The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

“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...