Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3)

by Dan Simmons

I was a peasant, a hunting guide who had killed the rich tourist assigned to my care, and an example had been made of me. Nothing more. I should not take it personally. I took it very personally.

I paused about three nanoseconds. For years my life had been as calm and predictable as most people’s. This week I had accidentally killed a man, been condemned and executed, and had awakened in Grandam’s favorite myth. Why stop there?

“To folly,” he said. “To divine madness. To insane quests and messiahs crying from the desert. To the death of tyrants. To confusion to our enemies.”

I resolved to quit being an egalitarian horse’s ass about it and to let him act any way he wanted.

“Meaning no disrespect, sir,” says the other man, “but there’s no way in the Good Lord’s fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.”

Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.

Power had been the god of billions, and when that god failed—and pulled down billions of its worshipers in its failure—the survivors cursed the memories of power amid their urban ruins, scratching out a peasant’s living in the shadows of the rotting skyscrapers, pulling their own plows through weeded lots between the abandoned highways and flyways and the skeleton of old Grand Concourse malls, fishing for carp where the River Tethys had carried thousands of elaborate yachts and pleasure-barges each day.

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”