The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (10 page)

I said nothing. I wondered if he could hear the pounding of my
heart at that moment.
Well
, I thought,
at least you don’t have to worry any longer that they think you are a god
.

The silence stretched. Finally Al added one more sentence that I have been thinking about ever since. “And if you did it again,” he said, “we would have to kill you again.”

We stared at each other for some time after that; each convinced, I am sure, that the other was a total idiot.

Day 104
:

Each new revelation adds to my confusion.

The absence of children here has bothered me since my first day in the village. Looking back through my notes, I find frequent mention of it in the daily observations I have dictated to my comlog, but no record of it in the personal mishmash here that I call a journal. Perhaps the implications were too frightening.

To my frequent and clumsy attempts at piercing this mystery, the Three Score and Ten have offered their usual enlightenment. The person questioned smiles beatifically and responds in some non sequitur that would make the babble of the Web’s worst village idiot seem like sage aphorisms in comparison. More often than not, they do not answer at all.

One day I stood in front of the one I have tagged as Del, stayed there until he had to acknowledge my presence, and asked, “Why are there no children?”

“We are the Three Score and Ten,” he said softly.

“Where are the babies?”

No response. No sense of evading the question, merely a blank stare.

I took a breath. “Who is the youngest among you?”

Del appeared to be thinking, wrestling with the concept. He was overmatched. I wondered if the Bikura had lost their time sense so completely that any such question was doomed. After a minute of silence, however, Del pointed to where Al was crouched in the sunlight, working with his crude hand loom, and said, “There is the last one to return.”

“To return?” I said. “From where?”

Del stared at me with no emotion, not even impatience. “You belong to the cruciform,” he said. “You must know the way of the cross.”

I nodded. I knew enough to recognize that in this direction lay one of the many conversational illogic-loops that usually derailed our dialogues. I hunted for some way to keep a grasp of the thin thread of information. “Then Al,” I said and pointed, “is the last to be born. To return. But others will … return?”

I was not sure that I understood my own question. How does one inquire about birth when the interviewee has no word for child and no concept of time? But Del seemed to understand. He nodded.

Encouraged, I asked, “Then when will the next of the Three Score and Ten be born? Return?”

“No one can return until one dies,” he said.

Suddenly I thought I understood. “So no new children … no one will be returned until someone dies,” I said. “You replace the missing one with another to keep the group at Three Score and Ten?”

Del responded with the type of silence I had come to interpret as assent.

The pattern seemed clear enough. The Bikura were quite serious about their Three Score and Ten. They kept the tribal population at seventy—the same number recorded on the passenger list of the dropship that crashed here four hundred years ago. Little chance of coincidence there. When someone died, they allowed a child to be born to replace the adult. Simple.

Simple but impossible. Nature and biology do not work that neatly. Besides the problem of minimum-herd population, there were other absurdities. Even though it is difficult to tell the ages of these smooth-skinned people, it is obvious that no more than ten years separates the oldest from the youngest. Although they act like children, I would guess their average age to be in the late thirties or mid-forties in standard years. So where are the very old? Where are the parents, aging uncles, and unmarried aunts? At this rate, the entire tribe will enter old age at approximately the same time. What happens when they all pass beyond childbearing age and it comes time to replace members of the tribe?

The Bikura lead dull, sedentary lives. The accident rate—even while living on the very edge of the Cleft—must be low. There are no predators. The seasonal variations are minimal and the food supply almost certainly remains stable. But, granted all this, there must have been times in the four-hundred-year history of this baffling group when disease swept the village, when more than the usual number of vines gave way and dropped citizens into the Cleft, or when
something
caused that abnormal cluster of sudden deaths that insurance companies have dreaded since time immemorial.

And then what? Do they breed to make up the difference and then revert to their current sexless behavior? Are the Bikura so different from every other recorded human society that they have a rutting period once every few years—once a decade?—once in a lifetime? It is doubtful.

I sit here in my hut and review the possibilities. One is that these people live
very
long lifetimes and can reproduce during most of that time, allowing for simple replacement of tribal casualties. Only this does not explain their common ages. And there is no mechanism to explain any such longevity. The best anti-aging drugs the Hegemony has to offer only manage to extend an active lifetime a bit over the hundred standard-year mark. Preventive health measures have spread the vitality of early middle age well into the late sixties—my age—but except for clonal transplants, bioengineering, and other perqs for the very rich, no one in the Worldweb can expect to begin planning a family when they are seventy or expect to dance at their hundred-and-tenth birthday party. If eating chalma roots or breathing the pure air of the Pinion Plateau had a dramatic effect on retarding aging, it would be a sure bet that everyone on Hyperion would be living here munching chalma, that this planet would have had a farcaster centuries ago, and that every citizen of the Hegemony who has a universal card would be planning to spend vacations and retirement here.

No, a more logical conclusion is that the Bikura live normal-length lives, have children at a normal rate, but kill them unless a replacement is required. They may practice abstinence or birth control—other than slaughtering the newborn—until the entire
band reaches an age where new blood will soon be needed. A mass-birthing time explains the apparent common age of the members of the tribe.

But who teaches the young? What happens to the parents and other older people? Do the Bikura pass along the rudiments of their crude excuse for a culture and then allow their own deaths? Would this be a “true death”—the rubbing out of an entire generation? Do the Three Score and Ten murder individuals at both ends of the bell-shaped age curve?

This type of speculation is useless. I am beginning to get furious at my own lack of problem-solving skills. Let’s form a strategy here and act on it, Paul. Get off your lazy, Jesuit ass.

PROBLEM
: How to tell the sexes apart?

SOLUTION
: Cajole or coerce a few of these poor devils into a medical exam. Find out what all the sex-role mystery and nudity taboo is about. A society that depends upon years of rigid sexual abstinence for population control is consistent with my new theory.

PROBLEM
: Why are they so fanatical about maintaining the same Three Score and Ten population that the lost dropship colony started with?

SOLUTION
: Keep pestering them until you find out.

PROBLEM
: Where are the children?

SOLUTION
: Keep pressing and poking until you find out. Perhaps the evening excursion down the cliff is related to all of this. There may be a nursery there. Or a pile of small bones.

PROBLEM
: What
is
this “belong to the cruciform” and “way of the cross” business if not a contorted vestige of the original colonists’ religious belief?

SOLUTION
: Find out by going to the source. Could their daily descent down the cliff be religious in nature?

PROBLEM
: What
is
down the cliff face?

SOLUTION
: Go down and see.

Tomorrow, if their pattern holds true, all threescore and ten of the Three Score and Ten will wander into the woods for several hours of foraging. This time I will not go with them.

This time I am going over the edge and down the cliff.

Day 105
:

   0930 hours—Thank You, O Lord, for allowing me to see what I have seen today.

Thank You, O Lord, for bringing me to this place at this time to see the proof of Your Presence.

1125 hours—Edouard … Edouard!

I have to return. To show you all! To show everyone.

I’ve packed everything I need, putting the imager disks and film in a pouch I wove from bestos leaves. I have food, water, the maser with its weakening charge. Tent. Sleep robes.

If only the arrestor rods had not been stolen!

The Bikura might have kept them. No, I’ve searched the hovels and the nearby forest. They would have no use for them.

It doesn’t matter!

I’ll leave today if I can. Otherwise, as soon as I can.

Edouard! I have it all here on the film and disks.

1400—

There is no way through the flame forests today. The smoke drove me back even before I penetrated the edge of the active zone.

I returned to the village and went over the holos. There is no mistake. The miracle is real.

1530 hours—

The Three Score and Ten will return any moment. What if they know … what if they can tell by looking at me that I have been
there
?

I could hide.

No, there is no need to hide. God did not bring me this far and let me see what I have seen only to let me die at the hands of these poor children.

1615 hours—

The Three Score and Ten returned and went to their huts without giving me a glance.

I sit here in the doorway of my own hut and cannot keep from smiling, from laughing, and from praying. Earlier I walked to the edge of the Cleft, said Mass, and took Communion. The villagers did not bother to watch.

How soon can I leave? Supervisor Orlandi and Tuk had said that the flame forest was fully active for three local months—a hundred and twenty days—then relatively quiet for two. Tuk and I arrived here on Day 87.…

I cannot wait another hundred days to bring the news to the world … to all of the worlds.

If only a skimmer would brave the weather and flame forests and pluck me out of here. If only I could access one of the datafix sats that serve the plantations.

Anything is possible. More miracles will occur.

2350 hours—

The Three Score and Ten have gone down into the Cleft. The voices of the evening wind choir are rising all around.

How I wish I could be with them now! There, below.

I will do the next best thing. I will drop to my knees here near the cliff edge and pray while the organ notes of the planet and sky sing what I now know is a hymn to a real and present God.

Day 106
:

I awoke today to a perfect morning. The sky was a deep turquoise; the sun was a sharp, blood-red stone set within. I stood outside my hut as the mists cleared, the arboreals ended their morning screech concert, and the air began to warm. Then I went in and viewed my tapes and disks.

I realize that in yesterday’s excited scribblings I mentioned nothing of what I found down the cliff. I will do so now. I have the disks, filmtapes, and comlog notes, but there is always the chance that only these personal journals will be found.

I lowered myself over the cliff edge at approximately 0730 hours yesterday morning. The Bikura were all foraging in the forest. The descent on vines had looked simple enough—they were bound around one another sufficiently to create a sort of ladder in most places—but as I swung out and began to let myself down, I could feel my heart pounding hard enough to be painful. There was a sheer three-thousand-meter drop to the rocks and river below. I kept a tight grip on at least two vines at all times and
centimetered my way down, trying not to look at the abyss beneath my feet.

It took me the better part of an hour to descend the hundred and fifty meters that I am sure the Bikura can cover in ten minutes. Eventually I reached the curve of an overhang. Some vines trailed away into space but most of them curled under the sheer slab of rock toward the cliff wall thirty meters in. Here and there the vines appeared to have been braided to form crude bridges upon which the Bikura probably walked with little or no help from their hands. I crawled along these braided strands, clutching other vines for support and uttering prayers I had not said since my boyhood. I stared straight ahead as if I could forget that there was only a seemingly infinite expanse of air under those swaying, creaking strands of vegetable matter.

There was a broad ledge along the cliff wall. I allowed three meters of it to separate me from the gulf before I squeezed through the vines and dropped two and a half meters to the stone.

The ledge was about five meters wide and it terminated a short distance to the northeast where the great mass of the overhang began. I followed a path along the ledge to the southwest and had gone twenty or thirty paces before I stopped in shock. It was a
path
. A path worn out of solid stone. Its shiny surface had been pushed centimeters below the level of the surrounding rock. Farther on, where the path descended a curving lip of ledge to a lower, wider level, steps had been cut into the stone but even these had been worn to the point that they seemed to sag in the middle.

I sat down for a second as the impact of this simple fact struck me. Even four centuries of daily travel by the Three Score and Ten could not account for such erosion of solid rock. Someone or something had used this path long before the Bikura colonists crashed here.
Someone or something had used this path for millennia
.

I stood and walked on. There was little noise except for the wind blowing gently along the half-kilometer-wide Cleft. I realized that I could hear the soft sound of the river far below.