Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

by Dan Simmons

It was vaguely man-shaped but in no way human. It stood at least three meters tall. Even when it was at rest, the silvered surface of the thing seemed to shift and flow like mercury suspended in midair. The reddish glow from the crosses set into the tunnel walls reflected from sharp surfaces and glinted on the curved metal blades protruding from the thing’s forehead, four wrists, oddly jointed elbows, knees, armored back, and thorax. It flowed between the kneeling Bikura, and when it extended four long arms, hands extended but fingers clicking into place like chrome scalpels, I was absurdly reminded of His Holiness on Pacem offering a benediction to the faithful. I had no doubt that I was looking at the legendary Shrike.

At that moment I must have moved or made a sound, for large red eyes turned my way and I found myself hypnotized by the dance of light within the multifaceted prisms there: not merely reflected light but a fierce, blood-bright glow which seemed to burn within the creature’s barbed skull and pulse in the terrible gems set where God meant eyes to be.

Soon he and the grizzled archer and a younger man who had lost his cap became an efficient killing team, closing in on a downed rider from three sides, Kassad using the mallet to knock the pleading horseman off his knees, then all three moving in with their blades. Only one knight gained his feet and raised a sword to confront them. The Frenchman flipped up his visor and called out a clear request for honor and single combat. The old man and the youth circled like wolves. Kassad returned with his bow and put an arrow into the knight’s left eye from ten paces.

The small attacker stood astride the knight, pinning the armored man’s sword arm with one foot while bringing the mallet down repeatedly onto helmet and visor. Kassad extricated himself from the tangle of legs and branches, sat on the downed man’s knees, and began slashing through gaps in armor at groin, sides, and underarms. Kassad’s rescuer jumped aside to plant both feet on the knight’s wrist and Kassad scrambled forward, stabbing through crevices where the helmet met chest armor, finally slamming the blade through slits in the visor itself. The knight screamed as the mallet came down a final time, almost catching Kassad’s hand as the hammer drove the blade through the visor slit like a ten-inch tent peg. The man-at-arms arched, lifting Kassad and sixty pounds of armor clear of the ground in a final violent spasm, and then fell back limply.

The effect was immediate and dramatic. In each case the target’s brain and cerebral fluid boiled, turned to vapor, and blew the encasing skull to bits. The New Prophet was in the middle of his live, planetwide broadcast—literally in the middle of pronouncing the word “heretic”—when 1730 hours arrived. For almost two minutes the TV screens and walls around the planet carried the image of the New Prophet’s headless body slumped over the microphone.

As if to demonstrate what war had once been about, the Ousters scoured North Bressia—first with several hundred fallout-free nuclear weapons and tactical plasma bombs, then with deathbeams, and finally with tailored viruses. Only a handful of the fourteen million residents escaped. South Bressia received no bombardment except for the lancing of specific military targets, airports, and the large harbor at Solno.

Ousters, it turned out, had changed physically in three centuries. They did prefer zero-gravity environments. But their mobile infantry’s powered exoskeletons served very well and it was only a matter of days before the black-clad, long-limbed Ouster troops were swarming over South Bressia’s cities like an infestation of giant spiders.

The elite Ouster equivalent of Hegemony Space Marines, the commandos would not only have been trained for free-fall combat but had been born and bred to zero g. Their long limbs, prehensile toes, and prosthetic tails would be added advantages for this environment, although Kassad doubted that they needed any more advantages than they already had.

The difficulty with that solution was that Kassad had seen the FORCE:intelligence holos of the Ouster ship they had captured off Bressia. There had been more than two hundred prisoners in the storage bay of that ship. And the Ousters obviously had many questions for these Hegemony citizens. Perhaps they had found it inconvenient to feed and imprison so many—or perhaps it was their basic interrogation policy—but the fact was that the Bressian civilians and captured FORCE troops had been found flayed open and pinned down on steel trays like frogs in a biology lab, their organs bathed with nutrient fluids, arms and legs efficiently amputated, eyes removed, and their minds readied for interrogators’ questions with crude cortical comtaps and shunt-plugs jacked directly through three-centimeter holes in the skulls.

There was nothing human about this particular quicksilver-over-chrome construct. Kassad dreamily noted the four arms, retractable fingerblades, the profusion of thornspikes on throat, forehead, wrists, knees, and body, but not once did his gaze leave the two thousand-faceted eyes which burned with a red flame that paled sunlight and dimmed the day to blood shadows. The Shrike, thought Kassad. “The Lord of Pain,” whispered Moneta. The thing turned and led them out of the dead city.

The Shrike did not seem to move—to Kassad it merely ceased being here and appeared there. The Ouster commando emitted a second, shorter scream, and then looked down in disbelief as the Shrike’s arm withdrew with the man’s heart in its bladed fist. The Ouster stared, opened his mouth as if to speak, and collapsed.

The phrase “fight like a cornered rat” is an extremely apt description. Throughout the history of military encounters, human combatants have been known to fight at their fiercest when challenged in enclosed places where flight is not an option. Whether in the passageways of La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont at Waterloo or in the Hive tunnels of Lusus, some of the most terrible hand-to-hand battles in history have been fought in cramped spaces where no retreat is possible. It was true this day. The Ousters fought…and died…like cornered rats.

The Chinese poet George Wu, who died in the Last Sino-Japanese War about three centuries before the Hegira, understood this when he recorded on his comlog: “Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.” Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: “Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

“Pilgrim’s Progress Effect. In the Massachusetts Colony of…what was it!—seventeenth-century Old Earth, every decent family had to have a copy in the household. But, my heavens, no one had to read it. It was the same with Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Stukatsky’s Visions in the Eye of a Decapitated Child.” “Who was Hitler?” I said. Tyrena smiled slightly. “An Old Earth politician who did some writing. Mein Kampf is still in print…Transline renews the copyright every hundred and thirty-eight years.”

“Look,” said Tyrena. “In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

There came the watermelon-carving sound of blades piercing flesh, of hooks being pulled free of tendon and bone. Sira’s head went back, her mouth opened impossibly wide, and her body exploded from the breastbone down. Flesh separated as if an invisible ax were chopping Sira Rob for kindling. Unseen scalpels completed the job of opening her, lateral incisions appearing like obscene time-lapse footage of a mad surgeon’s favorite operation. It was a brutal autopsy performed on a living person. On a once living person, rather, for when the blood stopped flying and the body ceased spasming, Sira’s limbs relaxed in death, legs opening again in an echo of the obscene display of viscera above. And then—for the briefest second—there was a blur of red and chrome near the bed. “Freeze, expand, and augment,” King Billy told the house computer. The blur resolved itself into a head out of a jolt addict’s nightmare: a face part steel, part chrome, and part skull, teeth like a mechanized wolf’s crossed with a steam shovel, eyes like ruby lasers burning through blood-filled gems, forehead penetrated by a curved spike-blade rising thirty centimeters from a quicksilver skull, and a neck ringed with similar thorns. “The Shrike?” I asked.

“According to the Shrike Cult gospel that the indigenies started, the Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the Angel of Final Atonement, come from a place beyond time to announce the end of the human race. I liked that conceit.” “The end of the human race,” repeated King Billy. “Yeah. He’s Michael the Archangel and Moroni and Satan and Masked Entropy and the Frankenstein monster all rolled into one package,”

“Because the Shrike Cult believes that mankind somehow created the thing,” I said, although I knew that King Billy knew everything I knew and more. “Do they know how to kill it?” he asked. “Not that I know of. He’s supposed to be immortal, beyond time.” “A god?” I hesitated. “Not really,” I said at last. “More like one of the universe’s worst nightmares come to life. Sort of like the Grim Reaper, but with a penchant for sticking souls on a giant thorn tree…while the people’s souls are still in their bodies.”

I retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos. It was not about the planet but about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans. It was about the unthinking hubris of a race which dared to murder its homeworld through sheer carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to the stars, only to meet the wrath of a god which humanity had helped to sire.

The third figure did not actually appear so much as allow its presence to impinge upon my consciousness; it was as if it always had been there and King Billy and I had failed to notice it until the flames grew bright enough. Impossibly tall, four-armed, molded in chrome and cartilage, the Shrike turned its red gaze on us.

The Shrike did not move, did not shift its bloody gaze. “Go!” cried King Billy, stutter forgotten, voice exalted, a blazing mass of poetry in each hand. “Return to the pit from whence you came!” The Shrike seemed to incline its head ever so slightly. Red light gleamed on sharp surfaces.

He was not there. One second the aging King was a hand’s length from me and in the next instant he was ten meters away, raised high above the courtyard stones. Fingers like steel thorns pierced his arms and chest and thighs, but he still writhed and my Cantos burned in his fists. The Shrike held him out like a father offering his son for baptism.

The Shrike did not move except to pull King Billy slowly back against his chest in an oddly affectionate motion. Billy writhed and screamed silently as a long steel thorn emerged from his harlequin silk just above the breastbone.

Billy screamed. Dimly, I heard blades rubbing bone as he twisted in the Shrike’s embrace. “Finish it!” he cried. “Martin…oh, God!” I turned then, took five fast paces, and threw the half-full bucket of kerosene. Fumes blurred my already blurred vision. Billy and the impossible creature that held him were soaked like two comics in a slapstick holie. I saw Billy blink and splutter, I saw the slickness on the Shrike’s chiseled muzzle reflect the meteor-brightened sky, and then the dying embers of burned pages in Billy’s still clenched fists ignited the kerosene.

For a second the pyre was a perfect sculpture of flame, a blue and yellow Pietà with a four-armed madonna holding a blazing Christ figure. Then the burning figure writhed and arched, still pinned by steel thorns and a score of scalpeled talons, and a cry went up which to this day I cannot believe emanated from the human half of that death-embraced pair. The scream knocked me to my knees, echoed from every hard surface in the city, and drove the pigeons into wheeling panic. And the scream continued for minutes after the flaming vision simply ceased to be, leaving behind neither ashes nor retinal image. It was another minute or two before I realized that the scream I now heard was mine.

The two and a half centuries since are not worth telling, much less reliving. The Poulsen treatments to keep the instrument alive and waiting. Two long, cold sleeps in illegal, sublight, cryogenic voyages; each swallowing a century or more; each taking its toll in brain cells and memory. I waited then. I wait still. The poem must be finished. It will be finished. In the beginning was the Word. In the end…past honor, past life, past caring… In the end will be the Word.

“Where’s the Poet? Show him! Show him, Muses mine, that I may know him! ’Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king. Or poorest of the beggar-class, Or any other wondrous thing A man may be ’twixt ape and Plato. ’Tis the man who with a bird, Wren or eagle, finds his way to All its instincts. He hath heard The lion’s roaring, and can tell What his horny throat expresseth, And to him the tigers yell Comes articulate and presseth On his ear like mother-tongue.”

The scene was illuminated by the glow of the twin red orbs. Sol looked down at his right hand and found a long, curved knife there. The blade and handle appeared to be made of bone. The voice, sounding more than ever to Sol like some cut-rate holie director’s shallow idea of what God’s voice should sound like, came again: “Sol! You must listen well. The future of humankind depends upon your obedience in this matter. You must take your daughter, your daughter Rachel whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”

And Sol, sick of the whole dream yet somehow alarmed by it, had turned and thrown the knife far into the darkness. When he turned back to find his daughter, the scene had faded. The red orbs hung closer than ever, and now Sol could see that they were multifaceted gems the size of small worlds. The amplified voice came again: “So? You have had your chance, Sol Weintraub. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.” And Sol awakened half laughing, half chilled by the dream. Amused by the thought that the entire Talmud and the Old Testament might be nothing more than a cosmic shaggy-dog story.

Time was mentioned in Shrike Church dogma, but only in the sense that the Shrike was supposed to be “…the Angel of Retribution from Beyond Time” and that true time had ended for the human race when Old Earth died and that the four centuries since had been “false time.”

HEBRON WAS A desert world. Four centuries of terraforming had made the atmosphere breathable and a few million acres of land arable. The creatures which had lived there before were small and tough and infinitely wary, and so were the creatures imported from Old Earth, including the human kind. “Ahh,” gasped Sol the day they arrived in the sun-baked village of Dan above the sun-baked kibbutz of K’far Shalom, “what masochists we Jews are. Twenty thousand surveyed worlds fit for our kind when the Hegira began, and those schmucks came here.”

any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

Worrying about AIs turning on us is about as productive as worrying that farm animals are going to revolt.”

Eight standard centuries ago, at the beginning of the First Information Age, a man named Norbert Wiener wrote: ‘Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?’

Martin Silenus had been writing notes on a pad but now he stood and paced the length of the room. “Jesus Christ, people. Look at us. We’re not six fucking pilgrims, we’re a mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform carrying the ghost of Paul Duré. Our ‘semisentient’ erg in the box there. Colonel Kassad with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if we are to believe her tale, carrying not only an unborn child but a dead Romantic poet. Our scholar with the child his daughter used to be. Me with my muse. The Consul with whatever fucking baggage he’s brought to this insane trek. My God, people, we should have received a fucking group rate for this trip.”