The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (340 page)

“Oddly enough,” said Father de Soya after we had gone another two hundred meters, “they did not get the idea from Rome’s ancient catacombs, which lie all about us here, but from the so-called catacombs of Paris … old quarry tunnels deep under that city. The Parisians had to move bones from their overflowing cemeteries to those tunnels between the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. They found that they could easily accommodate six million dead in just a few kilometers of corridors. Ahh … here we are …”

To our left, through an even narrower corridor of bones, was a path with a few boot marks in the dust, leading to another steel door, this one unlocked. It took all three of us to leverage the door open. The priest led the way down another set of rusting spiral stairs to a depth I estimated at being at least thirty-five meters beneath the street above. The match went out just as we stepped into another tunnel—much older than the subway vault, its edges and ceiling unfinished and tumbledown. I had caught a glimpse of side passages running off, of bones spilled haphazardly everywhere in these passages, of skulls upside down, of bits of rotted garments.

“According to Father Baggio,” whispered the priest, “this is where the real catacombs begin. The Christian catacombs which go back to the first century
A.D
.” A new match flared. I heard a rattle in the matchbox that sounded like very few matches indeed. “This way, I would guess,” said Father de Soya and led us to his right.

“We’re under the Vatican now?” whispered Aenea a few minutes later. I could feel her impatience. The match flared and died.

“Soon, soon,” said de Soya in the darkness. He lit another one. I heard no rattle in the box.

After another 150 meters or so, the corridor simply ended. There were no tumbled bones here, no skulls, only rough stone walls and a hint of masonry where the tunnel ended. The match went out. Aenea touched my hand as we waited in the darkness.

“I am sorry,” said the priest. “There are no more matches.”

I fought back the rise of panic in my chest. I was sure that I heard noises now … distant rat feet scurrying at the least, boots on stairs at the worst. “Do we backtrack?” I said, my whisper sounding far too loud in the absolute darkness.

“I was sure that Father Baggio said that these catacombs to the north had once connected to the older ones under the Vatican,” whispered Father de Soya. “Under St. Peter’s Basilica, to be precise.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to …” I began and stopped. In the few seconds of light before the match had gone out, I had glimpsed the relative newness of the brick wall between stones … a few centuries old as opposed to the millennia since the stone had been cut away. I crawled forward, feeling ahead of me until my fingers found stone, brick, loose mortar.

“This was hastily done,” I said, speaking with only the authority
I had gained as an assistant landscape worker on the Beak estates years and years before. “The mortar’s cracked and some of the bricks have crumbled,” I said, my fingers moving quickly. “Give me something to dig with Damn, I wish I hadn’t thrown away my knife …”

Aenea handed me a sharp-edged stick or branch in the dark and I was digging away for several minutes before I realized that I was working with a thigh bone broken at one end. The two of them joined me, digging with bones, scrabbling at the cold brick with our fingernails until the nails broke and our fingers bled. After some time at this, we paused to pant and catch our breath. Our eyes had not adapted to the darkness. There was no light here.

“The Mass will be over,” whispered Aenea. The tone in her voice made it sound like a tragic event.

“It is a High Mass,” whispered the priest. “A long ceremony.”

“Wait!” I said. My fingers had remembered a slight movement in the bricks—not in one or a few of them, but in the entire casement.

“Get back,” I said aloud. “Crawl to the side of the tunnel.” I backed up myself, but straight back, raised my left shoulder, lowered my head, and charged forward in a crouch, half expecting to bash my head on the stone and knock myself out.

I hit the bricks with a mighty grunt and a shower of dust and small debris. The bricks had not fallen away. But I had felt them sag away from me.

Aenea and de Soya joined me and in another minute we had pushed loose the center bricks, tumbled the entire mass away from us.

There was the faintest glimmer of light on the other side of the passage, but enough to show us a ramp of debris leading to an even deeper tunnel. We crawled down on our hands and knees, found room to stand, and moved through the earth-smelling corridor. Two more turns and we came into a catacomb as roughly hewn as the one above but illuminated by a narrow strip of glowtape running along the right wall at belt height. Another fifty meters of twisting and turning, always following the main passage illuminated by glowtape, and we came into a wider tunnel with modern glowglobes set every five meters. These globes were not lit, but the ancient glowtape continued on.

“We’re under St. Peter’s,” whispered Father de Soya. “This
area was first rediscovered in 1939, after they buried Pope Pius XI in a nearby grotto. The excavations were carried on for another twenty years or so before being abandoned. They have not been reopened to archaeologists.”

We came into an even wider corridor—wide enough for the three of us to walk side by side for the first time. Here the ancient rock and plastered walls with the occasional marble inset were covered with frescoes, early Christian mosaics, and broken statues set above grottoes in which bones and skulls were clearly visible. Someone had once placed plastic across many of these grottoes and the material had yellowed and opaqued to make the mortal remains within almost unviewable, but by bending and peering we could see empty eye sockets and pelvic ovals peering back at us.

The frescoes showed Christian images—doves carrying olive branches, women drawing water, the ubiquitous fish—but were next to older grottoes, cremation urns, and graves offering pre-Christian images of Isis and Apollo, Bacchus welcoming the dead to the afterlife with great, overflowing flagons of wine, a scene of oxen and rams cavorting, another with satyrs dancing—I immediately noticed the likeness to Martin Silenus and turned just in time to catch Aenea’s knowing glance—and still more with beings Father de Soya described as maenads, some rural scenes, partridges all in a row, a preening peacock with feathers of lapis chips that still caught the light in bright blue.

Peering through the ancient, mottled plastic and plastiglass at these things made me think that we were passing through some terrestrial aquarium of death. Finally we came to a red wall at right angles to a lower wall of faded, mottled blue with the remnants of graffiti in Latin still visible. Here the sheet of plastic was newer, fresher, and the small container of bones within quite visible. The skull had been set atop the neat pile of bones and seemed to be regarding us with some interest.

Father de Soya went to his knees in the dust, crossed himself, and bent his head in prayer. Aenea and I stood back and watched with the quiet embarrassment common to the unbeliever in the presence of any true faith.

When the priest arose, his eyes were moist. “According to Church history and Father Baggio, the workers uncovered these poor bones in 1949
A.D
. Later analysis showed that they belong to a robust man who died sometime in his sixties. We are directly under the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, which was built here because of the legend that St. Peter had been interred
secretly at just this spot. In 1968
A.D
., Pope Paul VI announced that the Vatican was convinced that these were indeed the bones of the fisherman, the same Peter who walked with Jesus and was the Rock upon which Christ built his Church.”

We looked at the silent heap of bones and then back at the priest.

“Federico, you know that I am not trying to bring down the Church,” Aenea said. “Only this current aberration of it.”

“Yes,” said Father de Soya, wiping his eyes roughly, leaving muddy streaks there. “I know that, Aenea.” He looked around, went to a door, opened it. A metal staircase led upward.

“There will be guards,” I whispered.

“I think not,” said Aenea. “The Vatican has spent eight hundred years fearing attack from space … from above. I do not believe they give much thought to their catacombs.” She stepped in front of the priest and started quickly but quietly up the metal steps. I hurried to follow her. I saw Father de Soya glance back toward the dim grotto, cross himself a final time, and follow us up toward St. Peter’s Basilica.

The light in the main basilica, although softened by evening, stained glass, and candlelight, was all but blinding after the catacombs.

We had climbed up through the subterranean shrine, up past a memorial basilica marked in stone as the Trophy of Gaius, through side corridors and service entrances, through the anteroom to the sacristy, past standing priests and craning altar boys, and out into the echoing expanse at the rear of the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica. Here were scores of dignitaries not important enough to have been awarded a place in the pews but still honored by being allowed to stand in the rear of the Basilica to witness this important celebration. It took only a glance to see that there were Swiss Guard and security people at all the entrances to the Basilica and in all the outer rooms with exits. Here at the back of the congregation, we were inconspicuous for the moment, just another priest and two somewhat under-dressed parishioners allowed to crane their necks to see the Holy Father on Holy Thursday.

Mass was still being celebrated. The air smelled of incense and candlewax. Hundreds of brightly robed bishops and VIPs
lined the gleaming rows of pews. At the marble altar rail before the baroque splendor canopy of the Throne of St. Peter, the Holy Father himself knelt to finish his menial work of washing the feet of twelve seated priests—eight men and four women. An unseen but large choir was singing—

I hesitated then, wondering what we were doing here, why this endless battle of Aenea’s had brought us to the center of these people’s faith. I believed everything she had taught us, valued everything she had shared with us, but three thousand years of tradition and faith had formed the words of this beautiful song and had built the walls of this mighty cathedral. I could not help but remember the simple wooden platforms, the firm but inelegant bridges and stairways of Aenea’s rebuilt Temple Hanging in Air. What was it … what were we … compared to this splendor and humility? Aenea was an architect, largely self-trained except for her adolescent years with the cybrid Mr. Wright, building stone walls out of desert rock and mixing concrete by hand.
Michelangelo
had helped to design this Basilica.

The Mass was almost over. Some of the standing crowd in the rear of the longitudinal nave were beginning to leave, walking lightly so as not to interrupt the end of the service with their footfalls, whispering only when they reached the stairs to the piazza outside. I saw that Aenea was whispering in Father de Soya’s ear and I leaned against them to hear, afraid that I might miss some vital instruction.

“Will you do me one final great service, Father?” she asked.

“Anything,” whispered the sad-eyed priest.

“Please leave the Basilica now,” Aenea whispered in his
ear. “Please go now, quietly, with these others. Leave now and lose yourself in Rome until the day comes to cease being lost.”

Father de Soya pulled his head back in shock, looking at Aenea from half a meter away with an expression of someone who has been abandoned. He leaned close to her ear. “Ask anything else of me, Teacher.”

“This is all I ask, Father. And I ask it with love and respect.”

The choir began singing another hymn. Above the heads in front of me, I could see the Holy Father completing the washing of the priests’ feet and moving back to the altar under the gilded canopy. Everyone in the pews stood in anticipation of the closing litanies and final benediction.

Father de Soya gave his own benediction of my friend, turned, and left the Basilica with a group of monks whose beads rattled as they walked.

I stared at Aenea with enough intensity to set wood aflame, trying to send her the mental message
DO NOT ASK ME TO LEAVE!

She beckoned me close and whispered in my ear, “Do one final thing for me, Raul, my love.”

I almost shouted “No, goddammit!” at the top of my lungs in the echoing nave of St. Peter’s Basilica during the holiest moments of Holy Thursday’s High Mass. Instead I waited.

Aenea rumbled in the pockets of her vest and came out with a small vial. The liquid in it was clear but somehow looked heavier than water. “Would you drink this?” she whispered and handed me the vial.

I thought of Romeo and Juliet, Caesar and Cleopatra, Abe-lard and Heloise, George Wu and Howard Sung. All star-crossed lovers. Suicide and poison. I drank down the potion in one gulp, setting the empty vial in my own shirt pocket, waiting for Aenea to take out and drink a similar potion. She did not.

“What was it?” I whispered, not fearing any answer.

Aenea was watching the final moments of the Mass. She leaned very close to whisper. “Antidote to the Pax’s birth control medication that you took when you joined the Home Guard.”

What the hell!!??!!
I came close to shouting over the Holy Father’s closing words.
You’re worried about family planning NOW?? Are you out of your goddamn MIND???

She leaned back, her breath warm on my neck as she whispered again. “Thank God, I’ve been carrying that for two days
and almost forgot it. Don’t worry, it’ll take about three weeks to take effect. Then you’ll never be shooting blanks again.”