“What are you doing?” asked Gamma.
“Burying him.” I was too tired to say more. I leaned against a thick chalma root and rested.
“No.” It was a command. “He is of the cruciform.”
I stared as Gamma turned and walked quickly back to the village. When the Bikura was gone, I pulled off the crude fiber tarp I had draped over the corpse.
Alpha was, without any doubt, truly dead. It no longer mattered to him or the universe whether he was of the cruciform or not. The fall had stripped him of most of his clothes and all of his dignity. The right side of his skull had been cracked and emptied like a breakfast egg. One eye stared sightlessly toward Hyperion’s sky through a thickening film while the other looked out lazily from under a drooping lid. His rib cage had been splintered so thoroughly that shards of bone protruded from his flesh. Both arms were broken and his left leg had been twisted almost off. I had used the medscanner to perform a perfunctory autopsy and it had revealed massive internal injuries; even the poor devil’s heart had been pulped by the force of the fall.
I reached out and touched the cold flesh. Rigor mortis was setting in. My fingers brushed across the cross-shaped welt on his chest and I quickly pulled my hand away. The cruciform was warm.
“Stand away.”
I looked up to see Beta and the rest of the Bikura standing there. I had no doubt that they would murder me in a second if I did not move away from the corpse. As I did so, an idiotically frightened part of my mind noted that the Three Score and Ten were now the Three Score and Nine. It seemed funny at the time.
The Bikura lifted the body and moved back toward the village. Beta looked at the sky, looked at me, and said:
“It is almost time. You will come.”
We went down into the Cleft. The body was carefully tied into a basket of vines and lowered with us.
The sun was not yet illuminating the interior of the basilica when they set Alpha’s corpse on the broad altar and removed his remaining rags.
I do not know what I expected next—some ritual act of cannibalism perhaps. Nothing would have surprised me. Instead, one of the Bikura raised his arms, just as the first shafts of colored light entered the basilica, and intoned, “You will follow the cross all of your days.”
The Three Score and Ten knelt and repeated the sentence. I remained standing. I did not speak.
“You will be of the cruciform all of your days,” said the little Bikura and the basilica echoed to the chorus of voices repeating the phrase. Light the color and texture of clotting blood threw a huge shadow of the cross on the far wall.
“You will be of the cruciform now and forever and ever,” came the chant as the winds rose outside and the organ pipes of the canyon wailed with the voice of a tortured child.
When the Bikura stopped chanting I did not whisper “Amen.” I stood there while the others turned and left with the sudden, total indifference of spoiled children who have lost interest in their game.
“There is no reason to stay,” said Beta when the others had gone.
“I want to,” I said, expecting a command to leave. Beta turned without so much as a shrug and left me there. The light dimmed. I went outside to watch the sun set and when I returned it had begun.
Once, years ago in school, I saw a time-lapse holo showing the decomposition of a kangaroo mouse. A week’s slow work of nature’s recycling had been accelerated to thirty seconds of horror. There was the sudden, almost comic bloating of the little corpse, then the stretching of flesh into lesions, followed by the sudden appearance of maggots in the mouth, eyes, and open sores, and finally the sudden and incredible corkscrew cleaning of meat from the bones—there is no other phrase that fits the image—as the pack of maggots spiraled right to left, head to tail, in a time-lapsed helix of carrion consumption that left behind nothing but bones and gristle and hide.
Now it was a man’s body I watched.
I stopped and stared, the last of the light fading quickly. There was no sound in the echoing silence of the basilica except for the pounding of my pulse in my own ears. I stared as Alpha’s corpse first twitched and then visibly vibrated, almost levitating off the altar in the spastic violence of sudden decomposition. For a few seconds the cruciform seemed to increase in size and deepen in color, glowing as red as raw meat, and I imagined then that I caught a glimpse of the network of filaments and nematodes holding the disintegrating body together like metal fibers in a sculptor’s melting model. The flesh flowed.
I stayed in the basilica that night. The area around the altar remained lit by the glow of the cruciform on Alpha’s chest. When the corpse moved the light would cast strange shadows on the walls.
I did not leave the basilica until Alpha left on the third day, but most of the visible changes had taken place by the end of that first night. The body of the Bikura I had named Alpha was broken down and rebuilt as I watched. The corpse that was left was not quite Alpha and not quite not Alpha, but it was intact. The face was a flowfoam doll’s face, smooth and unlined, features stamped in a slight smile. At sunrise of the third day, I saw the corpse’s chest begin to rise and fall and I heard the first intake of breath—a rasp like water being poured into a leather pouch. Shortly before noon I left the basilica to climb the vines.
I followed Alpha.
He has not spoken, will not reply. His eyes have a fixed, unfocused look and occasionally he pauses as if he hears distant voices calling.
No one paid attention to us when we returned to the village. Alpha went to a hut and sits there now. I sit in mine. A minute ago I opened my robe and ran my fingers across the welt of the cruciform. It lies benignly under the flesh of my chest. Waiting.
Day 140:
I am recovering from my wounds and the loss of blood. It cannot be cut out with a sharpened stone.
It does not like pain. I lost consciousness long before the pain or loss of blood demanded it. Each time I awoke and resumed cutting, I would be made to pass out. It does not like pain.
Day 158:
Alpha speaks some now. He seems duller, slower, and only vaguely aware of me (or anyone else) but he eats and moves. He appears to recognize me to some extent. The medscanner shows the heart and internal organs of a young man—perhaps of a boy of sixteen.
I must wait about another Hyperion month and ten days—about fifty days in all—until the flame forests become quiet enough for me to try to walk out, pain or no pain. We will see who can stand the most pain.
Day 173:
Another death.
The one called Will—the one with the broken finger—had been missing for a week. Yesterday the Bikura went several kilometers northeast as if following a beacon, and found the remains near the great ravine.
Evidently a branch had snapped while he was climbing to grasp some chalma fronds. Death must have been instantaneous when he broke his neck, but it is where he fell that is important. The body—if one could call it that—was lying between two great mud cones marking the burrows of the large red insects that Tuk called fire mantises. Carpet beetles might have been a more apt phrase. In the past few days the insects had stripped the corpse clean to the bone. Little was left to be found except the skeleton, some random shreds of tissue and tendon, and the cruciform—still attached to the rib cage like some splendid cross packed in the sarcophagus of a long-dead pope.
It is terrible, but I cannot help but feel some small sense of triumph beneath the sadness. There is no way that the cruciform can regenerate something out of these bare bones; even the terrible illogic of this accursed parasite must respect the imperative of the law of conservation of mass. The Bikura I called Will has died the true death. The Three Score and Ten truly are the Three Score and Nine from this time on.