by Dan Simmons
In each of the stalls, a cardinal jotted the name on a ’scriber pad provided by the Scrutineers. At the end of the Conclave, the ’scribers would be scrambled, their files deleted so that no record of the voting would remain.
And so the voting proceeded. For Lourdusamy as for the rest of the living cardinals present, the only suspense was whether the dissident cardinal-electors from the Acclamation would actually put someone else’s name into play.
As each card was read, the last Scrutineer ran a threaded needle through the word “Eligo” and slid the card down the thread. When all of the ballots had been read aloud, knots were tied in each end of the thread.
The winning candidate was admitted to the Chapel. Standing before the altar in a simple black cassock, the man looked humble and a bit overwhelmed.
Standing before him, the senior Deacon Cardinal said, “Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?”
“I do so accept it,” said the priest.
At this point, a stall was brought out and set behind the priest. The Cardinal Deacon raised his hands and intoned, “Thus accepting your canonical election, this gathering does—in the sight of God Almighty—acknowledge you as Bishop of the Church of Rome, true Pope, and Head of the College of Bishops. May God advise you well as He grants you full and absolute power over the Church of Jesus Christ.”
“Amen,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy and pulled the cord that lowered the canopy over his stall. All eighty-three physical canopies and thirty-seven holographic ones lowered at the same time, until only the new Pope’s remained raised. The priest—now pontiff—sat back in the seat beneath the papal canopy.
“What name do you choose as Supreme Pontiff?” asked the Deacon Cardinal.
“I choose the name Urban the Sixteenth,” said the seated priest.
There was a murmuring and hum from the cardinals’ stalls. The Cardinal Deacon held out his hand and he and the other Scrutineers led the priest from the Chapel. The murmuring and whispering rose in volume.
Cardinal Mustafa leaned out of his stall and said to Lourdusamy, “He must be thinking of Urban the Second. Urban the Fifteenth was a sniveling little coward in the twenty-ninth century who did little but read detective novels and write love letters to his former mistress.”
“Urban the Second,” mused Lourdusamy. “Yes, of course.”
After several minutes, the Scrutineers returned with the priest—now the Pope dressed in pure white—a white-caped cassock, a white zuchetto or skullcap, a pectoral cross, and a white fascia sash. Cardinal Lourdusamy went to his knees on the stone floor of the Chapel, as did all the other cardinals real and holographic, as the new Pontiff gave his first benediction.
Then the Scrutineers and the attending cardinals went to the stove to burn the votes now tethered on black thread, adding enough bianco chemical to make sure that the sfumata would indeed be white smoke.
The cardinals filed out of the Sistine Chapel and walked the ancient paths and corridors to St. Peter’s, where the senior Cardinal Deacon went alone onto the balcony to announce the name of the new Pontiff to the waiting multitudes.
AMONG THE FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND WAITING INDIVIDUALS in the multitude squeezed into, out of, and around St. Peter’s Square that morning was Father Captain Federico de Soya. He had been released from his de facto imprisonment at the Legionaries rectory only hours before. He was to report to Pax Fleet’s spaceport later that afternoon for shuttle to his new command. Walking through the Vatican, de Soya had followed the crowds—then had been engulfed by them—as men, women, and children had flowed like a great river toward the Square.
A great cheer had gone up when the puffs of white smoke first became visible from the stovepipe. The impossibly thick throng beneath the balcony of St. Peter’s somehow became thicker as tens of thousands more flowed around the colonnades and past the statuary. Hundreds of Swiss Guard troopers held the crowd back from the entrance to the Basilica and away from private areas.
When the Senior Deacon emerged and announced that the new Pope was to be called His Holiness Urban the XVI, a great gasp went up from the crowd. De Soya found himself gaping in surprise and shock. Everyone had expected Julius XV. The thought of anyone else as Pope was … well, unthinkable.
Then the new Pontiff stepped onto the balcony and the gasps turned to cheers that went on and on and on.
It was Pope Julius—the familiar face, the high forehead, the sad eyes. Father Lenar Hoyt, the savior of the Church, had once again been elected. His Holiness raised his hand in the familiar benediction and waited for the crowd to stop cheering so that he could speak, but the crowd would not stop cheering. The roar rose from half a million throats and went on and on.
Why Urban XVI? wondered Father Captain de Soya. He had read and studied enough history of the Church in his years as a Jesuit. Quickly he thumbed back through his mental notes on the Urban popes … most were forgettable or worse. Why …
“Damn,” Father Captain de Soya said aloud, the soft curse lost under the continuing roar of the faithful filling St. Peter’s Square. “Damn,” he said again.
Even before the crowd quieted enough for the new-old Pontiff to speak, to explain his choice of names, to announce what de Soya knew had to be announced, the father-captain understood. And his heart sank with that understanding.
Urban II had served from A.D. 1088 to 1099. At the synod the Pope had called in Clermont in … November, in the year 1095, de Soya thought … Urban II had made his call for holy war against the Muslims in the Near East, for the rescue of Byzantium, arid for the liberation of all eastern Christian holy places from Muslim domination. That call had led to the First Crusade … the first of many bloody campaigns.
The crowd finally quieted. Pope Urban XVI began to speak, the familiar but newly energized voice rising and falling over the heads of the half-million faithful listening in person and the billions listening via live broadcast.
Father Captain de Soya turned away even before the new Pope began to speak. He pushed and elbowed his way back through the unmoving crowd, trying to escape the suddenly claustrophobic confines of St. Peter’s Square.
It was no use. The crowd was rapt and joyous and de Soya was trapped in the mob. The words from the new Pontiff were also joyous and impassioned. Father Captain de Soya stood, unable to escape, and bowed his head. As the crowd began cheering and crying “Deus le volt!”—God wills it—de Soya began to weep.
Crusade. Glory. A final resolution of the Ouster Problem. Death beyond imagining. Destruction beyond imagining. Father Captain de Soya squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, but the vision of charged particle beams flaring against the blackness of space, of entire worlds burning, of oceans turning to steam and continents into molten rivers of lava, visions of orbital forests exploding into smoke, of charred bodies tumbling in zero-g, of fragile, winged creatures flaring and charring and expanding into ash …
De Soya wept while billions cheered.
4
t has been my experience that late-night departures and farewells are the hardest on the spirit.
The military was especially good at beginning major voyages in the middle of the night. During my time in the Hyperion Home Guard, it seemed that all important troop movements began in the wee hours. I began to associate that odd blend of fear and excitement, dread and anticipation, with predawn darkness and the smell of lateness. Aenea had said that I would be leaving that night of her announcement to the Fellowship, but it took time to load the kayak, for me to pack my gear and decide what to leave behind forever, and to close up my tent and work area in the compound, so we weren’t airborne in the dropship until after two A.M. and it was almost sunrise before we reached our destination.
I admit that I felt rushed and ordered about by the girl’s preemptive announcement. Many people had come to look to Aenea for leadership and advice during the four years we spent at Taliesin West, but I wasn’t one of those people. I was thirty-two years old. Aenea was sixteen. It was m
y job to watch out for her, to protect her, and—if it came to that—to tell her what to do and when to do it. I didn’t like this turn of events one bit.
I’d assumed that A. Bettik would be flying with us to wherever I was supposed to shove off, but Aenea said that the android would be staying behind at the compound, so I wasted another twenty minutes tracking him down and saying goodbye.
“M. Aenea says that we will meet up again in due course,” said the blue man, “so I am confident that we shall, M. Endymion.”
“Raul,” I said for the five hundredth time. “Call me Raul.”
“Of course,” said A. Bettik with that slight smile that suggested insubordination.
“Fuck it,” I said eloquently and stuck out my hand. A. Bettik shook it. I had the urge then to hug our old traveling companion, but I knew that it would embarrass him. Androids were not literally programmed to be stiff and subservient—they were, after all, living, organic beings, not machines—but between RNA-training and long practice, they were hopelessly formal creatures. At least this one was.
And then we were away, Aenea and I, taxiing the dropship out of its hangar into the desert night and lifting off with as little noise as possible. I had said good-bye to as many of the other Fellowship apprentices and workers as I had found, but the hour was late and the people were scattered to their dorm cubbies, tents, and apprentice shelters. I hoped that I would run into some of them again—especially some of the construction crewmen and women with whom I’d worked for four years—but I had little real belief that I would.
The dropship could have flown itself to our destination—just a series of coordinates Aenea had given it—but I left the controls on semimanual so I could pretend I had something to do during the flight. I knew from the coordinates that we would be traveling about fifteen hundred klicks. Somewhere along the Mississippi River, Aenea had said. The dropship could have done that distance in ten suborbital minutes, but we had been conserving its dwindling energy and fuel reserves, so once we had extended the wings to maximum, we kept our velocity subsonic, our altitude set at a comfortable ten thousand meters, and avoided morphing the ship again until landing. We ordered the Consul’s starship’s persona—which I’d long ago loaded from my comlog into the dropship’s AI core—to keep quiet unless it had something important to tell us, and then we settled back in the red instrument glow to talk and watch the dark continent pass beneath us.
“Kiddo,” I said, “why this galloping hurry?”
Aenea made the self-conscious, throwing-away gesture I had first seen her use almost five years earlier. “It seemed important to get things going.” Her voice was soft, almost lifeless, drained of the vitality and energy that had moved the entire Fellowship to her will. Perhaps I was the only living person who could identify the tone, but she sounded close to tears.
“It can’t be that important,” I said. “To make me leave in the middle of the night …”
Aenea shook her head and looked out the dark windscreen for a moment. I realized that she was crying. When she finally turned back, the glow from the instruments made her eyes look very moist and red. “If you don’t leave tonight, I’ll lose my nerve and ask you not to go. If you don’t go, I’ll lose my nerve again and stay on Earth … never go back.”
I had the urge to take her hand then, but I kept my big paw on the omnicontroller instead. “Hey,” I said, “we can go back together. This doesn’t make any sense for me to go off one way and you another.”
“Yes it does,” said Aenea so quietly that I had to lean to my right to hear her.
“A. Bettik could go fetch the ship,” I said. “You and I can stay on Earth until we’re ready to return …”
Aenea shook her head. “I’ll never be ready to go back, Raul. The thought scares me to death.”
I thought of the wild chase that had sent us fleeing through Pax space from Hyperion, barely eluding Pax starships, torch-ships, fighter aircraft, Marines, Swiss Guard, and God knows what else—including that bitch-thing from hell that had almost killed us on God’s Grove—and I said, “I feel the same way, kiddo. Maybe we should stay on Earth. They can’t reach us here.”
Aenea looked at me and I recognized the expression: it was not mere stubbornness, it was a closing of all discussion on a matter that was settled.
“All right,” I said, “but I still haven’t heard why A. Bettik couldn’t take this kayak and go get the ship while I farcast back with you.”
“Yes, you have,” said Aenea. “You weren’t listening.” She shifted sideways in the big seat. “Raul, if you leave and we agree to meet at a certain time in a certain place in Pax space, I have to go through the farcaster and do what I have to do. And what I have to do next, I have to do on my own.”
“Aenea,” I said.
“Yes?”
“That’s really stupid. Do you know that?”
The sixteen-year-old said nothing. Below and to the left, somewhere in western Kansas, a circle of campfires became visible. I looked out at the lights amid all that darkness. “Any idea what experiment your alien friends are doing down there?” I said.
“No,” said Aenea. “And they aren’t my alien friends.”
“Which aren’t they?” I said. “Aliens? Or friends?”
“Neither,” said Aenea. I realized that this was the most specific she had ever been about the godlike intelligences that had kidnapped Old Earth—and us, it seemed to me at times, as if we had been harried and driven through the farcasters like cattle.
“Care to tell me anything else about these nonalien non-friends?” I said. “After all, something could go wrong … I might not make it to our rendezvous. I’d like to know the secret of our hosts before I go.”
I regretted saying that as soon as the words were out. Aenea pulled back as if I had slapped her.
“Sorry, kiddo,” I said. This time I did put my hand on hers. “I didn’t mean that. I’m just angry.”
Aenea nodded and I could see the tears in her eyes again.
Still mentally kicking myself, I said, “Everyone in the Fellowship was sure that the aliens were benevolent, godlike creatures. People said ‘Lions and Tigers and Bears’ but what they were thinking was ‘Jesus and Yahweh and E.T.’ from that old flat film that Mr. W. showed us. Everyone was sure that when it came time to fold up the Fellowship, the aliens would appear and lead us back to the Pax in a big mothership. No danger. No muss. No fuss.”
Aenea smiled but her eyes still glistened. “Humans have been waiting for Jesus and Yahweh and E.T. to save their asses since before they covered those asses with bearskins and came out of the cave,” she said. “They’ll have to keep waiting. This is our business … our fight … and we have to take care of it ourselves.”
“Ourselves being you and me and A. Bettik against eight hundred billion or so of the born-again faithful?” I said softly.
Aenea made the graceful gesture with her hand again. “Yeah,” she said. “For now.”
• • •
WHEN WE ARRIVED IT WAS NOT ONLY STILL DARK, but raining hard—a cold, sleety, end-of-autumn rain. The Mississippi was a big river—one of Old Earth’s largest—and the dropship circled over it once before landing in a small town on the west bank. I saw all this on the viewscreen under image enhancement: the view out the actual windscreen was blackness and rain.
We came in over a high hill covered with bare trees, crossed an empty highway that spanned the Mississippi on a narrow bridge, and landed in an open, paved area about fifty meters from the river. The town ran back from the river here in a valley between wooded hills and on the viewscreen I could make out small, wooden buildings, larger brick warehouses, and a few taller structures near the river that might have been grain silos. Those kind of structures had been common in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries in this part of Old Earth: I had no idea why this city had been spared the earthquakes and fires of the Tribulations, or why the Lions and Tigers and Bears had rebuilt it, if they had. There ha
d been no sign of people in the narrow streets, nor of heat signatures on the infrared bands—neither living creatures nor groundcars with their overheated, internal combustion drive systems—but then again, it was almost four-thirty in the morning on a cold, rainy night. No one with an ounce of sense would be out in that lousy, stinking weather.
We both pulled on ponchos, I hefted my small backpack and said, “So long, Ship. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” and we were down the morphed stairs and into the rain.
Aenea helped me tug the kayak out of the storage area in the belly of the dropship and we headed down the slick street toward the river. On our previous river adventure, I had carried night-vision goggles, an assortment of weapons, and a raft full of fancy gadgets. This night I had the flashlight laser that was our only memento of the trip out to Earth—set to its weakest, most energy-conserving setting, it illuminated about two meters of rain-slick street—a Navajo hunting knife in my backpack, and some sandwiches and dried fruit packed away. I was ready to take on the Pax.
“What is this place?” I said.
“Hannibal,” said Aenea, struggling to hold the slick kayak as we stumbled down the street.
By this point I had to shift the slim flashlight laser in my teeth, keeping both hands on the bow of the stupid little boat. When we reached the point where the street became a loading ramp, running into the black torrent of the Mississippi, I set the kayak down, removed the flashlight, and said, “St, Petersburg.” I had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading in the Fellowship compound’s rich library of print books.
I saw Aenea’s hooded figure nod in the reflected glow of the flashlight beam.
“This is crazy,” I said, swinging the flashlight beam around the empty street, against the wall of the brick warehouses, out to the dark river. The rush of dark water was frightening. Any thought of setting off on that was insane.
“Yes,” said Aenea. “Crazy.” The cold rain beat on the hood of her poncho.
