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crowing of their poor befuddled rooster is more than I can stand some nights.
    Animals!
    Day 11
:
    Dinner tonight in the salon above the promenade deck with Citizen Heremis Denzel, a retired professor from a small planters’ college near Endymion. He informed me that the Hyperion firstdown team had no animal fetish after all; the official names of the three continents are not Equus, Ursa, and Aquila, but Creighton, Allensen, and Lopez. He went on to say that this was in honor of three middle-level bureaucrats in the old Survey Service. Better the animal fetish!
    It is after dinner. I am alone on the outside promenade to watch the sunset. The walkway here is sheltered by the forward cargo modules so the wind is little more than a salt-tinged breeze. Above me curves the orange and green skin of the dirigible. We are between islands; the sea is a rich lapis shot through with verdant undertones, a reversal of sky tones. A scattering of high cirrus catches the last light of Hyperion’s too small sun and ignites like burning coral. There is no sound except for the faintest hum of the electric turbines. Three hundred meters below, the shadow of a huge, mantalike undersea creature keeps pace with the dirigible. A second ago an insect or bird the size and color of a hummingbird but with gossamer wings a meter across paused five meters out to inspect me before diving toward the sea with folded wings.
    Edouard, I feel very alone tonight. It would help if I knew youwere alive, still working in the garden, writing evenings in your study. I thought my travels would stir my old beliefs in St. Teilhard’s concept of the God in Whom the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal, the
En Haut
and the
En Avant
are joined, but no such renewal is forthcoming.
    It is growing dark. I am growing old. I feel something … not yet remorse … at my sin of falsifying the evidence on the Armaghast dig. But, Edouard, Your Excellency, if the artifacts
had
indicated the presence of a Christ-oriented culture there, six hundred light-years from Old Earth, almost three thousand years
before
man left the surface of the home world …
    Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a way which could have meant the resurgence of Christianity in our lifetime?
    Yes, it was. But not, I think, because of the sin of tampering with the data, but the deeper sin of thinking that Christianity could be saved. The Church is dying, Edouard. And not merely our beloved branch of the Holy Tree, but all of its offshoots, vestiges, and cankers. The entire Body of Christ is dying as surely as this poorly used body of mine, Edouard. You and I knew this in Armaghast, where the blood-sun illuminated only dust and death. We knew it that cool, green summer at the College when we took our first vows. We knew it as boys in the quiet playfields of Villefrahche-sur-Saône. We know it now.
    The light is gone now; I must write by the slight glow from the salon windows a deck above. The stars lie in strange constellations. The Middle Sea glows at night with a greenish, unhealthy phosphorescence. There is a dark mass on the horizon to the southeast. It may be a storm or it may be the next island in the chain, the third of the nine “tails.” (What mythology deals with a cat with nine tails? I know of none.)
    For the sake of the bird I saw earlier—if it was a bird—I pray that it is an island ahead and not a storm.
    Day 28
:
    I have been in Port Romance eight days and I have seen three dead men.
    The first was a beached corpse, a bloated, white parody of a man, that had washed up on the mud flats beyond the mooring tower my first evening in town. Children threw stones at it.
    The second man I watched being pulled from the burned wreckage of a methane-unit shop in the poor section of town near my hotel. His body was charred beyond recognition and shrunken by the heat, his arms and legs pulled tight in the prizefighter posture burning victims have been reduced to