The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (187 page)

He has been reborn only twice before, but each time there had been a priest there to greet him, to give him the ceremonial sip of sacramental wine from the cup and then the customary glass of orange juice. There had been resurrection experts there to talk to him, explain things to him, until his befuddled mind began to work again.

This time there are only the claustrophobic, curved walls of the resurrection creche. Telltales blink and readouts share lines of print and symbols. De Soya cannot read yet. He feels lucky to be thinking at all. He sits up and dangles his legs over the edge of the resurrection bed.

My legs. I have two of them
. He is naked, of course, his skin pink and gleaming in the strange, parboiled wetness of the resurrection tank, and now he feels his ribs, his abdomen, his left leg—all the places slashed and ruined by the demon. He is perfect. There is no sign of the terrible wound that had separated his leg from his body.

“Raphael?”

“Yes, Father Captain?” The voice is angelic, which is to say, totally devoid of sexual identity. De Soya finds it soothing.

“Where are we?”

“Parvati System, Father Captain.”

“The others?” De Soya has only the foggiest memory of Sergeant Gregorius and his two surviving squad members. No memory of boarding the courier ship with them.

“Being awakened as we speak, Father Captain.”

“How much time has passed?”

“Just a bit less than four days since the sergeant brought you aboard, Father Captain. The enhanced jump was carried out within the hour of your installation in the resurrection creche. We have been station-keeping ten AUs from the world of Parvati, as per your instructions via Sergeant Gregorius, for the three days of your resurrection.”

De Soya nods his understanding. Even that slight motion is painful. Every cell in his body aches from resurrection. But the pain is a healthy ache, unlike the terrible pain of his wounds. “Have you contacted the Pax authorities on Parvati?”

“No, Father Captain.”

“Good.” Parvati had been a remote colony world during the days of the Hegemony; now it is a remote Pax colony. It holds no interstellar spacecraft—Pax military or Mercantilus—and only a small military contingent and a few crude interplanetary ships. If the girl was going to be captured in this system, the
Raphael
would have to do the capturing.

“Update on the girl’s ship?” he says.

“The unidentified spacecraft spun up two hours and eighteen minutes before we did,” said
Raphael
. “The translation coordinates were undoubtedly for Parvati System. Arrival time for the unidentified ship is approximately two months, three weeks, two days, and seventeen hours.”

“Thank you,” says de Soya. “When Gregorius and the others are revived and dressed, have them meet me in the situation room.”

“Yes, Father Captain.”

“Thank you,” he says again. He thinks,
Two months, three weeks, two days … Mother of Mercy, what am I going to do for almost three months in this backwater system?
Perhaps he had not thought through this clearly. Certainly he had been distracted by trauma, pain, and drugs. But the next nearest Pax system was Renaissance Vector, which was ten days shiptime travel from Parvati, five months time-debt—three and a half days and two months after the girl’s ship would arrive from
Hyperion System. No, he might not have been thinking clearly—he is not now, he realizes—but he had made the right decision. Better to come here and think things over.

I could jump to Pacem. Ask for instructions directly from Pax Command … from the Pope, even. Recuperate for two and a half months and jump back here with time to spare
.

De Soya shakes his head, grimaces from the discomfort of doing so. He has his instructions. Capture the girl and return her to Pacem. Returning to the Vatican would be only an admission of failure. Perhaps they would send someone else. During the preflight briefing, Captain Marget Wu had made it clear that the
Raphael
was unique—the only armed, six-person archangel-class courier ship in existence—and although another might have come on-line in the months of time-debt that have elapsed since he left Pacem, there is little sense in returning now. If
Raphael
was still the only armed archangel, all de Soya could do would be add two more troopers to the ship’s roster.

Death and resurrection are not to be taken lightly
. That precept had been driven home time and again in de Soya’s catechism when he was growing up. Just because the sacrament exists and is offered to the faithful, does not mean it should be exercised without great solemnity and restraint.

No, I’ll talk to Gregorius and the others and figure things out here. We can make our plans, then use the cryogenic-fugue cubbies to wait the last couple of months. When the girl’s ship arrives, the
St. Anthony
will be in hot pursuit. Between the torchship and
Raphael,
we should be able to interdict the ship, board her, and retrieve the girl without problem
.

Logically, this all makes sense to de Soya’s aching brain, but another part of his mind is whispering,
Without problem … this is what you thought about the Hyperion mission
.

Father Captain de Soya groans, lifts himself down from the resurrection couch, and pads off in search of a shower, hot coffee, and some clothes.

I knew little about the principles of the Hawking drive when I first experienced it years ago; I know little more about it now. The fact that it was essentially (if accidentally) the brainchild of someone who lived in the twentieth century, Christian Era, boggled my mind then as it does now, but not nearly as much as the experience itself.

We met in the library—formally known as the navigation level, the ship informed us—a few minutes before translation to C-plus speeds. I was dressed in my spare set of clothes and my hair was wet, as was Aenea’s. The child wore only a thick robe, which she must have found in the Consul’s closet, because the garment was far too large for her. She looked even younger than her twelve years, swallowed as she was in all those yards of terry cloth.

“Shouldn’t we be getting to the cryogenic-fugue couches?” I asked.

“Why?” said Aenea. “Don’t you want to see the fun?”

I frowned. All the offworld hunters and military instructors I had spoken to had spent their C-plus time in fugue. That’s the way humans had always spent their time between the stars. Something about the effect of the Hawking field on the body and mind. I had images of hallucinations, waking nightmares,
and unspeakable pain. I said as much while trying to sound calm about it.

“Mother and Uncle Martin told me that C-plus can be endured,” said the girl. “Even enjoyed. It just takes some getting used to.”

“And this ship was modified by the Ousters to make it easier,” said A. Bettik. Aenea and I were sitting at the low glass table in the middle of the library area; the android stood to one side. Try as I might to treat him as an equal, A. Bettik insisted on acting like a servant. I resolved to quit being an egalitarian horse’s ass about it and to let him act any way he wanted.

“Indeed,” said the ship, “the modifications included an enhanced containment field capability, which makes the side effects of C-plus travel much less disagreeable.”

“What exactly
are
the side effects?” I asked, not willing to show the full extent of my naïveté, but also not willing to suffer if I didn’t have to.

The android, the girl, and I looked at each other. “I have traveled between the stars in centuries past,” A. Bettik said at last, “but I was always in fugue. In storage, actually. We androids were shipped in cargo holds, stacked like frozen sides of beef, I am told.”

Now the girl and I looked at each other, embarrassed to meet the blue-skinned man’s gaze.

The ship made a noise that sounded remarkably like someone clearing his throat. “Actually,” it said, “from my observations of human passengers—which, I must say, is suspect because …”

“Because your memory is hazy,” the girl and I said in unison. We looked at each other again and laughed. “Sorry, Ship,” said Aenea. “Go on.”

“I was just going to say that from my observations, the primary effect of the C-plus environment on humans is some visual confusion, mental depression brought about by the field, and simple boredom. I believe that cryogenic fugue was developed for the long voyages, and is used as a convenience for shorter trips such as this.”

“And your … ah … Ouster modifications ameliorate these side effects?” I said.

“They are designed to,” replied the ship. “All except boredom, of course. That is a peculiarly human phenomenon, and I do not believe that a cure has been found.” There was a moment
of silence, and then the ship said, “We will reach the translation point in two minutes ten seconds. All systems are functioning optimally. Still no pursuit, although the
St. Anthony
is tracking us on its long-range detectors.”

Aenea stood up. “Let’s go down and watch the shift to C-plus.”

“Go down and watch?” I said. “Where? The holopit?”

“No,” called the girl from the stairway. “From outside.”

The spaceship had a balcony. I hadn’t known that. One could stand outside on it even while the ship was hurtling through space, preparing to translate to C-plus pseudo-velocities. I hadn’t known that—and if I had, I would not have believed it.

“Extend the balcony, please,” the girl had said to the ship, and the ship had extended the balcony—the Steinway moving out with it—and we’d walked through the open archway into space. Well, not really into space, of course; even I, the provincial shepherd, knew that our eardrums would have exploded, our eyes burst, and our blood boiled in our bodies if we had stepped into hard vacuum. But it
looked
as if we were walking out into hard vacuum.

“Is this safe?” I asked, leaning against the railing. Hyperion was a star-sized speck behind us, Hyperion’s star a blazing sun to port, but the plasma tail of our fusion drive—tens of klicks long—gave the impression that we were perched precariously on a tall blue pillar. The effect was a definite inducement to acrophobia, the illusion of standing unprotected in space created something akin to agoraphobia. I had not known until that instant that I was susceptible to any phobia.

“If the containment field fails for a second,” said A. Bettik, “under this g-load and velocity, we will die immediately. It matters little if we are inside or outside the ship.”

“Radiation?” I said.

“The field deflects cosmic and harmful solar radiation, of course,” said the android, “and opaques the view of Hyperion’s sun so that we do not go blind when we stare at it. Other than that, it allows the visible spectrum through quite nicely.”

“Yes,” I said, not convinced. I stepped back from the railing.

“Thirty seconds to translation,” said the ship. Even out here, its voice seemed to emanate from midair.

Aenea sat at the piano bench and began playing. I did not recognize the tune, but it sounded classical … something from the twenty-sixth century, perhaps.

I guess that I had expected the ship to speak again prior to the actual moment of translation—intone a final countdown or something—but there was no announcement. Suddenly the Hawking drive took over from the fusion drive; there was a momentary hum, which seemed to come from my bones; a terrible vertigo flooded over me and through me—it felt as if I were being turned inside out, painlessly but relentlessly; and then the sensation was gone before I could really comprehend it.

Space was also gone. By space, I mean the scene that I had been viewing less than a second earlier—Hyperion’s brilliant sun, the receding disk of the planet itself, the bright glare along the hull of the ship, the few bright stars visible through that glare, even the pillar of blue flame upon which we had been perched—all gone. In its place was … It is hard to describe.

The ship was still there, looming “above and below” us—the balcony upon which we stood still seemed substantial—but there seemed to be no light striking any part of it. I realize how absurd that sounds even as I write the words—there must be reflected light for anything to be seen—but the effect was truly as if part of my eyes had ceased working, and while they registered the
shape
and
mass
of the ship, light seemed to be missing.

Beyond the ship, the universe had contracted into a blue sphere near the bow and a red sphere behind the fins at the stern. I knew enough basic science to have expected a Doppler effect, but this was a false effect, since we had not been anywhere near the speed of light until translation to C-plus and were now far beyond it within the Hawking fold. Nonetheless, the blue and red circles of light—I could make out stars clustered in both spheres if I stared hard enough—now migrated farther to the bow and stern, shrinking to tiny dots of color. In between, filling the vast field of vision, there was … nothing. By that, I do not mean blackness or darkness. I mean void. I mean the sense of sickening nonsight one has when trying to look into a blind spot. I mean a nothing so intense that the vertigo it induced almost immediately changed to nausea within
me, racking my system as violently as the transitory sense of being pulled inside out had seconds before.

“My God!” I managed to say, gripping the rail tightly and squeezing my eyes shut. It did not help. The void was there as well. I understood at that second why interstellar voyagers always opted for cryogenic fugue.

Incredibly, unbelievably, Aenea continued playing the piano. The notes were clear, crystalline, as if unmodified by any connecting medium. Even with my eyes closed I could see A. Bettik standing by the door, blue face raised to the void. No, I realized, he was no longer blue … colors did not exist here. Nor did black, white, or gray. I wondered if humans who had been blind since birth dreamed of light and colors in this mad way.

“Compensating,” said the ship, and its voice had the same crystalline quality as Aenea’s piano notes.

Suddenly the void collapsed in on itself, vision returned, and the spheres of red and blue returned fore and aft. Within seconds the blue sphere from the stern migrated along the ship like a doughnut passing over a writing stylus, it merged with the red sphere at the bow, and colored geometries burst without warning from the forward sphere like flying creatures emerging from an egg. I say “colored geometries,” but this does nothing to share the complex reality: fractal-generated shapes pulsed and coiled and twisted through what had been the void. Spiral forms, spiked with their own subgeometries, curled in on themselves, spitting smaller forms of the same cobalt and blood-red brilliance. Yellow ovoids became pulsar-precise explosions of light. Mauve and indigo helixes, looking like the universe’s DNA, spiraled past us. I could
hear
these colors like distant thunder, like the pounding of surf just beyond the horizon.