The Rise of Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #4)

by Dan Simmons

Some fat men carry their weight like a weakness, a sign of self-indulgence and sloth. Other fat men absorb mass regally, an outward sign of their growing power.

the sand fell out in a red cascade, like dried blood from a broken hourglass.

My impulse was to hug her and hold her close and beg her not to disappear again. I did not do that.

anger written in my face, fists, muscles, and walk.

Rain pounded like tiny fists on closed coffins.

Ninety light-years away, in a star system only three light-years from Pacem, the original Raphael translated into real space with a violence that would have spit marrow from human bones, sliced through human cells like a hot blade through radiant gossamers, and scrambled human neurons like loose marbles on a steep hillside.

The kayak that I paddled was small and the Mississippi River was large.

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

“kept

typo

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.

beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.

That would make them an enemy of humanity in my book.”

Belphegor (sloth), Leviathan (envy), Beelzebub (gluttony), Satan (anger), Asmodeus (lechery), Mammon (avarice), and Lucifer (pride).

To lose all this forever is the essence of being human,

That’s precisely what messiahs do, Raul … bridge different worlds. Different eras. Provide the bond between two irreconcilable concepts.”

the human soul … distrusts homogeneity,

I did not forget that there was a panic button. The problem is simple—when there is real panic, one does not immediately think of buttons.

there were some appendages that might be sex organs, or perhaps eyes.

My skull felt as if there were a ball of mercury in it that shifted ponderously long seconds after my head itself turned.

It is a problem. To tell of such things. To share the most private and sacred of moments. It feels like a violation to put such things into words. And a lie not to.

Both men’s “traveling clothes” are more resplendent than my shot at formal wear, and they are surrounded by small hornet clusters of aides, monks, and security people.

Sol saw that love was a real and equal force in the universe … as real as electromagnetism or weak nuclear force. As real as gravity, and governed by many of the same laws.

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.”

Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.”

“First, no dependence on words and letters. Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated. The Void Which Binds is to be found in the deepest secrets and silences of things … the place where childhood dwells.

“Second, a special transmission outside the Scriptures. Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move. A musician can tell another musician apart from the millions who play notes as soon as the music begins. Poets glean poets in a few syllables, especially where the ordinary meaning and forms of poetry are discarded.

and in the still-warm crucible of burned-away words and images remains the gold of deeper things, what R. H. Blyth and Frederick Franck once called ‘the dark flame of life that burns in all things,’ … and ‘seeing with the belly, not with the eye; with “bowels of compassion.”

“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?”

the Void Which Binds is more than silence … it is the beginning of hearing.

“And, liberated from the restrictions of his time by his glimpse of the timelessness on the Void Which Binds, Jesus realized that it was he who was the key—not his teachings, not Scriptures based on his ideas, not groveling adulation to him or the suddenly evolving Old Testament God in which he solidly believed—but him, Jesus, a human man whose cells carried the decryption code to unlock the portal. Jesus knew that his ability to open that door lay not in his mind or soul but in his skin and bones and cells … literally in his DNA.

“But while the Core could feel and explore the outlines of the Void medium, send their probes into the multidimensional post-Hawking reality of it, they could not understand it. The Void Which Binds demands a level of sentient empathy which the Core had never bothered evolving. The first step toward true satori in the Void is learning the language of the beloved dead—and the Core has no beloved dead. The Void Which Binds was like a beautiful painting to a blind man who chooses to burn it like firewood, or like a Beethoven symphony to a deaf man who feels the vibration and builds a stronger floor to damp it out.

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.

“I can be a bastard, you know, but I wasn’t born one.

lovemaking is never absurd when you are making love to the person you truly love.

While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.

With what can I compare the Great Peak? Over the surrounding provinces, its blue-green hue never dwindles from sight. Infused by the Shaper of Forms with the soaring power of divinity, Shaded and sunlit, its slopes divide night from day. Breast heaving as I climb toward the clouds, Eyes straining to follow birds flying home, Someday I shall reach its peerless summit, And behold all mountains in a single glance. —Tu Fu, T’ang Dynasty, China, Old Earth

“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.”

An indefinite number of unique individuals can exist in a finite material world if they are nested within each other and that world is expanding.’

Total intimacy is an exemption from the space/time demands of the universe.

they were all shattered, leaking air and bodies, the podstems and connecting branches writhing in blind Newtonian response.

His face had gone blank in that way common to mild epileptics or deeply thoughtful people.

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.

exposed and smashed, scorched and tumbled and scattered.

“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.”

Perhaps if I waited long enough he would just die quietly.

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.