The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (271 page)

“The Church used to think so,” I said. “For almost three thousand years, the resurrection it offered was of the soul, not the body.”

“And do you believe in that other kind of resurrection?”

“No,” I said again, as quickly as I had before. I shook my head. “Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically … shallow.”

“Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said.

“Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said.

“No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’ ”

“A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said.

Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it.
Her
.

“Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”

I made a rude noise. “The Pax Church offers a more pragmatic certainty.”

Aenea nodded. “That may be its only recourse these days. Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.”

“Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago,” I said sternly. “Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars … pogroms … resistance to logic and science and medicine … not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.”

“Is all religion superstition then, Raul? All faith then folly?”

I squinted at her. The dim light from inside the shelter and the dimmer starlight outside played on her sharp cheekbones and the gentle curve of her chin. “What do you mean?” I said, correctly expecting a trap.

“If you had faith in me, would that be folly?”

“Faith in you … how?” I said, hearing my voice sounding suspicious, almost sullen. “As a friend? Or as a messiah?”

“What’s the difference?” asked Aenea, smiling again in that way that usually meant a challenge was in the offing.

“Faith in a friend is … friendship,” I said. “Loyalty.” I hesitated. “Love.”

“And faith in a messiah?” said Aenea, her eyes catching the light.

I made a brusque, throwing-away gesture. “That’s religion.”

“But what if your friend is the messiah?” she said, smiling openly now.

“You mean—‘What if your friend
thinks
she’s the messiah?’ ” I said. I shrugged again. “I guess you stay loyal to her and try to keep her out of the asylum.”

Aenea’s smile faded, but I sensed that it was not because of my harsh comment. Her gaze had turned inward. “I wish it were that simple, my dear friend.”

Touched, filled with a wave of anxiety as real as surging nausea, I said, “You were going to tell me why you were chosen as this messiah, kiddo. What makes you the bond between two worlds.”

The girl—young woman, I realized—nodded solemnly. “I was chosen simply because I was that first child of the Core and humankind.”

She had said that earlier. I nodded this time. “So those are the two worlds which you connect … the Core and us?”

“Two of the worlds, yes,” said Aenea, looking up at me again. “Not the only two. That’s precisely what messiahs
do
, Raul … bridge different worlds. Different eras. Provide the bond between two irreconcilable concepts.”

“And your connection to both these worlds makes you the messiah?” I said again.

Aenea shook her head quickly, almost impatiently. Something like anger glinted in her eyes. “No,” she said sharply. “I’m the messiah because of what I can
do
.”

I blinked at her vehemence. “What can you do, kiddo?”

Aenea held out her hand and gently touched me with it. “Remember when I said that the Church and Pax were right about me, Raul? That I was a virus?”

“Uh-huh.”

She squeezed my wrist. “I can
pass
that virus, Raul. I can infect others. Geometric progression. A plague of carriers.”

“Carriers of what?” I said. “Messiahhood?”

She shook her head. Her expression was so sad that it made me want to console her, put my arms around her. Her grip remained firm on my wrist. “No,” she said. “Just the next step in what we are. What we can be.”

I took a breath. “You talked about teaching the physics of love,” I said. “Of understanding love as a basic force of the universe. Is that the virus?”

Still holding my wrist, she looked at me a long moment. “That’s the source of the virus,” she said softly. “What I teach is how to
use
that energy.”

“How?” I whispered.

Aenea blinked slowly, as if she were the one dreaming and about to awaken. “Let’s say there are four steps,” she said. “Four stages. Four levels.”

I waited. Her fingers made a loop around my captured wrist.

“The first is learning the language of the dead,” she said.

“What does that …”

“Shhh!” Aenea had raised the first finger of her free hand to her lips to shush me.

“The second is learning the language of the living,” she said.

I nodded, not understanding either phrase.

“The third is hearing the music of the spheres,” she whispered.

In my reading at Taliesin West, I had run across this ancient phrase: it was all mixed up with astrology, the pre-Scientific Age on Old Earth, Kepler’s little wooden models of a solar system predicated on perfect shapes, shells of stars and planets being moved by angels … volumes of double-talk. I had no idea what my friend was talking about and how it could apply to an age when humanity moved faster than light through the spiral arm of the galaxy.

“The fourth step,” she said, her gaze turned inward again, “is learning to take the first step.”

“The first step,” I repeated, confused. “You mean the first step you mentioned … what was it? Learning the language of the dead?”

Aenea shook her head, slowly bringing me into focus. It was as if she had been elsewhere for a moment. “No,” she said, “I mean
taking the first step
.”

Almost holding my breath, I said, “All right. I’m ready, kiddo. Teach me.”

Aenea smiled again. “That’s the irony, Raul, my love. If I
choose to do this, I’ll always be known as the One Who Teaches. But the silly thing is, I don’t have to teach it. I only have to share this virus to impart each of these stages to those who wish to learn.”

I looked down at where her slim fingers encircled a part of my wrist. “So you’ve already given me this … virus?” I said. I felt nothing except the usual electric tingle that her touch always created in me.

My friend laughed. “No, Raul. You’re not ready. And it takes communion to share the virus, not just contact. And I haven’t decided what to do … if I
should
do this.”

“To share with me?” I said, thinking,
Communion?

“To share with everyone,” she whispered, serious again. “With everyone ready to learn.” She looked directly at me again. Somewhere in the desert, a coyote was yipping. “These … levels, stages … can’t coexist with a cruciform, Raul.”

“So the born-again can’t learn?” I said. This would rule out the vast majority of human beings.

She shook her head. “They can learn … they just can’t stay born-again. The cruciform has to go.”

I let out my breath. I did not understand most of this, but that’s because it seemed to be double-talk.
Don’t all would-be messiahs speak double-talk?
asked the cynical part of me in Grandam’s level voice. Aloud, I said, “There’s no way to remove a cruciform without killing the person wearing it. The true death.” I had always wondered if this fact had been the main reason I had been unwilling to go under the cross. Or perhaps it was just my youthful belief in my own immortality.

Aenea did not respond directly. She said, “You like the Amoiete Spectrum Helix people, don’t you?”

Blinking, I tried to understand this. Had I dreamed that phrase, those people, that pain? Wasn’t I dreaming now? Or was this a memory of a real conversation? But Aenea knew nothing of Dem Ria, Dem Loa, and the others. The night and stone-and-canvas shelter seemed to ripple like a shredding dreamscape.

“I like them,” I said, feeling my friend remove her fingers from my wrist.
Wasn’t my wrist shackled to the headboard?

Aenea nodded and sipped her cooling tea. “There’s hope for the Spectrum Helix people. And for all the thousands of other cultures which have reverted or sprung up since the Fall. The Hegemony meant homogeneity, Raul. The Pax means even more. The human genome … the human soul … distrusts
homogeneity, Raul. It—they—are always ready to take a chance, to risk change and diversity.”

“Aenea,” I said, reaching for her. “I don’t … we can’t …” There was a terrible sense of falling and the dreamscape came apart like thin cardboard in a hard rain. I could not see my friend.

“Wake up, Raul. They are coming for you. The Pax is coming.”

I tried to awaken, groping toward consciousness like a sluggish machine crawling uphill, but the weight of fatigue and the painkillers kept dragging me down. I did not understand why Aenea wanted me awake. We were conversing so well in the dream.

“Wake up, Raul Endymion.”
Wek op, Root Endmyun
. It was not Aenea. Even before I was fully awake and focused I recognized the soft voice and thick dialect of Dem Ria.

I sat straight up. The woman was undressing me! I realized that she had pulled the loose nightshirt off and was tugging my undershirt on—cleaned and smelling of fresh breezes now, but unmistakably my undershirt. My undershorts were already on. My twill pants, overshirt, and vest were laid across the bottom of the bed. How had she done this with the handcuff on my …

I stared at my wrist. The handcuffs were lying open on the bedclothes. My arm tingled painfully as circulation returned. I licked my lips and tried to speak without slurring. “The Pax? Coming?”

Dem Ria pulled my shirt on as if I were her child, Bin … or younger. I motioned her hands away and tried to close the buttons with suddenly awkward fingers. They had used buttons rather than sealtabs at Taliesin West on Old Earth. I thought I had grown used to them, but this was taking forever.

“… and we heard on the radio that a dropship had landed at Bombasino. There are four people in unknown uniforms—two men, two women. They were asking the Commandant about you. They just lifted off—the dropship and three skimmers. They will be here in four minutes. Perhaps less.”

“Radio?” I said stupidly. “I thought you said that the radio didn’t work. Isn’t that why the priest went to the base to get the doctor?”

“Father
Clifton
’s radio was not working,” whispered Dem Ria, pulling me to my feet. She held me steady as I stepped into my trousers. “We have radios … tightbeam transmitters … satellite relays … all of which the Pax knows nothing about. And spies in place. One has warned us … hurry, Raul Endymion. The ships will be here in a minute.”

I came fully awake then, literally flushed with a surge of anger and hopelessness that threatened to wash me away.
Why won’t these bastards leave me alone?
Four people in unknown uniforms. Pax, obviously. Evidently their search for Aenea, A. Bettik, and me had not ended when the priest-captain—de Soya—had let us escape the trap on God’s Grove more than four years earlier.

I looked at the chronometer readout on my comlog. The ships would be landing in a minute or so. There was nowhere I could run in that time where Pax troopers would not find me. “Let me go,” I said, pulling away from the short woman in the blue robe. The window was open, the afternoon breeze coming through the curtains. I imagined that I could hear the near-ultrasonic hum of skimmers. “I have to get away from your house …” I had images of the Pax torching the home with young Ces Ambre and Bin still in it.

Dem Ria pulled me back from the window. At that moment, the man of the household—young Alem Mikail Dem Alem—came in with Dem Loa. They were carrying the Lusian bulk of the Pax trooper who had been left to guard me. Ces Ambre, her dark eyes bright, was lifting the guard’s feet while Bin struggled to pull one of the man’s huge boots off. The Lusian was fast asleep, mouth open, drool moistening the high collar of his combat fatigues.

I looked at Dem Ria.

“Dem Loa brought him some tea about fifteen minutes ago,” she said softly. She made a graceful gesture that caused the blue sleeve of her robe to billow. “I am afraid that we used the rest of your ultramorph prescription, Raul Endymion.”

“I have to go …” I began. The ache in my back was bearable, but my legs were shaky.

“No,” said Dem Ria. “They will catch you within minutes.” She pointed to the window. From outside there came the unmistakable subsonic rumble of a dropship on EM drive, followed by the thud and bark of its thrusters. The thing must be hovering right above the village, seeking a landing site. A second
later the window vibrated to a triple sonic boom and two black skimmers banked above the adobe buildings next door.

Alem Mikail had stripped the Lusian to his thermal-weave underwear and had laid him out on the bed. Now he snapped the man’s massive right wrist into the handcuffs and snicked the other cuff around the headboard bar. Dem Loa and Ces Ambre were sweeping up the layers of fatigue clothing, body armor, and huge boots and stuffing them in a laundry bag. Little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem tossed the guard’s helmet in the bag. The thin boy was carrying the heavy flechette pistol. I started at the sight—children and weapons was a mix I learned to avoid even when I was a child myself, learning to handle power weapons while our caravan rumbled its way across the Hyperion moors—but Alem smiled and took the pistol from the boy, patting him on the back. It was obvious from the way Bin had held the weapon—fingers away from the trigger guard, pointing the muzzle away from himself and his father, checking the safety indicator even as he gave the pistol up—that he had handled such a device before.

Bin smiled at me, took the heavy bag with the guard’s clothing in it, and ran out of the room. The noise outside rose to a crescendo and I turned to look out the window.