The Rise of Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #4)

by Dan Simmons

“Good child mode.” This command had the comlog speak only when spoken to.

I had never been on a world as settled, as crowded, as interior as Lusus, and I could have easily spent a month exploring the bustling Hive I glimpsed from the concrete-channeled river.

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

This pain was all-absorbing. I was amazed by the relentless, mind-controlling quality of it. During the hours of agony that I had already endured and was yet to endure, I attempted to concentrate on my surroundings, to think of other things, to interact with the people around me, even to do simple multiplication tables in my head, but the pain flowed into all the compartments of my consciousness like molten steel into the fissures on a cracked crucible.

I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer—namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.

“Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”

Hegemony meant homogeneity, Raul. The Pax means even more. The human genome … the human soul … distrusts homogeneity, Raul. It—they—are always ready to take a chance, to risk change and diversity.”

But I had seen an example of Old Earth’s northern lights on a peninsula that had once been the Scandinavian Republic while on my round-the-world dropship tour of that planet: they had been shimmering and gooseflesh-producing, rippling and dancing along the northern horizon like the filmy gown of a ghost dancer. This world’s aurora held none of that subtlety. Bands of light, solid striations of light—as discrete and discernible as the keys of a vertical piano—began dancing high in the sky in the direction I thought of as south. Other curtains of green, gold, red, and cobalt began shimmering against the dark world of air beneath me. These grew longer, broader, taller, stretching to meet and blend with other curtains of leaping electrons. It was as if the planet were cutting paper dolls out of shimmering light. Within minutes, every part of the sky was alive and dancing with vertical, slanted, and near-horizontal ribbons of banded color. The cloud towers became visible again, billows and pennants reflecting the strobe of thousands of these cold lights. I could almost hear the hiss and rasp of solar particles being driven along the terrifying lines of magnetic force banding this giant world.

it was as if she were trying to hold herself together physically against some terrible centrifugal force.

To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.

Most of Buddhism, you see, gentlemen, can be explored, appreciated, and utilized as a tool toward enlightenment without descending into the supernatural.”

one of the great Zen masters of Old Earth, the poet William Blake, once said—‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ ”

perhaps that M. Blake meant that time without ending is worthless time, Cardinal Mustafa? That any being freed from mortality—even God—might envy the children of slow time?” The Cardinal nodded but showed no agreement. “Your Holiness, I cannot see how God could envy poor mortal humankind. Certainly God is not capable of envy.” The boy’s nearly invisible eyebrows shot up. “Yet, is not your Christian God, by definition, omnipotent? Certainly he, she, it must be capable of envy.”

I know from my catechism and in my soul that God is not capable of envy … especially not envy of his flawed creations.” “Flawed?” said the boy. Cardinal Mustafa smiled condescendingly, his tone that of a learned priest speaking to a child. “Humanity is flawed because of its propensity for sin,” he said softly. “Our Lord could not be envious of a being capable of sin.”

“One of our Zen masters, a man named Ikkyu, once wrote a poem to that effect— “All the sins committed In the Three Worlds Will fade and disappear Together with myself.”

“We feel that the slate is washed clean with death. You feel that it brings judgment. Why defer this judgment?”

Without God, the universe can only be a machine … unthinking, uncaring, unfeeling.” “Why?” said the boy. “I beg your pardon, Your Holiness?” “Why must the universe be unthinking, uncaring, unfeeling without your definition of a God?” the child said softly. He closed his eyes. “The morning dew Flees away, And is no more; Who may remain In this world of ours?”

“More frail and illusory Than numbers written on water, Our seeking from the Buddha Felicity in the afterworld.”

You do not think that God will grant our prayers.” Aenea shook her head. “I think that he meant two things, Your Eminence. First that the Buddha will not help us. It isn’t in his job definition, so to speak. Secondly, that planning for the afterworld is foolish because we are, by nature, timeless, eternal, unborn, undying, and omnipotent.”

“Ikkyu taught us that it is possible to live at least part of our lives in a timeless, spaceless world where there is no birth and death, no coming and going,” he said softly. “A place where there is no separation in time, no distance in space, no barrier barring us from the ones we love, no glass wall between experience and our hearts.”

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.

Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is. The reasons are many and complex, but all stem from the fact that we have evolved as one of the self-seeing organs of the evolving universe. Can the eye see itself?”

the Core is in a constant state of civil war, with almost every entity there fighting for itself and for no one else. It is a case of hyper-hyper-hyperparasitism to the tenth degree.

“One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”

This was a man whom Aenea would have loved to have met and talked with and debated with.

My IQ seemed to drop fifty points when I was in the presence of Martin Silenus.