Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3)

by Dan Simmons

‘The support and covering craft in orbit were also decimated, sir.’ ‘Decimated?’ The pain is making de Soya angry. ‘That means one in ten, Captain. Are ten percent of ship’s personnel on the casualty list?’ ‘No, sir,’ says Lempriere, ‘more like sixty percent.

Power had been the god of billions, and when that god failed – and pulled down billions of its worshipers in its failure – the survivors cursed the memories of power amid their urban ruins, scratching out a peasant’s living in the shadows of the rotting skyscrapers, pulling their own plows through weeded lots between the abandoned highways and flyways and the skeletons of old Grand Concourse malls, fishing for carp where the River Tethys had carried thousands of elaborate yachts and pleasure-barges each day.

In the afternoons, while I explored and A. Bettik went off to read by himself, Aenea would read aloud to the old priest. Once when I entered the room without knocking, I saw tears on the ancient missionary’s cheeks.