The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

“It wasn’t long ago that I would have been delighted to discover an Antichrist … even the presence of some antidivine power would have served to shore up my failing belief in any form of divinity.” “And now?” Sol asked quietly. Duré spread his fingers. “I too have been crucified.”

I awoke, and was not pleased to be awakened.

“The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.”

Ummon and the Stables recognize only one value—existence.

The Consul turned. There was something like eagerness on his tired face. “Do it, then. For God’s sake get it over with.” Spokesman Freeman Ghenga stood and faced the Consul. “You are condemned to live. You are condemned to repair some of the damage you have done.” The Consul staggered as if struck in the face. “No, you can’t … you must …” “You are condemned to enter the age of chaos which approaches,”

“The Core offered unity in unwitting subservience,” she said softly. “Safety in stagnation. Where are the revolutions in human thought and culture and action since the Hegira?”

“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.”

The River Tethys ceased to flow as the giant portals went opaque and died. Water spilled out, dried up, and left fish to rot under two hundred suns.

Maui-Covenant also rioted, but in celebration, the hundreds of thousands of descendents of the First Families riding the motile isles to displace the offworlders who had taken over so much of the world.

Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.

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.

If God evolved, and Sol was sure that God must, then that evolution was toward empathy—toward a shared sense of suffering rather than power and dominion.

“So long everyone!” he cried. “By God, it was all worth it, wasn’t it?” He turned into the light, and he and the baby were gone.