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At least, I will know so far as I am concerned. Which, when it comes right down to it, is the only aspect of the universe’s resolution with which most of us are concerned.
His poncho and chameleon-cloth hunting blouse were unsealed enough for me to see the gleam of a gold Pax double cross hanging around his neck and the red welt of the actual cruciform on his upper chest. M. Herrig was a born-again Christian.
M. Herrig had tried to take the weapon away from me. I had shot him at point-blank range, literally blowing his head off in the process. M. Herrig was the last to testify. Still shaken and pale from his three-day resurrection, dressed in a somber business suit and cape, his voice shook as he confirmed the other men’s testimony and described my brutal assault on him.
I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead.
whatever strangeness lay ahead, I was damned glad to be alive.
no one survives archangel voyages.
“To heroes,” he said. “To heroes who get their hair cut.” He drank the champagne in one gulp.
How could anyone live for a thousand years and not learn such a basic thing? Poets were strange.
It is then that Father Captain de Soya sees the second figure in the gloom. And it is then that the screaming begins.
“Goddamn him,” she was shouting, almost weeping. “Goddamn him.” These were the first words I heard our messiah utter.
Aenea sat at the piano bench and began playing. I did not recognize the tune, but it sounded classical … something from the twenty-sixth century, perhaps.
As a child, listening to Grandam’s tales of the old days, I had tried to imagine a world where everyone wore implants and could access the datasphere whenever they wanted. Of course, even then, Hyperion had no datasphere—and had never been part of the Web—but for most of the billions of members of the Hegemony, life must have been like an endless stimsim of visual, auditory, and printed information. No wonder a majority of humans had never learned to read during the old days.
But who says the Core is dead? That’s like saying that you swept away a couple of spiderwebs, so the spider has to be dead.”
The object falls from the dead man’s hand, and Gregorius glances at it as he kicks by to the stairwell. It is a book. “Shit,” mutters the sergeant. He has killed an unarmed man. He will lose points for this.
“Yeah, yeah,” says Rettig. “I know we accidentally killed her then. But the whole ship was wired to blow in that one. I doubt if that will happen.…
“Meaning no disrespect, sir,” says the other man, “but there’s no way in the Good Lord’s fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.”
“M. Endymion,” said the ship in that tone that made me think it was acting haughty, “I am an interstellar spacecraft capable of penetrating nebulae and existing quite comfortably within the outer shell of a red giant star. I shall hardly—as you put it—leak because of being immersed in H2O for a brief period of years.” “Sorry,” I said, and then—refusing to have the ship’s rebuke as the last word—“Don’t forget to close your air lock when you go under.”
“I thought of that,” said Aenea. I tapped my fingers on the ax handle. If that kid said that phrase one more time, I would seriously consider using the implement on her.
Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.
“You are with the Klingman group?” he asked in the same thick dialect. “Or the Otters?” I heard Oor dey autors? I didn’t know if he was saying “others” or “otters” or, perhaps, “authors.” Maybe this was a seaborne concentration camp for bad writers.
On the eighth day they leave the system, and for the first time Father Captain de Soya welcomes the coming death as a means of escape.
“Are you out of your crossdamned mind!” Major Leem explodes, and then—remembering the papal diskey—he adds, “Sir.”
I heard the hiss and felt the blessed numbness spreading. If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller.
Sometimes, I realized, the safety off on my plasma rifle, trying to walk lightly in the grinding weight of Sol Draconi Septem, the shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.
The heavy g-load and cold must have been making me more stupid than I usually was.
It is too near absolute darkness down there to see by light amplification or infrared, and she has not brought a flashlight, but she opens her mouth, and a brilliant beam of yellow light illuminates the tunnel and ice fog ahead of her.
I had realized when I was a boy that I would always be an outsider when it came to holy places … never having one of my own, never feeling comfortable in another’s. I did not enter.
