The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  Rachel Weintraub, whose first and final birthday would arrive in less than three standard days.

  Gladstone pounded her fist against stone, summoned her portal, and went elsewhere.

  It was midday on Mars. The Tharsis slums had been slums for six centuries and more. The sky overhead was pink, the air too thin and too cold for Gladstone, even with her cape around her, and dust blew everywhere. She walked the narrow lanes and cliffwalks of Relocation City, never finding an open enough spot to see anything beyond the next cluster of hovels or dripping filter towers.

  There were few plants here—the great forests of the Greening had been cut down for firewood or died and been covered by red dunes. Only a few bootleg brandy cacti and scuttling packs of parasitic spider lichen were visible between paths packed hard as stone by twenty generations of bare feet.

  Gladstone found a low rock and rested, lowering her head and massaging her knees. Groups of children, each naked except for strips of rags and dangling shunt jacks, surrounded her, begged for money, and then ran away giggling when she did not respond.

  The sun was high. Mons Olympus and the stark beauty of Fedmahn Kassad’s FORCE academy were not visible from here. Gladstone looked around. This was where the proud man had come from. Here is where he had run with youth gangs before being sentenced to the order, sanity, and honor of the military.

  Gladstone found a private place and stepped through her portal.

  · · ·

  God’s Grove was as it always was—perfumed by the scent of a million trees, silent except for the soft sounds of leaf rustle and wind, colored in halftones and pastels, the sunset igniting the literal rooftop of the world as an ocean of treetops caught the light, each leaf shimmering to the breeze, glittering with dew and morning showers as the breeze rose and carried the smell of rain and wet vegetation to Gladstone on her platform high above the world still sunk in sleep and darkness half a kilometer below.

  A Templar approached, saw the glint of Gladstone’s access bracelet as she moved her hand, and withdrew, a tall, robed figure blending back into the maze of foliage and vines.

  The Templars were one of the trickiest variables in Gladstone’s game. Their sacrifice of their treeship Yggdrasill was unique, unprecedented, inexplicable, and worrisome. Of all her potential allies in the war to come, none were more necessary and inscrutable than the Templars. Dedicated to life and devoted to the Muir, the Brotherhood of the Tree was a small but potent force in the Web—a token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

  Where was Het Masteen? Why had he left the Möbius cube with the other pilgrims?

  Gladstone watched the sun rise. The sky filled with orphan montgolfiers saved from the slaughter on Whirl, their many-hued bodies floating skyward like so many Portuguese men-o-war. Radiant gossamers spread membrane-thin solar wings to collect the sunlight. A flock of ravens broke cover and spiraled skyward, their cries providing harsh counterpoint to the soft breeze and sibilant rush of rain coming toward Gladstone from the west. The insistent sound of raindrops on leaves reminded her of her own home in the deltas of Patawpha, of the Hundred Day Monsoon which sent her and her brothers out into the fens hunting for toad flyers, bendits, and Spanish moss serpents to bring to school in a jar.

  Gladstone realized for the hundred thousandth time that there was still time to stop things. All-out war was not inevitable at this point. The Ousters had not counterattacked yet in a way the Hegemony could not ignore. The Shrike was not free. Not yet.

  All she had to do to save a hundred billion lives was return to the Senate floor, reveal three decades of deception and duplicity, reveal her fears and uncertainties …

  No. It would go as planned until it went beyond planning. Into the unforeseen. Into the wild waters of chaos where even the TechnoCore predictors, those who saw everything, would be blind.

  Gladstone walked the platforms, towers, ramps, and swinging bridges of the Templar tree city. Arboreals from a score of worlds and ARNied chimps scolded her and fled, swinging gracefully from flimsy vines three hundred meters above the forest floor. From areas closed to tourists and privileged visitors, Gladstone caught the scent of incense and clearly heard the Gregorian-like chants of the Templar sunrise service. Beneath her, the lower levels were coming alive with light and movement. The brief showers had passed over, and Gladstone returned to the upper levels, rejoicing in the view, crossing a sixty-meter wooden suspension bridge connecting her tree to one even larger, where half a dozen of the great hot air balloons—the only air transport the Templars allowed on God’s Grove—hung tethered and seemingly impatient to be away, their passenger nacelles swinging like heavy brown eggs, the skins of the balloons lovingly dyed in the patterns of living things—montgolfiers, Monarch butterflies, Thomas hawks, radiant gossamers, the now-extinct zeplens, sky squids, moon moths, eagles—so revered in legend that they had never been, retrieved or ARNied—and more.

  All this could be destroyed if I continue. Will be destroyed.

  Gladstone paused at the edge of a circular platform and gripped a railing so tightly that the age-mottles on her hands stood out harshly against suddenly pale skin. She thought of the old books she had read, pre-Hegira, prespaceflight, where people in embryonic nations on the continent of Europe had transported darker people—Africans—away from their homelands into a life of slavery in the colonial West. Would those slaves, chained and shackled, naked and curled in the fetid belly of a slave ship … would those slaves have hesitated to rebel, to drag down their captors, if it meant destroying the beauty of that slave ship … of Europe itself?

  But they had Africa to return to.

  Meina Gladstone let out a sound part groan and part sob. She whirled away from the glorious sunrise, from the sound of chants greeting the new day, from the rise of balloons—living and artificial—into the newborn sky, and she went below, down into the relative darkness to summon her farcaster.

  · · ·

  She could not go where the last pilgrim, Martin Silenus, had come from. Silenus was only a century and a half old, half-blue from Poulsen treatments, his cells remembering the cold freeze of a dozen long cryogenic fugues and even colder storage, but his lifetime had spanned more than four centuries. He had been born on Old Earth during the last days there, his mother from one of the noblest families, his youth a pastiche of decadence and elegance, beauty and the sweet smell of decay. While his mother stayed with the dying Earth, he had been sent spaceward so that someone could clear family debts, even if it meant … which it did … years of service as a bonded manual laborer on one of the most hellish backwater worlds in the Web.

  Gladstone could not go to Old Earth so she went to Heaven’s Gate.

  Mudflat was the capital, and Gladstone walked the cobblestone streets there, admiring the large old houses which overhung the narrow, stone-troughed canals crisscrossing their way up the artificial mountainside like something from an Escher print. Elegant trees and even larger horsetail ferns crowned the hilltops, lined the broad, white avenues, and swept out of sight around the elegant curve of white sand beaches. The lazy tide brought in violet waves which prismed to a score of colors before dying on the perfect beaches.

  Gladstone paused at a park looking over the Mudflat Promenade, where scores of couples and carefully dressed tourists took the evening air under gaslamp and leaf shadow, and she imagined what Heaven’s Gate had been more than three centuries earlier when it was a rough Protectorate world, not yet fully terraformed, and young Martin Silenus, still suffering from cultural dislocation, the loss of his fortune, and brain damage due to Freezer Shock on the long trip out, was working here as a slave.

  The Atmospheric Generating Station then had provided a few hundred square kilometers of breathable air, marginally liveable land. Tsunamis carried away cities, land reclamation projects, and workers with equal indifference. Bonded workers like Silenus dug out the acid canals, scraped rebreather bacteri
a from the lungpipe labyrinths under the mud, and dredged scum and dead bodies from the tidal mudflats after the floods.

  We have made some progress, thought Gladstone, despite the inertia forced upon us by the Core. Despite the near-death of science. Despite our fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations.

  She was dissatisfied. Before this world walk was over she had wanted to visit the home of each of the Hyperion pilgrims, however futile she knew that gesture to be. Heaven’s Gate was where Silenus had learned to write true poetry even while his temporarily damaged mind was lost to language, but this was not his home.

  Gladstone ignored the pleasant music rising from the concert on the Promenade, ignored the flights of commuter EMVs moving overhead like migrating fowl, ignored the pleasant air and soft light, as she called her portal to her and commanded it to farcast to Earth’s moon. The moon.

  Instead of activating the translation, her comlog warned her of the dangers of going there. She overrode it.

  Her microremote buzzed into existence, its tiny voice in her implant suggesting that it was not a good idea for the Chief Executive to travel to such an unstable place. She silenced it.

  The farcaster portal itself began to argue with her choice until she used her universal card to program it manually.

  The farcaster door blurred into existence, and Gladstone stepped through.

  The only place on Old Earth’s moon still habitable was the mountain and Mare area preserved for the FORCE Masada Ceremony, and it was here that Gladstone stepped out. The viewing stands and marching field were empty. Class-ten containment fields blurred the stars and the distant rim walls, but Gladstone could see where internal heating from terrible gravity tides had melted the distant mountains and made them flow into new seas of rock.

  Shé moved across a plain of gray sand, feeling the light gravity like an invitation to fly. She imagined herself as one of the Templar balloons, lightly tethered but eager to be away. She resisted the impulse to jump, to leap along in giant bounds, but her step was light, and dust flew in improbable patterns behind her.

  The air was very thin under the containment field dome, and Gladstone found herself shivering despite the heating elements in her cape. For a long moment she stood in the center of the featureless plain and tried to imagine just the moon, humankind’s first step in its long stagger from the cradle. But the FORCE viewing stands and equipment sheds distracted her, made such imaginings futile, and finally she raised her eyes to see what she had actually come for.

  Old Earth hung in the black sky. But not Old Earth, of course, merely the pulsing accretion disk and globular cloud of debris which had once been Old Earth. It was very bright, brighter than any of the stars seen from Patawpha on even the rarest clear night, but its brightness was strangely ominous, and it cast a sick light across the mud-gray field.

  Gladstone stood and stared. She had never been here before, had made herself not come before, and now that she was here, she desperately wanted to feel something, hear something, as if some voice of caution or inspiration or perhaps merely commiseration would come to her here.

  She heard nothing.

  She stood there another few minutes, thinking of little, feeling her ears and nose beginning to freeze, before she decided to go. It would be almost dawn on TC2.

  Gladstone had activated the portal and was taking a final look around when another portable farcaster door blurred into existence less than ten meters away. She paused. Not five human beings in the Web had individual access to Earth’s moon.

  The microremote buzzed down to float between her and the figure emerging from the portal.

  Leigh Hunt stepped out, glanced around, shivered from the cold, and walked quickly toward her. His voice was thin, almost amusingly childlike in the thin air.

  “M. Chief Executive, you must return at once. The Ousters have succeeded in breaking through in an amazing counterattack.”

  Gladstone sighed. She had known that this would be the next step. “All right,” she said. “Has Hyperion fallen? Can we evacuate our forces from there?”

  Hunt shook his head. His lips were almost blue from the cold. “You don’t understand,” came the attenuated voice of her aide. “It’s not just Hyperion. The Ousters are attacking at a dozen points. They’re invading the Web itself!”

  Suddenly numb and chilled to her core, more from shock than from the lunar cold, Meina Gladstone nodded, gathered her cape more tightly around her, and stepped back through the portal to a world which would never be the same again.

  NINETEEN

  They gathered at the head of the Valley of the Time Tombs, Brawne Lamia and Martin Silenus burdened with as many backpacks and carrying bags as they could manage, Sol Weintraub, the Consul, and Father Duré standing silent as a tribunal of patriarchs. The first shadows of afternoon were beginning to stretch east across the valley, reaching for the softly glowing Tombs like fingers of darkness.

  “I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to split up like this,” said the Consul, rubbing his chin. It was very hot. Sweat gathered on his stubbled cheeks and ran down his neck.

  Lamia shrugged. “We knew that we each would be confronting the Shrike alone. Does it matter if we’re separated a few hours? We need the food. You three could come if you want.”

  The Consul and Sol glanced at Father Duré. The priest was obviously exhausted. The search for Kassad had drained whatever reserves of energy the man had kept after his ordeal.

  “Someone should wait here in case the Colonel returns,” said Sol. The baby looked very small in his arms.

  Lamia nodded agreement. She settled straps on her shoulders and neck. “All right. It should be about two hours getting to the Keep. A little longer coming back. Figure a full hour there loading supplies, and we’ll still be back before dark. Close to dinnertime.”

  The Consul and Duré shook hands with Silenus. Sol put his arms around Brawne. “Come back safely,” he whispered.

  She touched the bearded man’s cheek, set her hand on the infant’s head for a second, turned, and started up the valley at a brisk pace.

  “Hey, wait a fucking minute for me to catch up!” called Martin Silenus, canteens and water bottles clattering as he ran.

  They came up out of the saddle between the cliffs together. Silenus glanced back and saw the other three men already dwarfed by distance, small sticks of color amid the boulders and dunes near the Sphinx. “It isn’t going quite as planned, is it?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” said Lamia. She had changed into shorts for the hike, and the muscles of her short, powerful legs gleamed under a sheen of sweat. “How was it planned?”

  “My plan was to finish the universe’s greatest poem and then go home,” said Silenus. He took a drink from the last bottle holding water. “Goddamn, I wish we’d brought enough wine to last us.”

  “I didn’t have a plan,” said Lamia, half to herself. Her short curls, matted with perspiration, clung to her broad neck.

  Martin Silenus snorted a laugh. “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that cyborg lover …”

  “Client,” she snapped.

  “Whatever. It was the Johnny Keats retrieval persona who thought it was important to get here. So now you’ve dragged him this far … you’re still carrying the Schrön loop aren’t you?”

  Lamia absently touched the tiny neural shunt behind her left ear. A thin membrane of osmotic polymer kept sand and dust out of the follicle-sized connector sockets. “Yes.”

  Silenus laughed again. “What the fuck good is it if there’s no data-sphere to interact with, kid? You might as well have left the Keats persona on Lusus or wherever.” The poet paused a second to adjust straps and packs. “Say, can you access the personality on your own?”

  Lamia thought of her dreams the night before. The presence in them had felt like Johnny … but the images had been of the Web. Memories? “No,” she said, “I can’t access a Schrön loop by myself. It carries more data than a hundred simple
implants could deal with. Now why don’t you shut up and walk?” She picked up the pace and left him standing there.

  The sky was cloudless, verdant, and hinting of depths of lapis. The boulder field ahead stretched southwest to the barrens, the barrens surrendering to the dunefields. The two walked in silence for thirty minutes, separated by five meters and their thoughts. Hyperion’s sun hung small and bright to their right.

  “The dunes are steeper,” said Lamia as they struggled up to another crest and slid down the other side. The surface was hot, and already her shoes were filling with sand.

  Silenus nodded, stopped, and mopped his face with a silken handkerchief. His floppy purple beret hung low over his brow and left ear, but offered no shade. “It would be easier following the high ground to the north there. Near the dead city.”

  Brawne Lamia shielded her eyes to stare in that direction. “We’ll lose at least half an hour going that way.”

  “We’ll lose more than that going this way.” Silenus sat on the dune and sipped from his water bottle. He pulled off his cape, folded it, and stuffed it in the largest of his backpacks.

  “What are you carrying there?” asked Lamia. “That pack looks full.”

  “None of your damned business, woman.”

  Lamia shook her head, rubbed her cheeks, and felt the sunburn there. She was not used to so many days in sunlight, and Hyperion’s atmosphere blocked little of the ultraviolet. She fumbled in her pocket for the tube of sunblock cream and smeared some on. “All right,” she said. “We’ll detour that way. Follow the ridgeline until the worst of the dunes are past and then cut back on a straight line toward the Keep.” The mountains hung on the horizon, seeming to grow no closer. The snow-topped summits tantalized her with their promise of cool breezes and fresh water. The Valley of the Time Tombs was invisible behind them, the view blocked by dunes and the boulder field.

  Lamia shifted her packs, turned to her right, and half-slid, half-walked down the crumbling dune.