The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (308 page)

About half of the people there move forward to line up and sip from one of the large goblets.
Chalices? This is blasphemy. It’s not right. Or is it?
One sip is all they take, then return to
their places on the tatami mats. No one seems especially energized or enlightened. No horns of light shine from anyone’s forehead after they partake of the wine. No one levitates or speaks in tongues. They each take a sip and sit down.

I realize that I have been holding back, trying to catch Aenea’s gaze. I have so many questions … Belatedly, feeling like a traitor to someone I should trust without hesitation, I move toward the back of the shortening line.

Aenea sees me. She holds her hand up briefly, palm toward me. The meaning is clear—
Not now, Raul. Not yet.
I hesitate another moment, irresolute, sick at the thought of these others—these strangers—entering into an intimacy with my darling when I cannot. Then, heart pounding and face burning, I sit back on my mat.

There is no formal end to the evening. People begin to leave in twos and threes. A couple—she drank of the wine, he did not—leave together with their arms around one another as if nothing has changed. Perhaps nothing
has
changed. Perhaps the communion ritual I’ve just watched is all metaphor and symbolism, or autosuggestion and self-hypnosis. Perhaps those who will themselves hard enough to perceive something called the Void Which Binds will have some internal experience that convinces them that it has happened. Perhaps it’s all bullshit.

I rub my forehead. I have such a headache. Good thing I didn’t drink the wine, I think. Wine sometimes brings on migraines with me. I chuckle and feel ill and empty for a moment, left behind.

Rachel says, “Don’t forget, the last stone will be set in place in the walkway tomorrow at noon. There’ll be a party on the upper meditation platform! Bring your own refreshments.”

And thus ends the evening. I go upstairs to our shared sleeping platform with a mixture of elation, anticipation, regret, embarrassment, excitement, and a throbbing headache. I confess to myself that I didn’t understand half of Aenea’s explanation of things, but I leave with a vague sense of letdown and inappropriateness … I’m sure, for instance, that Jesus Christ’s Last Supper did not end with a shouted reminder of a BYOB party on the upper deck.

I chuckle and then swallow the laugh. Last Supper. That has a terrible ring to it. My heart begins pounding again and my head hurts worse. Hardly the way to enter one’s lover’s bed room.

The chill air on the upper platform walkway clears my head a bit. The Oracle is just a sliver above towering cumulus to the east. The stars look cold tonight.

I am just about to enter our shared room and light the lantern when suddenly the skies explode.

They all came up from the lower levels—all of the ones who had stayed at the Temple Hanging in Air after most of the work had been finished—Aenea and A. Bettik, Rachel and Theo, George and Jigme, Kuku and Kay, Chim Din and Gyalo Thondup, Lhomo and Labsang, Kim Byung-Soon and Viki Groselj, Kenshiro and Haruyuki, Master Abbot Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi and his master, the young Dalai Lama, Voytek Majer and Janusz Kurtyka, brooding Rimsi Kyipup and grinning Changchi Kenchung, the Dorje Phamo the Thunderbolt Sow and Carl Linga William Eiheji. Aenea came to my side and slipped her hand in mine as we watched the skies in awed silence.

I am surprised that we were not all blinded by the light show going on up there where the stars had been a moment earlier: great blossoms of white light, strobes of sulfur yellow, blazing red streaks—far brighter than a comet or meteor’s tail—crisscrossed with blue, green, white, and yellow slashes—each as clear and straight as a diamond scratch on glass, then sudden bursts of orange that seemed to fold into themselves in silent implosions, followed by more white strobes and a resumption of red slashes. It was all silent, but the violence of light alone made us want to cover our ears and cringe in a sheltered place.

“What in ten hells is it?” asked Lhomo Dondrub.

“Space battle,” said Aenea. Her voice sounded terribly tired.

“I do not understand,” said the Dalai Lama. He did not sound afraid, merely curious. “The Pax authorities assured us that they would have only one of their starships in orbit—the
Jibril
, I believe is its name—and that it was on a diplomatic mission rather than a military one. Regent Reting Tokra also assured me of this.”

The Thunderbolt Sow made a rude noise. “Your Holiness, the Regent is in the pay of the Pax bastards.”

The boy looked at her.

“I believe it to be true, Your Holiness,” said Eiheji, his bodyguard. “I have heard things in the palace.”

The sky had faded almost to black but now it exploded again in a score of places. The rocky cliff face behind us bled reflections of red, green, and yellow.

“How can we see their laser lances if there is no dust or other colloidal particles to highlight them?” asked the Dalai Lama, his dark eyes bright. Evidently the news of his Regent’s betrayal was not surprising to him … or at least not as interesting as the battle going on thousands of kilometers above us. I was interested to see that the supreme holy person of the Buddhist world had been tutored in basic science.

Again, it was his bodyguard who answered. “Some ships must have been hit and destroyed already, Your Holiness,” said Eiheji. “The coherent beams and CPBs would become visible in the expanding fields of debris, frozen oxygen, molecular dust, and other gases.”

This caused a moment of silence in our group.

“My father watched this once, on Hyperion,” whispered Rachel. She rubbed her bare arms as if there had been a sudden chill.

I blinked and looked at the young woman. I had not missed Aenea’s comment about her friend’s father, Sol … I knew my
Cantos
well enough to identify Rachel as the infant on the legendary Hyperion pilgrimage, daughter of Sol Weintraub … but I admit that I had not completely believed it. The infant Rachel had become the almost mythical woman, Moneta, in the
Cantos
—someone who had traveled back in time in the Time Tombs with the Shrike. How could
that
Rachel be here, now?

Aenea put her arm around Rachel’s shoulders. “My mother
as well,” she said softly. “Only then it was thought to be the Hegemony forces against the Ousters.”

“Who is this, then?” demanded the Dalai Lama. “The Ousters against the Pax? And why have the Pax warships come unbidden to our system?”

Several white spheres of light pulsed, grew, dimmed, and died. We all blinked away the retinal echoes.

“I believe that the Pax warships were here since their first ship arrived, Your Holiness,” said Aenea. “But I do not think that they are fighting Ousters.”

“Who then?” said the boy.

Aenea turned her face back to the sky. “One of their own,” she said.

Suddenly there came a series of explosions quite different than the others … a closer, brighter series of explosions, followed by three blazing meteor trails. One exploded quickly in the upper atmosphere, trailing a score of minor debris trails that quickly died out. The second shot to the west, blazing from yellow to red to pure white, breaking up twenty degrees above the horizon and spilling a hundred lesser trails across the cloudy western horizon. The third screeched across the sky from west of the zenith to the eastern horizon—and I say “screeched” deliberately because we could hear the noise, at first a teakettle whistle, then a howl, then a terrible tornadic roar, diminishing as quickly as it came—finally to break up into three or four large, blazing masses in the east, all but one of which died out before reaching the horizon. This last burning fragment of star-ship seemed to wiggle in its flight at the last moment, with yellow bursts of light preceding it, slowing it, before it was lost to sight.

We waited another half hour on the upper platform, but except for dozens of fusion-flame streaks for the first few minutes—starships accelerating away from T’ien Shan, I knew—there was nothing left to see. Eventually the stars were once again the brightest things in the sky and everyone moved off—the Dalai Lama to sleep in the monks’ quarters here, others to permanent or temporary quarters on the lower levels.

Aenea bid a few of us to stay—Rachel and Theo, A. Bettik and Lhomo Dondrub, and me.

“That is the sign I’ve been waiting for,” she said very softly when all the others had left the platform. “We must leave tomorrow.”

“Leave?” I said. “To where? Why?”

Aenea touched my forearm. I interpreted this as saying,
I will explain later
. I shut up as the others spoke.

“The wings are ready, Teacher,” said Lhomo.

“I have taken the liberty of checking over the skinsuits and rebreathers in M. Endymion’s quarters while you were all away,” said A. Bettik. “They are all serviceable.”

“We’ll finish up the work and organize the ceremony tomorrow,” said Theo.

“I wish I were going,” said Rachel.

“Going where?” I said again, despite my best efforts to shut up and listen.

“You’re invited,” said Aenea, still touching my arm. That did not really answer my question. “Lhomo, and A. Bettik … if you’re both still game.”

Lhomo Dondrub gave his broad grin. The android nodded. I began to think that I was the only one in the temple compound that didn’t understand what was going on.

“Good night, all,” said Aenea. “We’ll be off at first light. You don’t need to see us off.”

“To hell with that,” said Rachel. Theo nodded agreement. “We’ll be there to say good-bye,” continued Rachel.

Aenea nodded and touched their arms. Everyone clambered down ladders or slid down cables.

Aenea and I were alone on the top platform. The skies seemed dark after the battle. I realized that clouds had risen above the ridgeline and were wiping the stars away like a wet towel drawn across a black slateboard. Aenea opened the door to her sleeping room, went in, lit the lantern, and returned to stand in the entrance. “Coming, Raul?”

We did talk. But not right away.

Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described—even the timing of our lovemaking seems absurd in the telling, with the sky literally falling and my lover having carried out a sort-of Last Supper convocation that night—but lovemaking is never absurd when you are making love to the person you truly love. And I was. If I had not realized that before the Last Supper night, I did then—completely, totally, and without reservation.

It was perhaps two hours later when Aenea pulled on a kimono and I donned a yukata and we moved away from the sleeping mat to the open shoji screens. Aenea brewed tea on the
small burner set in the tatami, and we took our cups and sat with our backs against the opposing shoji frames, our bare toes and legs touching, my right side and her left knee extending over the kilometers-long drop. The air was cool and smelled of rain, but the storm had moved north of us. The summit of Heng Shan was shrouded with clouds, but all the lower ridges were illuminated by a constant play of lightning.

“Is Rachel really the Rachel from the
Cantos
?” I said. It was not the question I most wanted to ask, but I was afraid to ask it.

“Yes,” said Aenea. “She’s the daughter of Sol Weintraub—the woman who caught the Merlin Sickness on Hyperion and aged backward twenty-seven years to the infant whom Sol brought on the pilgrimage.”

“And she was also known as Moneta,” I said. “And Memnosyne …”

“
Admonisher
,” murmured Aenea. “And
Memory
. Appropriate names for her role in that time.”

“That was two hundred and eighty years ago!” I said. “And scores of light-years away … on Hyperion. How did she get here?”

Aenea smiled. The warm tea breathed vapors that rose to her tousled hair. “I started life more than two hundred and eighty years ago,” she said. “And scores of light-years away … on Hyperion.”

“So did she get here the same way you did? Through the Time Tombs?”

“Yes and no,” said Aenea. She held up one hand to stop my protest. “I know that you want straight talk, Raul … no parables or similes or evasions. I agree. The time for plain talk is here. But the truth is that the Sphinx Time Tombs are only part of Rachel’s journey.”

I waited.

“You remember the
Cantos
,” she began.

“I remember that the pilgrim named Sol took his daughter … after the Keats persona somehow saved her from the Shrike and after she began aging normally … took her into the Sphinx into the future …” I stopped. “
This
future?”

“No,” said Aenea. “The infant Rachel grew into a child again, a young woman again, in a future beyond this one. Her father raised her a second time. Their story is … marvelous, Raul. Literally filled with marvels.”

I rubbed my forehead. The headache had gone, but now it
threatened to return. “And she got here via the Time Tombs again?” I said. “Moving back in time with them?”

“Partially via the Time Tombs,” said Aenea. “She is also able to move through time on her own.”

I stared. This bordered on madness.

Aenea smiled as if reading my thoughts or just reading my expression. “I know it seems insane, Raul. Much of what we’ve yet to encounter is very strange.”

“That’s an understatement,” I said. Another mental tumbler clicked into place. “Theo Bernard!” I said.

“Yes?”

“There was a Theo in the
Cantos
, wasn’t there?” I said. “A man …” There were different versions of the oral tale, the poem to be sung, and many of these minor details were dropped in the short, popular versions. Grandam had made me learn most of the full poem, but the dull parts had never held my interest.

“Theo Lane,” said Aenea. “At one time the Consul’s aide on Hyperion, later our world’s first Governor-General for the Hegemony. I met him once when I was a girl. A decent man. Quiet. He wore archaic glasses …”

“This Theo,” I said, trying to figure it all out.
Some sort of sex change?

Aenea shook her head. “Close, but no cigar, as Freud would have said.”

“Who?”

“Theo Bernard is the great-great-great-etcetera-granddaughter of Theo Lane,” said Aenea. “Her story is an adventure in itself. But she was born in this era … she did escape from the Pax colonies on Maui-Covenant and join the rebels … but she did so because of something I told the original Theo almost three hundred years ago. It had been passed down all those generations. Theo knew that I would be on Maui-Covenant when I was …”