Chapter 6 Chapter Four

One hundred and third day: The more I know, the less I know. I've moved most of my gear into the hut.They cleared out this hut for me to stay in the village and made it my house. I took pictures, recorded video and sound chips, and made a holographic scan of the village and its residents.They don't seem to mind.I would throw their image in front of them and they would just walk right through it with no interest at all.I played them what they had said and they laughed and went back to their looms and sat for hours doing nothing else and saying nothing.I gave them some trade trinkets, and they took them without a word, and threw them on the ground when they found they were inedible.The grass was littered with plastic beads, mirrors, bits of colored cloth, and cheap pens.

I opened a whole medical lab, but it was useless; Three Score and Ten wouldn't let me examine them, wouldn't give me a blood sample, and they wouldn't even after I showed them it was painless. Will let me scan them with a diagnostic kit, in a word, they won't work with me anyway.They don't argue.They don't explain.They just turn around and go on doing their nonsense. A week later, I still can't tell the difference between male and female.Their faces remind me of those visual puzzles that change shape as you stare at them; sometimes, Betty's face looks unmistakably female, and ten seconds later, the sense of gender is nowhere It's hard to find, I once again regarded her (him?) as Beta.Their voices also change.Soft, very soft, sexless...they reminded me of those badly programmed house computers one could come across in the backward world.

I would love to see a naked Bikura.For a Jesuit of forty-eight years of age, this is not easy to say.And, even for a seasoned voyeur, it's no easy feat.Apparently, nudity is a complete taboo for them.They wear robes when they are awake and when they doze off for two hours at noon.They left the village to defecate, and even then, I suspect, they did not remove their loose robes.They don't seem to bathe.Some people may think that they must be full of stench, but there is no other smell on these primitive people except a slight sweet smell of tea horse. "You have to take your clothes off sometimes," I said to Alpha one day, throwing my care behind me for information.

"No." After Al finished, he walked away. He sat there, doing nothing, but his whole body was tightly wrapped. They have no names.At first I thought it was incredible, but now I'm sure. "We were and always will be," said the shortest Bikura, who I thought was a woman and called her Opi, "we are the Three Score and Ten." I checked the communication log records, which confirmed my guess: Among the 16,000 human societies known to people, there is no society where there is no individual name.Even in Lusus' hive society, there were individual names, which consisted of their rank followed by a simple code.

I told them my name and they still stared at me blankly. "Father Paul Dooley, Father Paul Dooley," repeated the comlog translator, but no one tried to learn it, not even a simple babble. Except for the collective disappearance before sunset every day, and the usual two hours of sleep time, they rarely do things together.Even their quarters seemed haphazardly arranged.One nap, Al would be with Betty, the next with Gam, and the next with Zelda or Pete.There is no obvious system or schedule in sight.Every two days, the whole group of seventy would go out into the forest to forage for food, and return with berries, tea horse roots, tea horse skins, fruit, whatever they could eat.I was convinced they were vegetarian until I saw Del munching on an arboreal creature, the cold carcass of a baby.The small primate must have fallen from a high branch.So the Three Score and Ten had no disdain for meat; they were just too stupid to hunt.

When the Bikura were thirsty, they would walk about three hundred meters to drink from a small stream, which turned into a waterfall and fell into the chasm.As inconvenient as it was, I saw no leather water-skins, nor jugs, or pottery of any kind.I store the water in ten gallon plastic containers, but the villagers don't pay any attention.My respect for these people suddenly fell, and I found that they may have lived in this village for generations, but they did not have water resources at their fingertips. "Who built the house?" I asked.They have no word for the village. "Three twenty and ten," Will replied.I can only recognize him because he has a broken finger and it hasn't grown back.Each of them has at least one of these traits, although sometimes I find it easier to identify crows.

"When was it built?" I ask, though I should know by now that any question that begins with "when" won't be answered. I didn't get an answer. They do go into the Rift every night.Go down the vine.On the third night, I tried to watch their great escape, but six men stopped me on the edge of the cliff and led me back to the hut, gently but firmly.It was the first time I saw Bikura in aggressive behavior, and after they left, I sat there and thought about it for a while. The second night, when they started to set off, I hurried back to my hut without peeping out, but when they returned I retrieved the camera and tripod that had been thrown on the edge of the cliff.The timer works great.The holographic image shows that Bikura is climbing down the cliff by holding on to the vines, and his hands and feet are as agile as the small arboreal animals that are everywhere in the tea horse and weir wood forest.Then they disappeared beneath the tor.

"What do you do climbing down the cliff every night?" I asked Alpha the next day. The native looked at me with an angelic, Buddha-like smile on his face, and I began to feel disgusted. "You are of the cruciform," he said, as if it answered everything. "Are you going down the cliff to worship God?" I asked. no answer. I thought for a moment. "I also follow the cross," I said, knowing that my words would be translated as "belonging to the cross." Now, any day, I don't need a translation program anymore.But this conversation is too important to be left to luck. "Does that mean I should join you as you climb down the cliff?"

In that moment, I think Alpha is thinking.A line appeared on his forehead, and I realized that this was the first time I'd seen a Three Score and Ten almost frowning.Then he said, "You can't. You belong to the cruciform, but you're not a Three Score and Ten." I realized that every neuron and synapse in his brain was firing to make the distinction clear. "What would you do if I climbed off the cliff?" I asked, but I didn't expect him to answer.Hypothetical questions and my time-based inquiries all carry the same unproductive bad luck. But this time he actually answered.That angelic smile and carefree expression returned, and Alpha said softly: "If you try to climb down the cliff, we'll pin you to the grass, cut your throat with a sharp stone, and wait Waiting for your blood to stop, waiting for your heart to stop beating."

I didn't say a word.I wondered at that moment if he could hear the pounding of my heart.Well, I thought, at least you can stop worrying about them thinking you're a god. The silence continued.Finally, Alpha added a sentence that I'm still thinking about. "If you climb again," he said, "we'll kill you again." When we had finished we stared at each other for a while; I was sure, both of us were convinced, that the other was a complete fool. One hundred and fourth day: Each new discovery deepened my doubts. Since the first day I arrived in the village, one phenomenon has been bothering me: there are no children here.I went through my notes, which I dictated in my comlog after my daily observations, and as I went back, I found that I had mentioned this many times, but in this personal miscellany I call my diary , but not once mentioned.Maybe what's involved is just too creepy for me.

In my frequent and clumsy attempts to pierce this mystery, the Three Score and Ten have always given their usual enlightenment.The person being questioned had a blessed smile on his face, and answered some illogical inferences. In comparison, the babbling of the stupidest country idiot on the world network seems to be a wise epigram.And these guys often don't fart at all. One day I was standing in front of a guy I called Dey.I stood there for a long time, and finally he noticed me, and I asked, "Why are there no children here?" "We are Three Score and Ten," he said softly. "Where's the baby?" no answer.Without feeling that he was avoiding the question, he just stared blankly. I took a deep breath. "Which of you is the youngest?" Del seemed to be thinking, wrestling with the notion. He is defeated.I'm wondering if Bikura has lost all sense of time so completely that any question about time is doomed.After a minute of silence, however, Del pointed to Alpha, who was crouching in the sun, busy with his clumsy handloom, and said, "He's the last one to return." "Return?" I asked, "from where?" Del looked at me with no expression, not even impatience. "You are of the cross," he said, "and you must know the way of the cross." I nod.It was clear to me that there were many illogical loops in this conversation lane that always brought our conversation to a screeching halt.I racked my brains wondering if there was any way I could grasp this tiny piece of information. "So, that Alpha," I said, pointing, "was the last one born. Returned. But there are others who will... return?" I'm not sure I understand my question.How can one inquire about birth if one's language does not have the word "baby" and no sense of time?But Del seemed to get it.He nodded. Encouraged by this, I asked, "So, when will the next Three Score and Ten be born? When will they return?" "No one can return, only by dying," he said. I feel like I've had an epiphany. "That is to say, only when someone dies, there will be new children...new people return," I said, "you fill the vacancy of the missing people with another person, so as to keep this group at three twenty and ten in terms of quantity, right?" Del is silent, which I think can be read as his acquiescence. Their system could not have looked more clear.The Bikura took their three-six-and-ten numbers very seriously.They kept the number of tribes at seventy, which was the number recorded in the passenger list on the landing spacecraft that crashed here four hundred years ago.The chances of a coincidence between the two are slim.Once someone dies, they have a child born instead of an adult.Simple as that. Simple but impossible.Nature and ecology don't work so methodically.Besides the question of the minimum group size, there are other absurdities.Even though it was difficult to tell the ages of these smooth-skinned individuals, it was obvious that the difference between the oldest and the youngest was at most ten years.Although they act like children, I'd guess their average age is in the late thirties, or around forty-five.So where are the old men?Where are the parents, old uncle, and unmarried aunt?If things go on like this, the entire tribe will enter their old age almost at the same time.What happens when all of them pass childbirth and need to replace tribe members? Bikura lived a dull, sedentary life.Even living near the cliffside of the Great Rift, the rate of accidents is certainly low.There are no predators here.Seasons vary very little, and food supplies do remain almost constant.However, even if all of these are true, in the four hundred years of history of this inexplicable group, accidents cannot be avoided, such as disease sweeping through the village, such as some unusual vines breaking off like that, throwing someone off the ground. Cracks, for example, will something happen that insurance companies have been afraid of since untestable times. and then?Were they born with differences and then slowly reverted to their now asexual behavior?Are Bikura completely different from any other human society on record?Do they have estrus, every few years, every ten years? , or, once in a lifetime?doubtful. I sat in my hut, examining the possibilities.It may be that these individuals lived so long that they were fertile for the vast majority of their lives, making them simple replacements for the tribe's casualties.It's just that it doesn't explain their same age.There is also no way to explain how such a long lifespan was achieved.The best anti-aging medicine that the overlord can provide is only trying to increase the active lifespan of a person at the age of one hundred.Preventive healthcare measures extend early middle age vitality well into late sixties, which is my age, but in addition to clone grafts, bioengineering, and other privileges for the super rich Enjoy, no one in the World Wide Web is planning to start a family at seventy, or throw a dance at their one hundredth birthday party.If eating tea horse roots or breathing the pure air of the Feather Plateau had a dramatic effect on slowing aging, there is no doubt that everyone on Hyperion would live here, gorging on tea horses, a planet that was centuries ago There would be teletransmitters, and every citizen of the overlord who had a Universal Card would plan to spend their vacations and retirement here. No, the more plausible explanation is that Bikura lived a normal lifespan and had a normal birth rate of children, but they all killed newborns unless someone died.They might practice abstinence, or practice birth control, instead of killing babies, until a whole village reaches a certain old age and needs a new force.The timing of mass production explains the apparently identical ages of the tribe members. But who will teach the young?What happened to parents and other seniors?Did the Bikura pass on their introductory knowledge, pass on their clumsy culture, and let themselves die?Is this "real death", the death of an entire generation?Didn't the Three Score and Ten kill people at both ends of the bell-shaped age group? This kind of thinking is useless.I started getting angry at myself for my lack of problem-solving skills.Paul, let's think of a good strategy and act.You lazy Jesuit, don't do it yet. Question: How to identify gender? Solution: Coax a few poor devils, or force them, into medical examinations.Solve all the gender role puzzles and figure out what the nudity taboo is.If this society relies on years of strict abstinence to enforce population control, then this fits with my new theory. Question: Why are they so fanatical about keeping the number of Three Score and Ten equal to the number of colonists from the lost landing craft? Solution: Haunt them until you figure it out. Question: Where are the children? Solution: Keep attacking and probing until you figure it out.Maybe the nightly hikes downhill have something to do with it all.There might be a nursery there.Or a bunch of little bones. Question: "Belonging to the Cross" and "Way of the Cross", what are they, if not twisted remnants of the religious beliefs of the original colonists? Answer: Go to the source for the answer.Are they climbing down the cliff every day, is it an essentially religious act? Question: What's under the cliff? Answer: Go down and see for yourself. Tomorrow, if their system stayed the same, all the Three Score and Ten of the Three Score and Ten would be out foraging in the woods, and it would take hours.This time, I will go out with them. This time, I will come to the edge of the cliff and climb down the cliff. One hundred and fifth day: Nine thirty, thank you, Jesus my Lord, for showing me those things today. Thank you, Jesus my Lord, for bringing me here and for showing me the evidence of your existence at this moment. Twenty-five past eleven, Edward...Edward! I want to go back.Tell you all!tell everyone. I organized everything, the video camera disks and film in a pouch I woven out of bisto leaves.I have food, water, maser without electricity.tent.Nightgown. If only the lightning rod hadn't been stolen! Bikura may have hidden it somewhere.But no, I've searched the utility room and the nearby woods, but I can't find it.They shouldn't need them. It doesn't matter! If it works, I will leave today.If not, as soon as possible. Edward!Everything is pinned on these films and disks. fourteen o'clock sharp, I can't go through the flame forest today.I had barely reached the edge of the active zone when the smoke drove me back. I went back to the village and looked at the holo again.That's right.Miracles are real. half past fifteen, Three Score and Ten will be back any minute.What if they find out... what if they stare at me and know I've been there? I can hide. No, there is no need to hide.God didn't bring me so far to experience it just so I could die at the hands of these poor kids. sixteen fifteen, Three Score and Ten came back, and they went back to their hut without even looking at me. Sitting in the doorway of my hut, I couldn't help laughing, and laughing, and praying.Earlier, I walked to the brink of the Great Rift, said Mass, and began Communion.The villagers didn't bother to look at me. How soon can I leave?Director Orlandi and Tucker said that the flame forest will remain highly active within three local months, that is, one hundred and twenty days.Then the next two months will be relatively quiet.Tucker and I were here on the eighty-seventh... One hundred days to go, but I can't wait, I can't wait to bring the news to the world... to the world. If there is a skimmer that can ignore the wind and rain, ignore the flame forest, and take me far away and fly away from here.It would be great if I could hook up a data satellite serving the plantation. Everything is possible.More miracles will happen. Twenty-three fifty, The Three Score and Ten crawled into the Great Chasm.The voices of the Evening Wind Singing Team sounded around. How I wish I could be with them now!There, down there. I will do what I can next.I'll be here, near the edge of the cliff, on my knees, praying, while the organ notes of the planet and the sky sing, I know, a hymn to the real God. One hundred and sixth day: I woke up and it was a perfect morning.The sky is blue; the sun is a dazzling blood-red gem set in it.I stood outside the hut and watched as the fog cleared, the arboreal animals had stopped their early morning scream concerts, and the air began to warm.Then I went inside and looked at my tapes and disks. I realized, in all the excitement yesterday, that the scribbles hadn't mentioned anything about what I'd found under the cliff.Now I will talk about it in detail.I have diskettes, tape, and comlog records, but it's very likely that only these personal diaries will be found. About 7:30 yesterday morning, I started to climb down the cliff.At that time, Bikura was collecting food and grass in the forest.I thought it would be a simple matter of climbing down the vines, they wrapped around me long enough to form some sort of staircase in most places.But when I was swinging back and forth, I still felt my heart beating violently, and it made me miserable.The rocks and river below are a full three kilometers vertically from me.I have been holding on to at least two vines, descending centimeter by centimeter, trying not to look at the abyss under my feet. It took me half an hour to descend a hundred and fifty meters, a distance I'm sure would be a piece of cake for the Bikura, who could climb it in ten minutes.Finally, I came to a curved tor.Some vines spread into the sky and disappeared, but most of the vines twisted under this steep rock, climbing towards the cliff within 30 meters.These vines abound, and seem to be twisted into twists, forming a very clumsy bridge. It is very likely that Bikura can easily walk on the vines without using his hands.I crawled on these twisted ropes, clinging to other vines for support, chanting prayers I hadn't said since I was a child.I stared straight ahead, as if I could forget about the infinite space beneath these wobbly, creaking plant ropes. A wide ridge of rock runs across the cliff.I thought about it, and it was three meters away from me, separating me from the abyss, and then I squeezed through the vines and jumped onto the stone two and a half meters below. The ridge is about five meters wide.One end extends for a short distance to the northeast, and then it comes to an end, and then there are a large number of tors.I walked southwest along the other end of the ridge, and after walking twenty or thirty paces, I stopped suddenly, transfixed.A "path" appeared on the ridge.A path honed in solid stone.Its shiny face had been worn down a few centimeters, sinking under the surrounding flat stone.Farther on, the path became slightly shallower but took on a wider shape, with footsteps wearing away at the rocks, but even so worn they seemed to sink only in the middle. Overwhelmed by this simple fact, I sat down and pondered for a moment.Even if the Three Score and Ten had traveled here every day for four centuries, it would not have eroded the solid stone so much.Someone or something must have been walking this way long before the Bikura colonists fell here.Someone or something has been walking this path for millennia. I stand up and move on.Except for the sound of a gentle wind blowing through a large 500-meter-wide chasm, there were hardly any other sounds.I realized that I could hear the soft murmur of the river far below. The path turned left at a certain section of the cliff and came to a dead end.I step out momentarily to a wide platform of slowly descending stone and gaze out.I believe I crossed myself without thinking. Because this ridge cuts into the cliff due south and north, and is a hundred meters long, I can face due west and watch the chasm slam into the thirty-thousand-meter wide sky where the plateau ends.I realized right away that the setting sun illuminated the cliffs below the tor every night.From my vantage point, Hyperion's sun, on the equinoxes, seems to fall directly into the Great Rift, its red side just touching the pink-dyed rock walls, seeing These don't surprise me. I turned left and stared at the cliff.The worn path follows a broad ridge leading to a door carved from load-bearing stone.No, these were not just doors, they were portals, intricately carved portals, with elaborate stone casements, lintels.On the two paired gates on both sides, wide stained glass windows stretch out, at least twenty meters high, touching the tor.I moved closer, examining the front.Whoever built this thing widened the area under the tor, carved a steep and smooth Weeping Wall through the granite of the plateau, and dug a tunnel straight into the cliff to make it .My hand runs through the deep decorative cuts carved into the door.very smooth.Everything is slicked and worn and softened by time, and even here, protected from most of the bad weather by the lip of the tor, doesn't help.This... temple... carved into the southern wall of the Great Rift, is it thousands of years old? The stained glass was neither glass nor plastic, but some thick, transparent substance that seemed as hard to the touch as the surrounding stone.The windows are not made of composite panels either; the colors swirl, gradate, blend, blend with each other like oil paint floating on water. I took the flashlight out of my backpack and touched one of the doors, I stopped as the entrance swiveled inward and opened with ease and almost no friction. I step into this porch and there are no other words to describe it.After passing through the quiet ten-meter space, I stopped. In front of me was another wall, also made of the same stained glass material. Now, even behind me, there was a light shining, and the porch was filled with colorful lights.It immediately occurred to me that at sunset the straight rays of the sun would fill this space with incredible beams of color, would hit the stained glass wall in front of me, and would illuminate everything that lay ahead. I found the only door, outlined in thin, dull metal set in stained glass stone, and passed through it. At Payson, we did our best to recreate St. Peter's Basilica, which stands in the old Vatican, using old photographs and holograms.It is almost seven hundred feet long and four hundred and fifty feet wide, and when His Majesty declares Mass, the church can accommodate fifty thousand worshipers.However, even though the All-Universal Bishops' Conference holds an assembly every 43 years, we have never reached more than 50,000 believers.We have a replica of the throne of St. Peter in Bernini, and beside it, the central transept, with its colossal dome rising a hundred and thirty meters above the chancel.That place is unforgettable. And this place is bigger. In the dim light, by the beam of my torch, I made sure I was in a large room, a vast auditorium, a hollow carved out of solid rock.I reckoned that the smooth four walls rising to the zenith must be under the rocks of Bikula'an Village, and the difference between the two sides is only a few meters.There was no decoration, no equipment, nothing that could even move a little bit, except for one thing, squatting boxy in the very center of this huge, echoing cave room. At the center of the adoration of all peoples is an altar, a stone slab of five square meters, the rest of which has been hollowed out, from which rises a cross. Four meters high and three meters wide, it is carved into an old-fashioned but extremely detailed crucifixion in the old ground. The cross faces the stained glass wall, as if waiting for the sun and light to explode, waiting for them to light up the embedded diamonds, sapphires, and blood crystals. , lapis lazuli beads, Queen's Tears, onyx, and other precious stones that I could make out in the light of my flashlight as I approached. I got down on my knees and prayed.Then I turned off the flashlight, and after a few minutes of waiting, in the dim, smoky light, my eyes were finally able to see the cross.This thing, without a doubt, is what Picuraso calls the cruciform.It was placed here, at least thousands of years ago, maybe tens of thousands of years, long, long before humans fled the Old Land.Almost certainly before Christ's mission to Galilee.