The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (311 page)

“It was,” said Father LeBlanc. “I have never seen anything like it.”

Admiral Wu spoke to Mustafa. “Your Excellency, the people on this world have no energy weapons, no Hawking-drive detectors, no orbital defenses, no gravitonic detectors … hell, they don’t have radar or a communications system as far as we can tell. We can send dropships or fighter aircraft into the atmosphere to search for survivors without them ever knowing. It has to be a lot less intrusive than last night’s firefight and …”

“No,” said Cardinal Mustafa and there was no doubting the finality of his decision. The Grand Inquisitor pushed back his robe to glance at his chronometer. “The Vatican courier drone should arrive any moment with final orders for the arrest of the contagion vector named Aenea. Nothing must complicate that.”

Father Farrell rubbed his lean cheeks. “Regent Tokra called me this morning on the communicator channel we allocated him. It seems that their precious and precocious little Dalai Lama has gone missing …”

Breque and LeBlanc looked up in surprise.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Cardinal Mustafa, obviously aware of the news. “Nothing matters right now except receiving final go-ahead on this mission and arresting Aenea.” He looked at Admiral Wu. “And you must tell your Swiss Guard and Marine officers that no harm can come to the young woman.”

Wu nodded wearily. She had been briefed and rebriefed for months. “When do you think that the orders will come?” she asked the Cardinal.

Rhadamanth Nemes and her two siblings stood and walked
toward the door. “The time for waiting is over,” said Nemes with a thin-lipped smile. “We will bring Aenea’s head back to you.”

Cardinal Mustafa and the others were on their feet in an instant. “Sit down!” bellowed the Grand Inquisitor. “You have not been ordered to move.”

Nemes smiled and turned toward the door.

All of the clerics in the room were shouting. Archbishop Jean Daniel Breque crossed himself. Admiral Wu went for the flechette pistol in her holster.

Things then happened too quickly to perceive. The air seemed to blur. One instant, Nemes, Scylla, and Briareus were at the doorway eight meters away, the next instant they were gone and three shimmering chrome shapes stood among the black- and red-robed figures at the table.

Scylla intercepted Admiral Marget Wu before the woman could raise her flechette pistol. A chrome arm blurred. Wu’s head tumbled across the polished tabletop. The headless body stood a few seconds, some random nerve impulse ordered the fingers of the right hand to close, and the flechette pistol fired, blowing apart the legs of the heavy table and splintering the stone floor in ten thousand places.

Father LeBlanc leaped between Briareus and Archbishop Breque. The blurred, silver shape disemboweled LeBlanc. Breque dropped his glasses and ran into the adjoining room. Suddenly Briareus was gone—leaving nothing but a soft implosion of air where the blurred shape had stood a second before. There was a short scream from the other room, cut off almost before it began.

Cardinal Mustafa backed away from Rhadamanth Nemes. She took one step forward for every step he took backward. The blurred field around her had dropped away, but she looked no more human or less menacing.

“Damn you for the foul thing you are,” the Cardinal said softly. “Come ahead, I’m not afraid to die.”

Nemes raised one eyebrow. “Of course not, Your Excellency. But would it change your mind if I tell you that we’re throwing these bodies … and that head”—she gestured to where Marget Wu’s eyes had just stopped blinking and now stared blindly—“far out into the acid ocean, so that no resurrection will be possible?”

Cardinal Mustafa reached the wall and stopped. Nemes was
only two paces in front of him. “Why are you doing this?” he said, his voice firm.

Nemes shrugged. “Our priorities diverge for the time being,” she said. “Are you ready, Grand Inquisitor?”

Cardinal Mustafa crossed himself and said a hurried Act of Contrition.

Nemes smiled again, her right arm and right leg became shimmering silver things, and she stepped forward.

Mustafa watched in amazement. She did not kill him. With motions too quick to detect, she broke his left arm, shattered his right arm, kicked his legs out from under him—splintering both of them—and blinded him with two fingers that stopped just short of jabbing into his brain.

The roar of pain was without precedent for the Grand Inquisitor. Through it, he could hear her voice, still flat and lifeless. “I know your doc-in-the-box in the dropship or on the
Jibril
will fix you up,” she said. “We’ve buzzed them. They’ll be here in a few minutes. When you see the Pope and his parasites, tell them that those to whom I must report did not want the girl alive. Our apologies, but her death is necessary. And tell them to be careful in the future not to act without the consent of
all
elements of the Core. Good-bye, Your Excellency. I hope that the doc on the
Jibril
can grow you new eyes. What we are about to do will be worth seeing.”

Mustafa heard footsteps, the door sliding, and then silence except for the sound of someone screaming in terrible pain. It took him several minutes to realize that it was he who was screaming.

When I returned to the temple hanging in air, first light was seeping through the fog but the morning remained dark, drizzly, and cold. I had finally sobered up enough from my distraught and distracted state to take greater care while rappelling down the fixed lines, and it was good that I had—several times the brakes on the rappel gear slipped on the ice-shrouded rope and I would have fallen to my death if the safety lines had not arrested me.

Aenea was awake, dressed, and ready to leave when I arrived. She had on her thermal anorak, climbing harness, and climbing boots. A. Bettik and Lhomo Dondrub were dressed similarly, and both men carried long, heavy-looking, nylon-wrapped
packages over their shoulders. They were going with us. Others were there to say good-bye—Theo, Rachel, the Dorje Phamo, the Dalai Lama, George Tsarong, Jigme Norbu—and they seemed sad and anxious. Aenea looked tired; I was sure that she had not slept either. We made a tired-looking pair of adventurers. Lhomo walked over and handed me one of the long, nylon-wrapped bundles. It was heavy, but I shouldered it without question or complaint. I grabbed the rest of my own gear, answered Lhomo’s questions about the condition of the ropes to the ridgeline—everyone evidently thought that I had unselfishly reconnoitered our route—and stepped back to look at my friend and beloved. When she gave me a searching look, I answered with a nod.
It’s all right. I’m all right. I’m ready to go. We’ll talk about it later
.

Theo was crying. I was aware that this was an important parting—that we might not see one another again despite Aenea’s assurances to the other two women that everyone would be reunited before nightfall—but I was too emotionally numbed and worn out to react to it. I stepped away from the group for a moment to take deep breaths and focus my attention. It was probable that I would need all of my wits and alertness in the next few hours just to survive.
The problem with being passionately in love
, I thought,
is that it deprives you of too much sleep
.

We left by the east platform, moved in a fast trot down the icy ledge toward the fissure, passed the ropes I’d just descended, and reached the fissure without incident. The bonsai trees and fell fields looked ancient and unreal in the shifting ice fog, the dark limbs and branches dripping on our heads when they suddenly loomed out of the mist. The streams and water-falls sounded louder than I remembered as the torrent slid over the last overhang into the void to our left.

There were old, less reliable fixed ropes on the easternmost and highest folds of the fissure, and Lhomo led the way up these, followed by Aenea, then A. Bettik, and finally me. I noticed that our android friend was climbing as quickly and competently as he always did, despite the missing left hand. Once on the upper ridgeline, we were beyond my farthest point of my nighttime travels—the fissure acted as a barrier to ridgeline travel the way I had gone. Now the difficulty began in earnest as we followed the narrowest of paths—worn ledges, rock outcroppings, the occasional icefield, scree slopes—on the south side of the cliff face. The ridgeline above us was all serac
of wet, heavy snow and icy overhang, impossible to travel on. We moved silently, not even whispering, aware that the slightest noise could trigger an avalanche that would sweep us off these ten-centimeter ledges in a second. Finally, when the going got even tougher, we roped up—running the line through carabiners and attaching a doubled line to our web-sling harnesses—so that now if one fell he or she would be caught, or we would all go over. With Lhomo leading as strongly as ever, stepping confidently over foggy voids and icy crevasses that I would hesitate to attempt, I think that we all felt better about being connected.

I still did not know our destination. I did know that the great ridge that ran east from K’un Lun past Jo-kung would run out in a few more kilometers, dropping suddenly and dramatically into the poisonous clouds several klicks below. During certain weeks in the spring, the tides and vagaries of the ocean and clouds dropped the poisonous vapors low enough that the ridge emerged again, allowing supply caravans, pilgrims, monks, traders, and the simply curious to make their way east from the Middle Kingdom to T’ai Shan, the Great Peak of the Middle Kingdom, and the most inaccessible habitable point on the planet. The monks who lived on T’ai Shan, it was said, never returned to the Middle Kingdom or the rest of the Mountains of Heaven—for untold generations they had dedicated their lives to the mysterious tombs, gompas, ceremonies, and temples on that most holy of peaks. Now, as the weather worsened for us, I realized that if we started descending, we would not know when we left the roiling monsoon clouds and entered the roiling vaporous clouds until the poison air killed us.

We did not descend. After several hours of all but silent travel, we reached the precipice at the eastern boundary of the Middle Kingdom. The mountain of T’ai Shan was not visible, of course—even with the clouds having cleared a bit, little was visible except for the wet cliff face ahead of us and the twisting fog and cloud patterns all around.

There was a wide ledge here at the eastern edge of the world, and we sat on it gratefully as we dug cold handmeals out of our packs and drank from our water bottles. The tiny, succulent plants that carpeted this steep fell field were becoming tumescent as they gorged themselves on the first moisture of the monsoon months.

After we ate and drank, Lhomo and A. Bettik began opening our three heavy bundles. Aenea zipped open her own pack, which looked heavier than the duffels we men had carried. It did
not surprise me what was wrapped in these three parcels—nylon, alloy struts and frames, rigging, and in Aenea’s packet, more of the same as well as the two skinsuits and rebreathers that I’d brought with me from the ship and all but forgotten.

I sighed and looked to the east. “So we’re going to try to make T’ai Shan,” I said.

“Yes,” said Aenea. She began stripping out of her clothes.

A. Bettik and Lhomo looked away, but I felt my heart pound with anger at the thought of other men seeing my lover naked. I controlled myself, laid out the other skinsuit, and began peeling out of my own clothes, folding them into my heavy pack as I doffed each layer. The air was cold and the fog clammy on my skin.

Lhomo and A. Bettik were assembling the parawings as Aenea and I dressed—the skinsuits were just that, almost literally a second skin, but the harness and rigging for the rebreathers allowed us some modesty. The cowl went over my head tighter than a scuba headpiece, folding my ears flat against my head. Only the filters there allowed sound to be transmitted: they would pick up the comthread transmissions once we were effectively out of real air.

Lhomo and A. Bettik had assembled four parawings from the parts we had transported. As if answering my unasked question, Lhomo said, “I can only show you the thermals and make sure you reach the jet stream. I can’t survive at that altitude. And I do not want to go to T’ai Shan when there is little chance of returning.”

Aenea touched the powerful man’s arm. “We are grateful beyond words that you will guide us to the jet stream.”

The bold flyer actually blushed.

“What about A. Bettik?” I asked and then, realizing that I was talking about our friend as if he weren’t there, I turned to the android and said, “What about you? There’s no skinsuit or rebreather for you.”

A. Bettik smiled. I had always thought that his rare smiles were the wisest things I had ever seen on a human countenance—even if the blue-skinned man was not technically human.

“You forget, M. Endymion,” he said, “I was designed to suffer a bit more abuse than the average human body.”

“But the distance …” I began. T’ai Shan was more than a hundred kilometers east and even if we reached the jet stream, that would be almost an hour of rarified air … far too thin to breathe.

A. Bettik fastened the last rigging to his parawing—a pretty thing with a great blue delta wingspan almost ten meters across—and said, “If we are lucky enough to make the distance, I will survive it.”

I nodded and made to get into the rigging of my own kite then, not asking any more questions, not looking at Aenea, not asking her why the four of us were risking our lives this way, when suddenly my friend was at my elbow.

“Thank you, Raul,” she said, loudly enough for all to hear. “You do these things for me out of love and friendship. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

I made some gesture, suddenly unable to speak, embarrassed that she was thanking me when the other two were ready to leap into the void for her as well. But she was not finished speaking.

“I love you, Raul,” said Aenea, leaning on her tiptoes to kiss me on the lips. She rocked back and looked at me, her dark eyes fathomless. “I love you, Raul Endymion. I always have. I always will.”

I stood, bewildered and overwhelmed, as we all locked in to our parawing rigs and stood at the ultimate edge of nothing. Lhomo was the last to clip on. He moved from A. Bettik to Aenea to me, checking our riggings, checking every fastened nut, bolt, tension clip, and instaweld of our kites. Satisfied, he nodded respectfully toward A. Bettik, clipped into his own red-winged rig with a speed born of infinite practice and discipline, and moved to the edge of the cliff. Even the succulents did not grow in this last meter stretch, as if terrified of the drop. I knew that I was. The last rocky ledge was steeply pitched and slick from the rain. The fog had closed in again.