The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (170 page)

I had the urge to shrug again but spoke instead. “I haven’t accepted the cruciform, Father. It might not be the same thing.”

His brown eyes were insistent, almost pleading. “It
is
the same thing, my son. Our Lord has revealed this.”

I said nothing.

Father Tse set down his missal and touched my bound wrist. “You know that if you repent this night and accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, that three days after … tomorrow … you will rise to live again in the grace of Our Lord’s forgiveness.” His brown eyes did not blink. “You do know this, do you not, my son?”

I returned his gaze. Some prisoner in the adjoining cell block
had screamed most of the last three nights. I felt very tired. “Yes, Father,” I said. “I know how the cruciform works.”

Father Tse vigorously shook his head. “Not the cruciform, my son. The grace of Our Lord.”

I nodded. “Have you gone through resurrection, Father?”

The priest glanced down. “Not yet, my son. But I have no fear of that day.” He looked up at me again. “Nor must you.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. I had been thinking about this for almost every minute of the past six days and nights. “Look, Father,” I said, “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but I made the decision some years ago not to go under the cruciform, and I don’t think that this is the right time to change my mind.”

Father Tse leaned forward, eyes bright. “Any time is the right time to accept Our Lord, my son. After sunrise tomorrow there will be no more time. Your dead body will be taken out from this place and disposed of at sea, mere food for the carrion fish beyond the bay.…”

This was not a new image for me. “Yes,” I said, “I know the penalty for a murderer executed without converting. But I have this—” I tapped the cortical come-along now permanently attached to my temple. “I don’t need a cruciform symbiote embedded in me to put me in a deeper slavery.”

Father Tse pulled back as if I had slapped him. “One mere lifetime of commitment to Our Lord is not slavery,” he said, his stutter banished by cold anger. “Millions have offered this
before
the tangible blessing of immediate resurrection in this life was offered. Billions gratefully accept it now.” He stood up. “You have the choice, my son. Eternal light, with the gift of almost unlimited life in this world in which to serve Christ, or eternal darkness.”

I shrugged and looked away.

Father Tse blessed me, said good-bye in tones comingled with sadness and contempt, turned, called the guards, and was gone. A minute later pain stabbed at my skull as the guards tickled my come-along and led me back to my cell.

I won’t bore you with a long litany of the thoughts that chased through my mind that endless autumn night. I was twenty-seven years old. I loved life with a passion
that sometimes led me into trouble … although never anything as serious as this before. For the first few hours of that final night, I pondered escape the way a caged animal must claw at steel bars. The prison was set high on the sheer cliff overlooking the reef called the Mandible, far out on Toschahi Bay. Everything was unbreakable Perspex, unbendable steel, or seamless plastic. The guards carried deathwands, and I sensed no reluctance in them to use them. Even if I should escape, a touch of a button on the come-along remote would curl me up with the universe’s worst migraine until they followed the beacon to my hiding place.

My last hours were spent pondering the folly of my short, useless life. I regretted nothing but also had little to show for Raul Endymion’s twenty-seven years on Hyperion. The dominant theme of my life seemed to be the same perverse stubbornness that had led me to reject resurrection.

So you owe the Church a lifetime of service
, whispered a frenzied voice in the back of my skull,
at least you
get
a lifetime that way! And more lifetimes beyond that! How can you turn down a deal like that? Anything’s better than real death … your rotting corpse being fed to the ampreys, coelacanths, and skarkworms. Think about this!
I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep just to flee from the shouts echoing in my own mind.

The night lasted an eternity, but sunrise still seemed to come early. Four guards walked me to the death chamber, strapped me into a wooden chair, and then sealed the steel door. If I looked over my left shoulder, I could see faces peering through the Perspex. Somehow I had expected a priest—maybe not Father Tse again, but a priest, some representative of the Pax—to offer me one final chance at immortality. There was none. Only part of me was glad. I cannot say now whether I would have changed my mind at the last moment.

The method of execution was simple and mechanical—not as ingenious as a Schrödinger cat box, perhaps, but clever nonetheless. A short-range deathwand was set on the wall and aimed at the chair where I sat. I saw the red light click on the small comlog unit attached to the weapon. Prisoners in adjoining cells had gleefully whispered the mechanics of my death to me even before the sentence had been passed. The comlog computer had a random-number generator. When the number generated was a prime smaller than seventeen, the deathwand beam would be activated. Every synapse in the gray lump that was the personality
and memory of Raul Endymion would be fused. Destroyed. Melted down to the neuronic equivalent of radioactive slag. Autonomic functions would cease mere milliseconds later. My heart and breathing would stop almost as soon as my mind was destroyed. Experts said that death by deathwand was as painless a way to die as had ever been invented. Those resurrected after deathwand execution usually did not want to talk about the sensation, but the word in the cells was that it hurt like hell—as if every circuit in your brain were exploding.

I looked at the red light of the comlog and the business end of the short deathwand. Some wag had rigged an LED display so that I could see the numerals being generated. They flicked by like floor numbers on an elevator to hell: 26–74–109–19–37 … they had programmed the comlog to generate no numbers larger than 150 … 77–42–12–60–84–129–108–14–

I lost it then. I balled my fists, strained at the unyielding plastic straps, and screamed obscenities at the walls, at the pale faces distorted through the Perspex windows, at the fucking Church and its fucking Pax, at the fucking coward who’d killed my dog, at the goddamned fucking cowards who …

I did not see the low prime number appear on the display. I did not hear the deathwand hum softly as its beam was activated. I
did
feel something, a sort of hemlock coldness starting at the back of my skull and widening to every part of my body with the speed of nerve conduction, and I felt surprise at feeling something.
The experts are wrong and the cons are right
, I thought wildly.
You
can
feel your own death by deathwand
. I would have giggled then if the numbness had not flowed over me like a wave.

Like a black wave.

A black wave that carried me away with it.

I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead. At any rate, I awoke with no more discomfort than a vague tingling in my extremities and lay there watching sunlight crawl across a rough plaster ceiling for a minute or more until an urgent thought shook me full awake.

Wait a minute, wasn’t I … didn’t they …??

I sat up and looked around. If there was any lingering sense that my execution had been a dream, the prosaic quality of my surroundings dispelled it immediately. The room was pie-shaped with a curved and whitewashed outer stone wall and thick plaster ceilings. The bed was the only piece of furniture, and the heavy off-white linen on it complemented the texture of plaster and stone. There was a massive wooden door—closed—and an arched window open to the elements. One glance at the lapis sky beyond the window told me that I was still on Hyperion. There was no chance that I was still in the Port Romance prison; the stone here was too old, the details of the door too ornamental, the quality of linen too good.

I rose, found myself naked, and walked to the window. The autumn breeze was brisk, but the sun was warm on my skin. I was in a stone tower. Yellow chalma and the thick tangle of low weirwood wove a solid canopy of treetops up hills to the horizon.
Everblues grew on granite rock faces. I could see other walls, ramparts, and the curve of another tower stretching away along the ridgeline upon which this tower stood. The walls seemed
old
. The quality of their construction and the organic feel of their architecture was from an era of skill and taste long predating the Fall.

I guessed at once where I must be: the chalma and weirwood suggested that I was still on the southern continent of Aquila; the elegant ruins spoke of the abandoned city of Endymion.

I had never been to the town from which my family took its surname, but I had heard many descriptions of it from Grandam, our clan storyteller. Endymion had been one of the first Hyperion cities settled after the dropship crash almost seven hundred years earlier. Until the Fall it had been famous for its fine university, a huge, castlelike structure that towered over the old town below it. Grandam’s great-grandfather’s grandfather had been a professor at the university until the Pax troops commandeered the entire region of central Aquila and literally sent thousands of people packing.

And now I had returned.

A bald man with blue skin and cobalt-blue eyes came through the door, set underwear and a simple daysuit of what looked like homespun cotton on the bed, and said, “Please get dressed.”

I admit that I stared silently as the man turned and went out the door. Blue skin. Bright-blue eyes. No hair. He … it … had to be the first android that I had ever seen. If asked, I would have said that there were no androids left on Hyperion. They had been illegal to biofacture since before the Fall, and although they had been imported by the legendary Sad King Billy to build most of the cities in the north centuries ago, I had never heard of one still existing on our world. I shook my head and got dressed. The daysuit fit nicely, despite my rather unusually large shoulders and long legs.

I was back at the window when the android returned. He stood by the open door and gestured with an open hand. “This way please, M. Endymion.”

I resisted the impulse to ask questions and followed him up the tower stairs. The room at the top took up the entire floor. Late-afternoon sunlight streamed in through yellow-and-red stained-glass windows. At least one window was open, and I
could hear the rustle of the leaf canopy far below as a wind came up from the valley.

This room was as white and bare as my cell had been, except for a cluster of medical equipment and communication consoles in the center of the circle. The android left, closing the heavy door behind him, and it took me a second to realize that there was a human being in the locus of all that equipment.

At least I thought it was a human being.

The man was lying on a flowfoam hoverchair bed that had been adjusted to a sitting position. Tubes, IV drips, monitor filaments, and organic-looking umbilicals ran from the equipment to the wizened figure in the chair. I say “wizened,” but in truth the man’s body looked almost mummified, the skin wrinkled like the folds of an old leather jacket, the skull mottled and almost perfectly bald, the arms and legs emaciated to the point of being vestigial appendages. Everything about the old man’s posture made me think of a wrinkled and featherless baby bird that had fallen out of the nest. His parchment skin had a blue cast to it that made me think
android
for a moment, but then I saw the different shade of blue, the faint glow of the palms, ribs, and forehead, and realized that I was looking at a real human who had enjoyed—or suffered—centuries of Poulsen treatments.

No one receives Poulsen treatments anymore. The technology was lost in the Fall, as were the raw materials from worlds lost in time and space. Or so I thought. But here was a creature at least many centuries old who must have received Poulsen treatments as recently as decades ago.

The old man opened his eyes.

I have since seen eyes with as much power as his, but nothing in my life to that point had prepared me for the intensity of such a gaze. I think I took a step back.

“Come closer, Raul Endymion.” The voice was like the scraping of a dull blade on parchment. The old man’s mouth moved like a turtle’s beak.

I stepped closer, stopping only when a com console stood between me and the mummified form. The old man blinked and lifted a bony hand that still seemed too heavy for the twig of a wrist. “Do you know who I am?” The scratch of a voice was as soft as a whisper.

I shook my head.

“Do you know where you are?”

I took a breath. “Endymion. The abandoned university, I think.”

The wrinkles folded back in a toothless smile. “Very good. The namesake recognizes the heaps of stone which named his family. But you do not know who I might be?”

“No.”

“And you have no questions about how you survived your execution?”

I stood at parade rest and waited.

The old man smiled again. “Very good, indeed. All things come to him who waits. And the details are not that enlightening … bribes in high places, a stunner substituted for the deathwand, more bribes to those who certify the death and dispose of the body. It is not the ‘how’ we are interested in, is it, Raul Endymion?”

“No,” I said at last. “Why.”

The turtle’s beak twitched, the massive head nodded. I noticed now that even through the damage of centuries, the face was still sharp and angular—a satyr’s countenance.

“Precisely,” he said. “Why? Why go to the trouble of faking your execution and transporting your fucking carcass across half a fucking continent? Why indeed?”

The obscenities did not seem especially harsh from the old man’s mouth. It was as if he had sprinkled his speech with them for so long that they deserved no special emphasis. I waited.

“I want you to run an errand for me, Raul Endymion.” The old man’s breath wheezed. Pale fluid flowed through the intravenous tubes.