The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (231 page)

Nemes strides from the elevator into the room, taking note of the furniture, the lanterns, the bookcases. The old man is in the kitchen. His head comes up when he hears the rapid footsteps. “Raul?” he says. “Aenea?”

“Exactly,” says Rhadamanth Nemes, inserting two fingers under the old priest’s collar bone and lifting him off the ground. “Where is the girl Aenea?” she asks softly. “Where are all of them?”

Amazingly, the blind priest does not cry out in pain. His worn teeth are clenched and his blind eyes stare at the ceiling, but he says only, “I do not know.”

Nemes nods and drops the priest to the floor. Straddling his chest, she sets her forefinger to his eye and fires a seeker microfilament into his brain, the seeker probe finding its way to a precise region of his cerebral cortex.

“Now, Father,” she says, “let us try again. Where is the girl? Who is with her? Where are they?”

The answers begin flowing through the microfilament as coded bursts of dying neural energy.

Our days with Father Glaucus were memorable for their comfort, their slowed pace after so many weeks of hurrying to and fro, and their conversations. Mostly, I think, I remember the conversations.

It was shortly before the Chitchatuk returned that I learned one of the reasons for A. Bettik’s having taken this voyage with me.

“Do you have siblings, M. Bettik?” Father Glaucus asked, still refusing to use the android honorific.

To my amazement A. Bettik said, “Yes.” How could this be? Androids were designed and biofactured, assembled out of component genetic elements and grown in vats … like organs grown for transplants, I had always thought.

“During our biofacture,” A. Bettik went on after the old priest prompted, “androids were traditionally cloned in growth colonies of five—usually four males and one female.”

“Quintuplets,” said Father Glaucus from his rocking chair. “You have three brothers and a sister.”

“Yes,” said the blue-skinned man.

“But surely you weren’t …” I began, and stopped. I rubbed my chin. I had shaved there at Father Glaucus’s strange home—it had seemed the civilized thing to do—and the feel of smooth skin almost startled me. “But surely you didn’t grow up together,” I said. “I mean, weren’t androids …”

“Biofactured as adults?” said A. Bettik with the same slight smile. “No. Our growth process was accelerated—we reached maturity at approximately eight standard years—but there was a period of infancy and childhood. This delay was one of the reasons that android biofacture was almost prohibitively expensive.”

“What are your brothers’ and sister’s names?” asked Father Glaucus.

A. Bettik closed the book he had been leafing through. “The tradition was to name each member of the quint group in alphabetic order,” he said. “My siblings included A. Anttibe, A. Corresson, A. Darria, and A. Evvik.”

“Which was your sister?” asked Aenea. “Darria?”

“Yes.”

“What was your childhood like?” said the girl.

“Primarily one of being educated, trained for duties, and having service parameters defined,” said A. Bettik.

Aenea was lying on the carpet, cupping her chin in her hands. “Did you go to school? Did you play?”

“We were tutored at the factory, although the bulk of our knowledge came through RNA transfer.” The bald man looked at Aenea. “And if by ‘play’ you mean to find time to relax with my siblings, the answer is yes.”

“What happened to your siblings?” asked Aenea.

A. Bettik slowly shook his head. “We were initially transferred to service together, but we were separated shortly thereafter. I was purchased by the Kingdom of Monaco-in-Exile and shipped to Asquith. It was my understanding at the time that each of us would render service in different parts of the Web or Outback.”

“And you never heard from any of them again?” I said.

“No,” said A. Bettik. “Although there were a large number of android laborers imported for the construction of the Poet’s City during the transfer of King William the Twenty-third’s colony to that world, most had been in service on Asquith before my time, and none had encountered one of my siblings during their transshipment periods.”

“During the Web days,” I said, “it should have been easy to search the other worlds by farcaster and datasphere.”

“Yes,” said A. Bettik, “except for the fact that androids were forbidden by law and RNA inhibitors to travel by farcasters or access the datasphere directly. And, of course, it became
illegal to biofacture or own androids within the Hegemony shortly after my own creation.”

“So you were used in the Outback,” I said. “On distant worlds like Hyperion.”

“Precisely, M. Endymion.”

I took a breath. “And is that why you wished to make this trip? To find one of your siblings … one of your brothers or your sister?”

A. Bettik smiled. “The odds against running across one of my clone siblings would be truly astronomical, M. Endymion. Not only would the coincidence be unlikely, but the chance that any of them would have survived the wholesale destruction of androids following the Fall would be very slight. But—” A. Bettik stopped and opened his hands as if explaining foolishness.

It was that last evening before the band returned that I heard Aenea discuss her theory of love for the first time. It began with her questioning us about Martin Silenus’s
Cantos
.

“All right,” she said, “I understand that it was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books as soon as the Pax took over anywhere, but what about those worlds not yet swallowed by the Pax when it came out? Did he receive the critical acclaim he had been hungry for?”

“I remember arguing the
Cantos
in seminary,” chuckled Father Glaucus. “We knew it was prohibited, but that just made the allure all the greater. We resisted reading Virgil, but waited our turn to read that dog-eared copy of doggerel that was the
Cantos
.”

“Was it doggerel?” asked Aenea. “I always thought of Uncle Martin as a great poet, but that’s only because he told me he was. My mother always told me that he was a pain in the ass.”

“Poets can be both,” said Father Glaucus. He chuckled again. “In fact, it seems they often are both. As I remember it, most of the critics dismissed the
Cantos
in what few literary circles existed before the Church absorbed them. Some took him seriously … as a poet, not as a chronicler of what actually happened on Hyperion just before the Fall. But most made
fun of his apotheosis of love toward the end of his second volume.…”

“I remember that,” I said. “The character of Sol—the old scholar whose daughter has been aging backward—he discovers that love was the answer to what he had called The Abraham Dilemma.”

“I remember one nasty critic who reviewed the poem in our capital city,” chuckled Father Glaucus, “who quoted some graffiti found on a wall of an excavated Old Earth city before the Hegira—‘If love is the answer, what was the question?’ ”

Aenea looked at me for an explanation.

“In the
Cantos
,” I said, “the scholar character seems to discover that the thing the AI Core had called the Void Which Binds is love. That love is a basic force of the universe, like gravity and electromagnetism, like strong and weak nuclear force. In the poem Sol sees that the Core Ultimate Intelligence will never be capable of understanding that empathy is inseparable from that source … from love. The old poet described love as ‘the subquantum impossibility that carried information/from photon to photon.…’ ”

“Teilhard would not have disagreed,” said Father Glaucus, “although he would have phrased it differently.”

“Anyway,” I said, “the almost universal reaction to the poem—according to Grandam—was that it was weakened by this sentimentality.”

Aenea was shaking her head. “Uncle Martin was right,” she said. “Love
is
one of the basic forces of the universe. I know that Sol Weintraub really believed he had discovered that. He said as much to Mother before he and his daughter disappeared in the Sphinx, riding it to the child’s future.”

The blind priest quit rocking and leaned forward, his elbows propped on his bony knees. His padded cassock would have looked comical on a less dignified man. “Is this more complicated than saying that God is love?” he said.

“Yes!” said Aenea, standing in front of the fire now. She seemed older to me at that moment, as if she had grown and matured during our months together. “The Greeks saw gravity at work, but explained it as one of the four elements—earth—‘rushing back to its family.’ What Sol Weintraub glimpsed was a bit of the
physics
of love … where it resides, how it works, how one can understand and harness it. The difference between ‘God is love’ and what Sol Weintraub saw—and what Uncle
Martin tried to explain—is the difference between the Greek explanation of gravity and Isaac Newton’s equations. One is a clever phrase. The other sees the
thing itself
.”

Father Glaucus shook his head “You make it sound quantifiable and mechanical, my dear.”

“No,” said Aenea, and her voice was about as strong as I had ever heard it. “Just as you explained how Teilhard knew that the universe evolving toward greater consciousness could never be purely mechanical … that the forces were not dispassionate, as science had always assumed, but derived from the absolute passion of divinity … well, so an understanding of love’s part of the Void Which Binds can never be mechanical. In a sense, it’s the essence of humanity.”

I stifled the urge to laugh. “So you’re saying that there needs to be another Isaac Newton to explain the physics of love?” I said. “To give us its laws of thermodynamics, its rules of entropy? To show us the calculus of love?”

“Yes!” said the girl, her dark eyes very bright.

Father Glaucus was still leaning forward, his hands now gripping his knees very tightly. “Are you that person, young Aenea from Hyperion?”

Aenea turned away quickly, walking almost out of the light toward the darkness and ice beyond the smart glass before turning and slowly stepping back into the circle of warmth. Her face was downcast. Her lashes were wet with tears. When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost tremulous. “Yes,” she said. “I am afraid I am. I do not want to be. But I am. Or could be … if I survive.”

This sent chills down my back. I was sorry we had started this conversation.

“Will you tell us now?” said Father Glaucus. His voice held the simple entreaty of a child.

Aenea raised her face and then slowly shook her head. “I cannot. I am not ready. I’m sorry, Father.”

The blind priest sat back in his chair and suddenly looked very old. “It is all right, my child. I have met you. That is something.”

Aenea went over to the old man in his rocking chair and hugged him for a long minute.

•     •     •

Cuchiat and his band returned before we had awakened and got out of our beds and sleeping robes the next morning. During our days with the Chitchatuk, we had almost become accustomed to sleeping a few hours at a time and then resuming the march in the eternal ice gloom, but here with Father Glaucus we followed his system—dimming the lights a bit in the innermost rooms for a full eight hours of “night.” It was my observation that one was always weary in a one-point-seven-g environment.

The Chitchatuk disliked coming very far into the building, so they stood in the open window, which was more ice tunnel than interior, and made a variation of their soft ululation until we hurriedly dressed and came running.

The band was back up to the healthy prime of twenty-three, although where they had found their new member—a woman—Father Glaucus did not ask and the rest of us were never to learn. When I came into the room, the image struck me then and it has stayed with me ever since—the powerful, wraith-robed Chitchatuk squatting in their most typical posture, Father Glaucus squatting and chatting with Cuchiat, the old priest’s quilted and heavily patched cassock spreading out on the ice like a black flower, the glow of the fuel-pellet lanterns prisming light from the crystals at the entrance to the ice cave, and—beyond the smart glass—that terrible sense of ice and weight and darkness pressing … pressing.

We had long since asked Father Glaucus to be our interpreter in making—remaking, actually—our request of help to the indigenies, and now the old man broached the subject, asking the white-robed figures if they would indeed like to help us get our raft downriver. The Chitchatuk responded in turn, each waiting to address Father Glaucus and the rest of us individually, and each saying essentially the same thing—they were ready to make the voyage.

It was not to be a simple voyage. Cuchiat confirmed that there were tunnels descending all the way to the river at the second arch, almost two hundred meters lower than where we now sat, and that there was a stretch of open water where the river passed beneath this second farcaster, but …

There were no connecting tunnels between here and the second arch some twenty-eight kilometers to the north.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Aenea. “Where do these tunnels come from, anyway? They’re too round and regular to
be crevasses or fissures. Did the Chitchatuk make them at some time in the past?”

Father Glaucus looked at the child with an expression of bearded incredulity. “You mean you don’t know?” he said. He turned his head and rattled syllables at the Chitchatuk. Their reaction was almost explosive—excited chatter, the near barking that we associated with laughter.

“I hope I didn’t offend you, my dear,” said the old priest. He was smiling, his blind eyes turned in Aenea’s direction. “It is just such a given of our existence here, that it struck me—and the Indivisible People—as strangely humorous that someone could move through the ice and not know.”

“The Indivisible People?” said A. Bettik.

“Chitchatuk,” said Father Glaucus. “It means ‘indivisible’—or perhaps closer to the actual shading of the word—‘incapable of being made more perfect.’ ”

Aenea was smiling. “I’m not offended. I’d just like in on the joke. What
did
make the tunnels?”

“The wraiths,” I guessed before the priest could speak.