The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (333 page)

I come awake falling. I have been awake. The leaves of the Startree have shaded the pods for night and the stars to the out-system side are blazing. The voices do not diminish. The images do not fade. This is not like dreaming. This is a maelstrom of images and voices … thousands of voices in chorus, all clamoring to be heard. I had not remembered my mother’s voice until this moment. When Rabbi Schulmann cried out in Old Earth Polish and prayed in Yiddish, I had understood not only his voice but his thoughts
.

I am going mad
.

“No, my dear, you are not going mad,” whispers Aenea. She is floating against the warm pod wall with me, holding me. The chronometer on my comlog says that the sleep period along this region of the Biosphere Startree is almost over, that the leaves will be shifting to allow the sunlight in within the hour
.

The voices whisper and murmur and argue and sob. The images flit at the back of my brain like colors after a terrible blow to the head. I realize that I am holding myself stiffly, fists clenched, teeth clenched, neck veins straining, as against a terrible wind or wave of pain
.

“No, no,” Aenea is saying, her soft hands stroking my
cheek and temples. Sweat floats around me like a sour nimbus. “No, Raul, relax. You are so sensitive to this, my dear, just as I thought. Relax and allow the voices to subside. You can control this, my darling. You can listen when you wish, quiet them when you must.”

“But they never go away?” I say
.

“Not far away,” whispers Aenea. Ouster angels float in the sunlight beyond the leaf barrier sunward
.

“And you have listened to this since you were an infant?” I say
.

“Since before I was born,” says my darling
.

“My God, my God,” I say, holding my fists against my eyes. “My God.”

My name is Amnye Machen AI Ata and I am eleven standard years old when the Pax comes to my village of Qom-Riyadh. Our village is far from the cities, far from the few highways and skyways, far, even, from the caravan routes that crisscross the rock desert and the Burning Plains.

For two days the evening skies have shown the Pax ships burning like embers as they pass from east to west in what my father says is a place above the air. Yesterday the village radio carried orders from the imam at Al-Ghazali who heard over the phone lines from Omar that everyone in the High Reaches and the Burning Plains Oasis Camps are to assemble outside their yurts and wait. Father has gone to the meeting of the men inside the mud-walled mosque in our village.

The rest of my family stands outside our yurt. The other thirty families also wait. Our village poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, walks among us, trying to settle our nerves with verse, but even the adults are fearful.

My father has returned. He tells Mother that the mullah has decided that we cannot wait for the infidels to kill us. The village radio has not been able to raise the mosque at Al-Ghazali or Omar. Father thinks that the radio is broken again, but the mullah believes that the infidels have killed everyone west of the Burning Plains.

We hear the sound of shots from the front of the other yurts. Mother and my oldest sister want to run, but Father orders them to stay. There are screams. I watch the sky, waiting for the infidel Pax ships to reappear. When I look down again, the mullah’s enforcers are coming around the side of our yurt, setting new magazines in their rifles. Their faces are grim.

Father has us all hold hands. “God is great,” he says and
we respond, “God is great.” Even I know that “Islam” means submission to the merciful will of Allah.

At the last second, I see the embers in the sky—the Pax ships floating east to west across the zenith so high above.

“God is great!” cries Father.

I hear the shots.

“Aenea, I don’t know what these things mean.”

“Raul, they do not mean, they are.”

“They are real?”

“As real as any memories can be, my love.”

“But how? I can hear the voices … so many voices … as soon as I … touch one with my mind … these are stronger than my own memories, clearer.”

“They are memories, nonetheless, my love.”

“Of the dead …”

“These are, yes.”

“Learning their language …”

“In many ways we must learn their language, Raul. Their actual tongues … English, Yiddish, Polish, Parsi, Tamal, Greek, Mandarin … but also their hearts. The soul of their memory.”

“Are these ghosts speaking, Aenea?”

“There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life … when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us.”

“And these memories …”

“Resonate in the Void Which Binds.”

“How? All those billions of lives …”

“And thousands of races and billions of years, my love. Some of your mother’s memories are there … and my mother’s … but so are the life impressions of beings terribly far removed from us in space and time.”

“Can I touch those as well, Aenea?”

“Perhaps. With time and practice. It took me years to understand them. Even the sense impressions of life-forms so differently evolved are difficult to comprehend, much less their thoughts, memories, and emotions.”

“But you have done it?”

“I have tried.”

“Alien life-forms like the Seneschal Aluit or the Akerataeli?”

“Much more alien than that, Raul. The Seneschai lived hidden on Hebron near the human settlers for generations. And they are empaths—emotions were their primary language. The Akerataeli are quite different from us, but not so different from the Core entities whom my father visited.”

“My head hurts, kiddo. Can you help me stop these voices and images?”

“I can help you quiet them, my love. They will never really stop as long as we live. This is the blessing and burden of the communion with my blood. But before I show you how to quiet them, listen a few more minutes. It is almost leafturn and sunrise.”

My name was Lenar Hoyt, priest, but now I am Pope Urban XVI, and I am celebrating the Mass of Resurrection for John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa in St. Peter’s Basilica with more than five hundred of the Vatican’s most important faithful in attendance.

Standing at the altar, my hands outstretched, I read from the
Prayer of the Faithful
—

Cardinal Lourdusamy, who serves as my deacon for this Mass, intones—

Now, as the choir sings the Offertory Antiphon and the congregation kneels in echoing silence in anticipation of the Holy Eucharist, I turn back from the altar and say—

“Receive, Lord, these gifts which we offer You on behalf of Your servant, John Domenico Mustafa, Cardinal; You gave the reward of the high priesthood in this world; may he be briefly united with the company of Your Saints in the Kingdom of Heaven and return to us via Your Sacrament of Resurrection. Through Christ our Lord.”

The congregation responds in unison—

“Amen.”

I walk to Cardinal Mustafa’s coffin and resurrection crèche near the communion altar and sprinkle holy water on it, while praying—

The great organ in the Basilica thunders while the choir immediately begins singing the
Sanctus:

After Communion, after the Mass ends and the congregation departs, I walk slowly to the sacristy. I am sad and my heart hurts—literally. The heart disease has advanced once again, clogging my arteries and making every step and word painful. I think—
I must not tell Lourdusamy
.

That Cardinal appears as acolytes and altar boys help divest me of my garments.

“We have received a Gideon-drone courier, Your Holiness.”

“From which front?” I inquire.

“Not from the fleet, Holy Father,” says the Cardinal, frowning at a hardcopy message that he holds in his fat hands.

“From where then?” I say, holding out my hand impatiently. The message is written on thin vellum.

I look up at my Secretary of State. “Can you stop the fleet, Simon Augustino?”

His jowls seem to quiver. “No, Your Holiness. They made the jump more than twenty-four hours ago. They should be
almost finished with their accelerated resurrection schedule and commencing the attack within moments. We cannot outfit a drone and send it in time to recall them.”

I realize that my hand is shaking. I give the message back to Cardinal Lourdusamy. “Call in Marusyn and the other fleet commanders,” I say. “Tell them to bring every remaining capital fighting ship back to Pacem System. Immediately.”

“But Your Holiness,” says Lourdusamy, his voice urgent, “there are so many important task force missions under way at the present …”

“Immediately!” I snap.

Lourdusamy bows. “Immediately, Your Holiness.”

As I turn away, the pain in my chest and the shortness in my breath are like warnings from God that time is short.

“Aenea! The Pope …”

“Easy, my love. I’m here.”

“I was with the Pope … Lenar Hoyt … but he’s not dead, is he?”

“You are also learning the language of the living, Raul. Incredible that your first contact with another living person’s memories is with him. I think …”

“No time, Aenea! No time. His cardinal … Lourdusamy … brought your message. The Pope tried to recall the fleet, but Lourdusamy said that it was too late … that they jumped twenty-four hours ago and would be attacking any moment. That could be here, Aenea. It could be the fleet massing at Lacaille 9352 …”

“No!” Aenea’s cry brings me out of the cacophony of images and voices, memories and sense overlays, not banishing them completely, but making them recede to something not unlike loud music in an adjoining room.

Aenea has summoned a comlog unit from the cubby shelf and is calling both our ship and Navson Hamnim at the same time.

I try to focus on my friend and the moment, pulling clothes on as I do so, but like a person emerging from a vivid dream, the murmur of voices and other memories is still with me.

Father Captain Federico de Soya kneeling in prayer in his private cubby pod on the treeship
Yggdrasill,
only de Soya no longer thinks of himself as “Father-Captain,” but simply as “Father.” And he is unsure of even this title as he kneels and prays, prays as he has for hours this night, and longer hours in
the days and nights since the cruciform was removed from his chest and body by the communion with Aenea’s blood
.

Father de Soya prays for forgiveness of which—he knows beyond doubt—he is unworthy. He prays for forgiveness for his years as a Pax Fleet captain, his many battles, the lives he has taken, the beautiful works of man and God he has destroyed. Father Federico de Soya kneels in the one-sixth-g silence of his cubby and asks his Lord and Savior … the God of Mercy in which he had learned to believe and which he now doubts … to forgive him, not for his own sake, but so that his thoughts and actions in the months and years to come, or hours if his life is to be that short, might better serve his Lord …

I pull away from this contact with the sudden revulsion of someone realizing that he is becoming a voyeur. I understand immediately that if Aenea has known this “language of the living” for years, for her entire life, that she has almost certainly spent more energy denying it—avoiding these unsolicited entries into other people’s lives—than mastering it.