The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (256 page)

Cardinal Mustafa, the Grand Inquisitor, moved majestically toward the altar to cast the second vote.

It was more than an hour later that the votes were tallied. The first Scrutineer shook the receptacle to mix the votes. The second Scrutineer counted them—including the six votes copied from the interactive holos—depositing each in a second receptacle. The count equaled the number of voting cardinals in the Conclave. The Scrutiny proceeded.

The first Scrutineer unfolded a card, wrote down the name on it, and passed the card to the second Scrutineer, who made a note and passed it to the third and final Scrutineer. This man—Cardinal Couesnongle as it turned out—said the name aloud before making a note of it.

In each of the stalls, a cardinal jotted the name on a ’scriber pad provided by the Scrutineers. At the end of the Conclave, the ’scribers would be scrambled, their files deleted so that no record of the voting would remain.

And so the voting proceeded. For Lourdusamy as for the rest of the living cardinals present, the only suspense was whether
the dissident cardinal-electors from the Acclamation would actually put someone else’s name into play.

As each card was read, the last Scrutineer ran a threaded needle through the word “
Eligo
” and slid the card down the thread. When all of the ballots had been read aloud, knots were tied in each end of the thread.

The winning candidate was admitted to the Chapel. Standing before the altar in a simple black cassock, the man looked humble and a bit overwhelmed.

Standing before him, the senior Deacon Cardinal said, “Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?”

“I do so accept it,” said the priest.

At this point, a stall was brought out and set behind the priest. The Cardinal Deacon raised his hands and intoned, “Thus accepting your canonical election, this gathering does—in the sight of God Almighty—acknowledge you as Bishop of the Church of Rome, true Pope, and Head of the College of Bishops. May God advise you well as He grants you full and absolute power over the Church of Jesus Christ.”

“Amen,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy and pulled the cord that lowered the canopy over his stall. All eighty-three physical canopies and thirty-seven holographic ones lowered at the same time, until only the new Pope’s remained raised. The priest—now pontiff—sat back in the seat beneath the papal canopy.

“What name do you choose as Supreme Pontiff?” asked the Deacon Cardinal.

“I choose the name Urban the Sixteenth,” said the seated priest.

There was a murmuring and hum from the cardinals’ stalls. The Cardinal Deacon held out his hand and he and the other Scrutineers led the priest from the Chapel. The murmuring and whispering rose in volume.

Cardinal Mustafa leaned out of his stall and said to Lourdusamy, “He must be thinking of Urban the Second. Urban the Fifteenth was a sniveling little coward in the twenty-ninth century who did little but read detective novels and write love letters to his former mistress.”

“Urban the Second,” mused Lourdusamy. “Yes, of course.”

After several minutes, the Scrutineers returned with the priest—now the Pope dressed in pure white—a white-caped cassock, a white
zuchetto
or skullcap, a pectoral cross, and a white fascia sash. Cardinal Lourdusamy went to his knees on
the stone floor of the Chapel, as did all the other cardinals real and holographic, as the new Pontiff gave his first benediction.

Then the Scrutineers and the attending cardinals went to the stove to burn the votes now tethered on black thread, adding enough
bianco
chemical to make sure that the
sfumata
would indeed be white smoke.

The cardinals filed out of the Sistine Chapel and walked the ancient paths and corridors to St. Peter’s, where the senior Cardinal Deacon went alone onto the balcony to announce the name of the new Pontiff to the waiting multitudes.

Among the five hundred thousand waiting individuals in the multitude squeezed into, out of, and around St. Peter’s Square that morning was Father Captain Federico de Soya. He had been released from his de facto imprisonment at the Legionaries rectory only hours before. He was to report to Pax Fleet’s spaceport later that afternoon for shuttle to his new command. Walking through the Vatican, de Soya had followed the crowds—then had been engulfed by them—as men, women, and children had flowed like a great river toward the Square.

A great cheer had gone up when the puffs of white smoke first became visible from the stovepipe. The impossibly thick throng beneath the balcony, of St. Peter’s somehow became thicker as tens of thousands more flowed around the colonnades and past the statuary. Hundreds of Swiss Guard troopers held the crowd back from the entrance to the Basilica and away from private areas.

When the Senior Deacon emerged and announced that the new Pope was to be called His Holiness Urban the XVI, a great gasp went up from the crowd. De Soya found himself gaping in surprise and shock. Everyone had expected Julius XV. The thought of anyone else as Pope was … well, unthinkable.

Then the new Pontiff stepped onto the balcony and the gasps turned to cheers that went on and on and on.

It was Pope Julius—the familiar face, the high forehead, the sad eyes. Father Lenar Hoyt, the savior of the Church, had once again been elected. His Holiness raised his hand in the familiar benediction and waited for the crowd to stop cheering so that he could speak, but the crowd would not stop cheering. The roar rose from half a million throats and went on and on.

Why Urban XVI?
wondered Father Captain de Soya. He had
read and studied enough history of the Church in his years as a Jesuit. Quickly he thumbed back through his mental notes on the Urban popes … most were forgettable or worse. Why …

“Damn,” Father Captain de Soya said aloud, the soft curse lost under the continuing roar of the faithful filling St. Peter’s Square. “Damn,” he said again.

Even before the crowd quieted enough for the new-old Pontiff to speak, to explain his choice of names, to announce what de Soya knew had to be announced, the father-captain understood. And his heart sank with that understanding.

Urban II had served from
A.D
. 1088 to 1099. At the synod the Pope had called in Clermont in … November, in the year 1095, de Soya thought … Urban II had made his call for holy war against the Muslims in the Near East, for the rescue of Byzantium, and for the liberation of all eastern Christian holy places from Muslim domination. That call had led to the First Crusade … the first of many bloody campaigns.

The crowd finally quieted. Pope Urban XVI began to speak, the familiar but newly energized voice rising and falling over the heads of the half-million faithful listening in person and the billions listening via live broadcast.

Father Captain de Soya turned away even before the new Pope began to speak. He pushed and elbowed his way back through the unmoving crowd, trying to escape the suddenly claustrophobic confines of St. Peter’s Square.

It was no use. The crowd was rapt and joyous and de Soya was trapped in the mob. The words from the new Pontiff were also joyous and impassioned. Father Captain de Soya stood, unable to escape, and bowed his head. As the crowd began cheering and crying “
Deus le volt!
”—God wills it—de Soya began to weep.

Crusade. Glory. A final resolution of the Ouster Problem. Death beyond imagining. Destruction beyond imagining. Father Captain de Soya squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, but the vision of charged particle beams flaring against the blackness of space, of entire worlds burning, of oceans turning to steam and continents into molten rivers of lava, visions of orbital forests exploding into smoke, of charred bodies tumbling in zero-g, of fragile, winged creatures flaring and charring and expanding into ash …

De Soya wept while billions cheered.

It has been my experience that late-night departures and farewells are the hardest on the spirit.

The military was especially good at beginning major voyages in the middle of the night. During my time in the Hyperion Home Guard, it seemed that all important troop movements began in the wee hours. I began to associate that odd blend of fear and excitement, dread and anticipation, with predawn darkness and the smell of
lateness
. Aenea had said that I would be leaving that night of her announcement to the Fellowship, but it took time to load the kayak, for me to pack my gear and decide what to leave behind forever, and to close up my tent and work area in the compound, so we weren’t airborne in the dropship until after two
A.M
. and it was almost sunrise before we reached our destination.

I admit that I felt rushed and ordered about by the girl’s preemptive announcement. Many people had come to look to Aenea for leadership and advice during the four years we spent at Taliesin West, but I wasn’t one of those people. I was thirty-two years old. Aenea was sixteen. It was my job to watch out for her, to protect her, and—if it came to that—to tell
her
what to do and when to do it. I didn’t like this turn of events one bit.

I’d assumed that A. Bettik would be flying with us to wherever I was supposed to shove off, but Aenea said that the android would be staying behind at the compound, so I wasted
another twenty minutes tracking him down and saying goodbye.

“M. Aenea says that we will meet up again in due course,” said the blue man, “so I am confident that we shall, M. Endymion.”

“Raul,” I said for the five hundredth time. “Call me Raul.”

“Of course,” said A. Bettik with that slight smile that suggested insubordination.

“Fuck it,” I said eloquently and stuck out my hand. A. Bettik shook it. I had the urge then to hug our old traveling companion, but I knew that it would embarrass him. Androids were not literally
programmed
to be stiff and subservient—they were, after all, living, organic beings, not machines—but between RNA-training and long practice, they were hopelessly formal creatures. At least this one was.

And then we were away, Aenea and I, taxiing the dropship out of its hangar into the desert night and lifting off with as little noise as possible. I had said good-bye to as many of the other Fellowship apprentices and workers as I had found, but the hour was late and the people were scattered to their dorm cubbies, tents, and apprentice shelters. I hoped that I would run into some of them again—especially some of the construction crewmen and women with whom I’d worked for four years—but I had little real belief that I would.

The dropship could have flown itself to our destination—just a series of coordinates Aenea had given it—but I left the controls on semimanual so I could pretend I had something to do during the flight. I knew from the coordinates that we would be traveling about fifteen hundred klicks. Somewhere along the Mississippi River, Aenea had said. The dropship could have done that distance in ten suborbital minutes, but we had been conserving its dwindling energy and fuel reserves, so once we had extended the wings to maximum, we kept our velocity subsonic, our altitude set at a comfortable ten thousand meters, and avoided morphing the ship again until landing. We ordered the Consul’s starship’s persona—which I’d long ago loaded from my comlog into the dropship’s AI core—to keep quiet unless it had something important to tell us, and then we settled back in the red instrument glow to talk and watch the dark continent pass beneath us.

“Kiddo,” I said, “why this galloping hurry?”

Aenea made the self-conscious, throwing-away gesture I had first seen her use almost five years earlier. “It seemed important
to get things going.” Her voice was soft, almost lifeless, drained of the vitality and energy that had moved the entire Fellowship to her will. Perhaps I was the only living person who could identify the tone, but she sounded close to tears.

“It can’t be that important,” I said. “To make me leave in the middle of the night …”

Aenea shook her head and looked out the dark windscreen for a moment. I realized that she was crying. When she finally turned back, the glow from the instruments made her eyes look very moist and red. “If you don’t leave tonight, I’ll lose my nerve and ask you not to go. If you don’t go, I’ll lose my nerve again and stay on Earth … never go back.”

I had the urge to take her hand then, but I kept my big paw on the omnicontroller instead. “Hey,” I said, “we can go back together. This doesn’t make any sense for me to go off one way and you another.”

“Yes it does,” said Aenea so quietly that I had to lean to my right to hear her.

“A. Bettik could go fetch the ship,” I said. “You and I can stay on Earth until we’re ready to return …”

Aenea shook her head. “I’ll
never
be ready to go back, Raul. The thought scares me to death.”

I thought of the wild chase that had sent us fleeing through Pax space from Hyperion, barely eluding Pax starships, torch-ships, fighter aircraft, Marines, Swiss Guard, and God knows what else—including that bitch-thing from hell that had almost killed us on God’s Grove—and I said, “I feel the same way, kiddo. Maybe we
should
stay on Earth. They can’t reach us here.”

Aenea looked at me and I recognized the expression: it was not mere stubbornness, it was a closing of all discussion on a matter that was settled.

“All right,” I said, “but I still haven’t heard why A. Bettik couldn’t take this kayak and go get the ship while I farcast back with you.”

“Yes, you have,” said Aenea. “You weren’t listening.” She shifted sideways in the big seat. “Raul, if you leave and we agree to meet at a certain time in a certain place in Pax space, I have to go through the farcaster and do what I have to do. And what I have to do next, I have to do on my own.”

“Aenea,” I said.

“Yes?”

“That’s really stupid. Do you know that?”

The sixteen-year-old said nothing. Below and to the left, somewhere in western Kansas, a circle of campfires became visible. I looked out at the lights amid all that darkness. “Any idea what experiment your alien friends are doing down there?” I said.

“No,” said Aenea. “And they aren’t my alien friends.”