“Precisely,” said Father Duré. “Lenar, how many learned papers have been written on the Tombs and the Shrike creature? Hundreds? Thousands?” The aging priest had tamped in tobacco and now lighted his pipe: no small feat in zero-g, Hoyt observed. “Besides,” said Paul Duré, “even if the Shrike-thing is real, it is not human. I am partial to human beings.”
“Yes,” said Hoyt, ransacking his mental arsenal for potent arguments, “but the Bikura are such a small mystery. At the most you’re going to find a few dozen indigenies living in a region so cloudy and smoky and … unimportant that even the colony’s own mapsats haven’t noticed them. Why choose them when there are big mysteries to study on Hyperion … like the labyrinths!” Hoyt had brightened. “Did you know that Hyperion is one of the nine labyrinthine worlds, Father?”
“Of course,” said Duré. A rough hemisphere of smoke expanded from him until air currents broke it into tendrils and tributaries. “But the labyrinths have their researchers and admirers throughout the Web, Lenar, and the tunnels have been there—on all nine worlds—for how long? Half a million standard years? Closer to three quarters of a million, I believe. Their secret will last. But how long will the Bikura culture last before they’re absorbed into modern colonial society or, more likely, are simply wiped out by circumstances?”
Hoyt shrugged. “Perhaps they’re already gone. It’s been a long time since Spedling’s encounter with them and there haven’t been any other confirmed reports. If they are extinct as a group, then all of your time-debt and labor and pain of getting there will be for nothing.”
“Precisely,” was all that Father Paul Duré had said and puffed calmly on his pipe.
It was in their last hour together, during the dropship ride down, that Father Hoyt had gained the slightest glimpse into his companion’s thoughts. The limb of Hyperion had been glowing white and green and lapis above them for hours when suddenly the old dropship had cut into the upper layers of atmosphere, flame had briefly filled the window, and then they were flying silently some sixty kilometers above dark cloud masses and starlit seas with the hurtling terminator of Hyperion’s sunrise rushing toward them like a spectral tidal wave of light.
“Marvelous,” Paul Duré had whispered, more to himself than to his young companion. “Marvelous. It is at times like this that I have the sense … the slightest sense … of what a sacrifice it must have been for the Son of God to condescend to become the Son of Man.”
Hoyt had wanted to talk then, but Father Duré had continued to stare out the window, lost in thought. Ten minutes later they had landed at Keats Interstellar, Father Duré was soon swept into the whirlpool of customs and luggage rituals, and twenty minutes after that a thoroughly disappointed Lenar Hoyt was rising toward space and the Nadia Oleg once again.
“Five weeks later of my time, I returned to Pacem,” said Father Hoyt. “I had mislaid eight years but for some reason my sense of loss ran deeper than that simple fact. Immediately upon my return, the bishop informed me that there had been no word from Paul Duré during the four years of his stay on Hyperion. The New Vatican had spent a fortune on fatline inquiries, but neither the colonial authorities nor the consulate in Keats had been able to locate the missing priest.”
Hoyt paused to sip from his water glass and the Consul said, “I remember the search. I never met Duré, of course, but we did our best to trace him. Theo, my aide, spent a lot of energy over the years trying to solve the case of the missing cleric. Other than a few contradictory reports of sightings in Port Romance, there was no trace of him. And those sightings went back to the weeks right after his arrival, years before. There were hundreds of plantations out there with no radios or comlines, primarily because they were harvesting bootleg drugs as well as fiberplastic. I guess we never talked to the people at the right plantation. At least I know Father Duré’s file was still open when I left.”
Father Hoyt nodded. “I landed in Keats a month after your replacement had taken over at the consulate. The bishop had been astonished when I volunteered to return. His Holiness himself granted me an audience. I was on Hyperion less than seven of its local months. By the time I left to return to the Web, I had discovered the fate of Father Duré.” Hoyt tapped the two stained leather books on the table. “If I am to complete this,” he said, his voice thick, “I must read excerpts from these.”
The treeship Yggdrasill had turned so the bulk of the tree had blocked the sun. The effect was to plunge the dining platform and the curved canopy of leaves beneath it into night, but instead of a few thousand stars dotting the sky, as would have been the case from a planet’s surface, literally a million suns blazed above, beside, and beneath the group at the table. Hyperion was a distinct sphere now, hurtling directly at them like some deadly missile.
“Read,” said Martin Silenus.
FROM THE JOURNAL
OF FATHER PAUL DURÉ:
Day 1:
So begins my exile.
I am somewhat at a loss as to how to date my new journal. By the monastic calendar on Pacem, it is the seventeenth day of Thomasmonth in the Year of Our Lord 2732. By Hegemony Standard, it is October 12, 589 P.C. By Hyperion reckoning, or so I am told by the wizened little clerk in the old hotel where I am staying, it is the twenty-third day of Lycius (the last of their seven forty-day months), either 426 A.D.C. (after dropship crash!) or the hundred and twenty-eighth year of the reign of Sad King Billy, who has not reigned for at least a hundred of those years.
To hell with it. I’ll call it Day 1 of my exile.
Exhausting day. (Strange to be tired after months of sleep, but that is said to be a common reaction after awakening from fugue. My cells feel the fatigue of these past months of travel even if I do not remember them. I don’t remember feeling this tired from travel when I was younger.)
I felt bad about not getting to know young Hoyt better. He seems a decent sort, all proper catechism and bright eyes. It’s no fault of youngsters like him that the Church is in its final days. It’s just that his brand of happy naiveté can do nothing to arrest that slide into oblivion which the Church seems destined for.
Well, my contributions have not helped either.
Brilliant view of my new world as the dropship brought us down. I was able to make out two of the three continents—Equus and Aquila. The third one, Ursa, was not visible.
Planetfall at Keats and hours of effort getting through customs and taking ground transit into the city. Confused images: the mountain range to the north with its shifting, blue haze, foothills forested with orange and yellow trees, pale sky with its green-blue under-coating, the sun too small but more brilliant than Pacem’s. Colors seem more vivid from a distance, dissolving and scattering as one approaches, like a pointillist’s palette. The great sculpture of Sad King Billy which I had heard so much about was oddly disappointing. Seen from the highway, it looked raw and rough, a hasty sketch chiseled from the dark mountain, rather than the regal figure I had expected. It does brood over this ramshackle city of half a million people in a way that the neurotic poet-king probably would have appreciated.
The town itself seems to be separated into the sprawling maze of slums and saloons which the locals call Jacktown and Keats itself, the so-called Old City although it dates back only four centuries, all polished stone and studied sterility. I will take the tour soon.