The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (317 page)

“Absolutely,” said Aenea. “Look over there.”

A. Bettik had paused at a slab of marble upon which words were carved in Chinese and early Web English:

We climbed on. I thought that I could see something red at the top of this next flight of stairs. The South Gate of Heaven and entry to the summit slope? It was about time.

“Wasn’t that beautiful though?” I said, speaking of the poem. “Isn’t continuity like that as important or more important in human institutions as diversity?”

“It’s important,” agreed Aenea. “But that’s almost all humanity has been doing for the last millennium, Raul … recreating Old Earth institutions and ideas on different worlds. Look at the Hegemony. Look at the Church and the Pax. Look at this world …”

“T’ien Shan?” I said. “I think it’s wonderful …”

“So do I,” said Aenea. “But it’s all borrowed. The Buddhism has evolved a bit … at least away from idolatry and ritual back to the open-mindedness that was its earliest hallmark … but everything else is pretty much an attempt to recapture things lost with Old Earth.”

“Such as?” I said.

“Such as the language, dress, the names of the mountains, local customs … hell, Raul, even this pilgrimage trail and the Temple of the Jade Emperor, if we ever get there.”

“You mean there was a T’ai Shan mountain on Old Earth?” I said.

“Absolutely,” said Aenea. “With its own City of Peace and Heavenly Gates and Mouth of the Dragon. Confucius climbed it more than three thousand years ago. But the Old Earth stairway had just seven thousand steps.”

“I wish we’d climbed it instead,” I said, wondering if I could keep climbing. The steps were short, but there had been a hell of a lot of them. “I see your point though.”

Aenea nodded. “It’s wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves … culturally and physically.”

“Which brings us back to evolution,” I said. “What are the other directions, tendencies, goals, or whatever that you said had been ignored the last few centuries?”

“There are just a few more,” said Aenea. “One is an ever increasing number of individuals. Life likes gazillions of species, but it absolutely loves hypergazillions of individuals. In a sense, the universe is tooled up for individuals. There was a book in the Taliesin library called
Evolving Hierarchical Systems
by an Old Earth guy named Stanley Salthe. Did you see it?”

“No, I must have missed it when I was reading those early twenty-first-century holoporn novels.”

“Uh-huh,” said Aenea. “Well, Salthe put it sort of neatly–‘An indefinite number of unique individuals can exist in a finite material world if they are nested within each other and that world is expanding.’ ”

“Nested within each other,” I repeated, thinking about it. “Yeah, I get it. Like the Old Earth bacteria in our gut, and the paramecia we’ve dragged into space, and the other cells in our bodies … more worlds, more people … yeah.”

“The trick is more people,” said Aenea. “We have hundreds of billions, but between the Fall and the Pax, the actual human population in the galaxy—not counting Ousters—has leveled off in the last few hundred years.”

“Well, birth control is important,” I said, repeating what everyone on Hyperion had been taught. “I mean, especially with the cruciform capable of keeping people alive for centuries and centuries …”

“Exactly,” said Aenea. “With artificial immortality comes more stagnation … physical and cultural. It’s a given.”

I frowned. “But that’s not a reason to deny people the chance for extended life, is it?”

Aenea’s voice seemed remote, as if she were contemplating something much larger. “No,” she said at last, “not in itself.”

“What are the evolutionary directions?” I asked, seeing the red pagoda come closer above us and praying that the conversation would keep my mind off collapsing, rolling back down the twenty-some thousand steps we had climbed.

“Just three more worth mentioning,” said Aenea. “Increasing specialization, increasing codependency, and increasing evolvability. All of these are really important, but the last is most so.”

“How do you mean, kiddo?”

“I mean that evolution itself evolves. It has to. Evolvability is in itself an inherited survival trait. Systems—living and otherwise—have to learn how to evolve and, to some extent, control the direction and rate of their own evolution. We … I mean the human species … were on the verge of doing that a thousand years ago, and the Core took it away from us. At least from most of us.”

“What do you mean, ‘most of us’?”

“I promise that you’ll see in a few days, Raul.”

We reached the South Gate of Heaven and passed through its arched entry, a red arch under a golden pagoda roof. Beyond it was the Heavenly Way, a gentle slope that ran to the summit that was just visible. The Heavenly Way was nothing more than path on bare, black rock. We could have been walking on an airless moon like Old Earth’s—the conditions here were about as amenable to life. I started to say something to Aenea about this being a niche that life hadn’t stuck its foot into, when she led the way off the path to a small stone temple set in among the sharp crags and fissures a few hundred meters below the summit. There was an air lock that looked so ancient it appeared to have come out on one of the earliest seedships. Amazingly, it worked when she activated the press pad and the three of us stood in it until it cycled and the inner door opened. We stepped inside.

It was a small room and almost bare except for an ornate bronze pot holding fresh flowers, some sprigs of green on a low dais, and a beautiful statue—once gold—of a life-size woman in robes that appeared to be made of gold. The woman was fat-cheeked and of pleasant demeanor—a sort of female Buddha—and she looked to be wearing a gilded crown of leaves and had an oddly Christian halo of hammered gold behind her head.

A. Bettik pulled off his helmet and said, “The air is good. Air pressure more than adequate.”

Aenea and I folded back our skinsuit cowls. It was a pleasure to breathe regularly.

There were incense tapers and a box of matches at the statue’s foot. Aenea went to one knee and used a match to light one of the tapers. The smell of incense was very strong.

“This is the Princess of the Azure Clouds,” she said, smiling up at the smiling gold face. “The goddess of the dawn. By lighting this, I’ve just made an offering for the birth of grandchildren.”

I started to smile and then froze.
She has a child. My beloved has already had a child
. My throat tightened and I looked away, but Aenea walked over and took my arm.

“Shall we eat lunch?” she said.

I had forgotten about our brown bag lunch. It would have been difficult to eat it through our helmets and osmosis masks.

We sat in the dim light, in the windowless room, amid the floating smoke and scent of incense, and ate the sandwiches packed by the monks.

“Where now?” I said as Aenea began recycling the inner lock.

“I have heard that there is a precipice on the eastern edge of the summit called Suicide Cliff,” said A. Bettik. “It used to be a place for serious sacrifice. Jumping from it is said to provide instant communion with the Jade Emperor and to insure that your offering request is honored. If you really want to guarantee grandchildren, you might jump from there.”

I stared at the android. I was never sure if he had a sense of humor or simply a skewed personality.

Aenea laughed. “Let’s walk to the Temple of the Jade Emperor first,” she said. “See if anyone’s home.”

Outside, I was struck first by the isolation of the skinsuit and the airless clarity of everything. The osmosis mask had gone almost opaque because of the unfiltered ferocity of the midday sun at this altitude. Shadows were harsh.

We were about fifty meters from the summit and the temple when a form stepped out of the blackness of shadow behind a boulder and blocked our way. I thought
Shrike
and foolishly clenched my hands into fists before I saw what it was.

A very tall man stood before us, dressed in lance-slashed, vacuum combat armor. Standard Pax Fleet Marine and Swiss Guard issue. I could see his face through the impact-proof visor
—his skin was black, his features strong, and his short-cropped hair was white. There were fresh and livid scars on his dark face. His eyes were not friendly. He was carrying a Marine-class, multipurpose assault rifle, and now he raised it and leveled it at us. His transmission was on the skinsuit band.

“Stop!”

We stopped.

The giant did not seem to know what to do next.
The Pax finally have us
, was my first thought.

Aenea took a step forward. “Sergeant Gregorius?” came her voice on the skinsuit band.

The man cocked his head but did not lower the weapon. I had no doubt that the rifle would work perfectly in hard vacuum—either flechette cloud, energy lance, charged particle beam, solid slug, or hyper-k. The muzzle was aimed at my beloved’s face.

“How do you know my …” began the giant and then seemed to rock backward. “You’re her. The one. The girl we sought for so long, across so many systems. Aenea.”

“Yes,” said Aenea. “Are there others who survived?”

“Three,” said the man she had called Gregorius. He gestured to his right and I could just make out a black scar on black rock, with blackened remnants of something that might have been a starship escape bulb.

“Is Father Captain de Soya among them?” said Aenea.

I remembered the name. I remembered de Soya’s voice on the dropship radio when he had found us and saved us from Nemes and then let us go on God’s Grove almost ten of his and Aenea’s years ago.

“Aye,” said Sergeant Gregorius, “the captain’s alive, but just barely. He was burned bad on the poor old
Raphael
. He’d be atoms with her, if he hadn’t passed out an’ given me the opportunity to drag him to a lifeboat. The other two are hurt, but the father-captain’s dyin’.” He lowered the rifle and leaned on it wearily. “Dyin’ the true death … we have no resurrection crèche and the darlin’ father-captain made me promise to slag him to atoms when he went, rather than let him be resurrected a mindless idiot.”

Aenea nodded. “Can you take me to him? I need to talk to him.”

Gregorius shouldered the heavy weapon and looked suspiciously at A. Bettik and me. “And these two …”

“This is my dear friend,” said Aenea, touching A. Bettik’s arm. She took my hand. “And this is my beloved.”

The giant only nodded at this, turned, and led the way up the final stretch of slope to the summit to the Temple of the Jade Emperor.

On Hyperion, several hundred light-years toward galactic center from the events and the people on T’ien Shan, a forgotten old man rose out of the dreamless sleep of long-term cryogenic fugue and slowly became aware of his surroundings. His surroundings were a no-touch suspension bed, a gaggle of life-support modules encircling him and nuzzling him like so many feeding raptors, and uncountable tubes, wires, and umbilicals finishing their work of feeding him, detoxifying his blood, stimulating his kidneys, carrying antibiotics to fight infection, monitoring his life signs, and generally invading his body and dignity in order to revive him and keep him alive.

“Ah, fuck,” rasped the old man. “Waking up is a fucking, goddamn, dung-eating, corpse-buggering, shit storm of a nightmare for the terminally old. I’d pay a million marks if I could just get out of bed and go piss.”

“And good morning to you, M. Silenus,” said the female android monitoring the old poet’s life signs on the floating biomonitor. “You seem to be in good spirits today.”

“Bugger all blue-skinned wenches,” mumbled Martin Silenus. “Where are my teeth?”

“You haven’t grown them back yet, M. Silenus,” said the android. She was named A. Raddik and was a little over three
centuries old … less than one-third the age of the ancient human mummy floating in the suspension bed.

“No need to,” mumbled the old man. “Won’t fucking be awake long enough. How long was I under?”

“Two years, three months, eight days,” said A. Raddik.

Martin Silenus peered up at the open sky above his tower. The canvas roof on this highest level of his stone turret had been rolled back. Deep lapis blue. The low light of early morning or late evening. The shimmer and flit of radiant gossamers not yet illuminating their fragile half-meter butterfly wings.

“What season?” managed Silenus.

“Late spring,” said the female android. Other blue-skinned servants of the old poet moved in and out of the circular room, bent on obscure errands. Only A. Raddik monitored the last stages of the poet’s revival from fugue.

“How long since they left?” He did not have to specify who the “they” were. A. Raddik knew that the old poet meant not only Raul Endymion, the last visitor to their abandoned university city, but the girl Aenea—whom Silenus had known three centuries earlier—and whom he still hoped to see again someday.

“Nine years, eight months, one week, one day,” said A. Raddik. “All Earth standard, of course.”

“Hggrhh,” grunted the old poet. He continued peering at the sky. The sunlight was filtered through canvas rolled to the east, pouring light onto the south wall of the stone turret while not striking him directly, but the brightness still brought tears to his ancient eyes. “I’ve become a thing of darkness,” he mumbled. “Like Dracula. Rising from my fucking grave every few years to check on the world of the living.”

“Yes, M. Silenus,” agreed A. Raddik, changing several settings on the control panel.

“Shut up, wench,” said the poet.