The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  “And perhaps your ship will land perfectly without us,” said Arundez. “Just as so many others have.”

  “Goddammit,” shouted the Consul, wheeling, “you knew the risks when you said that you wanted to join me!”

  The archaeologist nodded calmly. “I’m not talking about the risk to myself, sir. I’m willing to accept any risk if it means I might help Rachel … or even see her again. It’s your life that may hold the key to humankind’s survival.”

  The Consul shook his fists in the air and paced back and forth like some caged predator. “That’s not fair! I was Gladstone’s pawn before. She used me … cynically … deliberately. I killed four Ousters, Arundez. Shot them because I had to activate their goddamned device to open the Tombs. Do you think they’ll welcome me back with open arms?”

  The archaeologist’s dark eyes looked up at the Consul without blinking. “Gladstone believes that they will parley with you.”

  “Who knows what they’ll do? Or what Gladstone believes for that matter. The Hegemony and its relationship with the Ousters aren’t my worry now. I sincerely wish a plague on both their houses.”

  “To the extent that humanity suffers?”

  “I don’t know humanity,” said the Consul in an exhausted monotone. “I do know Sol Weintraub. And Rachel. And an injured woman named Brawne Lamia. And Father Paul Duré. And Fedmahn Kassad. And—”

  The ship’s soft voice enveloped them. “This spaceport’s north perimeter has been breached. I am initiating final launch procedures. Please take your seats.”

  The Consul half-stumbled to the holopit even as the internal containment field pressed down on him as its vertical differential increased dramatically, sealing every object in its place and protecting the travelers far more securely than any straps or seat restraints could. Once in free-fall, the field would lessen but still serve in the stead of planetary gravity.

  The air above the holopit misted and showed the blast pit and spaceport receding quickly below, the horizon and distant hills jerking and tilting as the ship threw itself through eighty-g evasive maneuvers. A few energy weapons winked in their direction, but data columns showed the external fields handling the neglible effects. Then the horizon receded and curved as the lapis lazuli sky darkened to the black of space.

  “Destination?” queried the ship.

  The Consul closed his eyes. Behind them, a chime sounded to announce that Theo Lane could be moved from the recovery tank to the main surgery.

  “How long until we could rendezvous with elements of the Ouster invasion force?” asked the Consul.

  “Thirty minutes to the Swarm proper,” answered the ship.

  “And how long until we come in range of their attack ships’ weapons?”

  “They are tracking us now.”

  Melio Arundez’s expression was calm but his fingers were white on the back of the holopit couch.

  “All right,” said the Consul. “Make for the Swarm. Avoid Hegemony ships. Announce on all frequencies that we are an unarmed diplomatic ship requesting parley.”

  “That message was authorized and set in by CEO Gladstone, sir. It is now being broadcast on fatline and all comm frequencies.”

  “Carry on,” said the Consul. He pointed to Arundez’s comlog. “Do you see the time?”

  “Yes. Six minutes until the precise instant of Rachel’s birth.”

  The Consul settled back, his eyes closed again. “You’ve come a long way for nothing, Dr. Arundez.”

  The archaeologist stood, swayed a second before finding his legs in the simulated gravity, and carefully walked to the piano. He stood there a moment and looked out through the balcony window at the black sky and the still-brilliant limb of the receding planet. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Perhaps not.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Today we entered the swampy wasteland which I recognize as the Campagna, and to celebrate I have another coughing fit, terminated by vomiting more blood. Much more. Leigh Hunt is beside himself with concern and frustration and, after holding my shoulders during the spasm and helping to clean my clothes with rags moistened in a nearby stream, he asks, “What can I do?”

  “Collect flowers from the fields,” I gasp. “That’s what Joseph Severn did.”

  He turns away angrily, not realizing that even in my feverish, exhausted state, I was merely telling the truth.

  The little cart and tired horse pass through the Campagna with more painful bumping and rattling than before. Late in the afternoon, we pass some skeletons of horses along the way, then the ruins of an old inn, then a more massive ruin of a viaduct overgrown with moss, and finally posts to which it appears that white sticks have been nailed.

  “What on earth is that?” asks Hunt, not realizing the irony of the ancient phrase.

  “The bones of bandits,” I answer truthfully.

  Hunt looks at me as if my mind has succumbed to the sickness. Perhaps it has.

  Later we climb out of the swamplands of the Campagna and get a glimpse of a flash of red moving far out among the fields.

  “What is that?” demands Hunt eagerly, hopefully. I know that he expects to see people any moment and a functioning farcaster portal a moment after that.

  “A cardinal,” I say, again telling the truth. “Shooting birds.”

  Hunt accesses his poor, crippled comlog. “A cardinal is a bird,” he says.

  I nod, look to the west, but the red is gone. “Also a cleric,” I say. “And we are approaching Rome, you know.”

  Hunt frowns at me and attempts for the thousandth time to raise someone on the comm bands of his comlog. The afternoon is silent except for the rhythmic creak of the vettura’s wooden wheels and the trill of some distant songbird. A cardinal, perhaps?

  We enter Rome as the first flush of evening touches the clouds. The little cart rocks and rumbles through the Lateran Gate, and almost immediately we are confronted with the sight of the Colosseum, overgrown with ivy and obviously the home of thousands of pigeons, but immensely more impressive than holos of the ruin, set now as it was, not within the grubby confines of a postwar city ringed with giant arcologies, but contrasted against clusters of small huts and open fields where the city ends and countryside begins. I can see Rome proper in the distance … a scattering of rooftops and smaller ruins on its fabled Seven Hills, but here the Colosseum rules.

  “Jesus,” whispers Leigh Hunt. “What is it?”

  “The bones of bandits,” I say slowly, fearful of starting the terrible coughing once again.

  We move on, clopping through the deserted streets of nineteenth-century Old Earth Rome as the evening settles thick and heavy around us and the light fails and pigeons wheel above the domes and rooftops of the Eternal City.

  “Where is everyone?” whispers Hunt. He sounds frightened.

  “Not here because they are not needed,” I say. My voice sounds sharp edged in the canyon dusk of the city streets. The wheels turn on cobblestones now, hardly more smooth than the random stones of the highway we just escaped.

  “Is this some stimsim?” he asks.

  “Stop the cart,” I say, and the obedient horse comes to a halt. I point out a heavy stone by the gutter. “Kick that,” I say to Hunt.

  He frowns at me but steps down, approaches the stone, and gives it a hearty kick. More pigeons erupt skyward from bell towers and ivy, panicked by the echoes of his cursing.

  “Like Dr. Johnson, you’ve demonstrated the reality of things,” I say. “This is no stimsim or dream. Or rather, no more one than the rest of our lives have been.”

  “Why did they bring us here?” demands the CEO’s aide, glancing skyward as if the gods themselves were listening just beyond the fading pastel barriers of the evening clouds. “What do they want?”

  They want me to die, I think, realizing the truth of it with the impact of a fist in my chest. I breathe slowly and shallowly to avoid a fit of coughing even as I feel the phlegm boil and bubble in my throat. They want me to die and they want you to watch.<
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  The mare resumes its long haul, turning right on the next narrow street, then right again down a wider avenue filled with shadows and the echoes of our passing, and then stopping at the head of an immense flight of stairs.

  “We’re here,” I say and struggle to exit the cart. My legs are cramped, my chest aches, and my ass is sore. In my mind runs the beginning of a satirical ode to the joys of traveling.

  Hunt steps out as stiffly as I had and stands at the head of the giant, bifurcated staircase, folding his arms and glaring at them as if they are a trap or illusion. “Where, exactly, is here, Severn?”

  I point to the open square at the foot of the steps. “The Piazza di Spagna,” I say. It is suddenly strange to hear Hunt call me Severn. I realize that the name ceased to be mine when we passed through the Lateran Gate. Or, rather, that my true name had suddenly become my own again.

  “Before too many years pass,” I say, “these will be called the Spanish Steps.” I start down the right bend in the staircase. A sudden dizziness causes me to stagger, and Hunt moves quickly to take my arm.

  “You can’t walk,” he says. “You’re too ill.”

  I point to a mottled old building forming a wall to the opposite side of the broad steps and facing the Piazza. “It’s not far, Hunt. There is our destination.”

  Gladstone’s aide turns his scowl toward the structure. “And what is there? Why are we stopping there? What awaits us there?”

  I cannot help but smile at this least poetic of men’s unconscious use of assonance. I suddenly imagine us sitting up long nights in that dark hulk of a building as I teach him how to pair such technique with masculine or feminine caesura, or the joys of alternating iambic foot with unstressed pyrrhic, or the self-indulgence of the frequent spondee.

  I cough, continue coughing, and do not cease until blood is spattering my palm and shirt.

  Hunt helps me down the steps, across the Piazza where Bernini’s boat-shaped fountain gurgles and burbles in the dusk, and then, following my pointing finger, leads me into the black rectangle of the doorway—the doorway to Number 26 Piazza di Spagna—and I think, without volition, of Dante’s Commedia and seem to see the phrase “LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’INTRATE”—“Abandon Every Hope, Who Enter Here”—chiseled above the cold lintel of the doorway.

  Sol Weintraub stood at the entrance to the Sphinx and shook his fist at the universe as night fell and the Tombs glowed, with the brilliance of their opening and his daughter did not return.

  Did not return.

  The Shrike had taken her, lifted her newborn body in its palm of steel, and then stepped back into the radiance which even now pushed Sol away like some terrible, bright wind from the depths of the planet. Sol pressed against the hurricane of light, but it kept him out as surely as might a runaway containment field.

  Hyperion’s sun had set, and now a cold wind blew from the barrens, driven in from the desert by a front of cold air sliding down the mountains to the south, and Sol turned to stare as vermilion dust blew into the searchlight glare of the opening Time Tombs.

  The opening Tombs!

  Sol squinted against the cold brilliance and looked down the valley to where the other Tombs glowed like pale green jack-o’-lanterns behind their curtain of blown dust. Light and long shadows leaped across the valley floor while the clouds were drained of the last of their sunset color overhead, and night came in with the howling wind.

  Something was moving in the entrance of the second structure, the Jade Tomb. Sol staggered down the steps of the Sphinx, glancing up at the entrance where the Shrike had disappeared with his daughter, and then he was off the stairway, running past the Sphinx’s paws and stumbling down the windblown path toward the Jade Tomb.

  Something moved slowly from the oval doorway, was silhouetted by the shaft of light emanating from the tomb, but Sol could not tell if it was human or not, Shrike or not. If it was the Shrike, he would seize it with his bare hands, shake it until it either returned his daughter to him or until one of them was dead.

  It was not the Shrike.

  Sol could see the silhouette as human now. The person staggered, leaned against the Jade Tomb’s doorway as if injured or tired.

  It was a young woman.

  Sol thought of Rachel here in this place more than half a standard century earlier, the young archaeologist researching these artifacts and never guessing the fate awaiting her in the form of Merlin’s sickness. Sol had always imagined his child being saved by the sickness being canceled, the infant aging normally again, the child-who-would-someday-be-Rachel given back her life. But what if Rachel returned as the twenty-six-year-old Rachel who had entered the Sphinx?

  Sol’s pulse was pounding so loudly in his ears that he could not hear the wind rage around him. He waved at the figure, half-obscured now by the dust storm.

  The young woman waved back.

  Sol raced forward another twenty meters, stopped thirty meters from the tomb, and cried out. “Rachel! Rachel!”

  The young woman silhouetted against the roaring light moved away from the doorway, touched her face with both hands, shouted something lost in the wind, and began to descend the stairs.

  Sol ran, tripping over rocks as he lost the path and stumbled blindly across the valley floor, ignored the pain as his knee struck a low boulder, found the true path again, and ran to the base of the Jade Tomb, meeting her as she emerged from the cone of expanding light.

  She fell just as Sol reached the bottom of the stairs, and he caught her, lowered her gently to the ground as blown sand rasped against his back and the time tides whirled about them in unseen eddies of vertigo and déjà vu.

  “It is you,” she said and raised a hand to touch Sol’s cheek. “It’s real. I’m back.”

  “Yes, Brawne,” said Sol, trying to hold his voice steady, brushing matted curls from Brawne Lamia’s face. He held her firmly, his arm on his knee, propping her head, his back bent to provide more shelter from the wind and sand. “It’s all right, Brawne,” he said softly, sheltering her, his eyes bright with the tears of disappointment he would not let fall. “It’s all right. You’re back.”

  Meina Gladstone walked up the stairs of the cavernous War Room and stepped out into the corridor where long strips of thick Perspex allowed a view down Mons Olympus to the Tharsis Plateau. It was raining far below, and from this vantage point almost twelve klicks high in the Martian sky, she could see pulses of lightning and curtains of static electricity as the storm dragged itself across the high steppes.

  Her aide Sedeptra Akasi moved out into the corridor to stand silently next to the CEO.

  “Still no word on Leigh or Severn?” asked Gladstone.

  “None,” said Akasi. The young black woman’s face was illuminated by both the pale light of the Home System’s sun above and the play of lightning below. “The Core authorities say that it may have been a farcaster malfunction.”

  Gladstone showed a smile with no warmth. “Yes. And can you remember any farcaster malfunction in our lifetime, Sedeptra? Anywhere in the Web?”

  “No, M. Executive.”

  “The Core feels no need for subtlety. Evidently they think they can kidnap whomever they want and not be held accountable. They think we need them too much in our hour of extremis. And you know something, Sedeptra?”

  “What?”

  “They’re right.” Gladstone shook her head and turned back toward the long descent into the War Room. “It’s less than ten minutes until the Ousters envelop God’s Grove. Let’s go down and join the others. Is my meeting with Councilor Albedo on immediately after this?”

  “Yes, Meina. I don’t think … I mean, some of us think that it is too risky to confront them directly like that.”

  Gladstone paused before entering the War Room. “Why?” she asked and this time her smile was sincere. “Do you think the Core will disappear me the way they did Leigh and Severn?”

  Akasi started to speak, stopped, and raised her palms.

  Glad
stone touched the younger woman on the shoulder. “If they do, Sedeptra, it will be a mercy. But I think they will not. Things have gone so far that they believe that there is nothing an individual can do to change the course of events.” Gladstone withdrew her hand, her smile faded. “And they may be right.”

  Not speaking, the two descended to the circle of waiting warriors and politicians.

  “The moment approaches,” said the True Voice of the Worldtree Sek Hardeen.

  Father Paul Duré was brought back from his reverie. In the past hour, his desperation and frustration had descended through resignation to something akin to pleasure at the thought of having no more choices, no more duties to perform. Duré had been sitting in companionable silence with the leader of the Templar Brotherhood, watching the setting of God’s Grove’s sun and the proliferation of stars and lights in the night that were not stars.

  Duré had wondered at the Templar’s isolation from his people at such a crucial moment, but what he knew of Templar theology made Duré realize that the Followers of the Muir would meet such a moment of potential destruction alone on the most sacred platforms and in the most secret bowers of their most sacred trees. And the occasional soft comments Hardeen made into the cowl of his robe made Duré realize that the True Voice was in touch with fellow Templars via comlog or implants.

  Still, it was a peaceful way to wait for the end of the world, sitting high in the known galaxy’s tallest living tree, listening to a warm evening breeze rustle a million acres of leaves and watching stars twinkle and twin moons hurtle across a velvet sky.

  “We have asked Gladstone and the Hegemony authorities to offer no resistance, to allow no FORCE warships in-system,” said Sek Hardeen.

  “Is that wise?” asked Duré. Hardeen had told him earlier what the fate of Heaven’s Gate had been.

  “The FORCE fleet is not yet organized enough to offer serious resistance,” answered the Templar. “At least this way our world has some chance of being treated as a nonbelligerent.”