Endymion

26

During the 142 days that Father Captain de Soya waits for the girl to enter Renaissance System, he dreams about her every night. He sees her clearly as she was when first encountered at the Sphinx on Hyperion—willow thin, eyes alert but not terrified despite the sandstorm and threatening figures before her, her small hands partially raised as if ready to cover her face or rush forward to hug him. Often in his dreams she is his daughter and they are walking the crowded canal-streets of Renaissance Vector, discussing de Soya’s older sister, Maria, who has been sent to the St. Jude Medical Center in Da Vinci. In his dreams de Soya and the child walk hand in hand through the familiar canal-streets near the huge medical complex while he explains to her how he plans to save his sister’s life this time, how he will not allow Maria to die the way she had the first time.

In reality, Federico de Soya had been six standard years old when he and his family came to Renaissance Vector from their isolated region of Llano Estacado on their provincial world of MadredeDios. Almost everyone on the sparsely populated stone-and-desert world was Catholic, but not Pax born-again Catholic. The de Soya family had been part of the break-away Mariaist movement and had left Nuevo Madrid more than a century earlier when that world had voted to join the Pax and have all of its Christian churches submit to the Vatican. The Mariaists venerated the Holy Mother of Christ more than Vatican orthodoxy allowed, so young Federico had grown up on a marginal desert world with its devout colony of sixty thousand heretical Catholics who, as a form of protest, refused to accept the cruciform.

Then twelve-year-old Maria had become sick with an offworld retrovirus that swept like a scythe through the colony ranching region. Most sufferers of the Red Death either died within thirty-two hours or recovered, but Maria had lingered, her once-beautiful features all but obscured by the terrible, crimson stigmata. The family had taken her to the hospital in Ciudad del Madre on the windswept southern reach of Llano Estacado, but Mariaist medics there could do nothing but pray. There was a new Pax born-again Christian mission in Ciudad del Madre, discriminated against but tolerated by the locals, and the priest there—a kindly man named Father Maher—begged Federico’s father to allow their dying child to accept the cruciform. Federico was too young to remember the details of his parents’ agonized discussions, but he did remember the entire family—his mother and father, his other two sisters and younger brother—all on their knees in the Mariaist church there, begging for the Holy Mother’s guidance and intercession.

It was the other ranchers of the Llano Estacado Mariaist Cooperative who raised the money to send the entire family offworld to one of the famous medical centers on Renaissance Vector. While his brother and other sisters were left behind with a neighboring ranch family, for some reason six-year-old Federico was chosen to accompany his parents and dying sister on the long voyage. It was everyone’s first experience with actual coldsleep—more dangerous but cheaper than cryogenic fugue—and de Soya later remembered the chill in his bones that seemed to last through their weeks on Renaissance Vector.

At first the Pax medics in DaVinci seemed to arrest the spread of the Red Death through Maria’s system, even banishing some of the bleeding stigmata, but after three local weeks, the retrovirus again gained the upper hand. Once again a Pax priest—in this case, several who were on the staff of the hospital—beseeched de Soya’s parents to bend their Mariaist principles and allow the dying child to accept the cruciform before it was too late. Later, as he entered adulthood, de Soya could better imagine the agonies of his parents’ decision—the death of one’s deepest beliefs, or the death of one’s child.

In his dream, where Aenea is his daughter and they are walking the canal-streets near the medical center, he describes to her how Maria had given him her most prized possession—a tiny porcelain sculpture of a unicorn—just hours before she had slipped into a coma. In his dream, he walks with the 12-year-old Hyperion girl’s small hand in his, and tells her how his father—a strong man in both body and belief—had finally surrendered and asked for the Pax priests to administer the sacrament of the cross to his daughter. The priests at the hospital agreed, but insisted that de Soya’s parents and Federico formally convert to universal Catholicism before Maria could receive her cruciform.

De Soya explains to his daughter, Aenea, how he remembers the brief rebaptism ceremony at the local cathedral—St. John the Divine—where he and his parents renounced the ascendancy of the Holy Mother, and accepted the sole dominion of Jesus Christ as well as the power of the Vatican over their religious lives. He remembers receiving both First Communion and the cruciform that same evening.

Maria’s Sacrament of the Cross was scheduled for ten p.m. She died suddenly at 8:45 p.m. By the rules of the Church and the laws of the Pax, someone who suffered braindeath before receiving the cross could not be revived artificially to receive it.

Instead of being furious or feeling betrayed by his new Church, Federico’s father took the tragedy as a sign that God—not the God he had grown up praying to, the gentle Son infused with the universal female principles of the Holy Mother, but the fiercer New and Old Testament God of the Universal Church—had punished him, his family, and the entire Mariaist world of Llano Estacado. Upon the return to their homeworld with their child’s body dressed in white for burial, the elder de Soya had become an unrelenting apostle for the Pax version of Catholicism. It came at a fertile time, as the ranching communities were being swept with the Red Death. Federico was sent to the Pax school in Ciudad del Madre at age seven, and his sisters were sent away to the convent in northern Llano. Within his father’s lifetime—indeed, before Federico was sent to New Madrid with Father Maher to attend St. Thomas’s Seminary there—the surviving Mariaists on MadredeDios had all converted to Pax Catholicism. Maria’s terrible death had led to a world being born again.

In his dreams Father Captain de Soya explains little of this to the child walking with him through the nightmare-familiar streets of Da Vinci on Renaissance Vector. The girl, Aenea, seems to know all this.

In his dreams, repeated almost every night for 142 nights before the girl’s ship arrives, de Soya is explaining to the child how he has discovered the secret to curing the Red Death and saving his sister. The first morning that de Soya awakens, heart pounding and sheets soaked with sweat, he assumes that the secret to Maria’s rescue is the cruciform, but the next night’s dream proves him wrong.

The secret, it seems, is the return of Maria’s unicorn figure. All he has to do, he explains to his daughter, Aenea, is find the hospital through this maze of streets, and he knows that the return of the unicorn will save his sister. But he cannot find the hospital. The maze defeats him.

Almost five months later, on the eve of the arrival of the ship from Parvati System, in a variation on the same dream, de Soya does find the St. Jude Medical Center, where his sister is sleeping, but he realizes with growing horror that he has now lost the figurine.

In this dream Aenea speaks for the first time. Drawing the small porcelain statuette from the pocket of her blouse, the child says, “You see, we’ve had it with us the entire time.”

The reality of De Soya’s months in Renaissance System is literally and figuratively light-years away from the Parvati experience.

Unknown to de Soya, Gregorius, Kee, and Rettig—each a mangled corpse in the heart of Raphael’s resurrection créches—the ship is challenged within an hour of translating in-system. Two Pax ramscouts and a torchship come alongside after exchanging transponder codes and data with Raphael’s computer. It is decided to transfer the four bodies to a Pax resurrection center on Renaissance V.

Unlike their solitary awakening in Parvati System, de Soya and his Swiss Guard troopers return to consciousness with the proper ceremony and care. Indeed, the resurrection is a difficult one for the father-captain and Corporal Kee, and the two are returned to their créche for an additional three days. Later, de Soya can only speculate whether the ship’s automated resurrection facilities would have been up to the task.

As it is, the four are reunited after a week in-system, each man with his own chaplain/counselor. Sergeant Gregorius finds this unnecessary; he is eager and impatient to return to duty, but de Soya and the other two welcome their extra days of rest and recuperation from death.

The St. Anthony translates only hours after Raphael, and eventually de Soya is reunited with Captain Sati of the torchship and Captain Lempriere of the troopship St. Thomas Akira, which has returned to the Pax base in Renaissance System with more than eighteen hundred dead in cold storage and twenty-three hundred wounded men and women from the carnage in Hyperion System. The hospitals and cathedrals on Renaissance V. and in orbital Pax bases begin the surgeries and resurrections at once.

De Soya is present at her bedside when Commander Barnes-Avne regains life and consciousness. The small red-haired woman seems another person, diminished to the point that it makes de Soya’s heart ache with pity, with her head shaved, her skin red and slick with rebirth, and dressed only in a hospital gown. But her aggressiveness and demeanor have not been diminished. Almost at once she demands, “What the hell happened?”

De Soya tells her about the Shrike carnage. He fills her in on the seven months he has spent chasing the girl during the four months Barnes-Avne has spent in cold storage and transit from Hyperion.

“You’ve really screwed the pooch, haven’t you?” says the Commander.

De Soya smiles. So far, the Groundforce Commander is the only one to speak honestly to him. He is all too aware that he has had metaphorical carnal relations with the proverbial pooch: twice he has been in charge of a major Pax operation with a single objective—take a child into custody—and twice he has failed miserably. De Soya expects, at the very least, to be relieved of duty; more likely to be court-martialed. To that end, when an archangel courier arrives in-system two months before the girl’s arrival, de Soya orders the couriers to return at once to Pacem, to report his failure, and to return with instructions from Pax Command. In the meantime, Father Captain de Soya concludes his courier message, he will continue arranging the details of preparation for the girl’s capture in Renaissance System until he is relieved.

The resources available to him this time are impressive. Besides more than two hundred thousand ground troops, including several thousand elite Pax Marines and the surviving Swiss Guard Brigades from Hyperion, de Soya finds extensive sea and space naval forces. Present in Renaissance System and subject to his papal diskey command, are 27 torchships—8 of them omega class—as well as 108 nesting ramscouts to probe ahead of the torchships, 6 C3 fleet command-and-control ships with their escort cloud of 36 fast-attack ALRs, the attack carrier St. Malo with more than 200 space/air Scorpion fighters and seven thousand crew aboard, the antiquated cruiser Pride of Bressia, now renamed the Jacob, 2 additional troop transports in addition to the St. Thomas Akira, an even score of Benediction-class destroyers, 58 perimeter defense pickets—any 3 of which would be capable of defending an entire world (or a mobile task force) from attack—and more than 100 lesser ships, including in-system frigates that carried a lethal punch for close-in fighting, minesweepers, in-system couriers, drones, and the Raphael.

Three days after he has dispatched the second archangel courier to Pacem and seven weeks before Aenea’s arrival, the MAGI Task Force arrives—the Melchior, the Caspar, and Father Captain de Soya’s old ship, the Balthazar. At first de Soya is excited to see his old companions, but then he realizes that they will be present during his humiliation. Nonetheless, he goes out in Raphael to greet them while they are still six AUs from Renaissance V, and the first thing Mother Captain Stone does upon his stepping into the Balthazar is to hand him his duffel of personal possessions that he had been forced to leave behind. On top of his neatly folded clothes, carefully wrapped in foam, is his sister Maria’s gift of the porcelain unicorn.

De Soya is honest with Captain Hearn, Mother Captain Boulez, and Mother Commander Stone—he outlines the preparations he has made but tells them that a new Commander will almost certainly be arriving before the girl’s ship arrives. Two days later he is proved a liar. The archangel-class courier translates in-system with two aboard: Captain Marget Wu, aide to Fleet Admiral Marusyn, and the Jesuit Father Brown, special adviser to Monsignor Lucas Oddi, Undersecretary of Vatican State and confidant of Secretary of State Simon Augustino Cardinal Lourdusamy.

Captain Wu’s sealed orders for de Soya come with instructions to be opened even before her resurrection. He opens them immediately. The instructions are simple—he is to continue on his mission to capture the child, he will never be relieved of this duty, and Captain Wu, Father Brown, and any other dignitaries to arrive in-system are there only to observe and to underline—if any underlining is necessary—Father Captain de Soya’s total authority over all Pax officials in the pursuit of this goal.

This authority has been grudgingly accepted in the past weeks and months—there are three Pax Fleet admirals and eleven Pax Groundforce commanders in Renaissance System, and none are used to taking orders from a mere father-captain. But the papal diskey has been heard and obeyed. Now, in the final weeks, de Soya reviews his plans and meets with commanders and civilian leaders of all levels, down to the mayors of DaVinci and Benedetto, Toscanelli and Fioravante, Botticelli and Masaccio.

In the final weeks, with all plans made and forces assigned, Father Captain de Soya actually finds time for personal reflection and activities. Alone now, away from the controlled chaos of staff meetings and tactical simulations—away even from Gregorius, Kee, and Rettig, who accepted assignments as his personal bodyguards—de Soya walks the streets of DaVinci, visits the St. Jude Medical Center, and remembers his sister Maria. Somehow, he discovers, the nightly dreams are more compelling than seeing the real places.

De Soya has discovered that his old patron, Father Maher, has been serving for many years as rector in the Ascension Benedictine Monastery in the city-region of Florence on the opposite side of Renaissance V. from DaVinci, and he flies there to spend a long afternoon talking to the old man. Father Maher, now in his late eighties and “looking forward to my first new life in Christ,” is as optimistic, patient, and kind as de Soya remembers from almost three decades ago. Maher, it seems, has returned to MadredeDios more recently than de Soya. “The Llano Estacado has been abandoned,” says the old priest. “The ranches are empty now. Ciudad del Madre has a few dozen inhabitants, but only Pax researchers—seeing if the world is truly worth terraforming.”

“Yes,” says de Soya, “my family emigrated back to Nuevo Madrid more than twenty standard years ago. My sisters serve the Church-Loretta as a nun on Nevermore, Melinda as a priest on Nuevo Madrid.”

“And your brother Esteban?” asks Father Maher with a warm smile.

De Soya takes a breath. “Killed by the Ousters in a space battle last year,” he says. “His ship was vaporized. No bodies were recovered.”

Father Maher blinks as if he has been slapped. “I had not heard.”

“No,” says de Soya, “you wouldn’t have. It was far away—beyond the old Outback. Word has not officially reached even my family yet. I know only because my duties took me to the vicinity and I met a returning captain who told me the news.”

Father Maher shakes his bald and mottled head. “Esteban has found the only resurrection which Our Lord promised,” he says softly, tears in his eyes. “Eternal resurrection in Our Savior Jesus Christ.”

“Yes,” says de Soya. A moment later he says, “Do you still drink Scotch, Father Maher?”

The old man’s rheumy eyes lift to meet the other’s gaze. “Yes, but only for medicinal purposes, Father Captain de Soya.”

De Soya’s dark brows rise a bit. “I am still recovering from my last resurrection, Father Maher.”

The older priest nods seriously. “And I am preparing for my first one, Father Captain de Soya. I shall find the dusty bottle.”

On the following Sunday, de Soya celebrates Mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where he had accepted the cross so long ago. More than eight hundred of the faithful are in attendance, including Father Maher and Father Brown, the intelligent and insightful aide to Monsignor Oddi. Sergeant Gregorius, Corporal Kee, and Lancer Rettig also attend, taking Communion from de Soya’s hand.

That night de Soya again dreams of Aenea. “How is it that you are my daughter?” he asks this night. “I have always honored my vows of celibacy.”

The child smiles and takes his hand.

One hundred hours before the girl’s ship is to translate, de Soya orders his fleet into position. The translation point is perilously close to the gravity well of Renaissance Vector, and many of the experts are concerned that the old ship will break up, either under the gravity torque of such an unadvisable close exit from C-plus or from the horrendous deceleration needed if the ship is to land on the planet. Their concerns remain largely unspoken, as is their frustration at being kept in Renaissance System: many of the Fleet units had assignments along the frontier or deep in Ouster space. This waste of time has most of the officers on edge.

It is largely because of this undercurrent of tension that Father Captain de Soya calls a meeting of all line officers ten hours before the translation. Such conferences are usually handled over tightbeam linkups, but de Soya has the men and women physically transfer to the carrier St. Malo. The huge ship’s main briefing room is large enough to handle the scores of attending officers.

De Soya begins by reviewing the scenarios they have practiced for weeks or months now. If the child once again threatens self-destruction, three torchships—de Soya’s old MAGI Task Force—will close rapidly, wrap class-ten fields around the ship, stun whoever is aboard into unconsciousness, and hold the ship in stasis until the Jacob can take it in tow with its massive field generators.

If the ship tries to leave the system the way it ran from Parvati, ramscouts and fast-attack fighters will harass it while the torchships maneuver to disable it.

De Soya pauses in the briefing. “Questions?” Among the familiar faces he can see in the row upon row of briefing chairs are Captains Lempriere, Sati, Wu, and Hearn, Father Brown, Mother Captain Boulez, Mother Commander Stone, and Commander Barnes-Avne. Sergeant Gregorius, Kee, and Rettig stand at parade rest near the back of the briefing room, allowed in this august company only because of their status as personal bodyguards.

Captain Marget Wu says, “And if the ship attempts to land on Renaissance Vector, Renaissance Minor, or one of the moons?”

De Soya steps away from the low podium. “As we discussed at our last meeting, should the ship attempt to land, we will make the judgment at the time.”

“Based on what factors, Father Captain?” asks Fleet Admiral Serra from the C3 ship St. Thomas Aquinas.

De Soya hesitates only a second. “Several factors, Admiral. Where the ship is headed… whether it would be safer—for the girl—to allow it to land or to attempt to disable it en route… whether there is any chance for the ship to escape.”

“Is there any chance?” asks Commander Barnes-Avne. The woman is hale and formidable again in her space-black uniform.

“I will not say that there is no chance,” says Father Captain de Soya. “Not after Hyperion. But we will minimize any chance.”

“If the Shrike creature appears…” begins Captain Lempriere.

“We have rehearsed the scenario,” says de Soya, “and I see no reason to vary from our plans. This time we will rely upon computerized fire control to a greater extent. On Hyperion the creature remained in one spot for less than two seconds. This was too fast for human reactions and confused the programming in automated fire-control systems. We have reprogrammed those systems—including individual trooper’s suit fire-control systems.”

“So the Marines will board the ship?” asks a ramscout captain in the last row.

“Only if all else fails,” says de Soya. “Or after the girl and any companions have been locked in the stasis fields and stunned into unconsciousness.”

“And deathwands will be used against the creature?” asks a destroyer captain.

“Yes,” says de Soya, “as long as doing so does not put the child in danger. Any other questions?”

The room is silent.

“Father Maher from Ascension Monastery will close with the blessing,” says Father Captain de Soya. “Godspeed to you all.”