stairways—escalators halted more than a millennium ago, I realized—through a narrow corridor that continued downward along an echoing ramp, and then onto another platform. At the end of this platform, I could see a fiberplastic ladder leading down to where the tracks had been… where the tracks still were under the layers of dust, rubble, and rust.
We had just climbed down the ladder and stepped into the subway tunnel when the next match went out. But not before Aenea and I had seen what lay ahead.
Bones. Human bones. Bones and skulls stacked neatly almost two meters high on either side of a narrow passage between the rusted tracks.
Great heaps of bones, the socket ends out, skulls neatly placed at meter-intervals or arranged in geometric designs within the knobby walls of human bones.
Father de Soya lit the next match and began striding between the walls of skeletal human remains. The breeze of his motion flickered the tiny flame that he held aloft. “After the Seven Nations War in the early twenty-first century,” he said, his voice at a normal conversational volume now, “the cemeteries of Rome were overflowing. There had been mass graves dug all around the suburbs of the city and in the large parks. It became quite a health problem what with the global warming and constant flooding. All of the bio and chem warheads, you know. The subways had ceased to run anyway, so the powers-to-be authorized a r
emoval of the remains and their reinterment in the old metro systems.”
This time when the match burned out, we were in a section where the bones were stacked five layers high, each layer marked by a row of skulls, their white brows reflecting the light but the sightless sockets indifferent to our passing. The neat walls of bones went back for at least six meters on either side and rose to the vaulted ceiling ten meters above us. In a few places, there had been a small avalanche of bones and skulls and we had to pick our way over them carefully. Still there was the crunching underfoot. We did not move during the interludes of darkness between matches, but waited quietly. There was no other noise… not the scurry of rats nor the drip of water. Only our breathing and soft words disturbed the silence here.
“Oddly enough,” said Father de Soya after we had gone another two hundred meters, “they did not get the idea from Rome’s ancient catacombs, which lie all about us here, but from the so-called catacombs of Paris… old quarry tunnels deep under that city. The Parisians had to move bones from their overflowing cemeteries to those tunnels between the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. They found that they could easily accommodate six million dead in just a few kilometers of corridors. Ahh… here we are…”
To our left, through an even narrower corridor of bones, was a path with a few boot marks in the dust, leading to another steel door, this one unlocked. It took all three of us to leverage the door open. The priest led the way down another set of rusting spiral stairs to a depth I estimated at being at least thirty-five meters beneath the street above. The match went out just as we stepped into another tunnel—much older than the subway vault, its edges and ceiling unfinished and tumbledown. I had caught a glimpse of side passages running off, of bones spilled haphazardly everywhere in these passages, of skulls upside down, of bits of rotted garments.
“According to Father Baggio,” whispered the priest, “this is where the real catacombs begin. The Christian catacombs which go back to the first century A.D.” A new match flared. I heard a rattle in the matchbox that sounded like very few matches indeed. “This way, I would guess,” said Father de Soya and led us to his right.
