The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

Gladstone loved the Web. She loved it enough to know that she must help in destroying it.

Into the wild waters of chaos where even the TechnoCore predictors, those who saw everything, would be blind.

Sol’s decades as an academic had preconditioned him to hunt for patterns in events, a moral grain in the accreted stone of experience, but there had been no pattern to events on Hyperion—merely confusion and death.

No, by God, there was a pattern to things, a moral underpinning to this platform of seemingly random events, and Sol Weintraub would wager his and his daughter’s lives on that belief.

Humanity had become as blasé about sharing their lives with potential AI monitoring as pre-Civil War Old Earth USA-southern families had been about speaking in front of their human slaves.

I was thinking about how free of mobs recent centuries had been: to create a mob there must be public meetings, and public meetings in our time consisted of individuals communing via the All Thing or other datasphere channels; it is hard to create mob passion when people are separated by kilometers and light-years, connected only by comm lines and fatline threads.

“Are we so sure that Christ always knew what to do next? He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.”

“The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The votes are there. The mob just doesn’t know it’s a mob yet.

“Our new age of human expansion will terraform nothing. We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness. We will not make the universe adapt … we shall adapt.”

Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.