She looked over her shoulder as the Consul came through the entrance.

“Wait there!” snapped Lamia and moved quickly down the corridor, staying against the wall, pistol extended, propulsion charge primed, safety off. She paused at the open doorway to the small room where Hoyt’s body lay, crouched, swung around and in with weapon tracking.

Martin Silenus looked up from where he crouched by the corpse.

The fiberplastic sheet they had used to cover the priest’s body lay crumpled and lifted in Silenus’s hand. He stared at Lamia, looked without interest at the gun, and gazed back at the body. “Do you believe this?” he said softly.

Lamia lowered the weapon and came closer. Behind them, the Consul peered in. Brawne could hear Sol Weintraub in the corridor; the baby was crying.

“My God,” said Brawne Lamia and crouched next to the body of Father Lenar Hoyt. The young priest’s pain-ravaged features had been resculpted into the face of a man in his late sixties: high brow, long aristocratic nose, thin lips with a pleasant upturn at the corners sharp cheekbones, sharp ears under a fringe of gray hair, large eyes under lids as pale and thin as parchment.

The Consul crouched near them. “I’ve seen holos. It’s Father Paul Duré.”

“Look,” said Martin Silenus. He lowered the sheet further, paused, and then rolled the corpse on its side. Two small cruciforms on this man’s chest pulsed pinkly, just as Hoyt’s had, but his back was bare.

Sol stood by the door, hushing Rachel’s cries with gentle bouncing and whispered syllables. When the infant was silent, he said, “I thought that the Bikura took three days to… regenerate.”

Martin Silenus sighed. “The Bikura have been resurrected by the cruciform parasites for more than two standard centuries. Perhaps it’s easier the first time.”

“Is he…” began Lamia.

“Alive?” Silenus took her hand. “Feel.”

The man’s chest rose and fell ever so slightly. The skin was warm to the touch. Heat from the cruciforms under the skin was palpable.

Brawne Lamia snatched her hand back.

The thing that had been the corpse of Father Lenar Hoyt six hours earlier opened its eyes.

“Father Duré?” said Sol, stepping forward.

The man’s head turned. He blinked as though the dim light hurt his eyes, then made an unintelligible noise.

“Water,” said the Consul and reached into his tunic pocket for the small plastic bottle he carried. Martin Silenus held the man’s head while the Consul helped him drink.

Sol came closer, went to one knee, and touched the man’s forearm.

Even Rachel’s dark eyes seemed curious. Sol said, “If you can’t speak, blink twice for ‘yes,’ once for ‘no.’ Are you Duré?”

The man’s head swiveled toward the scholar. “Yes,” he said softly, his voice deep, tones cultured, “I am Father Paul Duré.”

Breakfast consisted of the last of the coffee, bits of meat fried over the unfolded heating unit, a scoop of grain mix with rehydrated milk, and the end of their last loaf of bread, torn into five chunks. Lamia thought that it was delicious.

They sat at the edge of shade under the Sphinx’s outflung wing, using a low, flat-topped boulder as their table. The sun climbed toward midmorning, and the sky remained cloudless. There was no sound except for the occasional klink of a fork or spoon and the soft tones of their conversation.

“You remember… before?” asked Sol. The priest wore an extra set of the Consul’s shipclothes, a gray jumpsuit with the Hegemony seal on the left breast. The uniform was a bit too small.

Duré held the cup of coffee in both hands, as if he were about to lift it for consecration. He looked up, and his eyes suggested depths of intelligence and sadness in equal measure. “Before I died?” said Duré.

The patrician lips sketched a smile. “Yes, I remember. I remember the exile, the Bikura…” He looked down. “Even the tesla tree.”

“Hoyt told us about the tree,” said Brawne Lamia. The priest had nailed himself onto an active tesla tree in the flame forests, suffering years of agony, death, resurrection, and death again rather than give in to the easy symbiosis of life under the cruciform.

Duré shook his head. “I thought… in those last seconds… that I had beaten it.”

“You had,” said the Consul. “Father Hoyt and the others found you. You had driven the thing out of your body. Then the Bikura planted your cruciform on Lenar Hoyt.”

Duré nodded. “And there is no sign of the boy?”

Martin Silenus pointed toward the man’s chest. “Evidently the fucking thing can’t defy laws governing conservation of mass. Hoyt’s pain had been so great for so long—he wouldn’t return to where the thing wanted him to go—that he never gained the weight for a… what the hell would you call it? A double resurrection.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Duré. His smile was sad. “The DNA parasite in the cruciform has infinite patience. It will reconstitute one host for generations if need be. Sooner or later, both parasites will have a home.”

“Do you remember anything after the tesla tree?” asked Sol quietly.

Duré sipped the last of his coffee. “Of death? Of heaven or hell?”

The smile was genuine. “No, gentlemen and lady, I wish I could say I did. I remember pain… eternities of pain… and then release. And then darkness. And then awakening here. How many years did you say have passed?”

“Almost twelve,” said the Consul. “But only about half that for Father Hoyt. He spent time in transit.”

Father Duré stood, stretched, and paced back and forth. He was a tall man, thin but with a sense of strength about him, and Brawne Lamia found herself impressed by his presence, by that strange, inexplicable charisma of personality which had cursed and bestowed power upon a few individuals since time immemorial. She had to remind herself that, first, he was a priest of a cult that demanded celibacy from its clerics, and, second, an hour earlier he had been a corpse. Lamia watched the older man pace up and down, his movements as elegant and relaxed as a cat’s, and she realized that both observations were true but neither could counteract the personal magnetism the priest radiated.

She wondered if the men sensed it.

Duré sat on a boulder, stretched his legs straight ahead of him, and rubbed at his thighs as if trying to get rid of a cramp. “You’ve told me something about who you are… why you are here,” he said. “Can you tell me more?”

The pilgrims glanced at one another.

Duré nodded. “Do you think that I’m a monster myself? Some agent of the Shrike? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“We don’t think that,” said Brawne Lamia. “The Shrike needs no agents to do his bidding. Besides, we know you from Father Hoyt’s story about you and from your journals.” She glanced at the others. “We found it… difficult… to tell our stories of why we have come to Hyperion. It would be all but impossible to repeat them.”

“I made notes on my comlog,” said the Consul. “They’re very condensed, but it should make some sense out of our histories… and the history of the last decade of the Hegemony. Why the Web is at war with the Ousters. That sort of thing. You’re welcome to access it if you wish. It shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“I would appreciate it,” said Father Duré and followed the Consul back into the Sphinx.

Brawne Lamia, Sol, and Silenus walked to the head of the valley.

From the saddle between the low cliffs, they could see the dunes and barrens stretching toward the mountains of the Bridle Range, less than ten klicks to the southwest. The broken globes, soft spires, and shattered gallerias of the dead City of Poets were visible only two or three klicks to their right, along a broad ridge which the desert was quietly invading.

“I’ll walk back to the Keep and find some rations,” said Lamia.

“I hate to split up the group,” said Sol. “We could all return.”