The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

Chat gpt Simmons v Lessing Dan Simmons and Doris Lessing, though distinct in their styles and genres, share several thematic and motif-based consonances in their writings. Here are five ways in which their works are aligned: 1. **Exploration of Human Nature and Psychology**: Both Simmons and Lessing delve deeply into the complexities of human nature and psychology. Simmons, especially in works like "Hyperion" and "The Terror," explores the motivations, fears, and inner struggles of his characters, often placing them in extreme situations to peel back layers of their psyche. Lessing, notably in "The Golden Notebook" and "The Fifth Child," similarly examines the psychological landscapes of her characters, focusing on their internal conflicts, mental health, and the impact of societal pressures. 2. **Social and Political Commentary**: Both authors use their narratives to provide social and political commentary. Simmons, through the expansive scope of his science fiction, often critiques issues such as authoritarianism, technological overreach, and environmental degradation. Lessing, particularly in her "Canopus in Argos" series and "The Golden Notebook," tackles themes of colonialism, feminism, and political ideology, often challenging the status quo and prompting readers to reflect on societal structures and injustices. 3. **Blending of Genres**: Simmons and Lessing both blur the lines between genres to create rich, multifaceted narratives. Simmons combines science fiction, horror, historical fiction, and fantasy, creating works that are not easily classified into a single genre. Lessing, though primarily known for her literary fiction, ventured into science fiction with her "Canopus in Argos" series and often infused her realistic narratives with elements of the fantastic and speculative, challenging the boundaries of traditional genre classifications. 4. **Focus on the Individual vs. Society**: Both authors often explore the tension between the individual and society. Simmons, in works like "The Rise of Endymion," examines how individuals navigate and sometimes rebel against societal constraints, religious dogma, and oppressive regimes. Lessing, in novels such as "The Golden Notebook," presents characters who struggle to maintain their individuality and integrity in the face of societal expectations and political movements, highlighting the conflicts between personal desires and collective responsibilities. 5. **Use of Multi-layered Narrative Structures**: Simmons and Lessing employ complex narrative structures to enrich their storytelling. Simmons' "Hyperion" uses a frame narrative with multiple characters telling their own stories, reminiscent of Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales." This approach allows for a diverse exploration of themes from different perspectives. Lessing's "The Golden Notebook" famously uses a fragmented narrative, with different notebooks representing various aspects of the protagonist's life, thoughts, and experiences. This technique provides a layered, multifaceted view of reality and consciousness. These shared approaches and thematic concerns highlight the ways in which Dan Simmons' and Doris Lessing's works resonate with each other, despite their different genres and styles. Their explorations of human nature, societal critique, genre blending, individual vs. societal dynamics, and innovative narrative structures create rich, thought-provoking literature that challenges and engages readers.

Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine … By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone—though erroneous they may be fine— This is the very thing in which consists poetry …” —JOHN KEATS, in a letter to his brother

great, crenelated cruisers, canvas-laden barks, and five-tiered barges, many showing signs of being equipped with levitation gear; elaborate houseboats, obviously fitted with their own farcasters; small, motile isles imported from the oceans of Maui-Covenant; sporty pre-Hegira speedboats and submersibles; an assortment of hand-carved nautical EMVs from Renaissance Vector; and a few contemporary go-everywhere yachts, their outlines hidden by the seamless reflective ovoid surfaces of containment fields.

Dinee Teats, former crib doxie and hopstop hostess to lungpipe proxies in the Mid-sump Barrens

Grow up

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

It’s strange but true that war-going spacecraft have been depicted in fiction, film, holo, and stimsim for more than eight hundred years; even before humankind had left Old Earth in anything but atmosphere-skimming converted airplanes, their flatfilms had shown epic space battles, huge interstellar dreadnoughts with incredible armament lunging through space like streamlined cities. Even the spate of recent war holies after the Battle of Bressia showed great fleets battling it out at distances two ground soldiers would find claustrophobic, ships ramming and firing and burning like Greek triremes packed into the straits of Artemisium.

coalescing into a semisolid mist as the containment field reified.

It was early here. The skies of Pacem were yellow, tinged with greenish clouds and an ammonia smell which attacked her sinuses and made her eyes water. The air had that thin, foul, chemical smell of a world neither completely terraformed nor totally inimical to man. Gladstone paused to look around. St. Peter’s was on a hilltop, the square embraced by a semicircle of pillars, a great basilica at its cusp. To her right, where the pillars opened to a staircase descending a kilometer or more to the south, a small city was visible, low, crude homes huddling between bone-white trees that resembled the skeletons of stunted creatures long since departed.

The isles were tamed and populated by Web citizens now. The dolphins were dead—some killed in the great battles with FORCE, most killing themselves in the inexplicable South Sea Mass Suicide, the last mystery of a race draped in mysteries. Gladstone took a seat on a low bench near the cliff’s edge and found a stalk of grass she could peel and chew. What happened to a world when it went from a home for a hundred thousand humans, in delicate balance with a delicate ecology, to the playground for more than four hundred million in the first standard decade of citizenship in the Hegemony? Answer: the world died.

The Consul, a man who had given four decades of his life as well as his wife and child to Hegemony service, had finally exploded in revenge like a bomb which had lain dormant for half a century.

Gladstone took no pleasure in the betrayal. The Consul had sold his soul, and would pay a terrible price—in history, in his own mind—but his treason was as nothing to the treachery Gladstone was prepared to suffer for. As Hegemony CEO, she was the symbolic leader of a hundred and fifty billion human souls. She was prepared to betray them all in order to save humanity.

Gladstone translated to a minor terminex in their hometown of Crawford. It was evening. Low, white homes set back on manicured lawns reflected Canadian Republic Revival sensibilities and farmers’ practicality. The trees were tall, broad limbed, and amazingly faithful to their Old Earth heritage. Gladstone turned away from the flow of pedestrians, most hurrying home after a workday elsewhere in the Web, and found herself strolling down brick walkways past brick buildings set around a grassy oval. To her left, she caught glimpses of farm fields past a row of homes. Tall green plants, possibly corn, grew in softly sighing ranks that stretched to the distant horizon where the last arc of a huge red sun was setting. Gladstone walked through the campus, wondering if this had been the college where Sol had taught, but not curious enough to query the datasphere. Gaslamps were lighting themselves under the canopy of leaves, and the first stars were becoming visible in the gaps where sky faded from azure to amber to ebony.

Weintraub had dealt with the New Testament’s message as a presage of a new stage in that relationship—a stage wherein mankind would no longer sacrifice its children to any god, for any reason, but where parents … entire races of parents … would offer themselves up instead. Thus the Twentieth Century Holocausts, the Brief Exchange, the tripartite wars, the reckless centuries, and perhaps even the Big Mistake of ’38.

No. It would go as planned until it went beyond planning. Into the unforeseen. Into the wild waters of chaos where even the TechnoCore predictors, those who saw everything, would be blind.

Gladstone paused at the edge of a circular platform and gripped a railing so tightly that the age-mottles on her hands stood out harshly against suddenly pale skin. She thought of the old books she had read, pre-Hegira, prespaceflight, where people in embryonic nations on the continent of Europe had transported darker people—Africans—away from their homelands into a life of slavery in the colonial West. Would those slaves, chained and shackled, naked and curled in the fetid belly of a slave ship … would those slaves have hesitated to rebel, to drag down their captors, if it meant destroying the beauty of that slave ship … of Europe itself? But they had Africa to return to.

Slavery Epistemic Colonialism

viewing lenses and looked from branch to branch, thorn to thorn. The people writhing there were of both genders and all ages. They wore a variety of torn clothing and disarrayed cosmetics that spanned many decades if not centuries. Many of the styles were not familiar to Kassad, and he assumed that he was looking at victims from his future. There were thousands … tens of thousands … of victims there. All were alive. All were in pain. Kassad stopped, focused on a branch four hundred meters from the bottom, upon a cluster of thorns and bodies far out from the trunk, upon a single thorn three meters long from which a familiar purple cape billowed. The form there writhed, twisted, and turned toward Fedmahn Kassad. He was looking at the impaled figure of Martin Silenus. Kassad cursed and formed fists so tight that the bones in his hands ached. He looked around for his weapons, magnifying vision to stare into the Crystal Monolith. There was nothing there. Colonel Kassad shook his head, realized that his skinsuit was a better weapon than any he had brought to Hyperion, and began to stride toward the tree. He did not know how he would climb it, but he would find a way. He did not know how he would get Silenus down alive—get all of the victims down—but he would do so or die in the trying. Kassad took ten paces and stopped on a curve of frozen dune. The Shrike stood between him and the tree.

Sol stood, walked slowly down the trail to the Sphinx, climbed the stairs, found a therm cloak and blankets, and made a nest for the two of them on the highest step as Hyperion winds howled and the Time Tombs glowed more brightly. Rachel lay on his chest and stomach, her cheek on his shoulder, her tiny hands curling and uncurling as she released the world for the land of infant sleep. Sol heard her gentle breathing as she moved into deep slumber, heard the soft sound as she blew tiny bubbles of saliva. After a while, he released his own hold on the world and joined her in sleep.

Cover?

realized that in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith—true faith—was trusting in that love.

“Why this is hell,” thinks Silenus, quoting Marlowe, “nor am I out of it.” But he knows it is not hell. Nor any afterlife. But he also knows that it is not some subbranch of reality; the thorn passes through his body! Eight centimeters of organic steel through his chest! But he has not died. He does not bleed. This place was somewhere and something, but it was not hell and it was not living. Time was strange here. Silenus had known time to stretch and slow before—the agony of the exposed nerve in the dentist’s chair, the kidney-stone pain in the Med clinic waiting room—time could slow, seem not to move as the hands of an outraged biological clock stood still in shock. But time did move then. The root canal was finished. The ultramorph finally arrived, took effect. But here the very air is frozen in the absence of time. Pain is the curl and foam of a wave that does not break. Silenus screams in anger and pain. And writhes upon his thorn. “Goddamn!” he manages at last. “Goddamn motherfuck sonofabitch.” The words are relics of a different life, artifacts from the dream he had lived before the reality of the tree. Silenus only half remembers that life, as he only half remembers the Shrike carrying him here, impaling him here, leaving him here. “Oh God!” screams the poet and clutches at the thorn with both hands, trying to lever himself up to relieve the great weight of his body which adds so immeasurably to the unmeasurable pain. There is a landscape below. He can see for mile...

The Web in this century had many of the religious overtones of the Rome of Old Earth just before the Christian Era: a policy of tolerance, a myriad of religions—most, like Zen Gnosticism, complex and inwardly turned rather than the stuff of proselytism—while the general tenor was one of gentle cynicism and indifference to religious impulse. But not now, not in this square.

I actually glanced behind me, thinking that surely this pompous poseur was not talking about me. But he was. And enough of the crowd had been converted to mob that a wave of people nearest the shouting demagogue surged in my direction, fists waving and spittle flying, and that surge moved others farther from the center, until the fringes of the crowd below me also moved in my direction to keep from being trampled.

Trump !

The surge became a roaring, shouting, screaming mass of rioters; at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

Epistemic Revolution !

The first was—I thought—a rather saccharine love poem beginning “The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!” The second was better, although contaminated with the romantic morbidity of an overly romantic and morbid age: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be consciencc-calm’d—sec here it is— I hold it towards you.

John Keats, the consumptive poet who had asked only that his tomb be nameless except for the inscription: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.

The datumplane analog of Brawne Lamia and her retrieval persona lover strike the surface of the megasphere like two cliff divers striking the surface of a turbulent sea. There is a quasi-electrical shock, a sense of having passed through a resisting membrane, and they are inside, the stars are gone, and Brawne’s eyes widen as she stares at an information environment infinitely more complex than any datasphere. The dataspheres traveled by human operators are often compared to complex cities of information: towers of corporate and government data, highways of process flow, broad avenues of datumplane interaction, subways of restricted travel, high walls of security ice with microphage guards on prowl, and the visible analog of every microwave flow and counterflow a city lives by. This is more. Much more. The usual datasphere city analogs are there, but small, so very small, as dwarfed by the scope of the megasphere as true cities would be on a world seen from orbit. The megasphere, Brawne sees, is as alive and interactive as the biosphere of any Class Five world: forests of green-gray data trees grow and prosper, sending out new roots and branches and shoots even as she watches; beneath the forest proper, entire microecologies of dataflow and subroutine AIs flourish, flower, and die as their usefulness ends; beneath the shifting ocean-fluid soil of the matrix proper, a busy subterranean life of data moles, commlink worms, reprogramming bacteria, data tree roots, and Strange ...

sobs if she allows her emotions to destroy what little sense of reality she is imposing on this madness.

[When you meet a swordsman/ meet him with a sword Do not offer a poem to anyone but a poet] Brawne stares at Johnny. Without volition, she sends her thoughts his way: —Jesus, Johnny, we didn’t come all this way to listen to a fucking Delphic oracle. We can get double-talk by accessing human politicians via the All Thing. [Kwatz!] The universe of their megalith shakes with laughter-spasms again. —Was I a swordsman then? sends Johnny. Or a poet? [Yes There is never one without the other]

Epistemic Ideology Dialectic

Blinks in the direction of the megalith AI.

Johnny sets his forehead against Brawne’s. His thought is like a whisper to her: —We are seeing a matrix simulation analog, hearing a translation in approximate mondo and koan. Ummon is a great teacher, researcher, philosopher, and leader in the Core. Brawne nods. —All right. Was that his story? —No. He is asking us if we can truly bear hearing the story. Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield. —I’ve never been too fond of ignorance. Brawne waves at the megalith. Tell us. [A less-enlightened personage once asked Ummon What is the God-nature/Buddha/Central Truth> Ummon answered him A dried shit-stick] [To understand the Central Truth/Buddha/God-nature in this instance/ the less-enlightened must understand that on Earth/your homeworld/my homeworld humankind on the most populated continent once used pieces of wood for toilet paper Only with this knowledge will the Buddha-truth be revealed]

the head of a pin where angels once danced

The phrase "angels dancing on the head of a pin" originated in the 17th century as a theological tool used by Protestants to mock medieval scholastics like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus

creating still a better generation of information retrieval/processing/prediction organism A better mousetrap

[We all agreed that Earth had to die so we killed it The Kiev Team’s runaway black hole forerunner to the farcaster terminex which binds your Web was no accident The Earth was needed elsewhere in our experiments so we let it die and spread humankind among the stars like the windblown seeds you were]

Epistemic !

None guess the truth Wherever the Core resides it had use for humankind/ use for each neuron of each fragile mind in our quest for Ultimate Intelligence/ so we constructed your civilization carefully so that/ like hamsters in a cage/ like Buddhist prayer wheels/ each time you turn your little wheels of thought our purposes are served] [Our God machine stretched/stretches/includes within its heart a million light-years and a hundred billion billion circuits of thought and action The Ultimates tend it like saffron-robed priests doing eternal zazen in front of the rusting hulk of a 1938 Packard But] [Kwatz!] [it works We created the Ultimate Intelligence Not now nor ten thousand years from now but sometime in a future so distant that yellow suns are red and bloated with age/ swallowing their children Saturn-like Time is no barrier to the Ultimate Intelligence

Your UI seems to make its home on the plane where Heisenberg and Schrödinger first trespassed Your accidental Intelligence appears not only to be the gluon but the glue Not a watchmaker but a sort of Feynman gardener tidying up a no-boundary universe with his crude sum-over-histories rake/ idly keeping track of every sparrow fall and electron spin while allowing each particle to follow every possible track in space-time and each particle of humankind to explore every possible crack of cosmic irony]

Epistemic

[The end of my story is simple The Time Tombs are artifacts sent back to carry the Shrike/ Avatar/Lord of Pain/Angel of Retribution/ half-perceived perceptions of an all-too-real extension of our UI Each of you was chosen to help with the opening of the Tombs and the Shrike’s search for the hidden one and the elimination of the Hyperion Variable/ for in the space-time knot which our UI would rule no such variables will be allowed Your damaged/ two-part UI has chosen one of humankind to travel with the Shrike and witness its efforts Some of the Core have sought to eradicate humanity Ummon has joined those who sought the second path/ one filled with uncertainty for both races Our group told Gladstone of her choice/ humankind’s choice/ of certain extermination or entry down the black hole of the Hyperion Variable and warfare/ slaughter/ disruption of all unity/ the passing of gods/ but also the end of stalemate/ victory of one side or the other if the Empathy third of the triune can be found and forced to return to the war The Tree of Pain will call him The Shrike will take him The true UI will destroy him Thus you have Ummon’s story]

!

“I am no Dante. I sought no Beatrice. My brief bout of courage—although fatalism is a more accurate term—had evaporated with the loss of daylight. I turned and almost ran the thirty paces to the opening of the cave. “There was no opening. The passage merely ended. I had heard no sound of cave-in or avalanche, and besides, the rock where the entrance should have been looked as ancient and undisturbed as the rest of that cavern. For half an hour I searched for an alternate exit, finding none, refusing to return to the staircase, finally sitting for some hours where the Cave Tomb entrance once had been. Another Shrike trick. Another cheap theatrical stunt by this perverse planet. Hyperion’s idea of a joke. Ha ha. “After several hours of sitting there in semidarkness, watching the light at the far end of the cave pulse soundlessly, I realized that the Shrike was not going to come to me here. The entrance would not magically reappear. I had the choice of sitting there until I died of starvation—or thirst, more likely, since I was already dehydrated—or of descending the damned staircase. “I descended. “Years ago, literally lifetimes ago, when I visited the Bikura near the Cleft on the Pinion Plateau, the labyrinth where I had encountered the Shrike had been three kilometers below the canyon wall. That was close to the surface; most of the labyrinths on most of the labyrinthine worlds are at least ten klicks beneath the crust. I had no doubt that this endless staircase … a steep ...

Duré’s smile was gone. “Do you hear what we’re saying? Do you hear the blasphemy in what we’re saying? I’m no candidate for the Godhead, Severn. I’ve betrayed my Church, my science, and now, by disappearing, my friends on the pilgrimage. Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity.” “Enough,” commanded Monsignor Edouard. “If the identity of this Empathy part of some future, manufactured deity is the mystery, think of the candidates just in the immediate troupe of your little Passion Play, M. Severn. The CEO, M. Gladstone, carrying the weight of the Hegemony on her shoulders. The other members of the pilgrimage … M. Silenus who, according to what you told Paul, even now suffers on the Shrike’s tree for his poetry. M. Lamia, who has risked and lost so much for love. M. Weintraub, who has suffered Abraham’s dilemma … even his daughter, who has returned to the innocence of childhood. The Consul, who—” “The Consul seems more Judas than Christ,” I said. “He betrayed both the Hegemony and the Ousters, who thought he was working for them.”

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

The ten-kilometer ride to the spaceport via the VIP highway or the skylanes above it usually took a few minutes, but Arundez’s roundabout, up-and-down approach over the hills, through the valleys, and between the trees added time and excitement to the trip. The Consul turned his head to watch hillsides and the slums of burning refugee camps flash by to his right. Men and women crouched against boulders and under low trees, covering their heads as the skimmer rushed past. Once the Consul saw a squad of FORCE: Marines dug in on a hilltop, but their attention was focused on a hill to the north from which there came a panoply of laser-lance fire. Arundez saw the Marines at the same instant and jinked the skimmer hard left, dropping it into a narrow ravine scant seconds before the treetops on the ridge above were sliced off as if by invisible shears.

A few energy weapons winked in their direction, but data columns showed the external fields handling the negligible effects. Then the horizon receded and curved as the lapis lazuli sky darkened to the black of space.

We enter Rome as the first flush of evening touches the clouds. The little cart rocks and rumbles through the Lateran Gate, and almost immediately we are confronted with the sight of the Colosseum, overgrown with ivy and obviously the home of thousands of pigeons, but immensely more impressive than holos of the ruin, set now as it was, not within the grubby confines of a postwar city ringed with giant arcologies, but contrasted against clusters of small huts and open fields where the city ends and countryside begins. I can see Rome proper in the distance … a scattering of rooftops and smaller ruins on its fabled Seven Hills, but here the Colosseum rules. “Jesus,” whispers Leigh Hunt. “What is it?” “The bones of bandits,” I say slowly, fearful of starting the terrible coughing once again. We move on, clopping through the deserted streets of nineteenth-century Old Earth Rome as the evening settles thick and heavy around us and the light fails and pigeons wheel above the domes and rooftops of the Eternal City.

I breathe slowly and shallowly to avoid a fit of coughing even as I feel the phlegm boil and bubble in my throat.

Low, orange grass—if grass it was—grew on the flatlands and low hills like fuzz on the back of some immense caterpillar, while things which might have been trees grew like whiskered-carbon sculptures, their trunks and branches Escher-ish in their baroque improbability, their leaves a riot of dark blue and violet ovals shimmering toward a sky alive with light.

When Dr. Clark and an Italian surgeon opened Keats’s body less than thirty hours after he had died, they found, as Severn later wrote a friend, “… the worst possible Consumption—the lungs were entirely destroyed—the cells were quite gone.” Neither Dr. Clark nor the Italian surgeon could imagine how Keats had lived those last two months or more. I think of this as I sit in the darkened room and look out on the darkened Piazza, all the while listening to the boiling in my chest and throat, feeling the pain like fire inside and the worse pain from the cries in my mind: cries from Martin Silenus on the tree, suffering for writing the poetry I had been too frail and cowardly to finish; cries from Fedmahn Kassad as he prepares to die at the claws of the Shrike; cries from the Consul as he is forced into betrayal a second time; cries from thousands of Templar throats as they bewail the death of both their world and their brother Het Masteen; cries from Brawne Lamia as she thinks of her dead lover, my twin; cries from Paul Duré as he lies fighting burns and the shock of memory, all too aware of the waiting cruciforms on his chest; cries from Sol Weintraub as he beats his fist on the earth of Hyperion, calling for his child, the infant cries of Rachel still in our ears. “Goddamn,” I say softly, beating my fist against the stone and mortar of the window frame. “Goddamn.” After a while, just as the first hint of paleness promises dawn, I move away from the window, find my bed, and li...

It is easier to allow myself to drift into the datasphere than to lie here through the endless night, listening to the fountain and waiting for the next hemorrhage. This weakness is worse than debilitating; it is turning me into a hollow man, all shell and no center. I remember when Fanny was taking care of me during my convalescence at Went-worth Place, and the tone of her voice, and the philosophical musings she used to air: “Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.

In the end, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.

The mountain was slowly rotating, and at this moment they turned into night. A convection breeze moved across the mountain terrace, rustling the Ousters’ robes and the Consul’s cape. Overhead, the stars seemed to explode into brilliance. The great rocks of the Stonehenge circle seemed to glow from some internal warmth.

Jesuit priest Paul Duré of Villefranche-sur-Saône would become Pope Teilhard I, the 487th Bishop of Rome, direct successor of the disciple Peter.