The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (14 page)

It does not like pain. I lost consciousness long before the pain or loss of blood demanded it. Each time I awoke and resumed cutting, I would be made to pass out. It does not like pain.

Day 158
:

Alpha speaks some now. He seems duller, slower, and only vaguely aware of me (or anyone else) but he eats and moves. He appears to recognize me to some extent. The medscanner shows the heart and internal organs of a young man—perhaps of a boy of sixteen.

I must wait about another Hyperion month and ten days—about fifty days in all—until the flame forests become quiet enough for me to try to walk out, pain or no pain. We will see who can stand the most pain.

Day 173
:

Another death.

The one called Will—the one with the broken finger—had been missing for a week. Yesterday the Bikura went several kilometers northeast as if following a beacon, and found the remains near the great ravine.

Evidently a branch had snapped while he was climbing to grasp some chalma fronds. Death must have been instantaneous when he broke his neck, but it is where he fell that is important. The body—if one could call it that—was lying between two great mud cones marking the burrows of the large red insects that Tuk called fire mantises. Carpet beetles might have been a more apt phrase. In the past few days the insects had stripped the corpse clean to the bone. Little was left to be found except the skeleton, some random shreds of tissue and tendon, and the cruciform—still attached to the rib cage like some splendid cross packed in the sarcophagus of a long-dead pope.

It is terrible, but I cannot help but feel some small sense of triumph beneath the sadness. There is no way that the cruciform can regenerate something out of these bare bones; even the terrible illogic of this accursed parasite must respect the imperative of the law of conservation of mass. The Bikura I called Will has died the true death. The Three Score and Ten truly are the Three Score and Nine from this time on.

Day 174
:

I am a fool.

Today I inquired about Will, about his dying the true death. I was curious at the lack of reaction from the Bikura. They had retrieved the cruciform but left the skeleton lying where they had found it; there was no attempt to carry the remains to the basilica. During the night I had become concerned that I would be made to fill the roll of the missing member of the Three Score and Ten. “It is very sad,” I said, “that one of you has died the true death. What is to become of the Three Score and Ten?”

Beta stared at me. “He cannot die the true death,” said the bald little androgyny. “He is of the cruciform.”

Somewhat later, while continuing my medscans of the tribe, I discovered the truth. The one I have tagged as Theta looks the same and acts the same, but now carries two cruciforms embedded in his flesh. I have no doubt that this is one Bikura who will tend toward corpulence in coming years, swelling and ripening like some obscene
E. coli
cell in a petri dish. When he/she/it dies, two will leave the tomb and the Three Score and Ten will be complete once more.

I believe I am going mad.

Day 195
:

Weeks of studying the damn parasite and still no clue as to how it functions. Worse, I no longer care. What I care about now is more important.

Why has God allowed this obscenity?

Why have the Bikura been punished this way?

Why was I chosen to suffer their fate?

I ask these questions in nightly prayers but I hear no answers, only the blood song of the wind from the Cleft.

Day 214
:

The last ten pages should have covered all of my field notes and technical conjectures. This will be my last entry before attempting the quiescent flame forest in the morning.

There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.

Edouard, I have spent so many hours wrestling with my faith—my lack of faith—but now, in this fearful corner of an all but forgotten world, riddled as I am with this loathsome parasite, I have somehow rediscovered a strength of belief the likes of which I have not known since you and I were boys. I now understand the
need
for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.

Day after day I have tried to leave the Cleft area and day after day I have suffered pain so terrible that it has become a tangible part of my world, like the too small sun or the green and lapis sky. Pain has become my ally, my guardian angel, my remaining link
with humanity. The cruciform does not like pain. Nor do I but, like the cruciform, I am willing to use it to serve my purposes. And I will do so consciously, not instinctively like the mindless mass of alien tissue embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless avoidance of death by any means. I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life. Life is sacred—I still hold to that as a core element of the Church’s thought and teachings these past twenty-eight hundred years when life has been so cheap—but even more sacred is the soul.

I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so—but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well—bravely and firm of faith—like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into the darkness, if not hopefully, then prayerfully that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices. All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable conviction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I … and so must the Church.

I no longer believe that any surgery or treatment can cure me of this thing that infests me, but if someone can separate it and study it and destroy it, even at the cost of my death, I will be well satisfied.

The flame forests are as quiet as they will ever be. To bed now. I leave before dawn.

Day 215
:

There is no way out.

Fourteen kilometers into the forest. Stray fires and bursts of current, but penetrable. Three weeks of walking would have got me through.

The cruciform will not let me go.

The pain was like a heart attack that would not stop. Still I staggered forward, stumbling and crawling through the ash. Eventually I lost consciousness. When I came to I was crawling
toward
the Cleft. I would turn away, walk a kilometer, crawl fifty meters, then lose consciousness again and awake back where I had started. All day this insane battle for my body went on.

Before sunset the Bikura entered the forest, found me five kilometers from the Cleft, and carried me back.

Dear Jesus, why have you let this be?

There is no hope now unless someone comes looking for me.

Day 223
:

Again the attempt. Again the pain. Again the failure.

Day 257
:

I am sixty-eight standard years old today. Work goes on with the chapel I am building near the Cleft. Attempted to descend to the river yesterday but was turned back by Beta and four others.

Day 280
:

One local year on Hyperion. One year in purgatory. Or is it hell?

Day 311
:

Working on quarrying stones on the ledges below the shelf where the chapel is going up and I made the discovery today: the arrestor rods. The Bikura must have thrown them over the edge when they murdered Tuk that night two hundred and twenty-three days ago.

These rods would allow me to penetrate the flame forest at any time if the cruciform would allow it. But it will not. If only they had not destroyed my medkits with the painkillers! But still, sitting here holding the rods today, I have an idea.

My crude experiments with the medscanner have continued. Two
weeks ago when Theta broke his leg in three places, I observed the reaction of the cruciform. The parasite did its best to block the pain; Theta was unconscious much of the time and his body was producing incredible quantities of endorphins. But the break was a very painful one and after four days the Bikura slashed Theta’s throat and took his body to the basilica. It was easier for the cruciform to resurrect his corpse than to tolerate such pain over a long period. But before his murder my scanner showed an appreciable retreat of the cruciform nematodes from some parts of the central nervous system.

I do not know if it would be possible to inflict on oneself—or to tolerate—levels of nonlethal pain sufficient to drive the cruciform out completely, but I am sure of one thing: the Bikura would not allow it.

Today I sit on the ledge below the half-finished chapel and I consider possibilities.

Day 438
:

The chapel is finished. It is my life’s work.

Tonight, when the Bikura went down into the Cleft for their daily parody of worship, I said Mass at the altar of the newly erected chapel. I had baked the bread from chalma flour and I am sure that it must have tasted of that bland, yellow leaf, but to me the taste was exactly like that of the first Host I had partaken of during my first Holy Communion in Villefranche-sur-Saône some sixty standard years earlier.

In the morning I will do what I have planned. Everything is in readiness: my journals and the medscan wafers will be in the pouch of woven bestos fibers. That is the best I can do.

The consecrated wine was only water, but in the dim light of sunset it looked blood red and tasted of Communion wine.

The trick will be to penetrate deep enough into the flame forest. I will have to trust that there is enough incipient activity in and from the tesla trees even during the quiet periods.

Goodbye, Edouard. I doubt if you are still alive, and should you be, I see no way that we could ever be reunited, separated as we are not only by years of distance but by a much wider gulf in the
form of a cross. My hope of seeing you again shall not be placed on this life but on the one to come. Strange to hear me speak like this again, is it not? I must tell you, Edouard, that after all these decades of uncertainty, and with great fear of what lies ahead, my heart and soul are nonetheless at peace.

2400 hours:

The sunset comes through the open chapel window and bathes the altar, the crudely carved chalice, and me in light. The wind from the Cleft rises in the last such chorus that—with luck and God’s mercy—I will ever hear.

   “That is the final entry,” said Lenar Hoyt.

When the priest quit reading, the six pilgrims at the table raised their faces toward him as if they were awakening from a common dream. The Consul glanced upward and saw that Hyperion was much closer now, filling a third of the sky, banishing the stars with its cold radiance.

“I arrived some ten weeks after I had last seen Father Duré,” continued Father Hoyt. His voice was a hoarse rasp. “More than eight years had passed on Hyperion … seven years since the last
entry in Father Duré’s journal.” The priest was visibly in pain now, his face paled to a sick luminescence and filmed with perspiration.

“Within a month I found my way to Perecebo Plantation upriver from Port Romance,” he continued, forcing some strength into his voice. “My assumption was that the fiberplastic growers might tell me the truth even if they would have nothing to do with the consulate or Home Rule Authorities. I was right. The administrator at Perecebo, a man named Orlandi, remembered Father Duré, as did Orlandi’s new wife, the woman named Semfa whom Father Duré mentioned in his journals. The plantation manager had tried to mount several rescue operations onto the Plateau, but an unprecedented series of active seasons in the flame forests had made them abandon their attempts. After several years they had given up hope that Duré or their man Tuk could still be alive.

“Nonetheless, Orlandi recruited two expert bush pilots to fly a rescue expedition up the Cleft in two plantation skimmers. We stayed in the Cleft itself for as long as we could, trusting to terrain-avoidance instruments and luck to get us to Bikura country. Even with bypassing most of the flame forest that way, we lost one of the skimmers and four people to tesla activity.”

Father Hoyt paused and swayed slightly. Gripping the edge of the table to steady himself, he cleared his throat and said, “There’s little else to tell. We located the Bikura village. There were seventy of them, each as stupid and uncommunicative as Duré’s notes had suggested. I managed to ascertain from them that Father Duré had died while trying to penetrate the flame forest. The bestos pouch had survived and in it we found his journals and medical data.” Hoyt looked at the others a second and then glanced down. “We persuaded them to show us where Father Duré had died,” he said. “They … ah … they had not buried him. His remains were badly burned and decomposed but complete enough to show us that the intensity of the tesla charges had destroyed the … the cruciform … as well as his body.