The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  Singh pulled a ceremonial fléchette pistol from his tunic and set it against the woman’s breast. “I am sorry, M. Executive. But I serve the Hegemony and …”

  Gladstone stepped back with her hand to her mouth as Admiral Kushwant Singh stopped speaking, stared sightlessly for a second, and fell to the grass. The fléchette pistol tumbled into the weeds.

  Morpurgo stepped forward to retrieve it, tucking it into his belt before he put away the deathwand in his hand.

  “You killed him,” said the CEO. “If he wouldn’t cooperate, I’d planned to leave him here. Maroon him on Kastrop-Rauxel.”

  “We couldn’t take the chance,” said the General, pulling the body farther from the farcaster. “Everything depends upon the next few hours.”

  Gladstone looked at her old friend. “You’re willing to go through with it?”

  “We have to,” said Morpurgo. “It will be our last chance to get rid of this yoke of oppression. I’ll give the deployment orders at once and hand over sealed orders in person. It will take most of the fleet …”

  “My God,” whispered Meina Gladstone, looking down at the body of Admiral Singh. “I’m doing all of this on the strength of a dream.”

  “Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Death is not, I discovered, a pleasant experience. Leaving the familiar rooms on the Piazza di Spagna and the rapidly cooling body there is similar to being thrust out in the night by fire or flood from the familiar warmth of one’s home. The rush of shock and displacement is severe. Thrown headlong into the metasphere, I experience the same sense of shame and sudden, awkward revelation which we have all had in our dreams when we realize that we have forgotten to get dressed and have come naked to some public place or social gathering.

  Naked is the correct word new, as I struggle to keep some shape to my tattered analog persona. I manage to concentrate sufficiently to form this almost random electron cloud of memories and associations into a reasonable simulacrum of the human I had been—or at least the human whose memories I had shared.

  Mister John Keats, five feet high.

  The metasphere is no less a frightening place than before—worse now that I have no mortal shelter to flee to. Vast shapes move beyond dark horizons, sounds echo in the Void Which Binds like footsteps on tile in an abandoned castle. Under and behind everything there is a constant and unnerving rumble like carriage wheels on a highway made of slate.

  Poor Hunt. I am tempted to return to him, pop in like Marley’s ghost to assure him that I am better off than I look, but Old Earth is a dangerous place for me right now: the Shrike’s presence burns on the metasphere datumplane there like flame on black velvet.

  The Core summons me with greater force, but that is even more dangerous. I remember Ummon destroying the other Keats in front of Brawne Lamia—squeezing the analog persona to him until it simply dissolved, the basic Core memory of the man deliquescing like a salted slug.

  No thank you.

  I have chosen death to godhood, but I have chores to do before I sleep.

  The metasphere frightens me, the Core frightens me more, the dark tunnels of the datasphere singularities I must travel terrify me to my analog bones. But there is nothing for it.

  I sweep into the first black cone, swirling around like a metaphorical leaf in an all-too-real whirlpool, emerging on the proper datumplane, but too dizzy and disoriented to do anything but sit there—visible to any Core AI accessing these ROMwork ganglia or phage routines residing in the violet crevices of any of these data mountain ranges—but the chaos in the TechnoCore saves me here: the great Core personalities are too busy laying siege to their own personal Troys to watch their back doors.

  I find the datasphere access codes I want and the synapse umbilicals I need, and it is the work of a microsecond to follow old paths down to Tau Ceti Center, Government House, the infirmary there, and the drug-induced dreams of Paul Duré.

  One thing my persona does exceptionally well is dream, and I discover quite by accident that my memories of my Scottish tour make a pleasant dreamscape in which to convince the priest to flee. As an Englishman and freethinker, I once had been opposed to anything which smacked of popery, but one thing must be said in tribute to the Jesuits—they are taught obedience even above logic, and for once this stands all of humankind in good stead. Duré does not ask why when I tell him to go … he awakes like a good boy, wraps a blanket around him, and goes.

  Meina Gladstone thinks of me as Joseph Severn but she accepts my message as if it is being delivered to her by God. I want to tell her no, I am not the One, I am only He Who Comes Before, but the message is the thing, so I deliver that and go.

  Passing through the Core on my way to Hyperion’s metasphere, I catch the burning-metal whiff of civil war and glimpse a great light which might well be Ummon in the process of being extinguished. The old Master, if indeed it is he, does not cite koans as he dies, but screams in agony as sincerely as any conscious entity ever has who is in the process of being fed to the ovens.

  I hurry on.

  The farcaster connection to Hyperion is tenuous at best: a single military farcaster portal and a single, damaged JumpShip in a shrinking perimeter of war-torn Hegemony ships. The singularity containment sphere cannot be protected from Ouster attacks for longer than a few minutes more. The Hegemony torchship carrying the Core deathwand device is preparing to translate in-system even as I come through and find my bearings in the limited datasphere level which allows observation. I pause to watch what happens next.

  “Christ,” said Melio Arundez, “Meina Gladstone’s coming through on a priority-one squirt.”

  Theo Lane joined the older man as they watched the override data mist the air above the holopit. The Consul came down the iron spiral staircase from the bedroom where he had gone to brood. “Another message from TC2?” he snapped.

  “Not to us specifically,” said Theo, reading the red codes as they formed and faded. “It’s an override fatline transmission to everyone, everywhere.”

  Arundez lowered himself into the pit cushions. “Something’s very wrong. Has the CEO ever broadcast on total wideband before?”

  “Never,” said Theo Lane. “The energy needed just to code such a squirt would be incredible.”

  The Consul stepped closer and pointed to the codes now disappearing. “It’s not a squirt. Look, it’s a real-time transmission.”

  Theo shook his head. “We’re talking transmission values of several hundred million gigaelectron volts here.”

  Arundez whistled. “At even a hundred million GeV, it’d better be important.”

  “A general surrender,” said Theo. “It’s the only thing that would call for a universal real-time broadcast. Gladstone’s sending it to the Ousters, Outback worlds, and overrun planets as well as the Web. It must be carried on all comm frequencies, HTV, and datasphere bands too. It must be a surrender.”

  “Shut up,” said the Consul. He had been drinking.

  The Consul had started drinking immediately upon his return from the Tribunal, and his temper, which had been foul even as Theo and Arundez were slapping him on the back and celebrating his survival, had not improved after the lift-off, clearance of the Swarm, and the two hours he spent alone drinking while they accelerated toward Hyperion.

  “Meina Gladstone won’t surrender,” slurred the Consul. The bottle of Scotch was still in his hand. “Just watch.”

  On the torchship HS Stephen Hawking, the twenty-third Hegemony spacecraft to carry the revered classical scientist’s name, General Arthur Morpurgo looked up from the C3 board and hushed his two bridge officers. Normally this class of torchship carried a crew of seventy-five. Now, with the Core deathwand device loaded in the weapons bay and armed, Morpurgo and four volunteers were the total crew. Displays and discreet computer voices assured them that the Stephen Hawking was on course, on time, and accelerating steadily toward ne
ar-quantum velocities and the military farcaster portal stationed at LaGrange Point Three between Madhya and its oversized moon. The Madhya portal opened directly to the fiercely defended Hyperion-space farcaster.

  “One minute eighteen seconds to translation point,” said Bridge Officer Salumun Morpurgo. The General’s son.

  Morpurgo nodded and keyed up the in-system wideband transmission. Bridge projections were busy enough with mission data, so the General allowed voice-only on the CEO’s broadcast. He smiled despite himself. What would Meina say if she knew he was at the helm of the Stephen Hawking? Better she didn’t know. There was nothing else he could do. He preferred not to see the results of his precise, hand-delivered orders of the past two hours.

  Morpurgo looked at his oldest son with pride so fierce it bordered on pain. There were only so many torchship-rated personnel he could approach about this mission, and his son had been the first to volunteer. If nothing else, the Morpurgo family’s enthusiasm might have allayed some Core suspicions.

  “My fellow citizens,” Gladstone was saying, “this is my final broadcast to you as your Chief Executive Officer.

  “As you know, the terrible war which has already devastated three of our worlds and is about to fall upon a fourth, has been reported as an invasion by the Ouster Swarms.

  “This is a lie.”

  The comm bands flared with interference and went dead. “Go to fatline,” said General Morpurgo.

  “One minute three seconds to translation point,” intoned his son.

  Gladstone’s voice returned, filtered and slightly blurred by fatline encrypting and decoding. “… to realize that our ancestors … and we ourselves … had made a Faustian bargain with a power not concerned with the fate of humankind.

  “The Core is behind the current invasion.

  “The Core is responsible for our long, comfortable dark age of the soul.

  “The Core is responsible for the ongoing attempt to destroy humanity, to remove us from the universe and replace us with a god-machine of their own devising.”

  Bridge Officer Salumun Morpurgo never lifted his eyes from the circle of instruments. “Thirty-eight seconds to translation point.”

  Morpurgo nodded. The other two crewmen on the C3 bridge showed faces sheened with sweat. The General realized that his own face was wet.

  “… have proven that the Core resides … has always resided … in the dark places between farcaster portals. They believe themselves to be our masters. As long as the Web exists, as long as our beloved Hegemony is joined by farcaster, they will be our masters.”

  Morpurgo glanced at his own mission chronometer. Twenty-eight seconds. The translation to Hyperion system would be—to human senses—instantaneous. Morpurgo was certain that the Core death-wand device was somehow keyed to detonate as soon as they entered Hyperion space. The shock wave of death would reach the planet Hyperion in less than two seconds, would engulf even the most distant elements of the Ouster Swarm before ten more minutes had passed.

  “Thus,” said Meina Gladstone, her voice betraying emotion for the first time, “as Chief Executive Officer of the Senate of the Hegemony of Man, I have authorized elements of FORCE:space to destroy all singularity containment spheres and farcaster devices known to be in existence.

  “This destruction … this cauterizing … will commence in ten seconds.

  “God save the Hegemony.

  “God forgive us all.”

  Bridge Officer Salumun Morpurgo said coolly, “Five seconds to translation, Father.”

  Morpurgo looked across the bridge and locked eyes with his son. Projections behind the young man showed the portal growing, growing, surrounding.

  “I love you,” said the General.

  Two hundred and sixty-three singularity containment spheres connecting more than seventy-two million farcaster portals were destroyed within two point six seconds of one another. FORCE fleet units, deployed by Morpurgo under Executive Order and reacting to orders unsealed less than three minutes before, reacted promptly and professionally, destroying the fragile farcaster spheres by missile, lance, and plasma explosive.

  Three seconds later, with the clouds of debris still expanding, the hundreds of FORCE spacecraft found themselves stranded, separated from each other and any other system by weeks or months via Hawking drive, and years of time-debt.

  Thousands of people were caught in farcaster transit. Many died instantly, dismembered or torn in half. Many more suffered amputated limbs as the portals collapsed behind them or before them. Some simply disappeared.

  This was the fate of the HS Stephen Hawking—precisely as planned—as both entrance and exit portals were expertly destroyed in the nanosecond of the ship’s translation. No part of the torchship survived in real space. Later tests showed conclusively that the so-called deathwand device was detonated in whatever passed for time and space in the strange Core geographies between the portals.

  The effect was never known.

  The effect on the rest of the Web and its citizens was immediately obvious.

  After seven centuries of existence and at least four centuries where few citizens existed without it, the datasphere—including the All Thing and all comm and access bands—simply ceased to be. Hundreds of thousands of citizens went insane at that moment—shocked into catatonia by the disappearance of senses which had become more important to them than sight or hearing.

  More hundreds of thousands of datumplane operators, including many of the so-called cyberpukes and system cowboys, were lost, their analog personas caught in the crash of the datasphere or their brains burned out by neural-shunt overload or an effect later known as zero-zero feedback.

  Millions of people died when their chosen habitats, accessible only by farcaster, became isolated deathtraps.

  The Bishop of the Church of the Final Atonement—the leader of the Shrike Cult—had carefully arranged to sit out the Final Days in some comfort in a hollowed-out mountain, lavishly stocked, deep in the Raven Range of the north reaches of Nevermore. Redundant farcasters were the only route in or out. The Bishop perished with several thousand of his acolytes, exorcists, lectors, and ostiaries clawing to get into the Inner Sanctum to share the last of the Holy One’s air.

  Millionaire publisher Tyrena Wingreen-Feif, ninety-seven standard years old and on the scene for three-hundred-plus years thanks to the miracle of Poulsen treatments and cryogenics, made the mistake of spending that fateful day in her farcaster-access-only office on the four hundred and thirty-fifth floor of the Transline Spire in the Babel section of Tau Ceti Center’s City Five. After fifteen hours of refusing to believe that farcaster service would not be renewed shortly, Tyrena gave in to comm call entreaties from her employees and dropped her containment field walls so that she could be picked up by EMV.

  Tyrena had not listened to instructions carefully enough. The explosive decompression blew her off the four hundred and thirty-fifth floor like a cork out of an overshaken champagne bottle. Employees and rescue squad members in the waiting EMV swore that the old lady cursed a blue streak for the entire four-minute fall.

  On most worlds, chaos had earned a new definition.

  The majority of the Web’s economy disappeared with the local data-spheres and the Web megasphere. Trillions of hard-earned and ill-gotten marks ceased to be. Universal cards quit functioning. The machinery of daily life coughed, wheezed, and shut down. For weeks or months or years, depending upon the world, it would be impossible to pay for groceries, charge a ride on public transit, settle the simplest debt, or receive services without access to black market coins and bills.

  But the webwide depression which had hit like a tsunami was a minor detail, reserved for later pondering. For most families, the effect was immediate and intensely personal.

  Father or mother had ’cast off to work as usual, say from Deneb Vier to Renaissance V, and instead of arriving home an hour late this evening, would be delayed eleven years—if he or she could find immediate transit on one of
the few Hawking drive spinships still traveling the hard way between the worlds.

  Well-to-do family members listening to Gladstone’s speech in their fashionable multiworld residence looked up to stare at each other, separated by only a few meters and open portals between the rooms, blinked, and were separated by light-years and actual years, their rooms now opening onto nothing.

  Children a few minutes away at school or camp or play or the sitter’s would be grown before they were reunited with parents.

  The Grand Concourse, already slightly truncated by the winds of war, found itself blown to oblivion, its endless belt of beautiful shops and prestige restaurants sliced into tawdry sections never to be reunited.

  The River Tethys ceased to flow as the giant portals went opaque and died. Water spilled out, dried up, and left fish to rot under two hundred suns.

  There were riots. Lusus tore itself apart like a wolf chewing at its own entrails. New Mecca went into spasms of martyrdom. Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna celebrated deliverance from the Ouster hordes and then hanged several thousand former Hegemony bureaucrats.

  Maui-Covenant also rioted, but in celebration, the hundreds of thousands of descendents of the First Families riding the motile isles to displace the offworlders who had taken over so much of the world. Later, the millions of shocked and displaced vacation-home owners were put to work dismantling the thousands of oil derricks and tourist centers which had spotted the Equatorial Archipelago like pox.

  On Renaissance Vector there was a brief spurt of violence followed by efficient social restructuring and a serious effort to feed an urban world without farms.

  On Nordholm, the cities emptied as people returned to the coasts and the cold sea and their ancestral fishing boats.

  On Parvati there was confusion and civil war.

  On Sol Draconi Septem there was jubilation and revolution followed by a new strand of retrovirus plague.

  On Fuji there was philosophical resignation followed by an immediate construction of orbital shipyards to create a fleet of Hawking drive spinships.