“Something more terrible than the crucifixion,” repeated Duré in a hoarse whisper.

Both Monsignor Edouard and I stared at the priest. Duré had crucified himself on a high-voltage tesla tree on Hyperion rather than submit to his cruciform parasite’s control. Through that creature’s ability to resurrect, Duré had suffered the agonies of crucifixion and electrocution many times.

“Whatever the En Haut consciousness flees,” whispered Duré, “it is most terrible.”

Monsignor Edouard touched his friend’s shoulder. “Paul, tell this man about your voyage here.”

Duré returned from whatever distant place his memories had taken him and focused on me. “You know all of our stories… and the details of our stay in the Valley of the Tombs on Hyperion?”

“I believe so. Up to the point you disappeared.”

The priest sighed and touched his forehead with long, slightly trembling fingers. “Then perhaps,” he said, “just perhaps you can make some sense of how I got here… and what I saw along the way.”

“I saw a light in the third Cave Tomb,” said Father Duré. “I stepped inside. I confess that thoughts of suicide had been in my mind… what is left of my mind after the cruciform’s brutal replication… I will not dignify that parasite’s function with the term resurrection.

“I saw a light and thought that it was the Shrike. It was my feeling that my second meeting with that creature—the first encounter was years ago in the labyrinth beneath the Cleft, when the Shrike annointed me with my unholy cruciform—the second meeting was long overdue.

“When we had searched for Colonel Kassad on the previous day, this Cave Tomb had been short, featureless, with a blank rock wall stopping us after thirty paces. Now that wall was gone and in its place was a carving not unlike the mouth of the Shrike, stone extended in that blend of the mechanical and organic, stalactites and stalagmites as sharp as calcium carbonate teeth.

“Through the mouth there was a stone stairway descending. It was from those depths that the light emanated, glowing pale white one moment, dark red the next. There was no noise except for the sigh of wind, as if the rock there were breathing.

“I am no Dante. I sought no Beatrice. My brief bout of courage—although fatalism is a more accurate term—had evaporated with the loss of daylight. I turned and almost ran the thirty paces to the opening of the cave.

“There was no opening. The passage merely ended. I had heard no sound of cave-in or avalanche, and besides, the rock where the entrance should have been looked as ancient and undisturbed as the rest of that cavern. For half an hour I searched for an alternate exit, finding none, refusing to return to the staircase, finally sitting for some hours where the Cave Tomb entrance once had been. Another Shrike trick. Another cheap theatrical stunt by this perverse planet. Hyperion’s idea of a joke. Ha ha.

“After several hours of sitting there in semidarkness, watching the light at the far end of the cave pulse soundlessly, I realized that the Shrike was not going to come to me here. The entrance would not magically reappear. I had the choice of sitting there until I died of starvation—or thirst, more likely, since I was already dehydrated—or of descending the damned staircase.

“I descended.

“Years ago, literally lifetimes ago, when I visited the Bikura near the Cleft on the Pinion Plateau, the labyrinth where I had encountered the Shrike had been three kilometers below the canyon wall. That was close to the surface; most of the labyrinths on most of the labyrinthine worlds are at least ten klicks beneath the crust. I had no doubt that this endless staircase… a steep and twisting spiral of stone stairs wide enough for ten priests to descend to hell abreast… would end up in the labyrinth. The Shrike had first cursed me with immortality there. If the creature or the power that drove it had any sense of irony at all, it would be fitting that both my immortality and mortal life ended there.

“The staircase twisted downward; the light grew brighter… now a roseate glow; ten minutes later, a heavy red; half an hour lower than that, a flickering crimson. It was far too Dante-esque and cheap fundamentalist staging for my tastes. I almost laughed aloud at the thought of a little devil appearing, tail and trident and cloven hooves intact, pencil-thin mustache twitching.

“But I did not laugh when I reached depths where the cause of the light became evident: cruciforms, hundreds and then thousands of them, small at first, clinging to the rough walls of the staircase like rough-hewn crosses left by some subterranean conquistadors, then larger ones and more of them until they almost overlapped, coral-pink, raw-flesh flushed, blood-red bioluminescent.

“It made me ill. It was like entering a shaft lined with bloated, pulsing leeches, although these were worse. I have seen the medscanner sonic and k-cross imaging of myself with only one of these things on me: excess ganglia infiltrating my flesh and organs like gray fibers, sheaths of twitching filaments, clusters of nematodes like terrible tumors which will not grant even the mercy of death. Now I had two on me: Lenar Hoyt’s and my own. I prayed that I would die rather than suffer another.

“I continued lower. The walls pulsed with heat as well as light, whether from the depths or the crowding of the thousands of cruciforms, I do not know. Eventually I reached the lowest step, the staircase ended, I turned a final twisting of stone, and was there.

“The labyrinth. It stretched away as I had seen it in countless holos and once in person: smooth tunneled, thirty meters to a side, carved out of Hyperion’s crust more than three-quarters of a million years ago, crossing and crisscrossing the planet like catacombs planned by some insane engineer. Labyrinths can be found on nine worlds, five in the Web, the rest, like this one, in the Outback: all are identical, all were excavated at the same time in the past, none surrender any clues as to the reason for their existence. Legends abound about the Labyrinth Builders, but the mythical engineers left no artifacts, no hints of their methods or alien makeup, and none of the theories about the labyrinths give a sensible reason for what must have been one of the largest engineering projects the galaxy has ever seen.

“All of the labyrinths are empty. Remotes have explored millions of kilometers of corridors cut from stone, and except where time and cave-in have altered the original catacombs, the labyrinths are featureless and empty.

“But not where I now stood.

“Cruciforms lighted a scene from Hieronymus Bosch as I gazed down an endless corridor, endless but not empty… no, not empty.

“At first I thought they were crowds of living people, a river of heads and shoulders and arms, stretching on for the kilometers I could see, the current of humanity broken here and there by the presence of parked vehicles all of the same rust-red color. As I stepped forward, approaching the wall of jam-packed humanity less than twenty meters from me, I realized that they were corpses. Tens, hundreds of thousands of human corpses stretching as far down the corridor as I could see; some sprawled on the stone floor, some crushed against walls, but most buoyed up by the pressure of other corpses so tightly were they jammed in this particular avenue of the labyrinth.

“There was a path; cutting its way through the bodies as if some machine with blades had mulched its way through. I followed it—careful not to touch an outspread arm or emaciated ankle.

“The bodies were human, still clothed in most cases, and mummified over eons of slow decomposing in this bacteria-free crypt. Skin and flesh had been tanned, stretched, and torn like rotten cheesecloth until it covered nothing but bone, and frequently not even that. Hair remained as tendrils of dusty tar, stiff as varnished fiberplastic. Blackness stared out from under opened eyelids, between teeth. Their clothing which must once have been a myriad of colors now was tan or gray or black, brittle as garments sculpted from thin stone. Time-melted plastic lumps on their wrists and necks might have been comlogs or their equivalent.