Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3)

by Dan Simmons

The Church and Pax had banned all true AIs more than two centuries before, and after seeing how the TechnoCore had helped the Ousters destroy the Hegemony, most of the trillions of people on a thousand devastated worlds had agreed wholeheartedly.

Before the Pax sealed off the Plateau, adventurers smuggled out cruciforms. Other symbiotes had been stolen from the Church itself. The result had always been the same—idiocy and sexlessness. Only the Church held the secret of successful resurrection.

It amuses me to think of World Historical Figures, much less heroes of future myths, paying to get their hair cut. I thought of this centuries ago, by the way … this strange disconnection between the stuff of myth and the stuff of life.

“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 started to raise the glass to my lips, but the old man was not done. “To heroes,” he said. “To heroes who get their hair cut.” He drank the champagne in one gulp. And so did I.

I have had a sense of the irony of things. So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd.

“things really haven’t changed that much. It sounds as if technology is sort of stuck … still not caught up to Hegemony days.” “Well,” I said, “the Pax is partly responsible for that. The Church prohibits thinking machines—true AIs—and its emphasis is on human and spiritual development rather than technological advancement.”

Have you ever noticed how on a trip—even a very long one—it is often the first week or so that stands out most clearly in your memory? Perhaps it is the enhanced perception that voyages bring, or perhaps it is an effect of orientation response on the senses, or perhaps it is simply that even the charm of newness soon wears off, but it has been my experience that the first days in a new place, or seeing new people, often set the tone for the rest of the trip. Or in this case, the rest of my life.

“Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core All other depths are shallow: essences, Once spiritual, are like muddy lees, Meant but to fertilize my earthly root, And make my branches lift a golden fruit Into the bloom of heaven.”

What he wanted—what he wanted his shepherd hero to learn—was how exalted these things could be—poetry, nature, wisdom, the voices of friends, brave deeds, the glory of strange places, the charm of the opposite sex. But he stopped before he got to the real essence.”

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.

Sometimes, I realized, the safety off on my plasma rifle, trying to walk lightly in the grinding weight of Sol Draconi Septem, the shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

“A monitum is a warning against uncritical acceptance of his ideas,” said Father Glaucus. “And Teilhard did not say that human beings would become God … he said that the entire conscious universe was part of a process of evolving toward the day—he called it the Omega Point—where all of creation, humanity included, would become one with the Godhead.”

different from Christianity’s—a cold, dispassionate mind, a predictive power able to absorb all variables.” Father Glaucus was nodding. “But they think, my son. Their earliest self-conscious progenitors were designed from living DNA—” “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? As Teilhard would have it, it is consciousness which God has created to accelerate the universe’s self-awareness as a means to understanding His will.”

“Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.” “Empathy,”

“Why?” says the blurred image of Raul. “And why did you kill your own creature?” De Soya shakes his head. “She was not my creature.” “The Church’s, then,” insists Raul. “Why?” “I hope she was not the Church’s creature,” de Soya says quietly. “If she was, then my Church has become the monster.”

Life is brutal that way … the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.