The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  “… the Angel of Retribution has been loosed among us, prophecies fulfilled, the Millennium come … the plan of the Avatar calls for such sacrifice … as prophesied by the Church of the Final Atonement, which knew, which has always known, that such atonement must be made … too late for such half-measures … too late for internecine strife … the end of mankind is upon us, the Tribulations have begun, the Millennium of the Lord is about to dawn.”

  I realized that the men in red were priests of the Shrike Cult and that the crowd was responding—first with scattered shouts of agreement, occasional cries of “Yes, yes!” and “Amen!” and then with chanting in unison, raised fists surging above the crowd, and fierce cries of ecstasy. It was incongruous, to say the least. The Web in this century had many of the religious overtones of the Rome of Old Earth just before the Christian Era: a policy of tolerance, a myriad of religions—most, like Zen Gnosticism, complex and inwardly turned rather than the stuff of proselytism—while the general tenor was one of gentle cynicism and indifference to religious impulse.

  But not now, not in this square.

  I was thinking about how free of mobs recent centuries had been: to create a mob there must be public meetings, and public meetings in our time consisted of individuals communing via the All Thing or other datasphere channels; it is hard to create mob passion when people are separated by kilometers and light-years, connected only by comm lines and fatline threads.

  Suddenly I was jarred from my reveries by a hush in the crowd’s roar, a turning of a thousand faces in my direction.

  “… and there is one of them!” cried the Shrike Cult holy man, his red robes flashing as he pointed in my direction. “One of those from the sealed circles of the Hegemony … one of the scheming sinners who has brought the Atonement to us this day … it is that man and those like him who want the Shrike Avatar to make you pay for his sins, while he and the others hide in safety in the secret worlds the Hegemony leadership has set aside for just this day!”

  I put down my cup of coffee, gulped my last bit of fried dough, and stared. The man was speaking gibberish. But how did he know that I had come from TC2? Or that I had access to Gladstone? I looked again, shielding my eyes from the glare and trying to ignore the raised faces and shaken fists aimed in my direction, focusing on the face above the red robes…

  My God, it was Spenser Reynolds, the action artist whom I’d last seen trying to dominate the dinner conversation at Treetops. Reynolds had shaved his head until nothing was left of his curled and coifed hair except a Shrike Cult queue at the back, but the face was still tanned and handsome, even distorted as it was now with simulated rage and a true believer’s fanatic faith.

  “Seize him!” cried Shrike Cult agitator Reynolds, still pointing in my direction. “Seize him and make him pay for the destruction of our homes, the deaths of our families, the end of our world!”

  I actually glanced behind me, thinking that surely this pompous poseur was not talking about me.

  But he was. And enough of the crowd had been converted to mob that a wave of people nearest the shouting demagogue surged in my direction, fists waving and spittle flying, and that surge moved others farther from the center, until the fringes of the crowd below me also moved in my direction to keep from being trampled.

  The surge became a roaring, shouting, screaming mass of rioters; at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

  I didn’t wish to remain around long enough to explain this to them. The crowd parted and began rushing up both sides of my divided staircase. I turned and tried the boarded door behind me. It was locked.

  I kicked until the door splintered inward on the third attempt, stepped through the gap just ahead of grasping hands, and began sprinting up a dark staircase in a hall which smelled of age and mildew. There were shouts and splintering sounds as the mob demolished the door behind me.

  There was an apartment on the third floor, occupied although the building had looked abandoned. It was not locked. I opened the door just as I heard footsteps on the flight below me.

  “Please help—” I began and stopped. There were three women in the dark room; perhaps three female generations of the same family, for there was some resemblance. All three sat in rotting chairs, clothed in soiled rags, white arms extended, pale fingers curled around unseen spheres; I could see the slim metal cable curling through the oldest woman’s white hair to the black deck on a dusty tabletop. Identical cables twisted from the daughter and grandaughter’s skulls.

  Wireheads. In the last stages of uplink anorexia from the looks of it. Someone must come in occasionally to feed them intravenously and to change their soiled clothing, but perhaps the war scare had kept their keepers away.

  Footsteps echoed on the stairs. I closed the door and ran up two more flights. Locked doors or abandoned rooms with puddles of water dripping from exposed lathing. Empty Flashback injectors scattered like soft-drink bulbs. This is not a quality neighborhood, I thought.

  I reached the roof ten steps ahead of the pack. What mindless passion the mob had lost in separation from their guru, it had gained in the dark and claustrophobic confines of the stairway. They may have forgotten why they were chasing me, but that made the thought of being caught by them no more attractive.

  Slamming the rotting door behind me, I looked for a lock, something to barricade the passage, anything. There was no lock. Nothing large enough to block the doorway. Frenzied footfalls echoed up the last flight of stairs.

  I looked around the rooftop: miniature uplink dishes growing like inverted, rusty toadstools, a line of wash that looked as if it had been forgotten years before, the decomposed corpses of a dozen pigeons, and an ancient Vikken Scenic.

  I made it to the EMV before the first of the mob came through the doorway. The thing was a museum piece. Dirt and pigeon droppings all but obscured the windshield. Someone had removed the original repellors and replaced them with cut-rate black market units that would never pass inspection. The Perspex canopy was fused and darkened in the back, as if someone had used it for target practice with a weapons laser.

  More to the point of the immediate moment, however, was the fact that it had no palmlock, merely a key lock which had been forced long before. I threw myself into the dusty seat and tried to slam the door; it would not latch, but hung half-open. I did not speculate on the small odds of the thing starting or the even smaller odds of my being able to negotiate with the mob as they dragged me out and down … if they didn’t merely throw me over the edge of the building. I could hear a bass roar of shouts as the mob worked itself to a frenzy in the square below.

  The first people onto the roof were a burly man in khaki tech overalls, a slim man in the latest Tau Ceti fashion-approved matte black suit, a terribly obese woman waving what looked to be a long wrench, and a short man in Renaissance V Self-Defense Force green.

  I held the door open with my left hand and slipped Gladstone’s override microcard into the ignition diskey. The battery whined, the transition starter ground away, and I closed my eyes and made a wish that the circuits were solar charged and self-repairing.

  Fists pounded on the roof, palms slapped against the warped Perspex near my face, and someone tugged open the door despite my best efforts to keep it closed. The shouting of the distant crowd was like the background noise an ocean makes; the screaming of the group on the rooftop more like the cry of oversized gulls.

  The lift circuits caught, repellors flared dust and pigeon crap over the rooftop mob, and I slipped my hand into the omni controller, shifted back and to the right, and felt the old Scenic lift, wobble, dip, and lift again.

  I banked right out over the square, only half aware that dashboard alarms were chiming and that someone was still dangling from the open door. I swooped low, smiling inadvertently as I saw Shrike Cult orator Reynolds duck and the crowd scatter, and then pulled up over the fountain while banking steeply to the left. />
  My screaming passenger did not let go of the door, but the door came off, so the effect was the same. I noticed that it had been the obese woman in the instant before she and the door hit the water eight meters below, splashing Reynolds and the crowd. I twitched the EMV higher and listened to the black market lift units groan about the decision.

  Angry calls from local traffic control joined the chorus of dashboard alarm voices, the car staggered as it shifted to police override, but I touched the diskey with my microcard again and nodded as control returned to the omni stick. I flew over the oldest, poorest section of the city, keeping close to the rooftops and banking around spires and clock towers to stay below police radar. On a normal day, the traffic control cops riding personal lift packs and stick skimmers would have swooped down and tangle-netted me long before this, but from the look of the crowds in the streets below and the riots I glimpsed near public farcaster terminexes, it didn’t look much like a normal day.

  The Scenic began to warn me that its time in the air was numbered in seconds now, I felt the starboard repellor give with a sickening lurch, and I worked hard with the omni and floor throttle to wobble the junker down to a landing in a small parking lot between a canal and a large, soot-stained building. This place was at least ten klicks from the square where Reynolds had incited the mob, so I felt safer taking my chances on the ground … not that there was much choice at this moment.

  Sparks flew, metal tore, parts of the rear quarter panel, flare skirt, and front access panel disassociated themselves from the rest of the vehicle, and I was down and stopped two meters from the wall overlooking the canal. I walked away from the Vikken with as much nonchalance as I could muster.

  The streets were still in the control of the crowds—not yet coalesced into a mob here—and the canals were a tangle of small boats, so I strolled into the closest public building to get out of sight. The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight … and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.

  I was wandering through the anteroom, checking titles and wondering idly whether the works of Salmud Brevy could be found here, when a small, wizened man in an outdated wool and fiberplastic suit approached me. “Sir,” he said, “it has been too long since we’ve had the pleasure of your company!”

  I nodded, sure that I had never met this man, never visited this place.

  “Three years, no? At least three years! My, how time flies.” The little man’s voice was little more than a whisper—the hushed tones of someone who has spent most of his life in libraries—but there was no denying the undertone of excitement there. “I’m sure you would like to go straight to the collection,” he said, standing aside as if to let me pass.

  “Yes,” I said, bowing slightly. “But after you.”

  The little man—I was almost sure that he was an archivist—seemed pleased to be leading the way. He chatted aimlessly about new acquisitions, recent appraisals, and visits of Web scholars as we walked through chamber after chamber of books: high, multitiered vaults of books, intimate, mahogany-lined corridors of books, vast chambers where our footfalls echoed off distant walls of books. I saw no one else during the walk.

  We crossed a tiled walkway with wrought-iron railings above a sunken pool of books where deep blue containment fields protected scrolls, parchments, crumbling maps, illuminated manuscripts, and ancient comic books from the ravages of atmosphere. The archivist opened a low door, thicker than most airlock entrances, and we were in a small, windowless room wherein thick drapes half-concealed alcoves lined with ancient volumes. A single leather chair sat on a pre-Hegira Persian carpet, and a glass case held a few scraps of vacuum-pressed parchment.

  “Do you plan to publish soon, sir?” asked the little man.

  “What?” I turned away from the case. “Oh … no,” I said.

  The archivist touched his chin with a small fist. “You’ll pardon me for saying so, sir, but it is a terrible waste if you do not. Even in our few discussions over the years, it has become apparent that you are one of the finest … if not the finest … Keats scholars in the Web.” He sighed and took a step back. “Excuse me for saying so, sir.”

  I stared at him. “That’s all right,” I said, suddenly knowing very well who he thought I was and why that person had come here.

  “You’ll wish to be left alone, sir.”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  The archivist bowed slightly and backed out of the room, closing the thick door all but a crack. The only light came from three subtle lamps recessed in the ceiling: perfect for reading, but not so bright as to compromise the cathedral quality of the little room. The only sound came from the archivist’s receding footsteps far away. I walked to the case and set my hands on the edges, careful not to smudge the glass.

  The first Keats retrieval cybrid, “Johnny,” obviously had come here frequently during his few years of life in the Web. Now I remembered mention of a library somewhere on Renaissance V in something Brawne Lamia had said. She had followed her client and lover here early in the investigation of his “death.” Later, after he had truly been killed except for the recorded persona in her Schrön loop, she had visited this place. She had told the others of two poems the first cybrid had visited daily in his ongoing effort to understand his own reason for existence … and for dying.

  These two original manuscripts were in the case. The first was—I thought—a rather saccharine love poem beginning “The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!” The second was better, although contaminated with the romantic morbidity of an overly romantic and morbid age:

  This living hand, now warm and capable

  Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

  And in the icy silence of the tomb,

  So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

  That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

  So in my veins red life might stream again,

  And thou be consciencc-calm’d—sec here it is—

  I hold it towards you.

  Brawne Lamia had taken this as almost a personal message from her dead lover, the father of her unborn child. I stared at the parchment, lowering my face so that my breath gently fogged the glass.

  It was not a message across time to Brawne, nor even a contemporary lament for Fanny, my single and dearest soul’s desire. I stared at the faded words—the handwriting carefully executed, the letters still quite legible across the gulfs of time and language evolution—and remembered writing them in December 1819, scrawling this fragment of verse on a page of the satirical “faery tale” I had just started—The Cap and Bells, or, The Jealousies. A terrible piece of nonsense, quite properly abandoned after the period of slight amusement it gave me.

  The “This living hand” fragment had been one of those poetic rhythms which echoes like an unresolved chord in the mind, driving one to see it in ink, on paper. It, in turn, had been an echo of an earlier, unsatisfactory line … the eighteenth, I believe … in my second attempt to tell the tale of the sun god Hyperion’s fall. I remember that the first version … the one undoubtedly still printed wherever my literary bones are left out on show like the mummified remains of some inadvertent saint, sunk in concrete and glass below the altar of literature … the first version had read:

  … Who alive can say,

  “Thou art no Poet; mayst not tell thy dreams”?

  Since every man whose soul is not a clod

  Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved,

  And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

  Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse

  Be Poet’s or Fanatic’s will be known

  When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

  I liked the scrawled version, with its sense of haunting and of being haunted, and would have substituted it for “When this warm scribe my hand …” even if it meant revising it a bit and
adding fourteen lines to the already too-long opening passage of the first Canto.…

  I staggered backward to the chair and sat, lowering my face to my hands. I was sobbing. I did not know why. I could not quit.

  For a long while after the tears ceased flowing, I sat there, thinking, remembering. Once, it may have been hours later, I heard the echo of footsteps coming from afar, pausing respectfully outside my small room, and then dwindling to distance once again.

  I realized that all of the books in all of the alcoves were works of “Mister John Keats, five feet high,” as I had once written—John Keats, the consumptive poet who had asked only that his tomb be nameless except for the inscription:

  Here lies One

  Whose Name was writ in Water.

  I did not stand to look at the books, to read them. I did not have to.

  Alone in the stillness and leather-and-aged-paper musk of the library, alone in my sanctuary of self and not-self, I closed my eyes. I did not sleep. I dreamed.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The datumplane analog of Brawne Lamia and her retrieval persona lover strike the surface of the megasphere like two cliff divers striking the surface of a turbulent sea. There is a quasi-electrical shock, a sense of having passed through a resisting membrane, and they are inside, the stars are gone, and Brawne’s eyes widen as she stares at an information environment infinitely more complex than any datasphere.

  The dataspheres traveled by human operators are often compared to complex cities of information: towers of corporate and government data, highways of process flow, broad avenues of datumplane interaction, subways of restricted travel, high walls of security ice with microphage guards on prowl, and the visible analog of every microwave flow and counterflow a city lives by.

  This is more. Much more.

  The usual datasphere city analogs are there, but small, so very small, as dwarfed by the scope of the megasphere as true cities would be on a world seen from orbit.