The Rise of Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #4)

by Dan Simmons

Grandam is squeezing my hand. “The young remember most deeply,” she says softly. “When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.”

“There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life … when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us.”

How they must have thought their efforts and adventures over, only to have to pick up their burdens again. How often, I realized now as an adult in my standard thirties, how often that is the case in all of our lives.

Father de Soya went to his knees in the dust, crossed himself, and bent his head in prayer. Aenea and I stood back and watched with the quiet embarrassment common to the unbeliever in the presence of any true faith.

I almost shouted “No, goddammit!” at the top of my lungs in the echoing nave of St. Peter’s Basilica during the holiest moments of Holy Thursday’s High Mass. Instead I waited.

My body spasmed and fell and I pissed my pants as all voluntary functions ceased, my last conscious sensation being the cold flow of urine down my pant leg onto the perfect tiles of St. Peter’s Basilica.

After a few minutes, a hidden door in the stone wall opened and Rhadamanth Nemes came in and walked to a place just beyond the grate to the right side of Aenea. A second Rhadamanth Nemes came in and took her place on Aenea’s left side. Two more Nemeses came in and took up positions farther back. They did not speak. Aenea did not speak to them.

I am drifting away when I feel someone pulling off my boots. I think it is the former Pope.

“No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.”

“It took you goddamn fucking long enough to get your lazy ass here,” said the mummy in the web of life-support tubes and filaments. “I thought I’d have to go out and drag you back from wherever you were lazing around like some fucking twentieth-century welfare queen.”

That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door.

One Earth year, eleven months, one week, and six hours can be an eternity if you allow it to be so. A day can be so. An hour.