Дэн Симмонс: Endymion

This was not a new image for me. “Yes,” I said, “I know the penalty for a murderer executed without converting. But I have this—” I tapped the cortical come-along now permanently attached to my temple. “I don’t need a cruciform symbiote embedded in me to put me in a deeper slavery.”

Father Tse pulled back as if I had slapped him. “One mere lifetime of commitment to Our Lord is not slavery,” he said, his stutter banished by cold anger. “Millions have offered this before the tangible blessing of immediate resurrection in this life was offered. Billions gratefully accept it now.” He stood up. “You have the choice, my son. Eternal light, with the gift of almost unlimited life in this world in which to serve Christ, or eternal darkness.”

I shrugged and looked away.

Father Tse blessed me, said good-bye in tones comingled with sadness and contempt, turned, called the guards, and was gone. A minute later pain stabbed at my skull as the guards tickled my come-along and led me back to my cell.

I won’t bore you with a long litany of the thoughts that chased through my mind that endless autumn night. I was twenty-seven years old. I loved life with a passion that sometimes led me into trouble… although never anything as serious as this before. For the first few hours of that final night, I pondered escape the way a caged animal must claw at steel bars. The prison was set high on the sheer cliff overlooking the reef called the Mandible, far out on Toschahi Bay. Everything was unbreakable Perspex, unbendable steel, or seamless plastic. The guards carried deathwands, and I sensed no reluctance in them to use them. Even if I should escape, a touch of a button on the come-along remote would curl me up with the universe’s worst migraine until they followed the beacon to my hiding place.

My last hours were spent pondering the folly of my short, useless life. I regretted nothing but also had little to show for Raul Endymion’s twenty-seven years on Hyperion. The dominant theme of my life seemed to be the same perverse stubbornness that had led me to reject resurrection.

So you owe the Church a lifetime of service, whispered a frenzied voice in the back of my skull, at least you get a lifetime that way! And more lifetimes beyond that! How can you turn down a deal like that? Anything’s better than real death… your rotting corpse being fed to the ampreys, coelacanths, and skarkworms. Think about this! I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep just to flee from the shouts echoing in my own mind.

The night lasted an eternity, but sunrise still seemed to come early. Four guards walked me to the death chamber, strapped me into a wooden chair, and then sealed the steel door. If I looked over my left shoulder, I could see faces peering through the Perspex. Somehow I had expected a priest—maybe not Father Tse again, but a priest, some representative of the Pax—to offer me one final chance at immortality. There was none. Only part of me was glad. I cannot say now whether I would have changed my mind at the last moment.

The method of execution was simple and mechanical—not as ingenious as a Schrödinger cat box, perhaps, but clever nonetheless. A short-range deathwand was set on the wall and aimed at the chair where I sat. I saw the red light click on the small comlog unit attached to the weapon. Prisoners in adjoining cells had gleefully whispered the mechanics of my death to me even before the sentence had been passed. The comlog computer had a random-number generator. When the number generated was a prime smaller than seventeen, the deathwand beam would be activated. Every synapse in the gray lump that was the personality and memory of Raul Endymion would be fused. Destroyed. Melted down to the neuronic equivalent of radioactive slag. Autonomic functions would cease mere milliseconds later. My heart and breathing would stop almost as soon as my mind was destroyed. Experts said that death by deathwand was as painless a way to die as had ever been invented. Those resurrected after deathwand execution usually did not want to talk about the sensation, but the word in the cells was that it hurt like hell—as if every circuit in your brain were exploding.

I looked at the red light of the comlog and the business end of the short deathwand. Some wag had rigged an LED display so that I could see the numerals being generated. They flicked by like floor numbers on an elevator to hell: 26-74-109-19-37… they had programmed the comlog to generate no numbers larger than 150… 77-42-12-60-84-129-108-14—

I lost it then. I balled my fists, strained at the unyielding plastic straps, and screamed obscenities at the walls, at the pale faces distorted through the Perspex windows, at the fucking Church and its fucking Pax, at the fucking coward who’d killed my dog, at the goddamned fucking cowards who…

I did not see the low prime number appear on the display. I did not hear the deathwand hum softly as its beam was activated. I did feel something, a sort of hemlock coldness starting at the back of my skull and widening to every part of my body with the speed of nerve conduction, and I felt surprise at feeling something. The experts are wrong and the cons are right, I thought wildly. You can feel your own death by deathwand. I would have giggled then if the numbness had not flowed over me like a wave.

Like a black wave.

A black wave that carried me away with it.

I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead. At any rate, I awoke with no more discomfort than a vague tingling in my extremities and lay there watching sunlight crawl across a rough plaster ceiling for a minute or more until an urgent thought shook me full awake.

Wait a minute, wasn’t I… didn’t they… ??

I sat up and looked around. If there was any lingering sense that my execution had been a dream, the prosaic quality of my surroundings dispelled it immediately. The room was pie-shaped with a curved and whitewashed outer stone wall and thick plaster ceilings. The bed was the only piece of furniture, and the heavy off-white linen on it complemented the texture of plaster and stone. There was a massive wooden door—closed—and an arched window open to the elements. One glance at the lapis sky beyond the window told me that I was still on Hyperion. There was no chance that I was still in the Port Romance prison; the stone here was too old, the details of the door too ornamental, the quality of linen too good.

I rose, found myself naked, and walked to the window. The autumn breeze was brisk, but the sun was warm on my skin. I was in a stone tower. Yellow chalma and the thick tangle of low weirwood wove a solid canopy of treetops up hills to the horizon. Everblues grew on granite rock faces. I could see other walls, ramparts, and the curve of another tower stretching away along the ridgeline upon which this tower stood. The walls seemed old. The quality of their construction and the organic feel of their architecture was from an era of skill and taste long predating the Fall.

I guessed at once where I must be: the chalma and weirwood suggested that I was still on the southern continent of Aquila; the elegant ruins spoke of the abandoned city of Endymion.

I had never been to the town from which my family took its surname, but I had heard many descriptions of it from Grandam, our clan storyteller. Endymion had been one of the first Hyperion cities settled after the dropship crash almost seven hundred years earlier. Until the Fall it had been famous for its fine university, a huge, castlelike structure that towered over the old town below it. Grandam’s great-grandfather’s grandfather had been a professor at the university until the Pax troops commandeered the entire region of central Aquila and literally sent thousands of people packing.