The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (270 page)

“Ah, that’s not necessary!” said the Commander, checking the screen on his desk. “This spacer is under arrest and will be delivered … hey!”

The four Noble Guard officers had clattered down the steps outside his office and were crossing the tarmac. Solznykov rushed out onto the landing and shouted after them. “Dropships aren’t allowed to operate in atmosphere here except to land at Bombasino. Hey! We’ll send a skimmer. Hey! This spacer’s almost certainly not one of your … he’s under guard … hey!”

The four did not look back as they reached their ship, ordered an escalator to morph down to them, and disappeared through the dropship hull. Sirens went off across the base and personnel ran for shelter as the heavy dropship lifted on thrusters, shifted to EM, and accelerated south across the port perimeter.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” whispered Commander Solznykov.

“Pardon me, sir?” said Colonel Vinara.

Solznykov gave him a glare that would have melted lead. “Dispatch two combat skimmers immediately.… no, make that three. I want a squad of Marines aboard each skimmer. This is our turf, and I don’t want these anemic Noble Guard pissants doing so much as littering without our say-so. I want the skimmers
there first and that fucking spacer taken into custody … 
our
custody … if it means harelipping every Spectrum Helix indigenie between here and Lock Childe Lamonde. Savvy, Colonel?”

Vinara could only stare at his commander.

“Move!”
shouted Commander Solznykov.

Colonel Vinara moved.

I was awake all that long night and the next day, writhing in pain, shuttling to the bathroom while carrying my IV-drip apparatus, trying painfully to urinate, and then checking the absurd filter I had to urinate through for any sign of the kidney stone that was killing me. Sometime in late morning I passed the thing.

For a minute I couldn’t believe it. The pain had been less for the past half hour or so, just the echo of pain in my back and groin, actually, but as I stared at the tiny, reddish thing in the filter cone—something larger than a grain of sand but much smaller than a pebble—I couldn’t believe that
it
could have caused such agony for so many hours.

“Believe it,” Aenea said as she sat on the edge of the counter and watched me pull my pajama shirt back in place. “It’s often the smallest things in life that cause us the greatest pain.”

“Yeah,” I said. I knew, vaguely, that Aenea was not there—that I would never have urinated in front of anyone like that, much less in front of this girl. I had been hallucinating her presence ever since the first ultramorph injection.

“Congratulations,” said the Aenea hallucination. Her smile seemed real enough—that slightly mischievous, slightly teasing turning up of the right side of her mouth that I’d grown accustomed
to—and I could see that she was wearing the green denim slacks and white cotton shirt she often wore when working in the desert heat. But I could also see the sink basin and soft towels through her.

“Thanks,” I said and shuffled back to collapse in the bed. I could not believe that the pain would not return. In fact, Dr. Molina had said that there might be several stones.

Aenea was gone when Dem Ria, Dem Loa, and the trooper on guard came into the room.

“Oh, it’s wonderful!” said Dem Ria.

“We’re so glad,” said Dem Loa. “We hoped that you would not have to go to the Pax infirmary for surgery.”

“Put your right hand up here,” said the trooper. He handcuffed me to the brass headboard.

“I’m a prisoner?” I said groggily.

“You always have been,” grunted the trooper. His dark skin was sweaty under his helmet visor. “The skimmer’ll be by tomorrow morning to pick you up. Wouldn’t want you missing the ride.” He went back out to the shade of the barrel tree out front.

“Ah,” said Dem Loa, touching my handcuffed wrist with her cool fingers. “We are sorry, Raul Endymion.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, feeling so tired and drugged that my tongue did not want to work right. “You’ve been nothing but kind. So kind.” The fading pain kept me from sleeping.

“Father Clifton would like to come in and speak with you. Would that be all right?”

At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest. I said, “Sure. Why not?”

Father Clifton was younger than I, short—but not as short as Dem Ria or Dem Loa or her race—and pudgy, with thinning, sandy hair receding from his friendly, flushed face. I thought that I knew his type. There had been a chaplain in the Home Guard a bit like Father Clifton—earnest, mostly inoffensive, a bit of a momma’s boy who may have gone into the priesthood so that he would never have to grow up and become really responsible for himself. It was Grandam who had pointed out to me how the parish priests in the various moor-end villages on Hyperion tended to remain somewhat childlike:
treated with deference by their parishioners, fussed over by housekeepers and women of all ages, never in real competition with other adult males. I don’t think that Grandam was actively anticlerical in spite of her refusal to accept the cross, just amused by this tendency of parish priests in the great and powerful Pax empire.

Father Clifton wanted to discuss theology.

I think that I moaned then, but it must have been taken for a reaction to the kidney stone, for the good priest merely leaned closer, patted my arm, and murmured, “There, there, my son.”

Did I mention that he was at least five or six years younger than me?

“Raul … may I call you Raul?”

“Sure, Father.” I closed my eyes as if falling asleep.

“What is your opinion of the Church, Raul?”

Under my eyelids, I rolled my eyes. “The Church, Father?”

Father Clifton waited.

I shrugged. Or to be more precise, I
tried
to shrug—it’s not that easy when one wrist is handcuffed above your head and the other arm is on the receiving end of an intravenous drip.

Father Clifton must have understood my awkward motion. “You’re indifferent to it then?” he asked softly.

As indifferent as one can be to an organization that’s tried to capture or kill me
, I thought. “Not indifferent, Father,” I said. “It’s just that the Church … well, it hasn’t been relevant to my life in most ways.”

One of the missionary’s sandy eyebrows rose slightly. “Gosh, Raul … the Church is a lot of things … not all of them spotlessly good, I’m sure … but I hardly think that it could be accused of being irrelevant.”

I considered shrugging again, but decided one awkward spasm of that sort was enough. “I see what you mean,” I said, hoping that the conversation was over.

Father Clifton leaned even closer, his elbows on his knees, his hands set together in front of him—but more in the aspect of persuasion and reason than prayer. “Raul, you know that they’re taking you back to Base Bombasino in the morning.”

I nodded. My head was still free to move.

“You know that the Pax Fleet and Mercantilus punishment for desertion is death.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but only after a fair trial.”

Father Clifton ignored my sarcasm. His brow was wrinkled with what could only be worry—although for my fate or for my
eternal soul, I was not sure which. Perhaps for both. “For Christians,” he began and paused a moment. “For Christians, such an execution is punishment, some discomfort, perhaps even momentary terror, but then they mend their ways and go on with their lives. For you …”

“Nothingness,” I said, helping him end his sentence. “The Big Gulp. Eternal darkness. Nada-ness. I become a worm’s casserole.”

Father Clifton was not amused. “This does not have to be the case, my son.”

I sighed and looked out the window. It was early afternoon on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. The sunlight was different here than on worlds that I had known well—Hyperion, Old Earth, even Mare Infinitus and other places I had visited briefly but intensely—but the difference was so subtle that I would have found it hard to describe. But it was beautiful. There was no arguing that. I looked at the cobalt sky, streaked with violet clouds, at the butter-rich light falling on pink adobe and the wooden sill; I listened to the sound of children playing in the alley, to the soft conversation of Ces Ambre and her sick brother, Bin, to the sudden, soft laughter as something in the game they were playing amused them, and I thought—
To lose all this forever?

And I hallucinated Aenea’s voice saying,
To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love
.

Father Clifton cleared his throat. “Have you ever heard of Pascal’s Wager, Raul?”

“Yes.”

“You have?” Father Clifton sounded surprised. I had the feeling that I had thrown him off stride in his prepared line of argument. “Then you know why it makes sense,” he said rather lamely.

I sighed again. The pain was steady now, not coming and going in the tidal surges that had overwhelmed me the past few days. I remembered first encountering Blaise Pascal in conversations with Grandam when I was a kid, then discussing him with Aenea in the Arizona twilight, and finally looking up his
Pensées
in the excellent library at Taliesin West.

“Pascal was a mathematician,” Father Clifton was saying, “pre-Hegira … mid-eighteenth century, I think …”

“Actually, he lived in the mid 1600s,” I said, “1623 to 1662, I think.” Actually, I was bluffing a bit on the dates. The numbers seemed right, but I would not have bet my life on
them. I remembered the era because Aenea and I had spent a couple of weeks one winter discussing the Enlightenment and its effect on people and institutions pre-Hegira, pre-Pax.

“Yes,” said Father Clifton, “but the
time
he lived isn’t as important as his so-called wager. Consider it, Raul—on one side, the chance of resurrection, immortality, an eternity in heaven and benefiting from Christ’s light. On the other side … how did you put it?”

“The Big Gulp,” I said. “Nada-ness.”

“Worse than that,” said the young priest, his voice thick with earnest conviction. “Nada means nothingness. Sleep without dreams. But Pascal realized that the absence of Christ’s redemption is worse than that. It’s eternal regret … longing … infinite sadness.”

“And hell?” I said. “Eternal punishment?”

Father Clifton squeezed his hands together, obviously uncomfortable at that side of the equation. “Perhaps,” he said. “But even if hell were just eternal recognition of the chances one has lost … why risk that? Pascal realized that if the Church was wrong, nothing would be lost by embracing its hope. And if it was right …”

I smiled. “A bit cynical, isn’t it, Father?”

The priest’s pale eyes looked directly into mine. “Not as cynical as going to your death for no reason, Raul. Not when you can accept Christ as your Lord, do good works among other human beings, serve your community and your brothers and sisters in Christ, and save your physical life and your immortal soul in the process.”

I nodded. After a minute, I said, “Maybe the time he lived was important.”

Father Clifton blinked, not following me.

“Blaise Pascal, I mean,” I said. “He lived through an intellectual revolution the likes of which humanity has rarely seen. On top of that, Copernicus and Kepler and their ilk were opening up the universe a thousandfold. The Sun was becoming … well … just a sun, Father. Everything was being displaced, moved aside, shoved from the center. Pascal once said, ‘I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’ ”

Father Clifton leaned closer. I could smell the soap and shaving cream scent on his smooth skin. “All the more reason to consider the wisdom of his wager, Raul.”

I blinked, wanting to move away from the pink and freshly scrubbed moon of a face. I was afraid that I smelled of sweat
and pain and fear. I had not brushed my teeth in twenty-four hours. “I don’t think that I want to make any wager if it means dealing with a Church that has grown so corrupt that it makes obedience and submission the price of its saving the life of someone’s child,” I said.

Father Clifton pulled away as if slapped. His fair skin flushed a deeper red. Then he stood and patted my arm. “You get some sleep. We’ll speak again before you leave tomorrow.”

But I did not have until tomorrow. If I had been outside at that moment, looking at just the precise quadrant of the late-afternoon sky, I would have seen the scratch of flame across the dome of cobalt as Nemes’s dropship entered the landing pattern for Pax Base Bombasino.

When Father Clifton left, I fell asleep.

I watched as Aenea and I sat in the vestibule of her shelter in the desert night and continued our conversation.

“I’ve had this dream before,” I said, looking around and touching the stone beneath the canvas of her shelter. The rock still held some of the day’s heat.

“Yes,” said Aenea. She was sipping from a fresh cup of tea.

“You were going to tell me the secret that makes you the messiah,” I heard myself say. “The secret which makes you the ‘bond between two worlds’ that the AI Ummon spoke of.”

“Yes,” said my young friend and nodded again, “but first tell me if you think that your reply to Father Clifton was adequate.”

“Adequate?” I shrugged. “I was angry.”

Aenea sipped tea. Steam rose from the cup and touched her lashes. “But you didn’t really respond to his question about Pascal’s Wager.”

“That was all the response I needed to give,” I said, somewhat irritated. “Little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem is dying of cancer. The Church uses their cruciform as leverage. That’s corrupt … foul. I’ll have none of it.”

Aenea looked at me over the steaming cup. “But if the Church were not corrupt, Raul … if it offered the cruciform without price or reservation. Would you accept it?”

“No.” The immediacy of my answer surprised me.

The girl smiled. “So it is not the corruption of the Church
that is at the heart of your objection. You reject resurrection itself.”

I started to speak, hesitated, frowned, and then rephrased what I was thinking. “
This
kind of resurrection, I reject. Yes.”

Still smiling, Aenea said, “Is there another kind?”