Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

by Dan Simmons

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.

A thin line of beard along his jawline served to accent the sharpness of his countenance as surely as blood on a knife blade.

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.

Sol Weintraub looked up upon introduction and the Consul noted the short gray beard, lined forehead, and sad, luminous eyes of the well-known scholar. The Consul had heard tales of the Wandering Jew and his hopeless quest, but he was shocked to realize that the old man now held the infant in his arms – his daughter Rachel, no more than a few weeks old. The Consul looked away.

The poor bastard :'(

‘Saved from certain death in war to be delivered to certain death at the hands of the Shrike,’ murmured Father Hoyt.

‘Nothing,’ said the Consul. ‘No violence. No forced entry. No deviation from course. No unexplained time lapses. No unusual energy emissions or depletions. No physical phenomena of any sort.’ ‘No passengers,’ said Het Masteen.

Fuck that

‘The Shrike is no myth,’ said Kassad. ‘Nor its steel tree.’

The Tree Of Pain

Nor had Father Duré lost his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church continued to be humankind’s last, best hope for immortality.

Agreed and forshdowing

But how long will the Bikura culture last before they’re absorbed into modern colonial society or, more likely, are simply wiped out by circumstances?’

Thats what happens when "civilization" comes a knocking

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 homeworld . . . Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a way which would have meant the resurgence of Christianity in our lifetime?

Wtf? Does that mean Christ was an alien?

Oh, God, to be sick so far from home.

The Bikura call themselves the ‘Three Score and Ten’.

70. 7 being the holy number of Hyperion. 7 travelers

He died the true death.’

No Cruciform no ressurection

All three stopped in the middle of 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 Cruciform resurrects you. Endymion

seventy

Four score and ten. Lol

‘And if you did it again,’ he said, ‘we would have to kill you again.’

They really believe he has Cruciform and can resurrect

‘There is the last one to return.’ ‘To return?’ I said. ‘From where?’

Resurrection

I sat down for a second as the impact of this simple fact struck me. Even four centuries of daily travel by the Three Score and Ten could not account for such erosion of solid rock. Someone or something had used this path long before the Bikura colonists crashed here. Someone or something had used this path for millennia.

The Shrike?

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.

‘You will be of the cruciform now and forever,’ he said. ‘Now and forever,’ echoed the Bikura. ‘Amen,’ I whispered.

According to the scanner, the cruciform itself is composed of familiar tissue . . . the DNA is mine. I am of the cruciform.

When I was finished with their medscans I stripped and studied myself. The cruciform rises from my chest like pink scar tissue, but I am still a man. For how long?

As I did so, an idiotically frightened part of my mind noted that the Three Score and Ten were now the Three Score and Nine. It seemed funny at the time.

Not really, YOU are the the 70th

The Bikura I called Will has died the true death. The Three Score and Ten truly are the Three Score and Nine from this time on.

Wrong again

The one I have tagged as Theta looks the same and acts the same, but now carries two cruciforms embedded in his flesh. I have no doubt that this is one Bikura who will tend toward corpulence in coming years, swelling and ripening like some obscene E coli cell in a petri dish. 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.

There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.

The lieutenant took his time scanning their visa chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making a comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.

The Shrike is on the move. It’s like a plague.’

The Pain Lord took the crew unto himself.

‘The Pain Lord is the Shrike,’

‘You have been in my dreams for years,’ he told her. ‘Yes. Your past. My future. The shock wave of events moves across time like ripples on a pond.’

The Shrike, thought Kassad. ‘The Lord of Pain,’ whispered Moneta. The thing turned and led them out of the dead city.

—He controls time. —The Pain Lord? —Of course.

Kassad screams and pulls away. Strips of his flesh rip away as he lunges up and sideways. Metal teeth click shut in a steel vagina, missing his glans by a moist millimeter.

‘My God,’ Father Hoyt was saying, ‘so, according to this Moneta creature, the Time Tombs are moving backward in time?’

‘If that’s true,’ said Brawne Lamia, ‘then you “met” this Moneta . . . or whatever her real name is . . . in her past but your future . . . in a meeting that’s still to come.’ ‘Yes,’ said Kassad.

‘Colonel, do you think the bitch was the Shrike?’ ‘I don’t know.’ Kassad’s monotone was barely audible.

‘First, do you think the Shrike . . . the woman . . . somehow wants to use you to start this terrible interstellar war you foresaw?’ ‘Yes,’ Kassad said softly.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

‘I love being a writer. It’s the paperwork I can’t stand.’ Get it? Well, amigos and amigette, I love being a poet. It’s the goddamned words I can’t stand.

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was programmed in classic binary. And the Word said, ‘Let there be life!’

And so, somewhere in the TechnoCore vaults of my mother’s estate, frozen sperm from my long-dead daddy was defrosted, set in suspension, shaken like the vanilla malts of yore, loaded into something part squirt gun and part dildo, and – at the magic touch of a trigger – ejaculated into Mother at a time when the moon was full and the egg was ripe.

Mother didn’t have to be impregnated in this barbaric fashion, of course. She could have chosen ex utero fertilization, a male lover with a transplant of Daddy’s DNA, a clonal surrogate, a gene-spliced virgin birth, you name it . . . but, as she told me later, she opened her legs to tradition. My guess is that she preferred it that way.

My shack was oddly comfortable: a table for eating, a cot for sleeping and fucking, a hole for pissing and shitting, and a window for silent staring. My environment mirrored my vocabulary.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and Heaven’s Gate was no exception.

But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

I became a poet. All I lacked were the words.

To be a true poet is to become God.

Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.

‘It sold because the mass subconscious was ready for it.’ ‘Maybe the mass subconscious is ready for this,’ I said.