Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3)

by Dan Simmons

This week I had accidentally killed a man, been condemned and executed, and had awakened in Grandam’s favorite myth. Why stop there? I stepped into the spaceship, and the doors folded shut behind me like a hungry mouth closing on a morsel.

“Which is Nemes,” rumbles the Cardinal. “Rhadamanth Nemes.”

“Designed from DNA to compute,” I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls. “And what was our DNA designed to do for the first few hundred million years, my son? Eat? Kill? Procreate? Were we any less ignoble in our beginnings than the pre-Hegira silicon and DNA-based AIs?

‘If love is the answer, what was the question?’