Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

by Dan Simmons

Sarai gripped his hand. “Do you think you’re the only one who has had the dream?” “Dream?” managed Sol. She sighed and sat at the white kitchen table. Morning light struck the plants on the sill like a yellow spotlight. “The dark place,” she said. “The red lights above. The voice. Telling us to…telling us to take…to go to Hyperion. To make…an offering.” Sol licked his lips but there was no moisture there. His heart pounded. “Whose name…whose name is called?”

Sarai shook her head. “The golem.” “You mean the Shrike.” “It’s the golem,” insisted Sarai. “The same one we see in the dream.” Sol was uneasy. “I don’t see a golem in the dream. What golem?” “The red eyes that watch,” said Sarai. “It’s the same golem that Rachel heard that night in the Sphinx.” “How do you know that she heard anything?” “It’s in the dream,” said Sarai. “Before we enter the place where the golem waits.” “We haven’t dreamed the same dream,” said Sol. “Mother, Mother…why haven’t you told me this before?”

The AIs had peacefully seceded from human control more than three centuries ago—before my time—and while they continued to serve the Hegemony as allies by advising the All Thing, monitoring the dataspheres, occasionally using their predictive abilities to help us avoid major mistakes or natural disasters, the TechnoCore generally went about its own indecipherable and distinctly nonhuman business in privacy.

Farcaster records would solve every interworld crime if the portals were true teleportation; the transport data record could have recreated the subject down to the last gram and follicle. Instead, a farcaster essentially is just a crude hole ripped in space/time by a phased singularity. If the farcaster criminal doesn’t use his or her own card, the only data we get are origination and destination.

“And then what?” I said. “They build your personality around a dead poet. Then what?” “This becomes the template upon which the AI is grown,” said Johnny. “The cybrid allows me to carry out my role in the datumplane community.” “As poet?” Johnny smiled again. “More as poem,” he said. “A poem?” “An ongoing work of art…but not in the human sense. A puzzle perhaps. A variable enigma which occasionally offers unusual insights into more serious lines of analysis.” “I don’t get it,” I said. “It probably does not matter. I very much doubt if my…purpose…was the cause of the assault.”

He nodded. “Keats,” he said. “Born in A.D. 1795. Died of tuberculosis in 1821. John Keats.”

Worrying about AIs turning on us is about as productive as worrying that farm animals are going to revolt.” “Except the AIs are smarter than us,” I said.

“Of course. But it is important for me to see the original…to touch it.” I thought about that. “What’s the poem about?” He smiled…or at least his lips did. The hazel eyes still seemed troubled. “It’s called Hyperion. It’s difficult to describe what it’s…about. Artistic failure, I suppose. Keats never finished it.”

Johnny shook his head. “This is nowhere in the Web.” I stopped walking. “That’s impossible.” By definition, any world which could be reached by farcaster was in the Web. “Nonetheless, it is not in the Web.” “Where is it then?” “Old Earth.” We walked on. Johnny pointed out another ruin. “The Forum.” Descending a long staircase, he said, “Ahead is the Piazza di Spagna where we’ll spend the night.”

One thing, though. I do not believe that it is a replica of the city of Rome alone. It is all of Old Earth.” I set both hands on the sun-warmed stone of the step I was sitting on. “All of Old Earth? All of its…continents, cities?”

“When I…awoke here, there were cybrid analogs of Joseph Severn, Dr. Clark, the landlady Anna Angeletti, young Lieutenant Elton, and a few others. Italian shopkeepers, the owner of the trattoria across the square who used to bring us our food, passersby, that sort of thing. No more than a score at the most.”

the ultimate religious and personal despair which had led Keats to demand his own epitaph be carved in stone as: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

“May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine. By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone—though erroneous they may be fine—This is the very thing in which consists poetry.”

Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it is part of a TechnoCore project going back at least seven standard centuries to realize the Ultimate Intelligence.” “The Ultimate Intelligence,” I said, exhaling smoke. “Uh-huh. So the TechnoCore is trying to…what?…to build God.”

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?’ Humanity dealt with this inconclusively with their early AIs.

Tall buildings from the phallic-symbol era of urban architecture rose from the swamps and lagoons of the North American littoral. Several had lights burning. Johnny pointed to one decrepit but oddly elegant structure and said, “The Empire State Building.”

“And surely you are aware that during the past several centuries the persona of the Old Earth poet Keats has been woven into the cultural mythos of the Hyperion colony?” “Yes. So?” The bishop rubbed his cheek with a large red ring on one finger. “So when you offered to go on the Shrike Pilgrimage we agreed. We were distressed when you reneged on this offer.”

The Core has contact with every colony world, with such interstellar barbarians as the Ousters, and with other sources the Hegemony could not imagine.” I sat stunned. “With the Ousters?” Since the war on Bressia a few years earlier, the Ousters had been the Web’s prime bogeymen. The idea of the Core…the same congregation of AIs which advises the Senate and the All Thing and which allow our entire economy, farcaster system, and technological civilization to run…the idea of the Core being in touch with the Ousters was frightening. And what the hell did Johnny mean by “other sources”? I didn’t really want to know right then.

may well be that Keats’s dreams of Hyperion were some sort of transtemporal communication between his then persona and his now persona. If nothing else, Hyperion is the key mystery of our age—physical and poetic—and it is quite probable that he…that I was born, died, and was born again to explore it.”

I nodded. Dad had once described Meina Gladstone as the only political genius in the Hegemony. He knew that she would be CEO someday despite her late start in politics. I wished Dad had lived to see it.

few decades ago, our scientists have confirmed that the anti-entropic fields around the Tombs are not merely a protection against time’s erosive effects as has been widely believed.” “What are they?” “The remnants of a field…or force…which has actually propelled the Tombs and their contents backward in time from some distant future.” “Contents?” I managed. “But the Tombs are empty. Ever since they were discovered.”

“A war with…the Ousters?” “Initially. View it as a way to force the issue between the TechnoCore and ourselves, Brawne. We will either have to incorporate the Hyperion system into the Web to allow it FORCE protection, or it will fall to a race which despises and distrusts the Core and all AIs.”

BB rubbed his upper lip. “There’s a legend that Cowboy Gibson did it before the Core seceded,” he mumbled. “But nobody believes it. And Cowboy disappeared.”

YOU’VE READ ALL the cyberpuke stuff. You know all about the terrible beauty of datumplane, the three-dimensional highways with their landscapes of black ice and neon perimeters and Day-Glo Strange Loops

“The result has been two futures—two realities if you will—one in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The other reality sees the Shrike invasion, the coming interstellar war, and the other products of the Time Tombs’ opening as a human fist struck back through time, a final, twilight effort by the Ousters, ex-colonials, and other small bands of humans who escaped the Volatiles’ extinction programs.”

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone! Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast, Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone, Bright eyes, accomplished shape, and languorous waist! Faded the flower and all its budded charms, Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes, Faded the shape of beauty from my arms, Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise— Vanished unseasonably at shut of eve, When the dusk holiday—or holinight— Of fragrant-curtained love begins to weave The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight; But, as I’ve read love’s missal through today, He’ll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

“BLESSED BE SHE BLESSED BE THE MOTHER OF OUR SALVATION BLESSED BE THE INSTRUMENT OF OUR ATONEMENT BLESSED BE THE BRIDE OF OUR CREATION BLESSED BE SHE” I was injured and in shock. I didn’t understand it then. I don’t understand it now.

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.”

“It’s an ancient comlog. It came out during the Hegira.” He removed a standard micro-disk from a pouch on his belt and inserted it. “Like Father Hoyt, I have someone else’s tale to tell before you can understand my own.” “Christ on a stick,” sneered Martin Silenus, “am I the only one who can tell a straightforward story in this fucking herd? How long do I have to…”

THE CONSUL’S TALE: REMEMBERING SIRI

‘It was the nightingale and not the lark, That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear.’ ”

Even if they brought us back to Hegemony-space, the round trip would have cost us eleven years’ worth of friends and family. The time-debt was irrevocable.

“You know very little,” Siri said to me. She was wading, shoeless, in a shallow tidepool. From time to time she would lift the delicate shell of a frenchhorn conch, inspect it for flaws, and drop it back into the silty water. “I’ve been well trained,” I replied. “Yes, I’m sure you’ve been well trained,” agreed Siri. “I know you are quite skillful, Merin. But you know very little.”

“You have to live to really know things, my love.

“Do you understand, Merin?” she whispered to me seconds later as her warmth connected us. “Yes,” I whispered back. But I did not.

“And then will come the missionaries. The petroleum geologists. The sea farmers. The developers.” Siri sipped at her coffee. “I would have thought your Hegemony was far beyond a petroleum economy.” I laughed and locked the wheel in. “Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there’s petroleum there.

“There’s an entire cultural mythos built around your little roll in the hay with that colonial girl.” “Siri,” I said. “Get your gear,” said Singh. “You’ll spend your three weeks groundside. The Ambassador’s experts say you’ll do the Hegemony more good down there than up here. We’ll see.” The world was waiting. Crowds were cheering. Siri was waving. We left the harbor in a yellow catamaran and sailed south-southeast, bound for the Archipelago and her family isle.

“Merin, my love, how strange our days apart and together have been. How beautifully absurd the myth that bound us. My days were but heartbeats to you. I hated you for that. You were the mirror that would not lie. If you could have seen your face at the beginning of each Reunion! The least you could have done was to hide your shock…that, at least, you could have done for me. “But through your clumsy naiveté there has always been…what?…something, Merin. There is something there that belies the callowness and thoughtless egotism which you wear so well. A caring, perhaps. A respect for caring, if nothing else.

It was my choice. I worked for the Hegemony. And I waited. At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the colonists do what they do best—destroy truly indigenous life. It is no accident that in six centuries of interstellar expansion the Hegemony has encountered no species considered intelligent on the Drake-Turing-Chen Index. On Old Earth, it had long been accepted that if a species put mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be extinct before long. As the Web expanded, if a species attempted serious competition with humanity’s intellect, that species would be extinct before the first farcaster opened in-system.

But on Hebron it was not the death of the Aluit which turned my heart to stone, but my part in dooming the colonists themselves. On Old Earth they had a word for what I was—quisling. For, although Hebron was not my world, the settlers who had fled there had done so for reasons as clear as those of my ancestors who signed the Covenant of Life on the Old Earth island of Maui. But I was waiting. And in my waiting I acted…in all senses of the word.

Now the forces-that-be in the Senate and AI Advisory Council had determined that some test had to be made of Ouster might in the Outback itself. Bressia was chosen. I admit, the Bressians had been our surrogates for decades before I arrived. Their

It was a slight miscalculation that I was still on Bressia when the Ouster hordes arrived. A few months’ difference. A military-political analysis team should have been there in my place. It did not matter. Hegemony purposes were served. The resolve and rapid-deployment capabilities of FORCE were properly tested where no real harm was done to Hegemony interests. Gresha died, of course. In the first bombardment. And Alón, my ten-year-old son. He had been with me…had survived the war itself…only to die when some FORCE idiot set off a booby trap or demolition charge too near the refugee barracks in Buckminster, the capital. I was not with him when he died.

The Ousters had been observing Hyperion since before the Battle of Bressia. Our intelligence suggested that they were obsessed with the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Their attack on the Hegemony hospital ship carrying Colonel Kassad, among others, had been a miscalculation; their ship captain had panicked when the hospital ship had been mistakenly identified as a military spinship. Worse, from the Ousters’ point of view, was the fact that by setting their dropships down near the Tombs themselves, the same commander had revealed their ability to defy the time tides.

The focus of that attack was to be Hyperion itself. I was made to understand that the resulting battle had more to do with internal Web politics than with the Ousters. Elements of the TechnoCore had opposed Hyperion’s entry into the Hegemony for centuries. Gladstone explained that this was no longer in the interest of humanity and that a forcible annexation of Hyperion—under the guise of defending the Web itself—would allow more progressive AI coalitions in the Core to gain power.

I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm—their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved.

Instead of killing me, they told me something. They showed me fatline intercepts, tightbeam recordings, and their own records from the date they fled Old Earth System, four and a half centuries earlier. Their facts were terrible and simple.

The Big Mistake of ’38 had been no mistake. The death of Old Earth had been deliberate, planned by elements of the TechnoCore and their human counterparts in the fledgling government of the Hegemony. The Hegira had been planned in detail decades before the runaway black hole had “accidentally” been plunged into the heart of Old Earth. The Worldweb, the All Thing, the Hegemony of Man—all of them had been built on the most vicious type of patricide.

did not tell her that they had promised to give me a device which would open the Time Tombs and allow the Shrike free rein.

The Ousters believed that the Time Tombs were artifacts from their future, the Shrike a weapon of redemption awaiting the proper hand to seize it. The Shrike Cult saw the monster as an avenging angel; the Ousters saw it as a tool of human devising, sent back through time to deliver humanity from the TechnoCore. Andil and the technicians were there to calibrate and experiment.

shot her then, her and the three technicians. Then I tossed Grand-mother Siri’s Steiner-Ginn laser far into the drift dunes and sat on an empty flowfoam crate and sobbed for several minutes. Then I walked over, used a technician’s comlog to enter the containment field, threw off the chameleon cloth, and triggered the device. There was no immediate change. The air held the same rich, late-winter light. The Jade Tomb glowed softly while the Sphinx continued to stare down at nothing. The only sound was the rasp of sand across the crates and bodies. Only a glowing indicator on the Ouster device showed that it was working…had already worked.