The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

Even without a datasphere, it is quite possible for my persona to travel through the rich, Void-Which-Binds soup which now surrounds Hyperion. My immediate reaction is to want to visit the One Who Will Be, but although that one’s brilliance dominates the metasphere, I am not yet ready for that. I am, after all, little John Keats, not John the Baptist. The Sphinx—a tomb patterned after a real creature that will not be designed by genetic engineers for centuries to come—is a maelstrom of temporal energies. There are really several Sphinxes visible to my expanded sight: the anti-entropic tomb carrying its Shrike cargo back in time like some sealed container with its deadly bacillus, the active, unstable Sphinx which contaminated Rachel Weintraub in its initial efforts to open a portal through time, and the Sphinx which has opened and is moving forward through time again. This last Sphinx is the blazing portal of light, which, second only to the One Who Will Be, lights Hyperion with its metaspherical bonfire.