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This thing only seeks a mindless avoidance of death by any means. I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life.
Kassad found a bit unnerving. The charge took less than forty seconds but Kassad discovered that this was ample time for his mouth to go absolutely dry, his breathing to begin to have problems, and for his testicles to retreat completely into his body. If the rest of Kassad could have found a comparable hiding place, he would have seriously considered crawling into it. As it was, he was too busy to run.
“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.”
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. Then came their second Diaspora, this one lasting five centuries and leading to dead-end desert worlds like Mars, their dream buried with the death of Old Earth.
As the New Bushido evolved it combined the age-old concepts of honor and individual courage with the need to spare civilians whenever possible. It also saw the wisdom of returning to the pre-Napoleonic concepts of small, “nontotal” wars with defined goals and proscribed excesses. The Code demanded a forsaking of nuclear weapons and strategic bombing campaigns in all but the most extreme cases but, more than that, it demanded a return to Old Earth medieval concepts of set battles between small, professional forces at a mutually agreed-upon time in a place where destruction of public and private
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he was counting on two emotions that were quintessentially human if not necessarily Ouster human: curiosity and the desire for revenge.
Every FORCE:space shuttle carried some sort of atmospheric egress device—it was a custom dating back almost eight centuries to when the entire realm of space flight consisted only of tentative excursions just above the skin of Old Earth’s atmosphere. A ship-to-ship shuttle probably would never need a planetary bail-out device, but age-old fears written into ancient regulations tended to die hard.
“Moneta,” said his dream, “or Mnemosyne,
“What is this place?” “The City of Poets. Abandoned more than a hundred years ago. Beyond that hill lie the Time Tombs.”
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.
Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
“Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.”
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
“Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”
“Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”
I TRIED TO explain this to my friends on Heaven’s Gate. “Piss, shit,” I said. “Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!” They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.
I used no words at all. Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
it sometimes took an hour or a day for a word to come to me, for a concept to sink its roots into the firm soil of language. Now it was an even slower process as I agonized over the perfect word, the precise rhyme scheme, the most playful image, and the most ineffable analog to the most elusive emotion.
For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
When one is writing—really writing—it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods.
“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.
the Shrike Cult believes that mankind somehow created the thing,”
I had summoned the Shrike. I knew that. I had summoned it by beginning my epic poem about it. In the beginning was the Word.
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.
Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.
“Sol! Take your daughter, your only 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.”
“The Church of the Shrike chooses its sacrificial victims from thousands of volunteers. The Web is full of stupid, depressed people. Few of these return.”
visible does not mean it does not exist. —That’s clumsy. It shouldn’t take three negatives to make a statement. Especially to state something as nonprofound as that.
Ezra Pound.
He nodded. “Keats,” he said. “Born in A.D. 1795. Died of tuberculosis in 1821. John Keats.”
‘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?’
felt the cool touch of his hand on my hip in a movement protective and casual without being possessive.
“We believe that the Core is embarked on a truly incredible project which would allow them to predict…everything. To handle every variable of space, time, and history as a quantum of manageable information.” “Their
“When I self-destruct my AI persona,” said Johnny, “the shift to cybrid consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but during that time my section of the Core perimeter defenses will drop. The security phages will fill the gap before too many more nanoseconds pass, but during that time…” “Entry to the Core,”
“The Stables are the old-line AIs, some of them dating back to pre-Mistake days; at least one of them gained sentience in the First Information Age. The Stables argue that a certain level of symbiosis is necessary between humanity and the Core. They’ve promoted the Ultimate Intelligence Project as a way to avoid rash decisions, to delay until all variables can be factored. The Volatiles are the force behind the Secession three centuries ago. The Volatiles have done conclusive studies that show how humankind’s usefulness is past and from this point on human beings constitute a threat to the
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“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
I felt him die then. I also felt the surge as his hand found the neural shunt, the white-light warmth of the surge to the Schrön loop as everything Johnny Keats ever was or would be exploded into me; almost, almost it was like his orgasm inside me two nights earlier, the surge and throb and sudden warmth and stillness after, with the echo of sensation there.
‘It was the nightingale and not the lark, That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear.’
They want me to unseal the tomb, to enter, and to have my private moment in the cool silent emptiness that has replaced the warm presence that was Siri. They want me to say my farewells so they can get on with their rites and rituals, open the farcaster doors, and join the waiting Worldweb of the Hegemony.
There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.”
For years I have carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk. An emptiness begins to grow inside me.
can sense in him the open honesty which often takes the place of intelligence in some people.
