Дэн Симмонс - Endymion

“Full battle stations,” says de Soya. He smiles slightly without being aware of doing so. Perhaps the Ousters are rushing to the rescue of their forest. Or perhaps there was a single defender and it has just launched a standoff weapon from somewhere beyond the system’s Oort cloud. Or perhaps it is the vanguard of an entire Swarm of Ouster fighting units and his task force is doomed. Whatever the threat, Father Captain de Soya prefers a fight to this… this vandalism.

“Vehicle is translating,” reports the acquisition officer from his perch above de Soya’s head.

“Very good,” says Father Captain de Soya. He watches displays flicker before his eyes, resets his shunt, and opens several virtual-optic channels. Now the C3 fades away and he stands in space, a giant five million klicks tall, seeing his own ships like specks with flaming tails, the curved column of smoke that is the destroyed forest bending past at belt height, and now this intruder flicking into existence seven hundred thousand klicks and an armreach above the plane of the ecliptic. Red spheres around his ships show external fields at combat strength. Other colors fill space, displaying sensor readings, acquisition pulses, and targeting preparation. Working on the millisecond tactical level, de Soya can launch weapons or unleash energies by pointing and snapping his fingers.

“Transponder beacon,” reports the com officer. “Current codes check. It is a Pax courier. Archangel class.”

De Soya frowns. What can be so important that the Pax Command is sending the Vatican’s fastest vehicle—a craft so swift that it is also the Pax’s greatest secret weapon? De Soya can see the Pax codes surrounding the tiny ship in tactical space. Its fusion flame reaches scores of kilometers. The ship is using almost no energy on internal containment fields, and the gravities involved are beyond raspberry-jam levels.

“Uncrewed?” queries de Soya. He desperately hopes so. Archangel-class ships can travel anywhere in known space within days—real-time days!—rather than the weeks of ship-time and years of real time demanded by all other craft—but no one survives archangel voyages.

Mother Commander Stone steps into the tactical environment with him. Her black tunic is almost invisible against space so that her pale face seems to float above the ecliptic, sunlight from the virtual star illuminating her sharp cheekbones. “No, sir,” she says softly. Her voice can be heard only by de Soya in this mode. “Beacon indicates two members of the crew in fugue.”

“Dear Jesus,” whispers de Soya. It is more prayer than curse. Even in high-g fugue tanks, these two people, already killed during C-plus travel, will now be more a microthin layer of protein paste than healthy raspberry jam. “Prepare the resurrection créches,” he says on the common band.

Mother Commander Stone touches the shunt behind her ear and frowns. “Message embedded in code. Human couriers are to be resurrected priority alpha. Dispensation level Omega.”

Father Captain de Soya’s head snaps around and he stares at his executive officer for a silent moment. The smoke from the burning orbital forest swirls around their waists. Priority resurrection defies the doctrine of the Church and the rules of Pax Command; it is also dangerous—the chances for incomplete reintegration go from near zero at the usual three-day rate, to almost fifty percent at the three-hour level. And priority level Omega means His Holiness on Pacem.

De Soya sees the knowledge in his exec’s eyes. This courier ship is from the Vatican. Either someone there or someone in Pax Command, or both, considered this message important enough to send an irreplaceable archangel courier ship, to kill two high-ranking Pax officers—since no one else would be trusted with an archangel—and to risk incomplete reintegration of those same two officers.

In tactical space de Soya raises his eyebrows in response to his exec’s questioning look. On the command band he says, “Very well, Commander. Instruct all three ships to match velocities. Prepare a boarding party. I want the fugue tanks transferred and the resurrections completed by oh-six-thirty hours. Please give my compliments to Captain Hearn on the Melchior and Mother Captain Boulez on the Caspar, and ask them to join me on the Balthazar for a meeting with the couriers at oh-seven-hundred.”

Father Captain de Soya steps from tactical space to the reality of the C3. Stone and the others are still looking at him.

“Quickly,” says de Soya, and kicks off from the display rim, flying across the space to his private door and pulling himself through the circular hatch. “Wake me when the couriers are resurrected,” he says to the white faces watching him in the seconds before the door irises shut.

I walked the streets of Endymion and tried to come to grips with my life, my death, and my life again.

I should say here that I was not as cool about these things—my trial, my “execution,” my strange meeting with this mythic old poet—as this narrative would suggest. Part of me was shaken to its core. They had tried to kill me! I wanted to blame the Pax, but the courts were not agents of the Pax—not directly. Hyperion had its own Home Rule Council, and the Port Romance courts were set up according to our own local politics. Capital punishment was not an inevitable Pax sentence, especially on those worlds where the Church governed via theocracy, but was a holdover from Hyperion’s old colonial days. My quick trial, its inevitable outcome, and my summary execution were, if anything, more expressions of Hyperion’s and Port Romance’s business leaders’ terror of frightening away Pax offworld tourists than anything else. I was a peasant, a hunting guide who had killed the rich tourist assigned to my care, and an example had been made of me. Nothing more. I should not take it personally.

I took it very personally. Pausing outside the tower, feeling the sun’s heat bounced from the broad paving stones of the courtyard, I slowly raised my hands. They were shaking. Too much had happened too soon, and my enforced calm during the trial and the brief period before my execution had demanded too much from me.

I shook my head and walked slowly through the university ruins. The city of Endymion had been built high on a brow of a hill, and the university had sat even higher along this ridge during colonial days, so the view to the south and east was beautiful. Chalma forests in the valley below glowed bright yellow. The lapis sky was free of contrails or airship traffic. I knew that the Pax cared nothing about Endymion, that it was the Pinion Plateau region to the northeast that their troops still guarded and their robots still mined for the unique cruciform symbiotes, but this entire section of the continent had been off-limits for so many decades that it had a fresh, wilderness feel to it.

Within ten minutes of idle walking, I realized that only the tower where I had awakened and its surrounding buildings seemed occupied. The rest of the university was in absolute ruins—its great halls open to the elements, its physical plant ransacked centuries before, its playing fields overgrown, its observatory dome shattered—and the city farther down the hillside looked even more abandoned. I saw entire city blocks there reclaimed by weirwood tangle and kudzu.

I could see that the university had been beautiful in its day: post-Hegira, neo-Gothic buildings were constructed of the sandstone blocks quarried not far from there in the foothills of the Pinion Plateau. Three years earlier, when I had worked as an assistant to the famous landscape artist Avrol Hume, doing much of the heavy work as he redesigned the First Family estates along the fashionable coast of the Beak, much of the demand then had been for “follies”—ersatz ruins set near ponds or forest or hilltop. I had become somewhat of an expert in setting old stones in artful states of decomposition to simulate ruins—most of them absurdly older than humankind’s history on this Outback world—but none of Hume’s follies had been as attractive as these real ruins. I wandered through the bones of a once-great university, admired the architecture, and thought of my family.