shadows showed for his face. Sol Weintraub lighted a pipe. Others accepted refills of coffee and settled back in their chairs.
Martin Silenus seemed the most avid and expectant of the listeners as he leaned forward and whispered: 'He seyde, "Syn I shal bigynne the game, What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name!
Now!at us ryde, and herkneth what i seye."
And with that word we ryden forth oure weye;
And he bigan with right a myrie cheere His tale anon, and seyde as ye may heere. '
THE PRIEST'S TALE: 'The Man Who Cried God'
'Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,' said Father Lenar Hoyt.
So began the priest's story. Later, dictating the tale into his cornlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the timeless failings of human speech.
Lenar Hoyt had been a young priest, born, raised, and only recently ordained on the Catholic world of Pacem, when he was given his first offworld assignment: he was ordered to escort the respected Jesuit Father Paul Dur into quiet exile on the colony world of Hyperion.
In another time, Father Paul Dur certainly would have become a bishop and perhaps a pope. Tall, thin, ascetic, with white hair receding from a noble brow and eyes too filled with the sharp edge 'of experience to hide their pain, Paul Dur was a follower of St Tellhard as well as an archaeologist, ethnologist, and eminent Jesuit theologian.
Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what amounted to a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the mainstream of Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite. Nor had Father Dur lost his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church continued to be humankind's last, best hope for immortality.
To Lenar Hoyt as a boy, Father Dur had been a somewhat godlike figure when glimpsed during his rare visits to the preseminary schools, or on the would-be seminarian's even rarer visits to the New Vatican. Then, during the years of Hoyt's study in seminary, Dur had been on an important Church-sponsored archaeological dig on the nearby world of Armaghast.
When the Jesuit returned, a few weeks after Hoyt's ordination, it had been under a cloud.
No one outside the highest circles of the New Vatican knew precisely what had happened, but there were whispers of excommunication and even of a hearing before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, dormant the four centuries since the confusion following the death of Earth.
Instead, Father Dur had asked for a posting to Hyperion, a world most people knew of only because of the bizarre Shrike cult which had originated there, and Father Hoyt had been chosen to accompany him. It would be a thankless job, traveling in a role which combined the worst aspects of apprentice, escort, and spy without even the satisfaction of seeing a new world; Hoyt was under orders to see Father Dur down to the Hyperion spaceport and then reboard the same spinship for its return voyage to the Worldweb. What the bishopric was offering Lenar Hoyt was twenty months in cryogenic fugue, a few weeks of in-system travel at either end of the voyage, and a time-debt which would return him to Pacem eight years behind his former classmates in the quest for Vatican careers and missionary postings.
Bound by obedience and schooled in discipline, Lenar Hoyt accepted without question.
Their transport, the aging spinship HS
Nadia Oleg, was a pockmarked metal tub with no artificial gravity of any sort when it was not under drive, no viewports for the passengers, and no on-board recreation except for the stimsims piped into the datalink to keep passengers in their hammocks and fugue couches. After awakening from fugue, the passengers – mostly offworld workers and economy-rate tourists with a few cult mystics and would-be Shrike suicides thrown in for good measure – slept in those same hammocks and fugue
Martin Silenus seemed the most avid and expectant of the listeners as he leaned forward and whispered: 'He seyde, "Syn I shal bigynne the game, What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name!
Now!at us ryde, and herkneth what i seye."
And with that word we ryden forth oure weye;
And he bigan with right a myrie cheere His tale anon, and seyde as ye may heere. '
THE PRIEST'S TALE: 'The Man Who Cried God'
'Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,' said Father Lenar Hoyt.
So began the priest's story. Later, dictating the tale into his cornlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the timeless failings of human speech.
Lenar Hoyt had been a young priest, born, raised, and only recently ordained on the Catholic world of Pacem, when he was given his first offworld assignment: he was ordered to escort the respected Jesuit Father Paul Dur into quiet exile on the colony world of Hyperion.
In another time, Father Paul Dur certainly would have become a bishop and perhaps a pope. Tall, thin, ascetic, with white hair receding from a noble brow and eyes too filled with the sharp edge 'of experience to hide their pain, Paul Dur was a follower of St Tellhard as well as an archaeologist, ethnologist, and eminent Jesuit theologian.
Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what amounted to a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the mainstream of Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite. Nor had Father Dur lost his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church continued to be humankind's last, best hope for immortality.
To Lenar Hoyt as a boy, Father Dur had been a somewhat godlike figure when glimpsed during his rare visits to the preseminary schools, or on the would-be seminarian's even rarer visits to the New Vatican. Then, during the years of Hoyt's study in seminary, Dur had been on an important Church-sponsored archaeological dig on the nearby world of Armaghast.
When the Jesuit returned, a few weeks after Hoyt's ordination, it had been under a cloud.
No one outside the highest circles of the New Vatican knew precisely what had happened, but there were whispers of excommunication and even of a hearing before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, dormant the four centuries since the confusion following the death of Earth.
Instead, Father Dur had asked for a posting to Hyperion, a world most people knew of only because of the bizarre Shrike cult which had originated there, and Father Hoyt had been chosen to accompany him. It would be a thankless job, traveling in a role which combined the worst aspects of apprentice, escort, and spy without even the satisfaction of seeing a new world; Hoyt was under orders to see Father Dur down to the Hyperion spaceport and then reboard the same spinship for its return voyage to the Worldweb. What the bishopric was offering Lenar Hoyt was twenty months in cryogenic fugue, a few weeks of in-system travel at either end of the voyage, and a time-debt which would return him to Pacem eight years behind his former classmates in the quest for Vatican careers and missionary postings.
Bound by obedience and schooled in discipline, Lenar Hoyt accepted without question.
Their transport, the aging spinship HS
Nadia Oleg, was a pockmarked metal tub with no artificial gravity of any sort when it was not under drive, no viewports for the passengers, and no on-board recreation except for the stimsims piped into the datalink to keep passengers in their hammocks and fugue couches. After awakening from fugue, the passengers – mostly offworld workers and economy-rate tourists with a few cult mystics and would-be Shrike suicides thrown in for good measure – slept in those same hammocks and fugue
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