Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3)

by Dan Simmons

We must not forget that the human soul, however independently created our philosophy represents it as being, is inseparable in its birth and in its growth from the universe into which it is born. —TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” wrote some pre-Hegira writer. Precisely. I must see these things in order to know what to think of them. I must see the events turned to ink and the emotions in print to believe that they actually occurred and touched me.

At age twenty-seven, I thought that I knew everything. I knew nothing.

I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead.

“Do I have a choice?” The face smiled again, but the eyes were as unchanging as the stone in the walls. “We always have choices, dear boy.

“Fifteen seconds,” says the ship. “You might wish to pray now.” “Fuck you,” says de Soya. He has been praying since he left the courier’s recovery room. Now he adds a final prayer for forgiveness for the obscenity.

“Then they’d better bring a full Swarm,” says the father-captain. “Anything less and we’ll handle them easily.” “Nothing in life is easy,” says Commander Barnes-Avne.

“We had a phrase for this in the Marines before I joined Swiss Guard, sir.” “Charlie Fox,” says Father Captain de Soya, trying to smile. “That’s what you polite navy types call it,” agrees Gregorius. He gestures the other two troopers toward the broken blister. They crawl out. Gregorius lifts de Soya and carries him out like a baby. “In the Marines, sir,” continues the sergeant, not even breathing heavily, “we called it a cluster fuck.”

So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd.

“Sir?” says Sergeant Gregorius. “Yes, Sergeant?” “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.”

Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe.

In the millennium and more since the twentieth century, when personal weapons were mass-produced to be incredibly deadly, cheap, and ugly as metal doorstops, some of us—the Consul and I among the few—had learned to treasure beautiful handmade or limited-production guns.

In the tradition of ship captains since the Middle Ages on Old Earth, de Soya knows well that the coin of a captain’s prerogatives has two sides—almost god-like power over everyone and everything aboard one’s ship, balanced by the requirement to take total responsibility for any damage to the ship or failure of one’s mission.

A strange new world! I will never be able to explain the thrill that jolted through me at that moment—despite our crash, despite our predicament, despite everything—I was looking at a new world! The effect on me was more profound than I had expected in all my anticipation of interworld travel.

I had also dug out an ax and an even more compact tool—a folding shovel, actually, although for millennia we idiots who had joined the infantry had been trained to call it “an entrenching tool.”

Aenea closed her eyes and spoke again, her voice soft, musical, and free from the singsong cant of those who ruin poetry.

I had always been struck by the … sense of history, I guess you would call it … that old firearms seemed to emanate.

the suicidal smell of cigarettes,

Part of my tired mind had been pondering theology during all this—not praying, but wondering about a Cosmic God who allowed Its creatures to torture each other like this. How many hominids, mammals, and trillions of other creatures had spent their last minutes in mortal fear such as this, their hearts pounding, their adrenaline coursing through them and exhausting them more quickly, their small minds racing in the hopeless quest of escape? How could any God describe Him- or Herself as a God of Mercy and fill the universe with fanged things such as this? I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how—although raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform—he had become an atheist while studying a terrestrial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until it was time for the hatched wasp larvae to burrow its way out of the living spider’s abdomen.

I heard the hiss and felt the blessed numbness spreading. If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller.

The fabric of space/time is much like one of the elaborate Vatican tapestries, thinks Nemes, and she who begins pulling on loose threads does so at the peril of watching the whole tapestry ravel.

The visual records meant nothing, of course; for more than a thousand years, since the beginning of the Digital Age, even the most compelling visual images could be faked by a child at a home computer.