The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  He had set the mat on a southwesterly course that should have left the Sea of Grass at or near the port city of Edge. If he had simply overflown Edge and the river while he slept, the river would be somewhere to his south, off to his left. But if he had aimed poorly as he left Pilgrims’ Rest, been just a few degrees off to his left, then the river would be winding northeast somewhere to his right. Even if he went the wrong way, he eventually would find a landmark—the coast of the Northern Mane if nothing else—but the delay could cost him a full day.

  The Consul kicked at a rock and folded his arms. The air was very cool after the heat of the day. A shiver made him realize that he was half-sick from sunburn. He touched his scalp and pulled his fingers away with a curse. Which way?

  The wind whistled through low sage and sponge lichen. The Consul felt very far removed from the Time Tombs and the threat of the Shrike, but he felt the presence of Sol and Duré and Het Masteen and Brawne and the missing Silenus and Kassad as an urgent pressure on his shoulders. The Consul had joined the pilgrimage as a final act of nihilism, a pointless suicide to put an end to his own pain, pain at the loss of even the memory of wife and child, killed during the Hegemony’s machinations on Bressia, and pain at the knowledge of his terrible betrayal—betrayal of the government he had served for almost four decades, betrayal of the Ousters who had trusted him.

  The Consul sat on a rock and felt that purposeless self-hatred fade as he thought of Sol and his infant child waiting in the Valley of the Time Tombs. He thought of Brawne, that brave woman, energy incarnate, lying helpless with that leechlike extension of the Shrike’s evil growing from her skull.

  He sat, activated the mat, and rose to eight hundred meters, so close to the ceiling of clouds that he could have raised a hand and touched them.

  A second’s break in the cloud cover far to his left showed a glint of ripple. The Hoolie lay about five klicks to the south.

  The Consul banked the hawking mat steeply to his left, feeling the tired containment field trying to press him to the carpet but feeling safer with the ropes still attached. Ten minutes later, he was high over the water, swooping down to ascertain that it was the broad Hoolie rather than some tributary.

  It was the Hoolie. Radiant gossamers glowed in the low, marshy areas along the banks. The tall, crenelated towers of architect ants cast ghostly silhouettes against a sky only slightly darker than the land.

  The Consul rose to twenty meters, took a drink of water from his bottle, and headed downriver at full speed.

  · · ·

  Sunrise found him below the village of Doukhobor’s Copse, almost to the Karla Locks, where the Royal Transport Canal cut west toward the northern urban settlements and the Mane. The Consul knew that it was less than a hundred and fifty klicks to the capital from here—but still a maddening seven hours away at the hawking mat’s slow pace. This was the point in the trip where he had hoped to find a military skimmer on patrol, one of the passenger dirigibles from the Copse of Naiad, even a fast powerboat he could commandeer. But there was no sign of life along the banks of the Hoolie except for the occasional burning building or ghee lamps in distant windows. The docks had been stripped of all boats. The river manta pens above the Locks were empty, the great gates open to the current, and no transport barges were lined up below where the river widened to twice its upriver size.

  The Consul swore and flew on.

  It was a beautiful morning as the sunrise illuminated the low clouds and made every bush and tree stand out in the low, horizontal light. It felt to the Consul as if it had been months since he had seen real vegetation. Weirwood and halfoak trees rose to majestic heights on the distant bluffs, while in the flood plain, the rich light caught the green shoots of a million periscope beans rising from their indigenie paddies. Womangrove root and firefern lined the banks, and each branch and twisting stood out in the sharp light of sunrise.

  The clouds swallowed the sun. It began to rain. The Consul tugged on the battered tricome, huddled under Kassad’s extra cloak, and flew on southward at a hundred meters.

  The Consul tried to remember. How long did the child Rachel have?

  Despite his long sleep the day before, the Consul’s mind was heavy with fatigue toxins. Rachel had been four days old when they had arrived at the valley. That had been … four days ago.

  The Consul rubbed his cheek, reached for a water bottle, and found them all empty. He could easily dip down and refill the bottles in the river, but he did not want to take the time. His sunburn ached and made him shiver as the rain dripped from his cap.

  Sol said that as long as I’m back by nightfall it would be all right. Rachel was born after twenty-hundred hours, translated to Hyperion time. If that’s right, if there’s no error, she has until eight tonight. The Consul rubbed water from his cheeks and eyebrows. Say seven more hours to Keats. An hour or two to liberate the ship. Theo will help … he’s Governor-General now. I can convince him that it’s in the Hegemony’s interest to countervene Gladstone’s orders to quarantine the ship. If necessary, I’ll tell him that she ordered me to conspire with the Ousters to betray the Web.

  Say, ten hours plus the fifteen-minute flight in the ship. Should be at least an hour to spare before sunset. Rachel will be only a few minutes old, but … what? What do we try besides the cryogenic fugue lockers? Nothing. It has to be that. It was always Sol’s last chance, despite the doctors’ warnings that it might kill the child. But then, what about Brawne?

  The Consul was thirsty. He pulled back the cloak, but the rain had lessened to the point that it was a fine drizzle, just enough to wet his lips and tongue to make him more thirsty. He cursed softly and began to descend slowly. Perhaps he could hover over the river just long enough to fill his bottle.

  The hawking mat quit flying thirty meters above the river. One second it was descending gradually, as smooth as a carpet on a gentle glass incline, and the next instant it was tumbling and plummeting out of control, a two-meter rug and terrified man thrown out of the window of a ten-story building.

  The Consul screamed and tried to jump free, but the rope connecting him to the carpet and the duffel strap tied to his belt tangled him in the flapping mass of hawking mat, and he fell with it, tumbling and twisting, the final twenty meters to the hard surface of the waiting Hoolie River.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Sol Weintraub had high hopes the night the Consul left. At long last, they were doing something. Or trying to. Sol did not believe that the cryogenic vaults of the Consul’s ship would be the answer to saving Rachel—medical experts on Renaissance Vector had pointed out the extreme danger of that procedure—but it was good to have an alternative, any alternative. And Sol felt that they had been passive long enough, awaiting the Shrike’s pleasure like condemned criminals awaiting the guillotine.

  The interior of the Sphinx seemed too treacherous this night, and Sol brought their possessions out on the broad granite porch of the tomb, where he and Duré sought to make Masteen and Brawne comfortable under blankets and capes, with packs for pillows. Brawne’s medical monitors continued to show no brain activity whatsoever, while her body rested comfortably. Masteen turned and tossed in the grip of fever.

  “What do you think the Templar’s problem is?” asked Duré. “Disease?”

  “It could be simple exposure,” said Sol. “After being abducted from the windwagon, he found himself wandering in the barrens and here in the Valley of the Time Tombs. He was eating snow for liquid and had no food at all.”

  Duré nodded and checked the FORCE medpatch they had attached to the inside of Masteen’s arm. The telltales showed the steady drip of intravenous solution. “But it seems to be something else,” said the Jesuit. “Almost a madness.”

  “Templars have an almost telepathic connection to their treeships,” said Sol. “It must have driven Voice of the Tree Masteen a bit mad when he watched the destruction of the Yggdrasill. Especially if he somehow knew it was necessary.”

  Duré nodded and co
ntinued sponging the Templar’s waxy forehead. It was after midnight, and the wind had come up, moving vermilion dust in lazy spirals and moaning around the wings and rough edges of the Sphinx. The Tombs glowed brightly and then dimmed, now one tomb, then the next, in no apparent order or sequence. Occasionally the tug of time tides would assail both men, making them gasp and grip the stone, but the wave of déjà vu and vertigo would fade after a moment. With Brawne Lamia attached to the Sphinx via the cable welded to her skull, they could not leave.

  Sometime before dawn, the clouds parted and the sky became visible, the thickly clustered stars almost painful in their clarity. For a while, the only signs of the great fleets warring there were the occasional fusion trails, narrow diamond-scratches on the pane of night, but then the blossoms of distant explosions began to unfurl again, and within the hour the glow of the Tombs had been dimmed by the violence above.

  “Who do you think will win?” asked Father Duré. The two men sat with their backs to the stone wall of the Sphinx, faces raised to the cusp of sky revealed between the tomb’s forward-curved wings.

  Sol was rubbing Rachel’s back as she slept on her stomach, rear end raised under the thin blankets. “From what the others say, it seems preordained that the Web must suffer a terrible war.”

  “So you believe the AI Advisory Council’s predictions?”

  Sol shrugged in the darkness. “I really know nothing about politics … or the Core’s accuracy in predicting things. I’m a minor scholar from a small college on a backwater world. But I have the feeling that something terrible is in store for us … that some rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.”

  Duré smiled. “Yeats,” he said. The smile faded. “I suspect that this place is the new Bethlehem.” He looked down the valley toward the glowing Tombs. “I spent a lifetime teaching about St. Teilhard’s theories of evolution toward the Omega Point. Instead of that, we have this. Human folly in the skies, and a terrible Antichrist waiting to inherit the rest.”

  “You think that the Shrike is the Antichrist?”

  Father Duré set his elbows on his raised knees and folded his hands. “If it’s not, we’re all in trouble.” He laughed bitterly. “It wasn’t long ago that I would have been delighted to discover an Antichrist … even the presence of some antidivine power would have served to shore up my failing belief in any form of divinity.”

  “And now?” Sol asked quietly.

  Duré spread his fingers. “I too have been crucified.”

  Sol thought of the images from Lenar Hoyt’s story about Duré; the elderly Jesuit nailing himself to a tesla tree, suffering the years of pain and rebirth rather than surrender to the cruciform DNA parasite which even now burrowed under the flesh of his chest.

  Duré lowered his face from the sky. “There was no welcome from a heavenly Father,” he said softly. “No reassurance that the pain and sacrifice had been worth anything. Only pain. Pain and darkness and then pain again.”

  Sol’s hand stopped moving on his infant’s back. “And that made you lose your faith?”

  Duré looked at Sol. “On the contrary, it made me feel that faith is all the more essential. Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level … that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.”

  Sol nodded slowly. “I had a dream during Rachel’s long battle with Merlin’s sickness … my wife Sarai had the same dream … that I was being called to sacrifice my only daughter.”

  “Yes,” said Duré. “I listened to the Consul’s summary on disk.”

  “Then you know my response,” said Sol. “First, that Abraham’s path of obedience can no longer be followed, even if there is a God demanding such obedience. Second, that we have offered sacrifices to that God for too many generations … that the payments of pain must stop.”

  “Yet you are here,” said Duré, gesturing toward the valley, the Tombs, the night.

  “I’m here,” agreed Sol. “But not to grovel. Rather to see what response these powers have to my decision.” He touched his daughter’s back again. “Rachel is a day and a half old now and growing younger each second. If the Shrike is the architect of such cruelty, I want to face him, even if he is your Antichrist. If there is a God and he has done this thing, I will show the same contempt to him.”

  “Perhaps we’ve all shown too much contempt as it is,” mused Duré.

  Sol looked up as a dozen pinpoints of fierce light expanded into ripples and shock waves of plasma explosions far out in space. “I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones. “To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”

  Father Duré raised one eyebrow and then smiled slightly. “I know the anger you feel.” The priest gently touched Rachel’s head. “Let’s try to get some sleep before sunrise, shall we?”

  Sol nodded, lay next to his child, and pulled the blanket up to his cheek. He heard Duré whispering something that might have been a soft good night, or perhaps a prayer.

  Sol touched his daughter, closed his eyes, and slept.

  The Shrike did not come in the night. Nor did it come the next morning as sunlight painted the southwestern cliffs and touched the top of the Crystal Monolith. Sol awoke as sunlight crept down the valley; he found Duré sleeping next to him, Masteen and Brawne still unconscious. Rachel was stirring and fussing. Her cry was that of a hungry newborn. Sol fed her with one of the last nursing paks, pulling the heating tab and waiting a moment for the milk to reach body temperature. Cold had settled in the valley overnight, and frost glinted on the steps to the Sphinx.

  Rachel ate greedily, making the soft mewling and sucking sounds that Sol remembered from more than fifty years earlier as Sarai had nursed her. When she finished, Sol burped her and left her on his shoulder as he rocked gently to and fro.

  A day and a half left.

  Sol was very tired. He was growing old despite the single Poulsen treatment a decade earlier. At the time he and Sarai would normally have been freed of parental duties—their only child in graduate school and off on an archaelogical dig in the Outback—Rachel had fallen prey to Merlin’s sickness, and parenthood had soon descended upon them once again. The curve of those duties rose as Sol and Sarai grew older—then Sol alone, after the air crash on Barnard’s World—and now he was very, very tired. But despite that, despite everything, Sol was interested to note that he did not regret a single day of caring for his daughter.

  A day and a half left.

  Father Duré awoke after a bit, and the two men made breakfast from the various canned goods Brawne had brought back with her. Het Masteen did not awaken, but Duré applied the next-to-last medpak, and the Templar began receiving fluids and I.V. nutrient.

  “Do you think M. Lamia should have the last medpak applied?” asked Duré.

  Sol sighed and checked her comlog monitors again. “I don’t think so, Paul. According to this, blood sugar is high … nutrient levels check out as if she had just eaten a decent meal.”

  “But how?”

  Sol shook his head. “Perhaps that damned thing is some sort of umbilical.” He gestured toward the cable attached to the point in her skull where the neural shunt socket had been.

  “So what do we do today?”

  Sol peered at a sky already fading to the green and lapis dome they had grown used to on Hyperion. “We wait,” he said.

  Het Masteen awoke in the heat of the day, shortly before the sun reached the zenith. The Templar sat straight up and said, “The Tree!”

  Duré hurried up the steps from where he had been pacing below. Sol lifted Rachel from where she lay in shadow near the wall and moved to Masteen’s side. The Templar’s eyes were focused on something above the level of the cliffs. Sol glanced up but could see only the paling sky.
r />   “The Tree!” cried the Templar again, and lifted one roughened hand.

  Duré restrained the man. “He’s hallucinating. He thinks he see the Yggdrasill, his treeship.”

  Het Masteen struggled against their hands. “No, not the Yggdrasill,” he gasped through parched lips, “the Tree. The Final Tree. The Tree of Pain!”

  Both men looked up then, but the sky was clear except for wisps of clouds blowing in from the southwest. At that moment, there was a surge of time tides, and both Sol “and the priest bowed their heads in sudden vertigo. It passed.

  Het Masteen was trying to get to his feet. The Templar’s eyes were still focused on something far away. His skin was so hot that it burned Sol’s hands.

  “Get the final medpak,” snapped Sol. “Program the ultramorph and antifever agent.” Duré hurried to comply.

  “The Tree of Pain!” managed Het Masteen. “I was meant to be its Voice! The erg is meant to drive it through space and time! The Bishop and the Voice of the Great Tree have chosen me! I cannot fail them.” He strained against Sol’s arms a second, then collapsed back to the stone porch. “I am the True Chosen,” he whispered, energy leaving him like air from an emptying balloon, “I must guide the Tree of Pain during the time of Atonement.” He closed his eyes.

  Duré attached the final medpak, made sure the monitor was set for Templar quirks in metabolism and body chemistry, and triggered the adrenaline and painkillers. Sol huddled over the robed form.

  “That’s not Templar terminology or theology,” said. Duré. “He’s using Shrike Cult language.” The priest caught Sol’s eye. “That explains some of the mystery … especially from Brawne’s tale. For some reason, the Templars have been in collusion with the Church of the Final Atonement … the Shrike Cult.”

  Sol nodded, slipped his own comlog on Masteen’s wrist and adjusted the monitor.

  “The Tree of Pain must be the Shrike’s fabled tree of thorns,” muttered Duré, glancing up at the empty sky where Masteen had been staring. “But what does he mean that he and the erg were chosen to drive it through space and time? Does he really think he can pilot the Shrike’s tree the way the Templars do the treeships? Why?”