The Rise of Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #4)

by Dan Simmons

“Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare.”

“My God,” she said softly, “that would be the ultimate end run.” Isozaki nodded and smiled again. “Do you know where that term originated, Anna?” “End run? No … some sport, I imagine.” “A very ancient warfare-surrogate sport called football,” said Isozaki.

Far above me, feathered cirrus and rippled cirrocumulus caught the twilight in a pastel riot of soft pinks, rose glows, violet tinges, and golden backlighting. It was as if I were in a temple with a high, rosy ceiling supported by thousands of irregular columns and pillars. The columns and pillars were towering mountains of cumulus and cumulonimbus, their anvil-shaped bases disappearing in the darkening depths hundreds or thousands of kilometers below my floating kayak, their rounded summits billowing high into the halo-tinged cirrostratus hundreds or thousands of kilometers above me. Each column of cloud caught the low, rich light passing through openings in the cloud many thousands of klicks to the west, and the light seemed to ignite the clouds as if their surfaces were made of wildly flammable material.

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.

“The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: that evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe. For that evolution to ‘succeed’ for these elements of the Core, they would have to abandon zero-sum parasitism and discover true symbiosis. They would have to enter into honest co-evolution with our human race.

Choose again. Aenea and I made love in the darkened living pod, despite our fatigue and the late hour. Our lovemaking was slow and tender and almost unbearably sweet. Choose again. They were the last words in my mind as I finally drifted … literally … off to sleep. Choose again. I understood. I chose Aenea and life with Aenea. And I believe that she had chosen me. And I would choose her and she would choose me again tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, and in every hour during those tomorrows. Choose again. Yes. Yes.

“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.” “And these memories …” “Resonate in the Void Which Binds.”