The Rise of Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #4)

by Dan Simmons

“The Church …” began Cognani and stopped. “Of course, the cruciform is just part of the power equation. The TechnoCore provides the Church with the secret of successful resurrection. But they’ve been in league with the Church for two hundred and eighty years …” “For their own purposes,” said Isozaki softly. “What are those purposes, Anna?” The office rotated into night. Stars exploded into existence. Cognani raised her face to the Milky Way to gain a moment to think. “No one knows,” she said at last. “Ohm’s Law.” Isozaki smiled. “Very good. Following the path of least resistance here may not lead us through the Church, but via the Core.” “But Councillor Albedo meets with no one except His Holiness and Lourdusamy.” “No one that we know of,” amended Isozaki. “But that is a matter of the Core coming to the human universe.”

been—Thou shalt not build a thinking machine equal or superior to humankind. “AIs” in use within the Pax were more “All-purpose Instruments” than “Artificial Intelligences” of the kind that had evolved away from humanity almost a millennium earlier: idiot thinking machines like Isozaki’s office AI or the cretinous ship computer on de Soya’s old ship, the Raphael. But in the past dozen years, secret research departments of the Pax Mercantilus had re-created the autonomous AIs equal to or surpassing those in common use during the days of the Hegemony. The risk and benefits of this project were almost beyond measure—absolute domination of Pax trade and a breaking of the old balance of power stand-off between Pax Fleet and Pax Mercantilus if successful, excommunication, torture in the dungeons of the Holy Office, and execution if discovered by the Church. And now this prospect.

Crusade. Glory. A final resolution of the Ouster Problem. Death beyond imagining. Destruction beyond imagining. Father Captain de Soya squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, but the vision of charged particle beams flaring against the blackness of space, of entire worlds burning, of oceans turning to steam and continents into molten rivers of lava, visions of orbital forests exploding into smoke, of charred bodies tumbling in zero-g, of fragile, winged creatures flaring and charring and expanding into ash … De Soya wept while billions cheered.

The sixteen-year-old said nothing. Below and to the left, somewhere in western Kansas, a circle of campfires became visible. I looked out at the lights amid all that darkness. “Any idea what experiment your alien friends are doing down there?” I said. “No,” said Aenea. “And they aren’t my alien friends.” “Which aren’t they?” I said. “Aliens? Or friends?” “Neither,” said Aenea. I realized that this was the most specific she had ever been about the godlike intelligences that had kidnapped Old Earth—and us, it seemed to me at times, as if we had been harried and driven through the farcasters like cattle.

“It was twofold,” she said softly. Somewhere in the desert night, a hawk called. “First, he believed what the TechnoCore told my father.” “About how they were the ones who had hijacked Earth?” I said. “About everything,” said Aenea. “Ummon was lying to the John Keats cybrid.” “Why?” I said. “They were just

“His second mistake was more subtle and serious,” she said, interrupting me without raising her voice. A pale glow still hung behind the mountains to the north and west. “Uncle Martin believed that the TechnoCore was humanity’s enemy,” she continued. I set my mug of tea down on stone. “Why is that a mistake?” I said. “Aren’t they our enemy?” When the girl did not answer I held up my hand, five fingers splayed. “One, according to the Cantos, the Core was the real force behind the attack on the Hegemony that led to the Fall of the Farcasters. Not the Ousters … the Core. The Church has denied that, made the Ousters responsible. Are you saying that the Church is right and the old poet was wrong?” “No,” said Aenea. “It was the Core that orchestrated the attack.” “Billions dead,” I said, almost spluttering in outrage. “The Hegemony toppled. The Web destroyed. The fatline cut …”

“The TechnoCore did not cut the fatline,” she said softly. “All right,” I said, taking a breath. “That was some mysterious entity … your Lions and Tigers and Bears, say. But it was still the Core behind the attack.” Aenea nodded and poured more tea for herself. I folded my thumb against my palm and touched the first finger with my other hand. “Second, did or did not the TechnoCore use the farcasters as a sort of cosmic leech to suck up human neural networks for their damned Ultimate Intelligence project? Everytime someone farcast, they were being … used … by those damned autonomous intelligences. Right or wrong?” “Correct,” said Aenea. “Three,” I said, folding the first finger away and tapping the next one in line, “the poem has Rachel—the pilgrim Sol Weintraub’s child who has come backward with the Time Tombs from the future—tell about a time to come when,” I shifted the tone of my voice as I quoted, “ ‘… the final war raged between the Core-spawned UI and the human spirit.’ Was this a mistake?”

“No,” said Aenea. “Four,” I said, beginning to feel foolish with my little finger exercise, but angry enough to continue, “didn’t the Core admit to your father that it created him … created the John Keats cybrid of him … just as a trap for the—what did they call it?—the empathy component of the human Ultimate Intelligence that’s supposed to come into existence sometime in the future?” “That’s what they said,” agreed Aenea, sipping her tea. She looked almost amused. This made me angrier. “Five,” I said, folding the last finger back so that my right hand was a fist. “Wasn’t it the Core as well as the Pax—hell, the Core ordering the Pax—that tried to have you caught and killed on Hyperion, on Renaissance Vector, on God’s Grove … halfway across the spiral arm?” “Yes,” she said softly. “And wasn’t it the Core,” I continue...

Aenea, are you including the Core in your definition of humanity?” “We created them,” she said softly. “Early on, we used human DNA to increase their computing power … their intelligence. We used to have robots. They created cybrids out of human DNA and AI personae. Right now, we have a human institution in power which gives all glory and demands all power because of its allegiance to and connection with God … the human Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps the Core has a similar situation with the Ultimates in control.” I could only stare at the girl. I did not understand.

“Empathy was supposedly the fleeing component of the human UI,” I said slowly as if working out a word puzzle. “Part of our evolved human consciousness in the future, come back in time.” Aenea looked at me. “The hybrid was the John Keats cybrid,” I continued. “Son of Man and Machine.” “No,” said Aenea softly. “That was Uncle Martin’s second misunderstanding. The Keats cybrids were not created to be the refuge for Empathy in this age. They were created to be the instrument of that fusion between the Core and humankind. To have a child, in other words.” I looked at the teenaged girl’s hands on my leg. “So you’re the consciousness ‘… as near divine as humankind has offered in thirty generations’?” Aenea shrugged. “And you have ‘… an imagination which can span space and time’?” “All human beings have that,” said Aenea. “It’s just that when I dream and imagine, I can see things that truly will be. Remember when I told you that I remember the future?” “Yeah.” “Well, right now I’m remembering that you will dream this conversation some months hence, while you’re lying in bed—in terrible pain, I’m afraid—on a world with a complicated name, in a home where people dress all in blue.”

Nemes was not offended by the comparison. She knew the unimaginable amounts of energy that had to be transferred from the Core via the Void Which Binds to her or her siblings when they phase-shifted. The Elements had to respect even their own instruments to divert so much energy in their direction.

“All non-Christian worlds,” Isozaki said again, omitting even the honorifics in addressing the others. “Or Christian worlds with large populations of non-Christians, such as Mars or Fuji or Nevermore. Cor Unum and Opus Dei have been exterminating non-Christians. But why transport their bodies? Why not just leave them to rot on their homeworlds and then bring in the Pax colonists?” His Holiness held up one hand. Isozaki fell silent. The Pope nodded in the direction of Cardinal Lourdusamy.

Lourdusamy nodded. “And who authorized this project, Cardinal Du Noyer?” “The Peace and Justice Commission, Your Excellency.” Isozaki’s head snapped around. The Cardinal had just laid the blame for this atrocity … this unprecedented mass murder … directly at the feet of one man. The Peace and Justice Commission had one prefect and only one prefect … Pope Urban XVI, formerly Pope Julius XIV. Isozaki lowered his gaze to the shoes of the fisherman and contemplated rushing the fiend, attempting to get his fingers around the Pope’s scrawny throat. He knew that the silent guards in the corner would cut him down halfway there. He was still tempted to try.

Isozaki went to one knee on the stone floor, not to pray, but just because he could no longer stand. How many centuries, gods of my ancestors, have accomplices to mass murder answered in this way? Since Horace Glennon-Height. Since the legendary Hitler. Since … forever. “Thank you, Cardinal Du Noyer,” said Lourdusamy. The old woman stepped back. Incredibly, it was the Pope who

worlds listed by Cardinal Du Noyer were … rendered lifeless … by Core technology, using Core robot spacecraft, and are being stored using Core techniques,” continued Albedo. “As Cardinal Du Noyer reported, approximately seven billion non-Christians have been processed in this manner over the past seven years. Another forty to fifty billion must be similarly processed in the next standard decade. It is time to explain the reason for this project and to enlist your direct aid in it.” Kenzo Isozaki was thinking—It is possible to wire the human skeletal structure with a powerful protein-based explosive so subtle that even the Swiss Guard sniffers would not have detected it. Would to the gods I had done that before coming here.

“You have been told—primarily through the banned Hyperion Cantos—that the Core consisted of Three Elements—the Stables, who wished to preserve the status quo between humanity and the Core, the Volatiles, who viewed humanity as a threat and plotted to destroy it—primarily through the destruction of the Earth via the Big Mistake of ’08, and the Ultimates, who thought only of creating an AI-based Ultimate Intelligence, a sort of silicon God which could predict and rule over the universe … or at least this galaxy. “All these truths are lies.” Isozaki realized that Anna

“The TechnoCore was never grouped into three warring elements,” said Albedo, pacing in front of the altar and dais. “From its evolution into consciousness a thousand years ago, the Core was made up of thousands of distinct elements and factions—often warring, more often cooperating, but always struggling to achieve a synthesis of agreement toward the direction autonomous intelligence and artificial life should evolve. That agreement has never crystallized.

“At that time, early elements of what would become the Human Hegemony and the forecasting elements of the TechnoCore realized that the goal of the evolving nanotech communities developed on those seedships was nothing less than the destruction of humankind and the creation of a new race of nanotech-controlled biologic adapts in a thousand distant star systems. The Hegemony and the Core responded by banning advanced nanotech research and by declaring war on the nanotech seedship colonies—the groups now known as the Ousters.

favored alliance with the nanotech universes—and this was more than a small faction—discovered something that terrified all elements of the Core. “As you know, our early research into Hawking-drive physics and faster-than-light communication led to the discovery of the Planck-space medium, what some have called the Void Which Binds. Evolving knowledge about this underlying and unifying substructure to the universe led to our creation of the FTL communication—the so-called fatline—as well as to the refined Hawking drive, the farcasters that united the Hegemonic WorldWeb, the planetary dataspheres evolving into megaspheres of Core-directed data, today’s instantaneous Gideon drive, and even experiments into antientropic bubbles within this universe—what we believe will become the Time Tombs on Hyperion.

“But those earliest neural net experiments revealed an amazing fact. There were other Cores in the universe … perhaps in our home galaxy. The discovery of this fact led to a civil war within our TechnoCore which still rages. Certain elements—not merely the Volatiles—decided that it was time to end the biological experiment that was the human race. Plans were made to ‘accidentally’ drop the ’08 Kiev black hole into the center of Old Earth before Hawking drives allowed for a general exodus. Other elements of the Core delayed these plans until the mechanisms for escape were given to the human race.

“Planck space, the Void Which Binds, is a multidimensional medium with its own reality and—as the Core was soon to learn—its own topography. The Hawking drive was not and is not a drive at all, in the classic sense, but an entry device which touches on Planck-space topography just long enough to change coordinates in the four-dimensional space/time continuum. Farcaster portals, on the other hand, allow actual entry to the Void Which Binds medium.

“Sol realized that love was the binding force of the Void Which Binds, the thread and fabric of the garment. And in that instant of satori, Sol realized that humankind was not the only seamstress of that gorgeous tapestry. Sol glimpsed the Void Which Binds and the force of love behind it, but he could not gain access to that medium. Human beings, so recently evolved from our primate cousins, have not yet gained the sensory capacity to see clearly or enter the Void Which Binds. “I say ‘to see clearly’ because all humans with an open heart and mind have caught rare but powerful glimpses of the Void landscape. Just as Zen is not a religion, but is religion, so the Void Which Binds is not a state of mind, but is the state of mind. The Void is all probability as standing waves, interacting with that standing wave front which is the human mind and personality. The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”

“All these holy books lie not from intention or failure of expression, but by their very nature of being reduced to words; all the images, precepts, laws, canons, quotations, parables, commandments, koans, zazen, and sermons in these beautiful books ultimately fail by adding only more words between the human being who is seeking and the perception of the Void Which Binds.

“I know,” she says. “The idea surprised me, as well, even though I knew this before I was born. These observers have an important function … to decide if humanity can be trusted to join them in the Void Which Binds medium, or if we are only vandals. It was one of these observers among us who recommended that Old Earth be transported away before the Core could destroy it. And it was one of these observers who designed the tests and simulations carried out on Old Earth during the last three centuries of its exile in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to better explain our species to them and measure the empathy of which we are capable. “These other races also sent their observers—spies, if you will—to dwell among the elements of the Core. They knew that it had been the Core tampering which had damaged the boundaries of the Void, but they also know that we created the Core.