Endymion

44

It was not just a single building frozen in the ice. An entire city was buried here in Sol Draconi Septem’s resublimated atmosphere, a small bit of the old Hegemony’s hubris frozen in place like an ancient insect locked in amber.

Father Glaucus was a gentle, humorous, generous man. We soon learned that he had been exiled to Sol Draconi Septem as a punishment for belonging to one of the last Teilhardian orders in the Church. While his order had rejected the basic tenets of Teilhard after Julius VI had published a bull proclaiming the antipope’s philosophy as blasphemy, the order was dissolved and its members either excommunicated or sent to the ass-ends of the Pax’s dominion. Father Glaucus did not refer to his fifty-seven standard years in this icy tomb as exile—he called it his mission.

While admitting that none of the Chitchatuk had shown the slightest interest in converting, Father Glaucus confessed that he had little interest in converting them. He admired their courage, respected their honesty, and was fascinated with their hard-earned culture. Before he had become blind—snowblindness, he called it, not simple cataracts… a combination of cold, vacuum, and hard radiation found on the surface—Father Glaucus had traveled with numerous Chitchatuk bands. “There were more then,” said the old priest as we sat in his brightly lit study. “Attrition has taken its toll. Where there were tens of thousands of the Chitchatuk in this region fifty years ago, only a few hundred survive today.”

In the first day or two, while Aenea, A. Bettik, and the blind priest spoke, I spent much of my time exploring the frozen city.

Father Glaucus illuminated four floors of one tall building with the fuel-pellet lanterns. “To keep away the wraiths,” he said. “They hate the light.” I found a stairway and descended into the darkness with a handlamp and my rifle ready. Twenty-some stories lower and a warren of ice tunnels led to the other buildings in the city. Decades earlier, Father Glaucus had marked the entrances to these buried structures with a light pen—WAREHOUSE, COURTHOUSE, COMMUNICATIONS CENTER, HEGEMONY DOME, HOTEL, and so forth. I explored some of these, seeing signs of the priest’s more recent visits here. On my third exploration I found the deep vaults where the high-energy fuel pellets were stored. These were the source of both heat and light for the old priest, and they were also his principal bargaining chip to bring the Chitchatuk in to visit.

“The wraiths give them everything except combustible material,” he had said. “The pellets give them light and a wee bit of heat. We enjoy the barter—they give me wraith-meat and hides, I give them light and heat and garrulous conversation. I think they first began talking to me because my band consisted of the most elegant prime number… one! In the early days I used to hide the location of the cache. Now I know that the Chitchatuk would never steal from me. Even if their lives depended on it. Even if the lives of their children depended on it.”

There was little else to see in the buried city. The darkness was absolute down there, and my handlamp did little to dispel the gloom. If I had harbored hopes of finding some easy way to get us downriver to the second arch—a giant blowtorch perhaps, or a fusion borer—those hopes were soon dashed. The city was, with the exception of Father Glaucus’s four floors of furniture, books, light, food, warmth, and conversation, as cold and dead as the ninth circle of hell.

On our third or fourth day there, just prior to our mealtime, I joined them in the old priest’s study as they chatted. I had already gone over the books on the shelf: volumes of philosophy and theology, mysteries, astronomy texts, ethnology studies, newanthro tomes, adventure novels, carpentry guides, medical texts, zoology books…

“The greatest sadness of my blindness thirty years ago,” Father Glaucus had said, that first day he proudly showed us his library, “was that I could no longer read my dear books. I am Prospero denied. You can’t imagine the time it took me to drag these three thousand volumes up from the library fifty stories down!”

In the afternoons, while I explored and A. Bettik went off to read by himself, Aenea would read aloud to the old priest. Once when I entered the room without knocking, I saw tears on the ancient missionary’s cheeks.

This day when I joined them, Father Glaucus was explaining Teilhard—the original Jesuit, not the antipope whom Julius VI had supplanted.

“He was a stretcher bearer in World War One,” Father Glaucus was saying. “He could have been a chaplain and stayed out of the line of fire, but he chose to be a stretcher bearer. They awarded him medals for his courage, including one called the Legion of Honor.”

A. Bettik cleared his throat politely. “Excuse me, Father,” he said softly. “Am I correct in assuming that the First World War was a pre-Hegira conflict limited to Old Earth?”

The bearded priest smiled. “Precisely, precisely, my dear friend. Early twentieth century. Terrible conflict. Terrible. And Teilhard was in the thick of it. His hatred of war lasted the rest of his life.”

Father Glaucus had long ago built his own rocking chair, and now he rocked back and forth in front of the fuel-pellet fire set in a crudely fashioned fireplace. The golden embers threw long shadows and more warmth than we had enjoyed since coming through the farcaster portal. “Teilhard was a geologist and paleontologist. It was in China—a nation-state on Old Earth, my friends—in the 1930’s that he devised his theories that evolution was an uncompleted process, yet one with a design. He saw the universe as God’s design to bring together the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal into a single conscious entity. Teilhard de Chardin saw every step of evolution as a hopeful sign—even mass extinctions as a cause for joy—with cosmogenesis, his word, occurring when humanity became central to the universe, noogenesis as the continued evolution of man’s mind, and hominization and ultrahominization as the stages of Homo sapiens evolving to true humanity.”

“Excuse me, Father,” I heard myself saying, only slightly aware of the incongruity of this abstract discussion amid the frozen city, beneath the frozen atmosphere, surrounded by wraith-killers and cold, “but wasn’t Teilhard’s heresy that humankind could evolve into God?”

The blind priest shook his head, his expression still pleasant. “During his lifetime, my son, Teilhard was never sanctioned for heresy. In 1962 the Holy Office—it was quite a different Holy Office then, I assure you—issued a monitum—”

“A what?” said Aenea, who sat on the carpet near the fire.

“A monitum is a warning against uncritical acceptance of his ideas,” said Father Glaucus. “And Teilhard did not say that human beings would become God… he said that the entire conscious universe was part of a process of evolving toward the day—he called it the Omega Point—where all of creation, humanity included, would become one with the Godhead.”

“Would Teilhard have included the TechnoCore in that evolution?” Aenea asked softly. She was hugging her knees.

The blind priest stopped rocking and combed his fingers through his beard. “Teilhardian scholars have wrestled with that for centuries, my dear. I am no scholar, but I am certain that he would have included the Core in his optimism.”

“But they are descended from machines,” said A. Bettik. “And their concept of an Ultimate Intelligence is quite different from Christianity’s—a cold, dispassionate mind, a predictive power able to absorb all variables.”

Father Glaucus was nodding. “But they think, my son. Their earliest self-conscious progenitors were designed from living DNA—”

“Designed from DNA to compute,” I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls.

“And what was our DNA designed to do for the first few hundred million years, my son? Eat? Kill? Procreate? Were we any less ignoble in our beginnings than the pre-Hegira silicon and DNA-based AIs? As Teilhard would have it, it is consciousness which God has created to accelerate the universe’s self-awareness as a means to understanding His will.”

“The TechnoCore wanted to use humanity as part of its UI project,” I said, “and then to destroy us.”

“But it did not,” said Father Glaucus.

“No thanks to the Core,” I said.

“Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”

“Empathy,” Aenea said softly.

Father Glaucus turned his blind eyes in her direction. “Precisely, my dear. But we are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design. They may resist it. They may try to undo it for their own complex purposes. But the universe continues to weave its own design.”

“You make the universe and its processes sound like a machine,” I said. “Programmed, unstoppable, inevitable.”

The old man shook his head slowly. “No, no… never a machine. And never inevitable. If Christ’s coming taught us anything, it is that nothing is inevitable. The outcome is always in doubt. Decisions for light or dark are always ours to make—ours and every conscious entity’s.”

“But Teilhard thought that consciousness and empathy would win?” said Aenea.

Father Glaucus waved a bony hand at the bookcase behind her. “There should be a book there… on the third shelf… it had a blue bookmark in it when last I looked, thirty-some years ago. Do you see it?”

“The Journals, Notebooks, and Correspondences of Teilhard de Chardin?” said Aenea.

“Yes, yes. Open it to where the blue bookmark is. Do you see the passage I have annotated? It is one of the last things these old eyes saw before the darkness closed…”

“The entry marked twelve December, 1919?” said Aenea.

“Yes. Read it, please.”

Aenea held the book closer to the light of the fire.

“’Note this well,’” she read. “’I attribute no definitive and absolute value to the various constructions of man. I believe that they will disappear, recast in a new whole that we cannot yet conceive. At the same time I admit that they have an essential provisional role—that they are necessary, inevitable phases which we (we or the race) must pass through in the course of our metamorphosis. What I love in them is not their particular form, but their function, which is to build up, in some mysterious way, first something divinizable—and then, through the grace of Christ alighting on our effort, something divine.’”

There was a moment of silence broken only by the soft hiss of the fuel-pellet fire and the creak and groan of the tens of millions of tons of ice above and around us. Finally Father Glaucus said, “That hope was Teilhard’s heresy in the eyes of the current Pope. Belief in that hope was my great sin. This”— he gestured to the outer wall where ice and darkness pressed against the glass—“this is my punishment.”

None of us spoke for another moment.

Father Glaucus laughed and set bony hands on his knees. “But my mother taught me there is no punishment or pain where there are friends and food and conversation. And we have all of these, M. Bettik! I say ’M. Bettik’ because your honorific does you no honor, sir. It sets you apart from humanity by falsely inventing false categories. M. Bettik!”

“Sir?”

“Would you do this old man the favor of going into the kitchen to retrieve the coffee that should be ready? I will see to the stew and the bread that is heating. M. Endymion?”

“Yes, Father?”

“Would you like to descend to the wine cellars to select the finest vintage available?”

I smiled, knowing that the old priest could not see me. “And how many floors must I descend before finding the cellar, Father? Not fifty-nine, I hope?”

The old man’s teeth showed through his beard. “I have wine with every meal, my son, so I would be in far better physical shape if that were the case. No, lazy old thing that I am, I keep the wine in the closet one flight below. Near the stairwell.”

“I’ll find it,” I said.

“I’ll set the table,” said Aenea. “And tomorrow night I cook.”

We all scattered to our duties.