…cont from Hyperion note
As part of that literary device I explained earlier in forcing all of the crew of the great “tree ship” to give their back story, only one really gets to tell his tale. A young priest named Lenar Hoyt (who didnt want to share backstories in the first place) is selected to go first. He briefly sets a scene where is escorting another priest named Father Duré down to to the planet, Hyperion’s surface. He explains that Father Duré is traveling to the planet as part of a self imposed exile for a so-far-unamed punishment of sins/crimes/treachery committed on another planet. He then pulls out a few burnt journals supposedly penned by Father Duré and reads them to the group stating that his story and reason for being on the expedition to Hyperion with the group could not be told without reading the journal.
This is where the story begins to get interesting and I found myself really engaging with the text in that hallucinatory way that often comes with in depth reading; where as I can place myself in the setting mentally or rather “mentally-visually”.
Father Duré sets out on the planet looking for a company of lost travelers some 400 odd years in the past lost to the planet in a ship crash. He has reason to believe that their dependents are still alive in some form and have taken on the role of an indigenous population called the Bikura. He describes the planet and its more civilized inhabitants as somewhat ‘ruddy’ and even their larger towns are described as only having a few thousand people. Crime is high, in one scene he witness a blatant mid day murder right in front of him and 3 dead bodies over the course of what appears to be a few weeks. He hires passage and guide through a “fire forest” that reacts to a singular “tesla tree” that electrocutes everything within its boundary alive, often exploding them into nothingness.
I imagine a jungle like world so far, maybe something you would see in a small rural area in the Amazon forest here on Earth. Either way, Father Duré slowly but surely finds his way further into the convenient in search of the Bikura. One night after a rather tumultuous traversal of the fire forest, he finds that his guide has been mysteriously killed in his sleep but he himself was left unharmed. He buries his guide and sets up a camp along a large cliff formation and keeps watch for several days in fear of his own life. The text heavily implies from the get-go that the Bikura were the murders, but he does not quite understand why.
One day, as he was on watch he encounters ALL of the Bikura, 70 in total. He notes that they do not have any sexual characteristics and appeared bald with no distinguishing features. They remain an enigma throughout the story. The Bikura end up taking him in on account of the fact that he is wearing a cross necklace, which either through translation issues or otherwise, they call the “cruciform”. They claim that he is “of the cruciform” like they are, and the priest takes this as a sign that they may be christians. The Bikura “worship” each day at the somewhere beyond the chasm that their homes rest in, warning the priest that if he should go down with them or behind their backs; they would “kill him, and when he came back they would kill him again”. This was a puzzling part of the story where I was trying to mentally figures these characters out with the priest.
After some time, the priest decides to risk death and decend into the chasm while the Bikura are away gathering food. (note: The Bikura are represented as incredibly unintelligent with Father Dure going so far as to say they were “retarded children”). Once below, he discovers an ancient carve out in the stone, and contained within was an alter and a jewled cross that he reckoned would be at least multiple millennia old. He alludes to the fact that this would pre-date christ on “old-earth” by thousands of years. In excitement, the priest begins to plan his way back out of the forest to tell the world of what he has seen.
Unfortunately, in Father Dure’s excitement, he made a mistake. He bathed. While he was bathing, one of the Bikura happened upon him and saw his body. Something about seeing his naked torso sent the Bikura into a frenzy claiming “he was not in fact of the cruciform”. They capture him, burn his equipment and records and plan to kill him, before ultimately deciding that he should live to “truly” become “of the cruciform”. Father Dure is then taken to the bottom of the chasm and into a labyrinth. (So far, labyrinth worlds have been alluded to several times in the book but we do not know their significance. Hyperion is one of 9 such worlds and my best guess at this point is that this will play a large role in the story somewhere down the line.)
Contained within the maze the group comes upon a small room filled to the brim with “cruciforms”, small jeweled crosses that cover the walls. This is also our first encounter with the legendary Shrike, who has somewhat of a cult following on Hyperion and is even on the cover of the book. The Shrike appears to Father Dure just before he is “blessed” by the Bikura. He appears as an armored silver being, covered in blades, who has both the properties of a liquid and mist at the same time, appearing in one place and then vanishing and reappearing in the next. The appearance to Father Dure in this scene seems to be foreshadowing in some fashion to elements of the story we have not yet seen. He is there one moment, gone in the next with very little bearing outside of symbology on Father Dure at the time.
The Bikura begin their blessing. Plucking a cruciform off the wall as if it were a plant, fashioning it as a necklace, and placing it around the priests neck. The threat of the Bikura killing the priest seems to have faded for the time being. After returning to the surface, the priest continues his plan to return to his order to report on all that he had seen, but the cross seems to have fused into his body. Upon scanning himself with his mediscanner he finds that it has sprouted roots and tendrils across his whole body and into his brain. Any attempt at trying to leave results in immense pain for the priest and the cruciform appears to be forcing him to stay in the village of the Bikura. Before too long, some of the Bikura die, mostly by accident, but after discovering that each and every Bikura had a “cruciform” on their chest and throughout their body, it is revealed that those crosses have strong regenerative properties and grant their hosts immortality. When one dies, they are placed in the hollowed out church below the cleft of the chasm and regenerate their bodies. Father Dure is now more determined than ever to leave the forest and Hyperion with it to find a way to remove the cruciform from his body. He knows that he cannot cross the fire forest without generally exploding and the cruciform will not let him leave either way. After much experimentation and musing on the part of Father Dure about his situation, the journal abruptly ends and we return to our crew on the great tree ship.
Father Hoyt, who appeared sickly from the beginning of the introduction, says that he recovered the journals while looking for Father Dure body some 8 years after his disappearance (note: traveling between worlds in this book incurs what they call “time debt”. In this sense, Father Hoyt hadn’t traveled away for 8 years but the time between his departure from Father Dure and his disappearance came to be 8 years.) Why this is important is I as the reader was not the only one who picked up the scent of something deeper going on with Father Hoyt simply returning to Hyperion to try and find Father Dure and more about the Bikura. The Consulate character (who seems to be the main character as of now) also senses something off about the priest.
No other character gets a chance to share their story or background at this juncture because the approach of the tree ship to Hyperion quickly interrupts any further sharing. All of the members of the party leave to board a landing vessel but Father Hoyt hangs back and disappears into his quarters. The consulate stays behind as well, telling the others he will catch up with them later, and goes off to find Father Hoyt. When he enters Father Hoyts room, he sees the priest on the ground writhing in agony and clutching a broken vial of what they call “ultra-morphine”. The consulate offers help to the priest if he tells the “rest of the story”, or the real story of what he found when he first came to Hyperion in search of Father Dure.
Yeilding to the pain, Father Hoyt admits that he did in fact find Father Dure when he returned to the planet. He had tracked Father Dures path into the fire forest and all the places he had been along the way, before finally discovering the Bikura himself. The told him of the “son of fire”, and told him of what had become of the old preist. Father Dure had crawled into the fire forest and nailed himself in the shape of a cross to the base of the Tesla tree (the source of destruction and explosion in the fire forest) dying and regenerating over and over for 7 long years. After taking him down from the cross, the cruciform falls from Father Dures body and he dies in the arms of Father Hoyt. Father Hoyt then collapses in pain and the consulate administers the ultra-morphine. He sees that Father Hoyt is also a host of a cruciform and being so far from the place of the Bikura is in immense pain. We do not know how he came to bear a cruciform at this point and we dont know the real reason why Father Hoyt is now returning again to Hyperion. This ends the first chapter at last. I will read on to discover more.