Brawne Lamia remained crouching for a moment, looking up at him as he weaved above her. Then she got to her feet, touched his shoulder for the briefest of seconds, lifted the packs and bottles to her back, and swung away, her pace faster than anything he could have kept up with in his youth. “I’ll be back this way in a few hours,” she called, not turning back to look at him. “Be out on this edge of the city. We’ll return to the Tombs together.”

Martin Silenus said nothing as he watched her diminish and then disappear in the rough ground to the southwest. The mountains shimmered in the heat. He looked down and saw that she had left the water bottle for him. He spat, added the bottle to his load, and walked into the waiting shade of the dead city.

Duré all but collapsed while they were eating lunch from the last two ration paks; Sol and the Consul carried him up the Sphinx’s wide stairway into the shade. The priest’s face was as white as his hair.

He attempted a smile as Sol lifted a water bottle to his lips. “All of you accept the fact of my resurrection rather easily,” he said, wiping the corners of his mouth with a finger.

The Consul leaned back against the stone of the Sphinx. “I saw the cruciforms on Hoyt. The same as you wear now.”

“And I believed his story… your story,” said Sol. He passed the water to the Consul.

Duré touched his forehead. “I’ve been listening to the comlog disks. The stories, including mine, are… incredible.”

“Do you doubt any of them?” asked the Consul.

“No. It is making sense of them that is the challenge. Finding the common element… the string of connection.”

Sol lifted Rachel to his chest, rocking her slightly, his hand on the back of her head. “Does there have to be a connection? Other than the Shrike?”

“Oh yes,” said Duré. A bit of color was returning to his cheeks. “This pilgrimage was not an accident. Nor was your selection.”

“Different elements had a say in who came on this pilgrimage,” said the Consul. “The AI Advisory Croup, the Hegemony Senate, even the Shrike Church.”

Duré shook his head. “Yes, but there was only one guiding intelligence behind this selection, my friends.”

Sol leaned closer. “God?”

“Perhaps,” said Duré, smiling, “but I was thinking of the Core… the artificial intelligences who have behaved so mysteriously through this entire sequence of events.”

The baby made soft, mewling noises. Sol found a pacifier for it and tuned the comlog on his wrist to heartbeat rates. The child curled its fists once and relaxed against the scholar’s shoulder. “Brawne’s story suggests that elements in the Core are trying to destabilize the status quo… allow humankind a chance for survival while still pursuing their Ultimate Intelligence project.”

The Consul gestured toward the cloudless sky. “Everything that’s happened… our pilgrimage, even this war… was manufactured because of the internal politics of the Core.”

“And what do we know of the Core?” asked Duré softly.

“Nothing,” said the Consul, and threw a pebble toward the carved stone to the left of the Sphinx’s stairway. “When all is said and done, we know nothing.”

Duré was sitting up now, massaging his face with a slightly moistened cloth. “Yet their goal is oddly similar to our own.”

“What’s that?” asked Sol, still rocking the baby.

“To know God,” said the priest. “Or failing that, to create Him.”

He squinted down the long valley. Shadows were moving farther out from the southwestern walls now, beginning to touch and enfold the Tombs. “I helped promote such an idea within the Church…”

“I’ve read your treatises on St. Teilhard,” said Sol. “You did a brilliant job defending the necessity of evolution toward the Omega Point—the Godhood—without stumbling into the Socinian Heresy.”

“The what?” asked the Consul.

Father Duré smiled slightly. “Socinus was an Italian heretic in the sixteenth century A. D. His belief… for which he was excommunicated… was that God is a limited being, able to learn and to grow as the world… the universe… becomes more complex. And I did stumble into the Socinian Heresy, Sol. That was the first of my sins.”

Sol’s gaze was level. “And the last of your sins?”

“Besides pride?” said Duré. “The greatest of my sins was falsifying data from a seven-year dig on Armaghast. Trying to provide a connection between the vanished Arch Builders there and a form of protoChristianity.

It did not exist. I fudged data. So the irony is, the greatest of my sins, at least in the Church’s eyes, was to violate the scientific method. In her final days, the Church can accept theological heresy but can brook no tampering with the protocols of science.”

“Was Armaghast like this?” asked Sol, making a gesture with his arm that included the valley, the Tombs, and the encroaching desert.

Duré looked around, his eyes bright for a moment. “The dust and stone and sense of death, yes. But this place is infinitely more threatening. Something here has not yet succumbed to death when it should have.”

The Consul laughed. “Let’s hope that we’re in that category. I’m going to drag the comlog up to that saddle and try again to establish a relay link with the ship.”

“I’ll go too,” said Sol.

“And I,” said Father Duré, getting to his feet, weaving for only a second, and refusing the offer of Weintraub’s hand.

The ship did not respond to queries. Without the ship, there could be no fatline relay to the Ousters, the Web, or anywhere else beyond Hyperion. Normal comm bands were down.

“Could the ship have been destroyed?” Sol asked the Consul.

“No. The message is being received, just not responded to. Gladstone still has the ship in quarantine.”

Sol squinted out over the barrens to where the mountains shimmered in the heat haze. Several klicks closer, the ruins of the City of Poets rose jaggedly against the skyline. “Just as well,” he said. “We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.”

Paul Duré began to laugh then, a deep, sincere sound, and stopped only when he began coughing and had to take a drink of water.

“What is it?” asked the Consul.

“The deus ex machina. What we were talking about earlier. I suspect that this is precisely the reason each of us is here. Poor Lenar with his deus in the machina of the cruciform. Brawne with her resurrected poet trapped in a Schrön loop, seeking the machina to release her personal deus. You, Sol, waiting for the dark deus to solve your daughter’s terrible problem. The Core, machina spawned, seeking to build their own deus.”

The Consul adjusted his sun glasses. “And you, Father?”

Duré shook his head. “I wait for the largest machina of all to produce its deus—the universe. How much of my elevation of St. Teilhard stemmed from the simple fact that I found no sign of a living Creator in the world today? Like the TechnoCore intelligences, I seek to build what I cannot find elsewhere.”

Sol watched the sky. “What deus do the Ousters seek?”

The Consul answered. “Their obsession with Hyperion is real. They think that this will be the birthplace of a new hope for humankind.”

“We’d better go back down,” said Sol, shielding Rachel from the sun. “Brawne and Martin should be returning before dinner.”

But they did not return before dinner. Nor was there any sign of them by sunset. Every hour, the Consul walked to the valley entrance, climbed a boulder, and watched for movement out among the dunes and boulder field. There was none. The Consul wished that Kassad had left a pair of his powered binoculars.

Even before the sky faded to twilight the bursts of light across its zenith announced the continuing battle in space. The three men sat on the highest step of the Sphinx’s staircase and watched the light show, slow explosions of pure white, dull red blossoms, and sudden green and orange streaks which left retinal echoes.