Free Hyperion by Dan Simmons Page A

rather, they have found me. I will write what I can before they come to rouse me from my 'sleep."

Today I was doing some detail mapping a mere four kilometers north of camp when the mists lifted in the midday warmth and I noticed a series of terraces on my side of the Cleft that had been hidden until then. 1 was using my powered glasses to inspect the terraces – actually a series of!addered ledges, spires, shelves, and tussocks extending far out onto the overhang – when i realized that I was staring at man-made habitations.

The dozen or so huts were crude- rough hovels of heaped chalma fronds, stones, and spongeturf- but they were unmistakably of human origin.

I was standing there irresolute, binoculars still lifted, trying to decide whether to climb down to the exposed ledges and confront the inhabitants or to retreat to my camp, when I felt that lifting chill along the back and neck that tells one with absolute certainty that he is no longer alone. 1. lowered the binoculars and turned slowly. The Bikura were there, at least thirty of them, standing in a semi-circle that left me no retreat to the forest.

I do not know what I expected; naked savages, perhaps, with fierce expressions and necklaces of teeth.

Perhaps I had half expected to find the kind of bearded, wild-haired hermits that travelers sometimes encountered in the Mosh6 Mountains on Hebron. Whatever 1 had held in mind, the reality of the Bikura did not fit the template.

The people who had approached me so silently were short – none came higher than my shoulder – and swathed in roughly woven dark robes that covered them from neck to toe. When they moved, as some did now, they seemed to glide over the rough ground like wraiths.

From a distance, their appearance reminded me of nothing so much as a gaggle of diminutive Jesuits at a New Vatican enclave.

I almost giggled then, but realized that such a response might well be a sign of rising panic. The Bikura showed no outward signs of aggression to cause such a panic; they carried no weapons, their small hands were empty. As empty as their expressions.

Their physiognomy is hard to describe succinctly.

They are bald. All of them. That baldness, the absence of any facial hair, and the loose robes that fell in a straight line to the ground, all conspired to make it very difficult to tell the men from the women. The group now confronting me- more than fifty by this time – looked to be all of roughly the same age: somewhere between forty and fifty standard years. Their faces were smooth, the skin tinged with a yellowish cast that I guessed might be associated with generations of ingesting trace minerals in the chalma and other local plant life.

One might be tempted to describe the round faces of the Bikura as cherubic until, upon closer inspection, that impression of sweetness fades and is replaced by another interpretation- placid idiocy. As a priest, I have spent enough time on backward worlds to see the effects of an ancient genetic disorder variously called Down's syndrome, mongolism, or generation-ship legacy. This, then, was the overall impression created by the sixty or so dark-robed little people who had approached me – I was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.

I reminded myself that these were almost certainly the same group of 'smiling children' who had slit Tuk's throat while he slept and left him to die like a butchered pig.

The closest Bikura stepped forward, stopped five paces from me, and said something in a soft monotone.

'Just a minute,' I said and fumbled out my cornlog. I tapped in the translator function.

'Beyetet ota menna!or cresfem ket?" asked the short man in front of me.

I slipped on the hearplug just in time to hear the comlng's translation. There was no lag time. The apparently foreign.language was a simple corruption of archaic seedship English not so far removed from the indigene argot of the plantations. 'You are the man