Martin Silenus seemed the most avid and expectant of the listeners as he leaned forward and whispered:
“He seyde, ‘Syn I shal bigynne the game,
What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name!
Now lat us ryde, and herkneth what I seye.’
And with that word we ryden forth oure weye;
And he bigan with right a myrie cheere
His tale anon, and seyde as ye may heere.”
THE PRIEST’S TALE:
“THE MAN WHO CRIED GOD”
“Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,” said Father Lenar Hoyt.
So began the priest’s story. Later, dictating the tale into his comlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the timeless failings of human speech.
Lenar Hoyt had been a young priest, born, raised, and only recently ordained on the Catholic world of Pacem, when he was given his first offworld assignment: he was ordered to escort the respected Jesuit Father Paul Duré into quiet exile on the colony world of Hyperion.
In another time, Father Paul Duré certainly would have become a bishop and perhaps a pope. Tall, thin, ascetic, with white hair receding from a noble brow and eyes too filled with the sharp edge of experience to hide their pain, Paul Duré was a follower of St. Teilhard as well as an archaeologist, ethnologist, and eminent Jesuit theologian. Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what amounted to a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the mainstream of Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite. Nor had Father Duré lost his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church continued to be humankind’s last, best hope for immortality.
To Lenar Hoyt as a boy, Father Duré had been a somewhat godlike figure when glimpsed during his rare visits to the preseminary schools, or on the would-be seminarian’s even rarer visits to the New Vatican. Then, during the years of Hoyt’s study in seminary, Duré had been on an important Church-sponsored archaeological dig on the nearby world of Armaghast. When the Jesuit returned, a few weeks after Hoyt’s ordination, it had been under a cloud. No one outside the highest circles of the New Vatican knew precisely what had happened, but there were whispers of excommunication and even of a hearing before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, dormant the four centuries since the confusion following the death of Earth.
Instead, Father Duré had asked for a posting to Hyperion, a world most people knew of only because of the bizarre Shrike cult which had originated there, and Father Hoyt had been chosen to accompany him. It would be a thankless job, traveling in a role which combined the worst aspects of apprentice, escort, and spy without even the satisfaction of seeing a new world; Hoyt was under orders to see Father Duré down to the Hyperion spaceport and then reboard the same spinship for its return voyage to the Worldweb. What the bishopric was offering Lenar Hoyt was twenty months in cryogenic fugue, a few weeks of in-system travel at either end of the voyage, and a time-debt which would return him to Pacem eight years behind his former classmates in the quest for Vatican careers and missionary postings.
Bound by obedience and schooled in discipline, Lenar Hoyt accepted without question.
Their transport, the aging spinship HS Nadia Oleg, was a pockmarked metal tub with no artificial gravity of any sort when it was not under drive, no viewports for the passengers, and no on-board recreation except for the stimsims piped into the datalink to keep passengers in their hammocks and fugue couches. After awakening from fugue, the passengers—mostly offworld workers and economy-rate tourists with a few cult mystics and would-be Shrike suicides thrown in for good measure—slept in those same hammocks and fugue couches, ate recycled food in featureless mess decks, and generally tried to cope with spacesickness and boredom during their twelve-day, zero-g glide from their spinout point to Hyperion.
Father Hoyt learned little from Father Duré during those days of forced intimacy, nothing at all about the events on Armaghast which had sent the senior priest into exile. The younger man had keyed his comlog implant to seek out as much data as it could on Hyperion and, by the time they were three days out from planetfall, Father Loyt considered himself somewhat of an expert on the world.
“There are records of Catholics coming to Hyperion but no mention of a diocese there,” said Hoyt one evening as they hung talking in their zero-g hammocks while most of their fellow passengers lay tuned into erotic stimsims. “I presume you’re going down to do some mission work?”
“Not at all,” replied Father Duré. “The good people of Hyperion have done nothing to foist their religious opinions on me, so I see no reason to offend them with my proselytizing. Actually, I hope to travel to the southern continent—Aquila—and then find a way inland from the city of Port Romance. But not in the guise of a missionary. I plan to set up an ethnological research station along the Cleft.”
“Research?” Father Hoyt had echoed in surprise. He closed his eyes to key his implant. Looking again at Father Duré, he said, “That section of the Pinion Plateau isn’t inhabited, Father. The flame forests make it totally inaccessible most of the year.”
Father Duré smiled and nodded. He carried no implant and his ancient comlog had been in his luggage for the duration of the trip. “Not quite inaccessible,” he said softly. “And not quite uninhabited. The Bikura live there.”
“Bikura,” Father Hoyt said and closed his eyes. “But they’re just a legend,” he said at last.
“Hmmm,” said Father Duré. “Try cross-indexing through Mamet Spedling.”
Father Hoyt closed his eyes again. General Index told him that Mamet Spedling had been a minor explorer affiliated with the Shackleton Institute on Renaissance Minor who, almost a standard century and a half earlier, had filed a short report with the Institute in which he told of hacking his way inland from the then newly settled Port Romance, through swamplands which had since been reclaimed for fiberplastic plantations, passing through the flame forests during a period of rare quietude, and climbing high enough on the Pinion Plateau to encounter the Cleft and a small tribe of humans who fit the profile of the legendary Bikura.
Spedling’s brief notes hypothesized that the humans were survivors of a missing seedship colony from three centuries earlier and clearly described a group suffering all of the classic retrograde cultural effects of extreme isolation, inbreeding, and overadaptation. In Spedling’s blunt words, “… even after less than two days here it is obvious that the Bikura are too stupid, lethargic, and dull to waste time describing.” As it turned out, the flame forests then began to show some signs of becoming active and Spedling had not wasted any more time observing his discovery but had rushed to reach the coast, losing four indigenie bearers, all of his equipment and records, and his left arm to the “quiet” forest in the three months it took him to escape.
“My God,” Father Hoyt had said as he lay in his hammock on the Nadia Oleg, “why the Bikura?”
“Why not?” had been Father Duré’s mild reply. “Very little is known about them.”
“Very little is known about most of Hyperion,” said the younger priest, becoming somewhat agitated. “What about the Time Tombs and the legendary Shrike north of the Bridle Range on Equus?” he said. “They’re famous!”