The Rise of Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #4)

by Dan Simmons

He had always distrusted people who asked to speak freely or who vowed to speak candidly or who used the expression “frankly.”

“I have always made an awkward bow.”

“What was the Depression?” “Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state,” Aenea said. “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.” “Jesus,” I said. “Precisely,” said Aenea.

As the crowd began cheering and crying “Deus le volt!”—God wills it—de Soya began to weep. 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 military was especially good at beginning major voyages in the middle of the night. During my time in the Hyperion Home Guard, it seemed that all important troop movements began in the wee hours. I began to associate that odd blend of fear and excitement, dread and anticipation, with predawn darkness and the smell of lateness.

“Humans have been waiting for Jesus and Yahweh and E.T. to save their asses since before they covered those asses with bearskins and came out of the cave,” she said. “They’ll have to keep waiting. This is our business … our fight … and we have to take care of it ourselves.”

De Soya saw their eagerness for combat and was saddened by it.

You were given orders. You obeyed them. We are soldiers.”

“I don’t think that I want to make any wager if it means dealing with a Church that has grown so corrupt that it makes obedience and submission the price of its saving the life of someone’s child,”

“Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars … pogroms … resistance to logic and science and medicine … not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.”

“You all know that the cruciform had been a failure. Prior to the Fall, humans resurrected by this symbiote’s actions were retarded and sexual neuters.

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.

“A monk said to Tozan, ‘A monk has died; where has he gone?’ Tozan answered, ‘After the fire, a sprout of grass.’ ”

“The Bible lies. The Koran lies. The Talmud and Torah lie. The New Testament lies. The Sutta-pitaka, the nikayas, the Itivuttaka, and the Dhammapada lie. The Bodhisattva and the Amitabha lie. The Book of the Dead lies. The Tiptaka lies. All Scripture lies … just as I lie as I speak to you now. “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.

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?”

“There is no guarantee of happiness, wisdom, or long life if you drink of me this evening,” she says, very softly. “There is no nirvana. There is no salvation. There is no afterlife. There is no rebirth. There is only immense knowledge—of the heart as well as the mind—and the potential for great discoveries, great adventures, and a guarantee of more of the pain and terror that make up so much of our short lives.”

I confess to myself that I didn’t understand half of Aenea’s explanation of things, but I leave with a vague sense of letdown and inappropriateness … I’m sure, for instance, that Jesus Christ’s Last Supper did not end with a shouted reminder of a BYOB party on the upper deck.

“Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing,” said my young friend. “A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere … consensual idiocy.”

“With artificial immortality comes more stagnation … physical and cultural. It’s a given.”

I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.

The Vatican is broken as surely as if the fist of God had smashed down from the sky in an anger beyond human understanding.

In the morning I am still suffused with the exhilaration of my freedom, but my head hurts, my back hurts, my stomach aches, my teeth hurt, my hair hurts, and I am sure that a pack of small, fuzzy creatures has taken up residence in the back of my mouth.

“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.”