The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (9 page)

“Yes,” I said, knowing now that these were the ones who had
touched me the night I slept through Tuk’s murder. Which meant that these were the ones who had murdered Tuk.

I waited. The hunting maser was in my pack. The pack was set against a small chalma not ten paces from me. Half a dozen Bikura stood between me and it. It did not matter. I knew at that instant that I would not use a weapon against another human being, even a human being who had murdered my guide and might well be planning to murder me at any second. I closed my eyes and said a silent Act of Contrition. When I opened my eyes, more of the Bikura had arrived. There was a cessation of movement, as if a quorum had been filled, a decision reached.

“Yes,” I said again into the silence, “I am the one who wears the cross.” I heard the comlog speaker pronounce the last word “cresfem.”

The Bikura nodded in unison and—as if from long practice as altar boys—all went to one knee, robes rustling softly, in a perfect genuflection.

I opened my mouth to speak and found that I had nothing to say. I closed my mouth.

The Bikura stood. A breeze moved the brittle chalma fronds and leaves together to make a dry, end-of-summer sound above us. The Bikura nearest to me on the left stepped closer, grasped my forearm with a touch of cool, strong fingers, and spoke a soft sentence that my comlog translated as, “Come. It is time to go to the houses and sleep.”

It was midafternoon. Wondering if the comlog had translated the word “sleep” properly or if it might be an idiom or metaphor for “die,” I nodded and followed them toward the village at the edge of the Cleft.

Now I sit in the hut and wait. There are rustling sounds. Someone else is awake now. I sit and wait.

Day
97:

The Bikura call themselves the “Three Score and Ten.”

I have spent the past twenty-six hours talking to them, observing, making notes when they take their two-hour, midafternoon “sleep,”
and generally trying to record as much data as I can before they decide to slit my throat.

Except now I am beginning to believe that they will not hurt me.

I spoke to them yesterday after our “sleep.” Sometimes they do not respond to questions and when they do the responses are little better than the grunts or divergent answers one receives from slow children. After their initial question and invitation at our first encounter, none of them originated a single query or comment my way.

I questioned them subtly, carefully, cautiously, and with the professional calm of a trained ethnologist. I asked the simplest, most factual questions possible to make sure that the comlog was functioning properly. It was. But the sum total of the answers left me almost as ignorant as I had been twenty-some hours before.

Finally, tired in body and spirit, I abandoned professional subtlety and asked the group I was sitting with, “Did you kill my companion?”

My three interlocutors did not look up from the weaving they were doing on a crude loom. “Yes,” said the one I have come to think of as Alpha because he had been the first to approach me in the forest, “we cut your companion’s throat with sharpened stones and held him down and silent while he struggled. He died the true death.”

“Why?” I asked after a moment. My voice sounded as dry as a corn husk crumbling.

“Why did he die the true death?” said Alpha, still not looking up. “Because all of his blood ran out and he stopped breathing.”

“No,” I said. “Why did you kill him?”

Alpha did not respond, but Betty—who may or may not be female and Alpha’s mate—looked up from her loom and said simply, “To make him die.”

“Why?”

The responses invariably came back and just as invariably failed to enlighten me one iota. After much questioning, I had ascertained that they had killed Tuk to make him die and that he had died because he had been killed.

“What is the difference between death and true death?” I asked, not trusting the comlog or my temper at this point.

The third Bikura, Del, grunted a response that the comlog interpreted as, “Your companion died the true death. You did not.”

Finally, in frustration far too close to rage, I snapped, “Why not? Why didn’t you kill me?”

All three stopped in the middle of their mindless weaving and looked at me. “You cannot be killed because you cannot die,” said Alpha. “You cannot die because you belong to the cruciform and follow the way of the cross.”

I had no idea why the damn machine would translate cross as “cross” one second and as “cruciform” the next.
Because you belong to the cruciform
.

A chill went through me, followed by the urge to laugh. Had I stumbled into that old adventure holo cliché—the lost tribe that worshiped the “god” that had tumbled into their jungle until the poor bastard cuts himself shaving or something, and the tribespeople, assured and a bit relieved at the obvious mortality of their visitor, offer up their erstwhile deity as a sacrifice?

It would have been funny if the image of Tuk’s bloodless face and raw-rimmed, gaping wound was not so fresh.

Their reaction to the cross certainly suggested that I had encountered a group of survivors of a once Christian colony—Catholics?—even though the data in the comlog insisted that the dropship of seventy colonists who had crashed on this plateau four hundred years ago had held only Neo-Kerwin Marxists, all of whom should have been indifferent if not openly hostile to the old religions.

I considered dropping the matter as being far too dangerous to pursue, but my stupid need to know drove me on. “Do you worship Jesus?” I asked.

Their blank expressions left no need for a verbal negative.

“Christ?” I tried again. “Jesus Christ? Christian? The Catholic Church?”

No interest.

“Catholic? Jesus? Mary? St. Peter? Paul? St. Teilhard?”

The comlog made noises but the words seemed to have no meaning for them.

“You follow the cross?” I said, flailing for some last contact.

All three looked at me. “We belong to the cruciform,” said Alpha.

I nodded, understanding nothing.

This evening I fell asleep briefly just before sunset and when I awoke it was to the organ-pipe music of the Cleft’s nightfall winds. It was much louder here on the village ledges. Even the hovels seemed to join the chorus as the rising gusts whistled and whined through stone gaps, flapping fronds, and crude smokeholes.

Something was wrong. It took me a groggy minute to realize that the village was abandoned. Every hut was empty. I sat on a cold boulder and wondered if my presence had sparked some mass exodus. The wind music had ended and meteors were beginning their nightly show through cracks in low clouds when I heard a sound behind me and turned to find all seventy of the Three Score and Ten behind me.

They walked past without a word and went to their huts. There were no lights. I imagined them sitting in their hovels, staring.

I stayed outside for some time before returning to my own hut. After a while I walked to the edge of the grassy shelf and stood where rock dropped away into the abyss. A cluster of vines and roots clung to the cliff face but appeared to end a few meters into space and hang there above emptiness. No vine could have been long enough to offer a way to the river two kilometers below.

But the Bikura had come from this direction.

Nothing made sense. I shook my head and went back to my hut.

Sitting here, writing by the light of the comlog diskey, I try to think of precautions I can take to insure that I will see the sunrise.

I can think of none.

Day 103
:

The more I learn, the less I understand.

I have moved most of my gear to the hut they leave empty for me here in the village.

I have taken photographs, recorded video and audio chips, and imaged a full holoscan of the village and its inhabitants. They do not seem to care. I project their images and they walk right through them, showing no interest. I play back their words to them and they smile and go back into their hovels to sit for hours, doing nothing,
saying nothing. I offer them trade trinkets and they take them without comment, check to see if they are edible, and then leave them lying. The grass is littered with plastic beads, mirrors, bits of colored cloth, and cheap pens.

I have set up the full medical lab but to no avail; the Three Score and Ten will not let me examine them, will not let me take blood samples, even though I have repeatedly shown them that it is painless, will not let me scan them with the diagnostic equipment—will not, in short, cooperate in any way. They do not argue. They do not explain. They simply turn away and go about their nonbusiness.

After a week I still cannot tell the males from the females. Their faces remind me of those visual puzzles that shift forms as you stare; sometimes Betty’s face looks undeniably female and ten seconds later the sense of gender is gone and I think of her (him?) as Beta again. Their voices undergo the same shift. Soft, well-modulated, sexless … they remind me of the poorly programmed homecomps one encounters on backward worlds.

I find myself hoping to catch a glimpse of a naked Bikura. This is not easy for a Jesuit of forty-eight standard years to admit. Still, it would not be an easy task even for a veteran voyeur. The nudity taboo seems absolute. They wear the long robes while awake and during their two-hour midday nap. They leave the village area to urinate and defecate, and I suspect that they do not remove the loose robes even then. They do not seem to bathe. One would suspect that this would cause olfactory problems, but there is no odor about these primitives except for the slight, sweet smell of chalma. “You must undress sometimes,” I said to Alpha one day, abandoning delicacy in favor of information. “No,” said Al and went elsewhere to sit and do nothing while fully dressed.

They have no names. I found this incredible at first, but now I am sure.

“We are all that was and will be,” said the shortest Bikura, one I think of as female and call Eppie. “We are the Three score and Ten.”

I searched the comlog records and confirmed what I suspected: in more than sixteen thousand known human societies, none are listed where there are no individual names at all. Even in the Lusushive
societies, individuals respond to their class category followed by a simple code.

I tell them my name and they stare. “Father Paul Duré, Father Paul Duré,” repeats the comlog translator but there is no attempt at even simple repetition.

Except for their mass disappearances each day before sunset and their common two-hour sleep time, they do very little as a group. Even their lodging arrangements appear random. Al will spend one naptime with Betty, the next with Gam, and the third with Zelda or Pete. No system or schedule is apparent. Every third day the entire group of seventy goes into the forest to forage and returns with berries, chalma roots and bark, fruit, and whatever else might be edible. I was sure they were vegetarians until I saw Del munching on the cold corpse of an infant arboreal. The little primate must have fallen from the high branches. It seems then that the Three Score and Ten do not disdain meat; they simply are too stupid to hunt and kill it.

When the Bikura are thirsty they walk almost three hundred meters to a stream that cascades into the Cleft. In spite of this inconvenience, there are no signs of water skins, jugs, or any type of pottery. I keep my reserve of water in ten-gallon plastic containers but the villagers take no notice. In my plummeting respect for these people, I do not find it unlikely that they have spent generations in a village with no handy water source.

“Who built the houses?” I ask. They have no word for village.

“The Three Score and Ten,” responds Will. I can tell him from the others only by a broken finger that did not mend well. Each of them has at least one such distinguishing feature, although sometimes I think it would be easier to tell crows apart.

“When did they build them?” I ask, although I should know by now that any question that starts with “when” will not receive an answer.

I receive no answer.

They do go into the Cleft each evening. Down the vines. On the third evening, I tried to observe this exodus but six of them turned me back from the edge and gently but persistently brought me back to my hut. It was the first observable action of the Bikura that had
hinted at aggression and I sat in some apprehension after they had gone.

The next evening as they departed I went quietly to my hut, not even peering out, but after they returned I retrieved the imager and its tripod from where I had left them near the edge. The timer had worked perfectly. The holos showed the Bikura grabbing the vines and scrambling down the cliff face as nimbly as the little arboreals that fill the chalma and weirwood forests. Then they disappeared under the overhang.

“What do you do when you go down the cliff each evening?” I asked Al the next day.

The native looked at me with the seraphic, Buddha smile I have learned to hate. “You belong to the cruciform,” he said as if that answered everything.

“Do you worship when you go down the cliff?” I asked.

No answer.

I thought a minute. “I also follow the cross,” I said, knowing that it would be translated as “belong to the cruciform.” Any day now I will not need the translator program. But this conversation was too important to leave to chance. “Does this mean that I should join you when you go down the cliff face?”

For a second I thought that Al was thinking. His brow furrowed and I realized that it was the first time that I had seen one of the Three Score and Ten come close to frowning. Then he said, “You cannot. You belong to the cruciform but you are not of the Three Score and Ten.”

I realized that it had taken every neuron and synapse in his brain to frame that distinction.

“What would you do if I did go down the cliff face?” I asked, expecting no response. Hypothetical questions almost always had as much luck as my time-based queries.

This time he did respond. The seraphic smile and untroubled countenance returned and Alpha said softly, “If you try to go down the cliff we will hold you down on the grass, take sharpened stones, cut your throat, and wait until your blood stops flowing and your heart stops beating.”