by Dan Simmons
Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a way which could have meant the resurgence of Christianity in our lifetime?
Yes, it was. But not, I think, because of the sin of tampering with the data, but the deeper sin of thinking that Christianity could be saved. The Church is dying, Edouard. And not merely our beloved branch of the Holy Tree, but all of its offshoots, vestiges, and cankers. The entire Body of Christ is dying as surely as this poorly used body of mine, Edouard. You and I knew this in Armaghast, where the blood-sun illuminated only dust and death. We knew it that cool, green summer at the College when we took our first vows. We knew it as boys in the quiet playfields of Villefiranche-sur-Saône. We know it now.
The light is gone now; I must write by the slight glow from the salon windows a deck above. The stars lie in strange constellations. The Middle Sea glows at night with a greenish, unhealthy phosphorescence. There is a dark mass on the horizon to the southeast. It may be a storm or it may be the next island in the chain, the third of the nine “tails.” (What mythology deals with a cat with nine tails? I know of none.)
For the sake of the bird I saw earlier—if it was a bird—I pray that it is an island ahead and not a storm.
Day 28:
I have been in Port Romance eight days and I have seen three dead men.
The first was a beached corpse, a bloated, white parody of a man, that had washed up on the mud flats beyond the mooring tower my first evening in town. Children threw stones at it.
The second man I watched being pulled from the burned wreckage of a methane-unit shop in the poor section of town near my hotel. His body was charred beyond recognition and shrunken by the heat, his arms and legs pulled tight in the prizefighter posture burning victims have been reduced to since time immemorial. I had been fasting all day and I confess with shame that I began to salivate when the air filled with the rich, frying-fat odor of burned flesh.
The third man was murdered not three meters from me. I had just emerged from the hotel onto the maze of mud-splattered planks that serve as sidewalks in this miserable town when shots rang out and a man several paces ahead of me lurched as if his foot had slipped, spun toward me with a quizzical look on his face, and fell sideways into the mud and sewage.
He had been shot three times with some sort of projectile weapon. Two of the bullets had struck his chest, the third entered just below the left eye. Incredibly, he was still breathing when I reached him. Without thinking about it, I removed my stole from my carrying bag, fumbled for the vial of holy water I had carried for so long, and proceeded to perform the sacrament of Extreme Unction. No one in the gathering crowd objected. The fallen man stirred once, cleared his throat as if he were about to speak, and died. The crowd dispersed even before the body was removed.
The man was middle-aged, sandy-haired, and slightly overweight. He carried no identification, not even a universal card or comlog. There were six silver coins in his pocket.
For some reason, I elected to stay with the body the rest of that day. The doctor was a short and cynical man who allowed me to stay during the required autopsy. I suspect that he was starved for conversation.
“This is what the whole thing’s worth,” he said as he opened the poor man’s belly like a pink satchel, pulling the folds of skin and muscle back and pinning them down like tent flaps.
“What thing?” I asked.
“His life,” said the doctor and pulled the skin of the corpses face up and back like a greasy mask. “Your life. My life.” The red and white stripes of overlapping muscle turned to blue bruise around the ragged hole just above the cheekbone.
“There has to be more than this,” I said.
The doctor looked up from his grim work with a bemused smile. “Is there?” he said. “Please show me.” He lifted the man’s heart and seemed to weigh it in one hand. “In the Web worlds, this’d be worth some money on the open market. There’re those too poor to keep vat-grown, cloned parts on store, but too well off to die just for want of a heart. But out here it’s just offal.”
“There has to be more,” I said, although I felt little conviction. I remembered the funeral of His Holiness Pope Urban XV shortly before I left Pacem. As has been the custom since pre-Hegira days, the corpse was not embalmed. It waited in the anteroom off the main basilica to be fitted for the plain wooden coffin. As I helped Edouard and Monsignor Frey place the vestments on the stiffened corpse I noticed the browning skin and slackening mouth.
The doctor shrugged and finished the perfunctory autopsy. There was the briefest of formal inquiries. No suspect was found, no motive put forward. A description of the murdered man was sent to Keats but the man himself was buried the next day in a pauper’s field between the mud flats and the yellow jungle.
Port Romance is a jumble of yellow, weirwood structures set on a maze of scaffolds and planks stretching far out onto the tidal mud flats at the mouth of the Kans. The river is almost two kilometers wide here where it spills out into Toschahai Bay, but only a few channels are navigable and the dredging goes on day and night. I lie awake each night in my cheap room with the window open to the pounding of the dredge-hammer sounding like the booming of this vile city’s heart, the distant susurration of the surf its wet breathing. Tonight I listen to the city breathe and cannot help but give it the flayed face of the murdered man.
The companies keep a skimmerport on the edge of town to ferry men and materiel inland to the larger plantations, but I do not have enough money to bribe my way aboard. Rather, I could get myself aboard but cannot afford to transport my three trunks of medical and scientific gear. I am still tempted. My service among the Bikura seems more absurd and irrational now than ever before. Only my strange need for a destination and a certain masochistic determination to complete the terms of my self-imposed exile keep me moving upriver.
There is a riverboat departing up the Kans in two days. I have booked passage and will move my trunks onto it tomorrow. It will not be hard to leave Port Romance behind.
Day 41:
The Emporotic Girandole continues its slow progress upriver. No sight of human habitation since we left Melton’s Landing two days ago. The jungle presses down to the riverbank like a solid wall now; more, it almost completely overhangs us in places where the river narrows to thirty or forty meters. The light itself is yellow, rich as liquid butter, filtered as it is through foliage and fronds eighty meters above the brown surface of the Kans. I sit on the rusted tin roof of the center passenger barge and strain to make out my first glimpse of a tesla tree. Old Kady sitting nearby pauses in his whittling, spits over the side through a gap in his teeth, and laughs at me. “Ain’t going to be no flame trees this far down,” he says. “If they was the forest sure as hell wouldn’t look like this. You got to get up in the Pinions before you see a tesla. We ain’t out of the rain forest yet, Padre.”
It rains every afternoon. Actually, rain is too gentle a term for the deluge that strikes us each day, obscuring the shore, pounding the tin roofs of the barges with a deafening roar, and slowing our upstream crawl until it seems we are standing still. It is as if the river becomes a vertical torrent each afternoon, a waterfall which the ship must climb if we are to go on.
The Girandole is an ancient, flat-bottomed tow with five barges lashed around it like ragged children clinging to their tired mother’s skirts. Three of the two-level barges carry bales of goods to be traded or sold at the few plantations and settlements along the river. The other two offer a simulacrum of lodging for the indigenies traveling upriver, although I suspect that some of the barge’s residents are permanent. My own berth boasts a stained mattress on the floor and lizardlike insects on the walls.
After the rains everyone gathers on the decks to watch the evening mists rise from the cooling river. The air is very hot and supersaturated with moisture most of the day now. Old Kady tells me that I have come too late to make the climb through the rain and flame forests before the tesla trees become active. We shall see.
Hyperion’s small moon is not visible tonight but this world moves through more debris than is common for a planet so close to its sun and the night skies are illuminated by frequent meteor showers. Tonight the heavens are especially fertile and when we move onto wide sections of the river we can see a tracery of brilliant meteor trails weaving the stars together. Their images burn the retina after a while and I look down at the river only to see the same optic echo there in the dark waters.
There is a bright glow on the eastern horizon and Old Kady tells me that this is from the orbital mirrors which give light to a few of the larger plantations.
It is too warm to return to my cabin. I spread my thin mat on the rooftop of my barge and watch the celestial light show while clusters of indigenie families sing haunting songs in an argot I have not even tried to learn. I wonder about the Bikura, still far away from here, and a strange anxiety rises in me.
Somewhere in the forest an animal screams with the voice of a frightened woman.
Day 60:
Arrived Perecebo Plantation. Sick.
Day 62:
Very ill. Fever, fits of shaking. All yesterday I was vomiting black bile. The rain is deafening. At night the clouds are lit from above by orbital mirrors. The sky seems to be on fire. My fever is very high.
A woman takes care of me. Bathes me. Too sick to be ashamed. Her hair is darker than most indigenies’. She says little. Dark, gentle eyes.
Oh, God, to be sick so far from home.
Day
sheis waiting spying comesin from the rain the thin shirt on purpose to tempt me, knows what iam my skin burning on fire thin cotton nipples dark against it i knowwho they are they are watching, here hear their voices at night they bathe me in poison burns me they think I dont know but i hear their voices above the rain when the screaming stops stop stop
My skin is almost gone, red underneath can feel the hole in my cheek, when I find the bullet iwill spit it out it out, agnusdeiquitolispecattamundi miserer nobis misere nobis miserere
Day 65;
Thank you, dear Lord, for deliverance from illness.
Day 66:
Shaved today. Was able to make it to the shower.
Semfa helped me prepare for the administrator’s visit. I expected him to be one of the large, gruff types I’ve seen out the window, working in the sorting compound, but he was a quiet black man with a slight lisp. He was most helpful. I had been concerned about paying for my medical care but he reassured me that there would be no charge. Even better—he will assign a man to lead me into the high country! He says it is late in the season but if I can travel in ten days we should be able to make it through the flame forest to the Cleft before the tesla trees are fully active.
After he left I sat and talked to Semfa a bit. Her husband died here three local months ago in a harvesting accident. Semfa herself had come from Port Romance; her marriage to Mikel had been a salvation for her and she has chosen to stay on here doing odd jobs rather than go back downriver. I do not blame her.
After a massage, I will sleep. Many dreams about my mother recently.
Ten days. I will be ready in ten days.
Day 75:
Before leaving with Tuk, I went down to the matrix paddies to say goodbye to Semfa. She said little but I could see in her eyes that she was sad to see me go. Without premeditation, I blessed her and then kissed her on the forehead. Tuk stood nearby, smiling and bobbing. Then we were off, leading the two packbrids. Supervisor Orlandi came to the end of the road and waved as we entered the narrow lane hacked into the aureate foliage.
Domine, dirige nos.
Day 82:
After a week on the trail—what trail?—after a week in the trackless, yellow rain forest, after a week of exhausting climb up the ever steeper shoulder of the Pinion Plateau, we emerged this morning onto a rocky outcropping that allowed us a view back across an expanse of jungle toward the Beak and the Middle Sea. The plateau here is almost three thousand meters above sea level and the view was impressive. Heavy rain clouds spread out below us to the foot of the Pinion Hills, but through gaps in the white and gray carpet of cloud we caught glimpses of the Kans in its leisurely uncoiling toward Port R. and the sea, chrome-yellow swatches of the forest we had struggled through, and a hint of magenta far to the east that Tuk swore was the lower matrix of fiberplastic fields near Perecebo.
We continued onward and upward late into the evening. Tuk is obviously worried that we will be caught in the flame forests when the tesla trees become active. I struggle to keep up, tugging at the heavily laden ‘brid and saying silent prayers to keep my mind off my aches, pains, and general misgivings.
Day 83:
Loaded and moving before dawn today. The air smells of smoke and ashes.
The change in vegetation here on the Plateau is startling. No longer evident are the ubiquitous weirwood and leafy chalma. After passing through an intermediate zone of short evergreens and everblues, then after climbing again through dense strands of mutated lodgepole pines and triaspen, we came into the flame forest proper with its groves of tall prometheus, trailers of ever present phoenix, and round stands of amber lambents. Occasionally we encountered impenetrable breaks of the white-fibrous, bifurcated bestos plants that Tuk picturesquely referred to as “… looking like de rotting cocks o’ some dead giants what be buried shallow here, dat be sure.” My guide has a way with words.
It was late afternoon before we saw our first tesla tree. For half an hour we had been trudging over an ash-covered forest floor, trying not to tread on the tender shoots of phoenix and firewhip gamely pushing up through the sooty soil, when suddenly Tuk stopped and pointed.
The tesla tree, still half a kilometer away, stood at least a hundred meters tall, half again as high as the tallest prometheus. Near its crown it bulged with the distinctive onion-shaped dome of its accumulator gall. The radial branches above the gall trailed dozens of nimbus vines, each looking silver and metallic against the clear green and lapis sky. The whole thing made me think of some elegant High Muslim mosque on New Mecca irreverently garlanded with tinsel.
“We got to get de ‘brids and our asses de hell out o’ here,” grunted Tuk. He insisted that we change into flame forest gear right then and there. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening trudging on in our osmosis masks and thick, rubber-soled boots, sweating under layers of leathery gamma-cloth. Both of the ‘brids acted nervous, their long ears pricking at the slightest sound. Even through my mask I could smell the ozone; it reminded me of electric trains I had played with as a child on lazy Christmas Day afternoons in Villefranche-sur-Saône.
We are camping as close as we can to a bestos break this night. Tuk showed me how to set out the ring of arrestor rods, all the time clucking dire warnings to himself and searching the evening sky for clouds.
I plan to sleep well in spite of everything.
Day 84:
0400 hours—
Sweet Mother of Christ.
For three hours we have been caught up in the middle of the end of the world.
The explosions started shortly after midnight, mere lightning crashes at first, and against our better judgment Tuk and I slid our heads through the tent flap to watch the pyrotechnics. I am used to the Matthewmonth monsoon storms on Pacem, so the first hour of lightning displays did not seem too unusual. Only the sight of distant tesla t
rees as the unerring focus of the aerial discharge was a bit unnerving. But soon the forest behemoths were glowing and spitting with their own accumulated energy and then—just as I was drifting off to sleep despite the continued noise—true Armageddon was unleashed.
At least a hundred arcs of electricity must have been released in the first ten seconds of the tesla trees’ opening spasms of violent energy. A prometheus less than thirty meters from us exploded, dropping flaming brands fifty meters to the forest floor. The arrestor rods glowed, hissed, and deflected arc after arc of blue-white death over and around our small campsite. Tuk screamed something but no mere human sound was audible over the onslaught of light and noise. A patch of trailing phoenix burst into flame near the tethered ’brids and one of the terrified animals—hobbled and blindfolded as it was—broke free and lunged through the circle of glowing arrestor rods. Instantly half a dozen bolts of lightning from the nearest tesla arced to the hapless animal. For a mad second I could have sworn I saw the beast’s skeleton glowing through boiling flesh and then it spasmed high into the air and simply ceased to be.
For three hours we have watched the end of the world. Two of the arrestor rods have fallen but the other eight continue to function. Tuk and I huddle in the hot cave of our tent, osmosis masks filtering enough cool oxygen out of the superheated, smoky air to allow us to breathe. Only the lack of undergrowth and Tuk’s skill in placing our tent away from other targets and near the sheltering bestos plants have allowed us to survive. That and the eight whiskered-alloy rods that stand between us and eternity.
“They seem to be holding up well!” I shout to Tuk over the hiss and crackle, crash and split of the storm.
“Dey be made to stand de hour, mebbe two,” grunts my guide. “Any time, mebbe sooner, dey fuse, we die.”
I nod and sip at lukewarm water through the slipstrip of my osmosis mask. If I survive this night, I shall always thank God for His generosity in allowing me to see this sight.
