“The large vehicles might once have been EMVs but now were heaps of pure rust. A hundred meters in, I stumbled, and rather than fall off the meter-wide path into the field of bodies, I steadied myself on a tall machine all curves and clouded blisters. The pile of rust collapsed inward on itself.

“I wandered, Virgil-less, following the terrible path gnawed out of decayed human flesh, wondering why I was being shown all this, what it meant. After an indeterminable time of walking, staggering between piles of discarded humanity, I came to an intersection of tunnels; all three corridors ahead were filled with bodies. The narrow path continued in the labyrinth to my left. I followed it.

“Hours later, perhaps longer, I stopped and sat on the narrow stone walk which wound among the horror. If there were tens of thousands of corpses in this small stretch of tunnel, Hyperion’s labyrinth must contain billions. More. The nine labyrinthine worlds together must be a crypt for trillions.

“I had no idea why I was being shown this ultimate Dachau of the soul. Near where I sat, the mummified corpse of a man still sheltered a woman’s corpse with the curve of his bone-bare arm. In her arms was a small bundle with short black hair. I turned away and wept.

“As an archaeologist I had excavated victims of execution, fire, flood, earthquake, and volcano. Such family scenes were not new to me; they were the sine qua non of history. But somehow this was much more terrible. Perhaps it was the numbers; the dead in their holocaust millions.

Perhaps it was the soul-stealing glow of the cruciforms which lined the tunnels like thousands of blasphemous bad jokes. Perhaps it was the sad crying of the wind moving through endless corridors of stone.

“My life and teachings and sufferings and small victories and countless defeats had brought me here—past faith, past caring, past simple, Miltonic defiance. I had the sense that these bodies had been here half a million years or more, but that the people themselves were from our time or, worse yet, our future. I lowered my face to my hands and wept.

“No scraping or actual noise warned me, but something, something, a movement of air perhaps… I looked up and the Shrike was there, not two meters distant. Not on the path but in among the bodies: a sculpture honoring the architect of all this carnage.

“I got to my feet. I would not sit or kneel before this abomination.

“The Shrike moved toward me, gliding more than walking, sliding as if it were on frictionless rails. The blood light of the cruciforms spilled over its quicksilver carapace. Its eternal, impossible grin—steel stalactites, stalagmites.

“I felt no violence toward the thing. Only sadness and a terrible pity. Not for the Shrike—whatever the hell it was—but for all the victims who, alone and ungirded by even the flimsiest of faiths, have had to face the terror-in-the-night which that thing embodies.

“For the first time, I noticed that up close, less than a meter away, there was a smell around the Shrike—a stench of rancid oil, overheated bearings, and dried blood. The flames in its eyes pulsed in perfect rhythm with the rise and fall of the cruciform glow.

“I did not believe years ago that this creature was supernatural, some manifestation of good or evil, merely an aberration of the universe’s unfathomable and seemingly senseless unfoldings: a terrible joke of evolution. St. Teilhard’s worst nightmare. But still a thing, obeying natural laws, no matter how twisted, and subject to some rules of the universe somewhere, somewhen.

“The Shrike lifted its arms toward me, around me. The blades on its four wrists were much longer than my own hands; the blade on its chest, longer than my forearm. I stared up into its eyes as one pair of its razorwire and steel-spring arms surrounded me while the other pair came slowly around, filling the small space between us.

“Fingerblades uncurled. I flinched but did not step back as those blades lunged, sank into my chest with a pain like cold fire, like surgical lasers slicing nerves.

“It stepped back, holding something red and reddened further with my blood. I staggered, half expecting to see my heart in the monster’s hands: the final irony of a dead man blinking in surprise at his own heart in the seconds before blood drains from a disbelieving brain.

“But it was not my heart. The Shrike held the cruciform I had carried on my chest, my cruciform, that parasitic depository of my slow-to-die DNA. I staggered again, almost fell, touched my chest. My fingers came away coated with blood but not with the arterial surges that such crude surgery deserved; the wound was healing even while I watched. I knew that the cruciform had sent tubers and filaments throughout my body. I knew that no surgical laser had been able to separate those deadly vines from Father Hoyt’s body—nor from mine. But I felt the contagion healing, the internal fibers drying and fading to the faintest hint of internal scar tissue.

“I still had Hoyt’s cruciform. But that was different. When I died, Lenar Hoyt would rise from this re-formed flesh. I would die. There would be no more poor duplicates of Paul Duré, duller and less vital with each artificial generation.

“The Shrike had granted me death without killing me.

“The thing cast the cooling cruciform into the heaps of bodies and took my upper arm in his hand with an effortless cutting of three layers of fabric, an instant flow of blood from my biceps at the slightest contact with those scalpels.

“He led the way through bodies toward the wall. I followed, trying not to step on corpses, but in my haste not to have my arm severed, I was not always successful. Bodies crumpled to dust. One received my footprint in the collapsing cavity of its chest.

“Then we were at the wall, at a section suddenly cleared of cruciforms, and I realized that it was some energy-shielded opening… the wrong size and shape to be a standard farcaster portal, but similar in its opaque buzz of energy. Anything to get me out of this storage place of death.

“The Shrike shoved me through.”

“Zero gravity. A maze of shattered bulkheads, tangles of wiring floating like some giant creature’s entrails, red lights flashing—for a second, I thought there were cruciforms here too but then realized that these were emergency lights in a dying spacecraft—then recoiling, tumbling in unaccustomed zero-g as more corpses tumbled by: not mummies here, but fresh dead, newly killed, mouths agape, eyes distended, lungs exploded, trailing clouds of gore as they simulated life in their slow, necrotic response to each random current of air and surge of the shattered FORCE spacecraft.

“It was a FORCE spacecraft, I was sure. I saw the FORCE:space uniforms on the young corpses. I saw the military-jargon lettering on the bulkheads and blown hatches, the useless instructions on the worse-than-useless emergency lockers with their skinsuits and still-uninnated pressure balls folded away on shelves. Whatever had destroyed this ship had done so with the suddenness of a plague in the night.

“The Shrike appeared next to me.

“The Shrike… in space! Free of Hyperion and the bonds of the time tides! There were farcasters on many of these ships!

“There was a farcaster portal not five meters down the corridor from me. One body tumbled toward it, the young man’s right arm passing through the opaque field as if he were testing the water of the world on the other side. Air was screaming out of this shaft in a rising whine.

Come! I urged the corpse, but the pressure differential blew him away from the portal, his arm surprisingly intact, recovered, although his face was an anatomist’s mask.

“I turned toward the Shrike, the movement making me spin half a revolution in the other direction.

“The Shrike lifted me, blades tearing skin, and passed me down the corridor toward the farcaster. I could not have changed trajectories if I had wanted to. In the seconds before I passed through the humming, sputtering portal, I imagined vacuum on the other side, drops from great heights, explosive decompression, or—worst of all—a return to the labyrinth.