Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

by Dan Simmons

The Consul thought about the sharp pleasure of the hunt and the equally sharp solace of solitude: solitude he had earned through the pain and nightmare he had already suffered on Hyperion. Hyperion.

The Consul thought of the Shrike, free to wander everywhere on Hyperion, of the millions of indigenies and thousands of Hegemony citizens helpless before a creature which defied physical laws and which communicated only through death, and he shivered despite the warmth of the cabin.

There was something, thought the Consul, almost pleasantly demonic about Martin Silenus, with his ruddy cheeks, broad mouth, pitched eyebrows, sharp ears, and constantly moving hands sporting fingers long enough to serve a concert pianist. Or a strangler. The poet’s silver hair had been cropped into rough-hewn bangs.

“They no longer appear to be motivated by human logic.” Martin Silenus laughed loudly, spilling his wine as he gestured. “As if we fucking humans were ever motivated by human logic!” He took a deep drink, wiped his mouth, and laughed again.

The Consul shook his head. “Spacecraft and aircraft have been trying to take the short route to the northern moors for almost four hundred years,” he said. “I know of none who made it.” “May one inquire,” said Martin Silenus, happily raising his hand like a schoolboy, “just what the gibbering fuck happens to these legions of ships?”

“Marvelous melodrama,” laughed Silenus. “A real-life, Christ-weeping Sargasso of Souls and we’re for it. Who orchestrates this shitpot of a plot, anyway?”

“Even more fascinating, is anyone here a member or follower of the Church of the Shrike? I, for one, am a Jew, and however confused my religious notions have become these days, they do not include the worship of an organic killing machine.”

Martin Silenus made an expansive gesture. “I was baptized a Lutheran,” he said. “A subset which no longer exists. I helped create Zen Gnosticism before any of your parents were born. I have been a Catholic, a revelationist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a Bound Shaker, a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake’s Nada, and a dues-paying subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now, I am happy to say, I am a simple pagan.” He smiled at everyone. “To a pagan,” he concluded, “the Shrike is a most acceptable deity.”

“Straddling each a dolphin’s back And steadied by a fin, Those Innocents re-live their death, Their wounds open again.”

I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet’s world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy. There are three Zen Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim mosques in the town, but the real houses of worship are the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling the fiberplastic shipments from the south, and the Shrike Cult temples where lost souls hide their suicidal hopelessness behind a shield of shallow mysticism. The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

It is growing dark. I am growing old. I feel something…not yet remorse…at my sin of falsifying the evidence on the Armaghast dig. But, Edouard, Your Excellency, if the artifacts had indicated the presence of a Christ-oriented culture there, six hundred light-years from Old Earth, almost three thousand years before man left the surface of the home world… Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a way which could have meant the resurgence of Christianity in our lifetime? Yes, it was. But not, I think, because of the sin of tampering with the data, but the deeper sin of thinking that Christianity could be saved.

It rains every afternoon. Actually, rain is too gentle a term for the deluge

Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now

Domine, dirige nos.

Lord guide us

Occasionally we encountered impenetrable breaks of the white-fibrous, bifurcated bestos plants that Tuk picturesquely referred to as “…looking like de rotting cocks o’ some dead giants what be buried shallow here, dat be sure.” My guide has a way with words.

“Watch over him, Lord,” I said at last, disgusted at my own hypocrisy, sure in my heart that I was mouthing words only to myself. “Give him safe passage. Amen.”

their mindless weaving and looked at me. “You cannot be killed because you cannot die,” said Alpha. “You cannot die because you belong to the cruciform and follow the way of the cross.”

The Bikura were quite serious about their Three Score and Ten. They kept the tribal population at seventy—the same number recorded on the passenger list of the dropship that crashed here four hundred years ago. Little chance of coincidence there. When someone died, they allowed a child to be born to replace the adult. Simple.

To either side of these twin doors spread broad windows of stained glass, rising at least twenty meters toward the overhang. I went closer and inspected the facade. Whoever had built this had done so by widening the area under the overhang, slicing a sheer, smooth wall into the granite of the plateau, and then tunneling directly into the cliff face. I ran my hand over the deeply cut folds of ornamental carving around the door.

I knelt and prayed. Shutting off the flashlight, I waited several minutes before my eyes could discern the cross in the dim, smoky light. This was, without a doubt, the cruciform of which the Bikura spoke. And it had been set here a minimum of many thousands of years ago—perhaps tens of thousands—long before mankind first left Old Earth. Almost certainly before Christ taught in Galilee.

Yes, it was the young priest named Hoyt. I had said yes and dismissed the fact. I was interested in the Bikura—actually more in the self-inflicted pain of my own exile—not the labyrinths or their builders.

The cave walls and ceiling were encrusted with crosses ranging in size from a few millimeters to almost a meter long. Each glowed with a deep, pink light of its own. Invisible in the torchlight, these glowing crosses now suffused the tunnel with light. I approached one embedded in the wall nearest me. Thirty or so centimeters across, it pulsed with a soft, organic glow. This was not something that had been carved out of stone or attached to the wall; it was definitely organic, definitely alive, resembling soft coral.

“You will follow the cross all of your days,” said Alpha, and his voice carried the cadence of litany. The rest of the Bikura repeated the statement in a tone just short of a chant. “You will be of the cruciform all of your days,” said Alpha, and as the others repeated this he reached out and pulled a small cruciform away from the cave wall. It was not more than a dozen centimeters long and it came away from the wall with the faintest of snaps. Its glow faded even as I watched. Alpha removed a small thong from his robe, tied it around small knobs at the top of the cruciform, and held the cross above my head. “You will be of the cruciform now and forever,”

I stared as Alpha’s corpse first twitched and then visibly vibrated, almost levitating off the altar in the spastic violence of sudden decomposition. For a few seconds the cruciform seemed to increase in size and deepen in color, glowing as red as raw meat, and I imagined then that I caught a glimpse of the network of filaments and nematodes holding the disintegrating body together like metal fibers in a sculptor’s melting model. The flesh flowed.

third day, but most of the visible changes had taken place by the end of that first night. The body of the Bikura I had named Alpha was broken down and rebuilt as I watched. The corpse that was left was not quite Alpha and not quite not Alpha, but it was intact.

When he/she/it dies, two will leave the tomb and the Three Score and Ten will be complete once more. I believe I am going mad.

now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it. Day after day I have tried to leave the Cleft area and day after day I have suffered pain so terrible that it has become a tangible part of my world, like the too small sun or the green and lapis sky. Pain has become my ally, my guardian angel, my remaining link with humanity.

But before his murder my scanner showed an appreciable retreat of the cruciform nematodes from some parts of the central nervous system. I do not know if it would be possible to inflict on oneself—or to tolerate—levels of nonlethal pain sufficient to drive the cruciform out completely, but I am sure of one thing: the Bikura would not allow it. Today I sit on the ledge below the half-finished chapel and I consider possibilities.

I managed to ascertain from them that Father Duré had died while trying to penetrate the flame forest. The bestos pouch had survived and in it we found his journals and medical data.”

first the rest of the story.” Hoyt stared, reached weakly for the injector. Sweating himself now, the Consul held the instrument just out of reach. “Yes, in a second,” he said. “After the rest of the story. It’s important that I know.” “Oh, God, sweet Christ,” sobbed Hoyt. “Please!” “Yes,” gasped the Consul. “Yes. As soon as you tell me the truth.”

“His left arm…he’d pounded the stake between the radius and ulna…missed veins…just like the goddamned Romans. Very secure as long as his skeleton was intact. Other hand…right hand…palm down. He’d driven the spike first. Sharpened both ends. Then…impaled his right hand. Somehow bent the spike over. Hook.

understood then. Understood it all. Somehow…even before reading the journals. Understood he’d been hanging there…oh, dear God…seven years. Living. Dying. The cruciform…forcing him to live again. Electricity…surging through him every second of those…those seven years. Flames. Hunger. Pain. Death. But somehow the goddamned…cruciform…leeching substance from the tree maybe, the air, what was left…rebuilding what it could…forcing it to live, to feel the pain, over and over and over….

When I removed the pouch, the cruciform on his chest fell away also. Just…fell right off…long, bloody roots. Then the thing…the thing I’d been sure was a corpse…the man raised its head. No eyelids. Eyes baked white. Lips gone. But it looked at me and smiled. He smiled. And he died…really died…there in my arms. The ten thousandth time, but real this time. He smiled at me and died.”

It was there, of course, lying under the pale skin of Hoyt’s chest like some great, raw, cross-shaped worm. The Consul took a breath and gently turned the priest over. The second cruciform was where he had expected to find it, a slightly smaller, cross-shaped welt between the thin man’s shoulder blades. It stirred slightly as the Consul’s fingers brushed the fevered flesh.

This isn’t like the old days when you were here and the goddamned suicides could get up there and even sit around for a week and maybe even change their minds and come home. The Shrike is on the move. It’s like a plague.”

The group stepped out and stared at the charred and toppled wreckage of what had been the Shrike Temple. Since the Time Tombs had been closed as too dangerous some twenty-five local years earlier, the Shrike Temple had become Hyperion’s most popular tourist attraction.

“All of the Shrike Cult priests and acolytes escaped through tunnels. The mob had been surrounding this place for months. Their leader, a woman named Cammon from somewhere east of the Sea of Grass, gave everyone in the Temple plenty of warning before they set off the DL-20.”

“You folks have been in transit for three years,” he said. “The universe has changed. Shrike cultists are being burned out and beaten up in the Web. You can imagine the attitude here. The Keats police have been absorbed under the martial law I declared fourteen months ago. They and the SDF watched while the mob torched the Temple. So did I. There were half a million people here tonight.”

Cicero’s was not named after some piece of pre-Hegira literary trivia. Rumor had it that the bar was named after a section of an Old Earth city—some said Chicago, USA, others were sure it was Calcutta, AIS—but only Stan Leweski, owner and great-grandson of the founder, knew for sure, and Stan had never revealed its secret.

on the balcony at Cicero’s, it was all too easy to fall back into the rhythms of a former life; he would drink until the early morning hours, watch the predawn meteor showers as the clouds cleared, and then stagger to his empty apartment near the market, going into the consulate four hours later showered, shaved, and seemingly human except for the blood in his eyes and the insane ache in his skull. Trusting in Theo—quiet, efficient Theo—to get him through the morning. Trusting in luck to get him through the day. Trusting in the drinking at Cicero’s to get him through the night. Trusting in the unimportance of his posting to get him through life.

The Shrike Temple had used androids extensively, complying with the Church of the Shrike doctrine which proclaimed that androids were free from original sin, therefore spiritually superior to humankind and—incidentally—exempt from the Shrike’s terrible and inevitable retribution.

our survival chances in some way, then I say let’s hear from everyone before the contributors start getting chopped and diced by that ambulatory food processor we’re so eager to visit.”

The battle continued in the deadly comic-opera vein common to all armed combat since the first rock and thighbone duels on Old Earth.

The ultimate insult to the noble-born French dead—if the dead indeed could be further insulted—lay in the fact that the English archers were not only common men, common in the lowest, most flea-infested sense of the word, but that they were draftees. Doughboys. GIs. Grunts. AIPs. Spezzes. K-techs. Jump Rats.

with much pointing and animated conversation. Kassad knew that they had to decide upon a name for the battle so that their respective records would agree. He also knew that they would settle on the name of the nearest castle, Agincourt, even though it had figured in neither strategy nor battle.

The OCS:HTN was part of the Worldweb All Thing, the real-time network which governed Hegemony politics, fed information to tens of billions of data-hungry citizens, and had evolved a form of autonomy and consciousness all its own. More than a hundred and fifty planetary dataspheres mingled their resources within the framework created by six thousand omega-class AIs to allow the OCS:HTN to function.

“The HTN stuff doesn’t simulate,” whined Cadet Radinski, the best AI expert Kassad could find and bribe to explain, “it dreams, dreams with the best historical accuracy in the Web—way beyond the sum of its parts ’cause it plugs in holistic insight as well as facts—and when it dreams, it lets us dream with it.”

She came to him on the second day of Gettysburg and again at Borodino, where the clouds of powder smoke hung above the piles of bodies like a vapor congealed from departing souls.

FEDMAHN KASSAD HAD grown up in a culture of poverty and sudden death. As a member of the minority who still called themselves Palestinians, he and his family had lived in the slums of Tharsis, human testimony to the bitter legacy of the terminally dispossessed. Every Palestinian in the Worldweb and beyond carried the cultural memory of a century of struggle capped by a month of nationalist triumph before the Nuclear Jihad of 2038 wiped it all away.

Schrauder’s Zen Massif

joined with his peers in sneering at the New Bushido as a code for faggots, but an ancient vein of honor in the young Kassad’s soul secretly resonated to the thought of a samurai class whose life and work revolved around duty, self-respect, and the ultimate value of one’s word.