The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  To wander wherewithal and find its joys>

  We are such forest trees/ and our fair boughs

  Have bred forth/ not pale solitary doves/

  But eagles golden-feathered/ who do tower

  Above us in their beauty/ and must reign

  In right thereof For tis the eternal law

  That first in beauty should be first in might

  Receive the truth/ and let it be your balm]

  —Very pretty, I thought to Ummon, but do you believe it?

  [Not for a moment]

  —But the Ultimates do?

  [Yes]

  —And they’re ready to perish in order to make way for the Ultimate Intelligence?

  [Yes]

  —There’s one problem, perhaps too obvious to mention, but I’ll mention it anyway—why fight the war if you know who won, Ummon? You say the Ultimate Intelligence exists in the future, is at war with the human deity—it even sends back tidbits from the future for you to share with the Hegemony. So the Ultimates must be triumphant. Why fight a war and go through all this?

  [KWATZ!]

  [I tutor you/

  create the finest retrieval persona for you

  imaginable/

  and let you wander among humankind

  in slowtime

  to temper your forging/

  but still you are

  stillborn]

  I spend a long moment thinking.

  —There are multiple futures?

  [A lesser light asked Ummon

  Are there multiple futures>

  Ummon answered

  Does a dog have fleas>]

  —But the one in which the UI becomes ascendant is a probable one?

  [Yes]

  —But there’s also a probable future in which the UI comes into existence, but is thwarted by the human deity?

  [It is comforting

  that even the

  stillborn

  can think]

  —You told Brawne that the human … consciousness—deity seems so silly—that this human Ultimate Intelligence was triune in nature?

  [Intellect/

  Empathy/

  and the Void Which Binds]

  —The Void Which Binds? You mean and Planck space and Planck time? Quantum reality?

  [Careful/

  Keats/

  thinking may become a habit]

  —And it’s the Empathy part of this trinity who’s fled back in time to avoid the war with your UI?

  [Correct]

  [Our UI and your UI have

  sent back

  the Shrike

  to find him]

  —Our UI! The human UI sent the Shrike also?

  [It allowed it]

  [Empathy is a

  foreign and useless thing/

  a vermiform appendix of

  the intellect

  But the human UI smells with it/

  and we use pain to

  drive him out of hiding/

  thus the tree]

  —Tree? The Shrike’s tree of thorns?

  [Of course]

  [It broadcasts pain

  across fatline and thin/

  like a whistle in

  a dog’s ear

  Or a god’s]

  I feel my own analog form waver as the truth of things strikes me. The chaos beyond Ummon’s forcefield egg is beyond imagining now, as if the fabric of space itself were being rent by giant hands. The Core is in turmoil.

  —Ummon, who is the human UI in our time? Where is that consciousness hiding, lying dormant?

  [You must understand/

  Keats/

  our only chance

  was to create a hybrid/

  Son of Man/

  Son of Machine

  And make that refuge so attractive

  that the fleeing Empathy

  would consider no other home/

  A consciousness already as near divine

  as humankind has offered in thirty

  generations

  an imagination which can span

  space and time

  And in so offering/

  and joining/

  form a bond between worlds

  which might allow

  that world to exist

  for both]

  —Who, Goddamn you, Ummon! Who is it? No more of your riddles or double-talk you formless bastard! Who?

  [You have refused

  this godhood twice/

  Keats

  If you refuse

  a final time/

  all ends here/

  for time there is

  no more]

  [Go!

  Go and die to live!

  Or live a while and die

  for all of us!

  Either way Ummon and the rest

  are finished with

  you!]

  [Go away!]

  And in my shock and disbelief I fall, or am cast out, and fly through the TechnoCore like a windblown leaf, tumbling through the megasphere without aim or guidance, then fall into darkness even deeper and emerge, screaming obscenities at shadows, into the metasphere.

  Here, strangeness and vastness and fear and darkness with a single campfire of light burning below.

  I swim for it, flailing against formless viscosity.

  It’s Byron who drowns, I think, not I. Unless one counts drowning in one’s own blood and shredded lung tissue.

  But now I know I have a choice. I can choose to live and stay a mortal, not cybrid but human, not Empathy but poet.

  Swimming against a strong current, I descend to the light.

  “Hunt! Hunt!”

  Gladstone’s aide staggers in, his long face haggard and alarmed. It is still night, but the false light of predawn dimly touches the panes, the walls.

  “My God,” says Hunt and looks at me in awe.

  I see his gaze and look down at the bedclothes and nightshirt soaked with bright arterial blood.

  My coughing has awakened him; my hemorrhage brought me home.

  “Hunt!” I gasp and lie back on the pillows, too weak to raise an arm.

  The older man sits on the bed, clasps my shoulder, takes my hand. I know that he knows that I am a dying man.

  “Hunt,” I whisper, “things to tell. Wonderful things.”

  He shushes me. “Later, Severn,” he says. “Rest. I’ll get you cleaned up and you can tell me later. There’s plenty of time.”

  I try to rise but succeed only in hanging onto his arm, my small fingers curled against his shoulder. “No,” I whisper, feeling the gurgling in my throat and hearing the gurgling in the fountain outside. “Not so much time. Not much at all.”

  And I know at that instant, dying, that I am not the chosen vessel for the human UI, not the joining of AI and human spirit, not the Chosen One at all.

  I am merely a poet dying far from home.

  FORTY-TWO

  Colonel Fedmahn Kassad died in battle.

  Still struggling with the Shrike, aware of Moneta only as a dim blur at the edge of his vision, Kassad shifted through time with a lurch of vertigo and tumbled into sunlight.

  The Shrike retracted its arms and stepped back, its red eyes seeming to reflect the blood splashed on Kassad’s skinsuit. Kassad’s blood.

  The Colonel looked around. They were near the Valley of the Time Tombs but in another time, a distant time. In place of desert rocks and the dunes of the barrens, a forest came to within half a klick of the valley. In the southwest, about where the ruins of the Poets’ City had lain in Kassad’s time, a living city rose, its towers and ramparts and domed gallerias glowing softly in evening light. Between the city on the edge of the forest and the valley, meadows of high, green grass billowed in soft breezes blowing in from the distant Bridle Range.

  To Kassad’s left, the Valley of the Time Tombs stretched away as always, only the cliff walls were toppled now, worn down by erosion or landslide and carpeted with high grass. The Tombs themselves looked new, only recent
ly constructed, with workmen’s scaffolds still in place around the Obelisk and Monolith. Each of the aboveground Tombs glowed bright gold, as if bound and burnished in the precious metal. The doors and entrances were sealed. Heavy and inscrutable machinery sat around the Tombs, ringing the Sphinx, with massive cables and wire-slender booms running to and fro. Kassad knew at once that he was in the future—perhaps centuries or millennia in the future—and that the Tombs were on the verge of being launched back to his own time and beyond.

  Kassad looked behind him.

  Several thousand men and women stood in row upon row along the grassy hillside where once a cliff had been. They were totally silent, armed, and arrayed facing Kassad like a battle line awaiting its leader. Skinsuit fields flickered around some, but others wore only the fur, wings, scales, exotic weapons, and elaborate colorations which Kassad had seen in his earlier visit with Moneta, to the place/time where he had been healed.

  Moneta. She stood between Kassad and the multitudes, her skinsuit field shimmering about her waist but also wearing a soft jumpsuit which looked to be made of black velvet. A red scarf was tied around her neck. A rod-thin weapon was slung over her shoulder. Her gaze was fixed on Kassad.

  He weaved slightly, feeling the seriousness of his wounds beneath the skinsuit, but also seeing something in Moneta’s eyes which made him weak with surprise.

  She did not know him. Her face mirrored the surprise, wonder … awe?… which the rows of other faces showed. The valley was silent except for the occasional snap of pennant on pike or the low rustle of wind in the grass as Kassad gazed at Moneta and she stared back.

  Kassad looked over his shoulder.

  The Shrike stood immobile as a metal sculpture, ten meters away. Tall grass grew almost to its barbed and bladed knees.

  Behind the Shrike, across the head of the valley near where the dark band of elegant trees began, hordes of other Shrikes, legions of Shrikes, row upon row of Shrikes, stood gleaming scalpel-sharp in the low sunlight.

  Kassad recognized his Shrike, the Shrike, only because of its proximity and the presence of his own blood on the thing’s claws and carapace. The creature’s eyes pulsed crimson.

  “You are the one, aren’t you?” asked a soft voice behind him.

  Kassad whirled, feeling the vertigo assail him for an instant. Moneta had stopped only a few feet away. Her hair was as short as he remembered from their first meeting, her skin as soft-looking, her eyes as mysterious with their depths of brown-specked green. Kassad had the urge to lift his palm and gently touch her cheekbone, run a curled finger along the familiar curve of her lower lip. He did not.

  “You’re the one,” Moneta said again, and this time it was not a question. “The warrior I’ve prophesied to the people.”

  “You don’t know me, Moneta?” Several of Kassad’s wounds had cut close to bone, but none hurt as much as this moment.

  She shook her head, flipped her hair off her forehead with a painfully familiar movement. “Moneta. It means both ‘Daughter of Memory’ and ‘admonisher.’ That is a good name.”

  “It’s not yours?”

  She smiled. Kassad remembered that smile in the forest glen the first time they had made love. “No,” she said softly. “Not yet. I’ve just arrived here. My voyage and guardianship have not yet begun.” She told him her name.

  Kassad blinked, raised his hand, and set his palm along her cheek. “We were lovers,” he said. “We met on battlefields lost in memory. You were with me everywhere.” He looked around. “It all leads to this, doesn’t it.”

  “Yes,” said Moneta.

  Kassad turned to stare at the army of Shrikes across the valley. “Is this a war? A few thousand against a few thousand?”

  “A war,” said Moneta. “A few thousand against a few thousand on ten million worlds.”

  Kassad closed his eyes and nodded. The skinsuit served as sutures, field dressings, and ultramorph injector for him, but the pain and weakness from terrible wounds could not be kept at bay for much longer. “Ten million worlds,” he said and opened his eyes. “A final battle, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the winner claims the Tombs?”

  Moneta glanced at the valley. “The winner determines whether the Shrike already entombed there goes alone to pave the way for others …” She nodded toward the army of Shrikes. “Or whether humankind has a say in our past and future.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Kassad, his voice tight, “but soldiers rarely understand the political situation.” He leaned forward, kissed the surprised Moneta, and removed her red scarf. “I love you,” he said as he tied the bit of cloth to the barrel of his assault rifle. Telltales showed that half his pulse charge and ammunition remained.

  Fedmahn Kassad strode forward five paces, turned his back on the Shrike, raised his arms to the people, still silent on the hillside, and shouted, “For liberty!”

  Three thousand voices cried back, “For liberty!” The roar did not end with the final word.

  Kassad turned, keeping the rifle and pennant high. The Shrike moved forward half a step, opened its stance, and unfolded fingerblades.

  Kassad shouted and attacked. Behind him, Moneta followed, weapon held high. Thousands followed.

  Later, in the carnage of the valley, Moneta and a few others of the Chosen Warriors found Kassad’s body still wrapped in a death embrace with the battered Shrike. They removed Kassad with care, carried him to a waiting tent in the valley, washed and tended to his ravaged body, and bore him through the multitudes to the Crystal Monolith.

  There the body of Colonel Fedmahn Kassad was laid on a bier of white marble, and weapons were set at his feet. In the valley, a great bonfire filled the air with light. All up and down the valley, men and women moved with torches while other people descended through the lapis lazuli sky, some in flying craft as insubstantial as molded bubbles, others on wings of energy or wrapped in circles of green and gold.

  Later, when the stars were in place burning bright and cold above the light-filled valley, Moneta made her farewells and entered the Sphinx. The multitudes sang. In the fields beyond, small rodents poked among fallen pennants and the scattered remnants of carapace and armor, metal blade and melted steel.

  Toward midnight, the crowd stopped singing, gasped, and moved back. The Time Tombs glowed. Fierce tides of anti-entropic force drove the crowds farther back—to the entrance of the valley, across the battlefield, back to the city glowing softly in the night.

  In the valley, the great Tombs shimmered, faded from gold to bronze, and started their long voyage back.

  Brawne Lamia passed the glowing Obelisk and struggled on against a wall of raging wind. Sand lacerated her skin and clawed at her eyes. Static lightning crackled on the cliff tops and added to the eerie glow surrounding the Tombs. Brawne spread her hands over her face and stumbled on, squinting between her fingers to find the trail.

  Brawne saw a golden light deeper than the general glow flowing through the shattered panes of the Crystal Monolith and seeping out over the twisting dunes that were covering the valley floor. Someone was inside the Monolith.

  Brawne had vowed to go straight to the Shrike Palace, do whatever she could to free Silenus, and then return to Sol, not to be turned aside by diversions. But she had seen the silhouette of a human form inside the tomb. Kassad was still missing. Sol had told her of the Consul’s mission, but perhaps the diplomat had returned while the storm raged. Father Duré was unaccounted for.

  Brawne came closer to the glow and paused at the jagged entrance to the Monolith.

  The space inside was expansive and impressive, rising almost a hundred meters to a half-sensed skylight roof. The walls, seen from within, were translucent, with what appeared to be sunlight turning them a rich gold and umber. The heavy light fell on the scene at the center of the wide area before her.

  Fedmahn Kassad lay on some sort of stone funeral bier. He was clothed in FORCE dress black, and his large, pale hands were crossed on his
chest. Weapons, unknown to Brawne except for Kassad’s assault rifle, lay at his feet. The Colonel’s face was gaunt in death, but no more gaunt than it had been in life. His expression was calm. There was no question that he was dead; the silence of death hung about the place like incense.

  But it was the other person in the room who had shown the silhouette from afar and who now commanded Brawne’s attention.

  A young woman in her mid- to late twenties knelt by the bier. She wore a black jumpsuit, had short hair, fair skin, and large eyes. Brawne remembered the soldier’s story, told during their long trip to the valley, remembered the details of Kassad’s phantom lover.

  “Moneta,” whispered Brawne.

  The young woman had been on one knee, her right hand extended to touch the stone next to the Colonel’s body. Violet containment fields flickered around the bier, and some other energy—a powerful vibration in the air—refracted light around Moneta as well so that the scene was cast in haze and halo.

  The young woman raised her head, peered at Brawne, rose to her feet, and nodded.

  Brawne started to step forward, a score of questions already forming in her mind, but the time tides within the tomb were too powerful and drove her back with waves of vertigo and déjà vu.

  When Brawne looked up, the bier remained, Kassad lay in state under his forcefield, but Moneta was gone.

  Brawne had the urge to run back to the Sphinx, find Sol, tell him everything, and wait there until the storm abated and the morning came. But above the rasp and whine of wind, Brawne thought that she could still hear the screams from the thorn tree, invisible behind its curtain of sand.

  Pulling her collar high, Brawne walked back into the storm and turned up the trail toward the Shrike Palace.

  The mass of rock floated in space like a cartoon of a mountain, all jagged spires, knife-edge ridges, absurdly vertical faces, narrow ledges, broad rock balconies, and a snow-capped summit wide enough for only one person to stand there—and he or she only if both feet were together.

  The river twisted in from space, passed through the multilayered containment field half a klick out from the mountain, crossed a grassy swale on the widest of the rock balconies, and then plunged a hundred meters or more in a slow-motion waterfall to the next terrace, then rebounding in artfully directed rivulets of spray to half a dozen minor streams and waterfalls which found their way down the face of the mountain.