The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (176 page)

A. Bettik waited.

“Don’t you wish to be free?” I said at last. “To be an independent person in your own right?”

A. Bettik walked to the bed. I thought that he was going to sit down, but he only folded and stacked the shirt and trousers I had been wearing earlier. “M. Endymion,” he said, “I should point out that although the laws of the Hegemony died with the Hegemony, I have considered myself a free and independent person for some centuries now.”

“Yet you and the others work for M. Silenus here, in hiding,” I persisted.

“Yes, sir, but I have done so from my own free choice. I was designed to serve humanity. I do it well. I take pleasure in my work.”

“So you’ve stayed here by your own free will,” I perseverated.

A. Bettik nodded and smiled briefly. “Yes, for as much as any of us has a free will, sir.”

I sighed and pushed myself away from the window. It was full dark out now. I presumed that I would be summoned to the old poet’s dinner party before long. “And you will continue staying here and caring for the old man until he finally dies,” I said.

“No, sir,” said A. Bettik. “Not if I am consulted on the matter.”

I paused, my eyebrows lifting. “Really?” I said. “And where will you go if you are consulted on the matter?”

“If you choose to accept this mission which M. Silenus has offered you, sir,” said the blue-skinned man, “I would choose to go with you.”

When I was led upstairs, I discovered that the top floor was no longer a sickroom; it had been transformed
into a dining room. The flowfoam hoverchair was gone, the medical monitors were gone, the communication consoles were absent, and the ceiling was open to the sky. I glanced up and located the constellations of the Swan and the Twin Sisters with the trained eye of a former shepherd. Braziers on tall tripods sat in front of each of the stained-glass windows, their flames adding both warmth and light to the room. In the center of the room, the com consoles had been replaced with a three-meter-long dining table. China, silver, and crystal glimmered in the light of candles flickering from two ornate candelabra. A place had been set at each end of the table. At the far end, Martin Silenus awaited, already seated in a tall chair.

The old poet was hardly recognizable. He seemed to have shed centuries in the hours since I had last seen him. From being a mummy with parchment skin and sunken eyes, he had transformed into just another old man at a dining table—a
hungry
old man from the look in his eyes. As I approached the table, I noticed the subtle IV drips and monitor filaments snaking under the table, but otherwise the illusion of someone restored to life from the dead was almost perfect.

Silenus chuckled at my expression. “You caught me at my worst this afternoon, Raul Endymion,” he rasped. The voice was still harsh with age, but much more forceful than before. “I was still recovering from my cold sleep.” He gestured me to my place at the other end of the table.

“Cryogenic fugue?” I said stupidly, unfurling the linen napkin and dropping it to my lap. It had been years since I had eaten at a table this fancy—the day that I had demobilized from the Home Guard, I had gone straight to the best restaurant in the port city of Gran Chaco on South Talon Peninsula and ordered the finest meal on the menu, blowing my last month’s pay in the process. It had been worth it.

“Of course cryogenic fucking fugue,” said the old poet. “How else do you think I pass these decades?” He chuckled again. “It merely takes me a few days to get up to speed again after defrosting. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

I took a breath. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” I said, “how old are you?”

The poet ignored me and beckoned to the waiting android—not A. Bettik—who nodded toward the stairwell. Other androids began carrying up the food in silence. My water glass was filled. I watched as A. Bettik showed a bottle of wine to the
poet, waited for the old man’s nod, and then went through the ritual, offering him the cork and a sample to taste. Martin Silenus sloshed the vintage wine around in his mouth, swallowed, and grunted. A. Bettik took this for assent and poured the wine for each of us.

The appetizers arrived, two for each of us. I recognized the charbroiled chicken yakitori and the tender Mane-raised beef carpaccio arugula. In addition, Silenus helped himself to the sautéed foie gras wrapped in mandrake leaves that had been set near his end of the table. I lifted the ornamented skewer and tried the yakitori. It was excellent.

Martin Silenus might be eight or nine hundred years old, perhaps the oldest human alive, but the codger had an appetite. I saw the gleam of perfect white teeth as he attacked the beef carpaccio, and I wondered if these new additions were dentures or Arnied substitutes. Probably the latter.

I realized that I was ravenous. Evidently either my pseudoresurrection or the exercise involved in climbing to the ship had instilled an appetite in me. For several minutes there was no conversation, only the soft sound of the serving androids’ footsteps on stones, the crackle of flames in the braziers, an occasional hint of night breeze overhead, and the sounds of our chewing.

As the androids removed our appetizer plates and brought in bowls of steaming black mussel bisque, the poet said, “I understand that you met our ship today.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was the Consul’s private ship?”

“Of course.” Silenus gestured to an android, and bread was brought still hot from the oven. The smell of it mingled with the rising vapors from the bisque and the hint of autumn foliage on the breeze.

“And this is the ship you expect me to use to rescue the girl?” I said. I expected the poet to ask for my decision then.

Instead, he said, “What do you think of the Pax, M. Endymion?”

I blinked, the spoon of bisque halfway to my mouth. “The Pax?”

Silenus waited.

I set the spoon back and shrugged. “I don’t think much of it, I guess.”

“Not even after one of its courts sentenced you to death?” Instead of sharing what I had been thinking earlier—how it
had not been the Pax influence that sentenced me, but Hyperion’s brand of frontier justice—I said, “No. The Pax has been mostly irrelevant to my life.”

The old poet nodded and sipped his bisque. “And the Church?”

“What about it, sir?”

“Has it been largely irrelevant to your life?”

“I guess so.” I realized that I was sounding like a tongue-tied adolescent, but these questions seemed less important than the question he was supposed to ask me, and the decision I was supposed to give him.

“I remember the first time we heard of the Pax,” he said. “It was only a few months after Aenea disappeared. Church ships arrived in orbit, and troops seized Keats, Port Romance, Endymion, the university, all of the spaceports and important cities. Then they lifted off in combat skimmers, and we realized that they were after the cruciforms on the Pinion Plateau.”

I nodded. None of this was new information. The occupation of the Pinion Plateau and search for cruciforms had been the last great gamble of a dying Church, and the beginning of the Pax. It had been almost a century and a half before
real
Pax troops had arrived to occupy all of Hyperion and to order the evacuation of Endymion and other towns near the Plateau.

“But the ships which put in here during the expansion of the Pax,” continued the poet, “what tales they brought! The Church’s expansion from Pacem through the old Web worlds, then the Outback colonies …”

The androids removed the bisque bowls and returned with plates of carved fowl with pommery mustard sauce and a gratin of Kans River manta with caviar mousseline.

“Duck?” I said.

The poet showed his reconstituted teeth. “It seemed appropriate after your … ah … trouble of the last week.”

I sighed and touched the slice of fowl with my fork. Moist vapors rose to my cheek and eyes. I thought of Izzy’s eagerness as the ducks approached the open water. It seemed a lifetime ago. I looked at Martin Silenus and tried to imagine having centuries of memories to contend with. How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind? The old poet was grinning at me in that wild way of his, and once again I wondered if he
was
sane.

“So we heard about the Pax and wondered what it would be
like when it truly arrived,” he continued, chewing while he spoke. “A theocracy … unthinkable during the centuries of the Hegemony. Religion then was, of course, purely personal choice—I belonged to a dozen religions and started more than one of my own during my days as a literary celebrity.” He looked at me with bright eyes. “But of course you know that, Raul Endymion. You know the
Cantos
.”

I tasted the manta and said nothing.

“Most people I knew were Zen Christians,” he continued. “More Zen than Christian, of course, but not too much of either, actually. Personal pilgrimages were fun. Places of power, finding one’s Baedecker point, all of that crap …” He chuckled. “The Hegemony would never have dreamed of getting involved with religion, of course. The very thought of mixing government and religious opinion was barbaric … something one found on Qom-Riyadh or somesuch Outback desert world. And then came the Pax, with its glove of velvet and its cruciform of hope.…”

“The Pax doesn’t rule,” I said. “It advises.”

“Precisely,” agreed the old man, pointing his fork at me while A. Bettik refilled his wineglass. “The Pax advises. It does not rule. On hundreds of worlds the Church administers to the faithful and the Pax advises. But, of course, if you are a Christian who wishes to be born again, you will not ignore the advice of the Pax or the whispers of the Church, will you?”

I shrugged again. The influence of the Church had been a constant of life as long as I had been alive. There was nothing strange about it to me.

“But you are not a Christian who wishes to be born again, are you, M. Endymion?”

I looked at the old poet then, and a terrible suspicion formed in the back of my mind.
He somehow finessed my fake execution and transported me here when I should have been buried at sea by the authorities. He has clout with the Port Romance authorities. Could he have dictated my conviction and sentencing? Was all this some sort of test?

“The question is,” he continued, ignoring my basilisk stare, “
why
are you not a Christian? Why do you not wish to be born again? Don’t you enjoy life, Raul Endymion?”

“I enjoy life,” I said tersely.

“But you have not accepted the cross,” he continued. “You have not accepted the gift of extended life.”

I put down my fork. An android servant interpreted that as a sign that I was finished and removed the plate of untouched duckling. “I have not accepted the
cruciform
,” I snapped. How to explain the suspicion bred into my nomadic clan through generations of being the expatriates, the outsiders, the unsettled indigenies? How to explain the fierce independence of people like Grandam and my mother? How to explain the legacy of philosophical rigor and inbred skepticism passed on to me by my education and upbringing? I did not try.

Martin Silenus nodded as if I had explained. “And you see the cruciform as something other than a miracle offered the faithful through the miraculous intercession of the Catholic Church?”

“I see the cruciform as a parasite,” I said, surprising myself by the vehemence in my voice.

“Perhaps you are afraid of losing … ah … your masculinity,” rasped the poet.

The androids brought in two swans sculpted of mocha chocolate and filled with highland branch-truffles and set them at our places. I ignored mine. In the
Cantos
the priest pilgrim—Paul Duré—tells his tale of discovering the lost tribe, the Bikura, and learning how they had survived centuries by a cruciform symbiote offered to them by the legendary Shrike. The cruciform resurrected them much as it did today, in the era of the Pax, only in the priest’s tale the side effects included irreversible brain damage after several resurrections and the disappearance of all sexual organs and impulses. The Bikura were retarded eunuchs—all of them.

“No,” I said. “I know that the Church has somehow solved that problem.”

Silenus smiled. He looked like a mummified satyr when he did that. “
If
one has taken Communion and
if
one is resurrected under the auspices of the Church,” he rasped. “Otherwise, even if one has somehow stolen a cruciform, his fate remains that of the Bikura.”

I nodded. Generations had attempted to steal immortality. Before the Pax sealed off the Plateau, adventurers smuggled out cruciforms. Other symbiotes had been stolen from the Church itself. The result had always been the same—idiocy and sexlessness. Only the Church held the secret of successful resurrection.

“So?” I said.

“So why has allegiance to the Church and a tithing of every
tenth year of service to the Church been too high a price for you, my boy? Billions have opted for life.”

I sat in silence for a moment. Finally I said, “Billions can do what they want. My life is important to me. I want to keep it … 
mine
.”

This made no sense even to me, but the poet once again nodded as if I had explained matters to his satisfaction. He ate his chocolate swan while I watched. The androids removed our plates and filled our cups with coffee.

“All right,” the poet said, “have you thought about my proposition?”

The question was so absurd that I had to stifle the urge to laugh. “Yes,” I said at last. “I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

“And I have a few questions.”

Martin Silenus waited.

“What is in this for me?” I asked. “You talk about the difficulty of my going back to a life here on Hyperion—lack of papers and all that—but you know I’m comfortable in the wilderness. It would be a hell of a lot easier for me to take off for the fens and avoid the Pax authorities than it would be to chase across space with your kid-friend in tow. Besides, to the Pax, I’m dead. I could go home to the moors and stay with my clan with no problem.”

Martin Silenus nodded.

After another moment of silence I said, “So why should I even consider this nonsense?”