The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  On Asquith there was finger-pointing followed by the victory of the Socialist Labor Workers’ Party in the World Parliament.

  On Pacem there was prayer. The new Pope, His Holiness Teilhard I, called a great council into session—Vatican XXXIX—announced a new era in the life of the Church, and empowered the council to prepare missionaries for long voyages. Many missionaries. For many voyages. Pope Teilhard announced that these missionaries would not be proselytizers, but searchers. The Church, like so many species grown used to living on the edge of extinction, adapted and endured.

  On Tempe there were riots and death and the rise of demagogues.

  On Mars the Olympus Command stayed in touch with its farflung forces for a while via fatline. It was Olympus which confirmed that the “Ouster invasion waves” everywhere but Hyperion system had simply limped to a halt. Intercepted Core ships were empty and unprogrammed. The invasion was over.

  On Metaxas there were riots and reprisals.

  On Qom-Riyadh a self-appointed fundamentalist Shiite ayatollah rode out of the desert, called a hundred thousand followers to him, and wiped out the Suni Home Rule government within hours. The new revolutionary government returned power to the mullahs and set back the clock two thousand years. The people rioted with joy.

  On Armaghast, a frontier world, things went on pretty much as they always had except for a dearth of tourists, new archaeologists, and other imported luxuries. Armaghast was a labyrinthine world. The labyrinth there stayed empty.

  On Hebron there was panic in the offworld center of New Jerusalem, but the Zionist elders soon restored order to the city and world. Plans were made. Rare offworld necessities were rationed and shared. The desert was reclaimed. Farms were extended. Trees were planted. The people complained to each other, thanked God for deliverance, argued with God about the discomfort of that same deliverance, and went about their business.

  On God’s Grove entire continents still burned, and a pall of smoke filled the sky. Soon after the last of the “Swarm” had passed, scores of treeships rose through the clouds, climbing slowly on fusion thrusters while shielded by erg-generated containment fields. Once beyond the gravity well, most of these treeships turned outward in a myriad of directions along the galactic plane of the ecliptic and began the long spin-up to quantum leap. Fatline squirts leaped from treeship to distant, waiting Swarms. The reseeding had begun.

  On Tau Ceti Center, seat of power and wealth and business and government, the hungry survivors left the dangerous spires and useless cities and helpless orbiting habitats and went in search of someone to blame. Someone to punish.

  They did not have far to look.

  General Van Zeidt had been in Government House when the portals failed and now he commanded the two hundred Marines and sixty-eight security people left to guard the complex. Former CEO Meina Gladstone still commanded the six Praetorians Kolchev had left her when he and the other ranking senators had departed on the first and last FORCE evacuation dropship to get through. Somewhere the mob had acquired anti-space missiles and lances, and none of the other three thousand Government House employees and refugees would be going anywhere until the siege was lifted or the shields failed.

  Gladstone stood at the forward observation post and watched the carnage. The mob had destroyed most of Deer Park and the formal gardens before the last lines of interdiction and containment fields had stopped them. There were at least three million frenzied people pressed against those barriers now, and the mob grew larger every minute.

  “Can you drop the fields back fifty meters and restore them before the mob covers the ground?” Gladstone asked the General. Smoke filled the sky from the cities burning to the west. Thousands of men and women had been smashed against the blur of containment field by the throngs behind them until the lower two meters of the shimmering wall looked as if it had been painted with strawberry jam. Tens of thousands more pressed closer to that inner shield despite the agony of nerve and bone the interdiction field was causing them.

  “We can do that, M. Executive,” said Van Zeidt. “But why?”

  “I’m going out to talk to them.” Gladstone sounded very tired.

  The Marine looked at her, sure that she was making some bad joke. “M. Executive, in a month they will be willing to listen to you … or any of us … on radio or HTV. In a year, maybe two, after order’s restored and rationing’s successful, they might be ready to forgive. But it will be a generation before they really understand what you did … that you saved them … saved us all.”

  “I want to talk to them,” said Meina Gladstone. “I have something to give to them.”

  Van Zeidt shook his head and looked at the circle of FORCE officers who had been staring out at the mob through slits in the bunker and who now were staring at Gladstone with equal disbelief and horror.

  “I’d have to check with CEO Kolchev,” said General Van Zeidt.

  “No,” Meina Gladstone said tiredly. “He rules an empire which no longer exists. I still rule the world I destroyed.” She nodded toward her Praetorians and they produced deathwands from their orange-and-black-striped tunics.

  None of the FORCE officers moved. General Van Zeidt said, “Meina, the next evacuation ship will make it.”

  Gladstone nodded as if distracted. “The inner garden, I should think. The mob will be at a loss for several moments. The withdrawal of the outer fields will throw them off balance.” She looked around as if she might be forgetting something and then extended her hand to Van Zeidt. “Goodbye, Mark. Thank you. Please take care of my people.”

  Van Zeidt shook her hand and watched as the woman adjusted her scarf, absently touched a bracelet comlog as if for luck, and went out of the bunker with four of her Praetorians. The small group crossed the trampled gardens and walked slowly toward the containment fields. The mob beyond seemed to react like a single, mindless organism, pressing through the violet interdiction field and screaming with the voice of some demented thing.

  Gladstone turned, raised one hand as if to wave, and gestured her Praetorians back. The four guards hurried across the matted grass.

  “Do it,” said the oldest of the remaining Praetorians. He pointed to the containment field control remote.

  “Fuck you,” General Van Zeidt said clearly. No one would go near that remote while he lived.

  Van Zeidt had forgotten that Gladstone still had access to codes and tactical tightbeam links. He saw her raise her comlog, but he reacted too slowly. Lights on the remote blinked red and then green, the outer fields winked out and then re-formed fifty meters closer in, and for a second, Meina Gladstone stood alone with nothing between her and the mob of millions except a few meters of grass and countless corpses suddenly surrendered to gravity by the retreating shield walls.

  Gladstone raised both arms as if embracing the mob. Silence and lack of motion extended for three eternal seconds, and then the mob roared with the voice of a single great beast, and thousands surged forward with sticks and rocks and knives and broken bottles.

  For a moment it seemed to Van Zeidt that Gladstone stood like an impervious rock against that tidal wave of rabble; he could see her dark suit and bright scarf, see her standing upright, her arms still raised, but then more hundreds surged in, the crowd closed, and the CEO was lost.

  The Praetorians lowered their weapons and were put under immediate arrest by Marine sentries.

  “Opaque the containment fields,” ordered Van Zeidt. “Tell the drop-ships to land in the inner garden at five-minute intervals. Hurry!”

  The General turned away.

  “Good Lord,” said Theo Lane as the fragmented reports kept coming in over the fatline. There were so many millisecond squirts being sent that the computer could do little to separate them. The result was a mélange of madness.

  “Play back the destruction of the singularity containment sphere,” said the Consul.

  “Yes, sir,” said the ship and interrupted its fatline messages for a replay of the sudden burst of whi
te, followed by a brief blossoming of debris and sudden collapse as the singularity swallowed itself and everything within a six-thousand-klick radius. Instruments showed the effect of gravity tides: easily adjusted for at this distance but playing havoc with the Hegemony and Ouster ships still locked in battle closer to Hyperion.

  “All right,” said the Consul, and the rush of fatline reports resumed.

  “There’s no doubt?” asked Arundez.

  “None,” said the Consul. “Hyperion is an Outback world again. Only this time there is no Web to be Outback to.”

  “It’s so hard to believe,” said Theo Lane. The ex-Governor-General sat drinking Scotch: the only time the Consul had ever seen his aide indulge in a drug. Theo poured another four fingers. “The Web … gone. Five hundred years of expansion wiped out.”

  “Not wiped out,” said the Consul. He set his own drink, still unfinished, on a table. “The worlds remain. The cultures will grow apart, but we still have the Hawking drive. The one technological advance we gave ourselves rather than leased from the Core.”

  Melio Arundez leaned forward, his palms together as if praying. “Can the Core really be gone? Destroyed?”

  The Consul listened a moment to the babble of voices, cries, entreaties, military reports, and pleas for help coming over the fatline voice-only bands. “Perhaps not destroyed,” he said, “but cut off, sealed away.”

  Theo finished his drink and carefully set his glass down. His green eyes had a placid, glazed look. “You think there are … other spider-webs for them? Other farcaster systems? Reserve Cores?”

  The Consul made a gesture with his hand. “We know they succeeded in creating their Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps that UI allowed this … winnowing … of the Core. Perhaps it’s keeping some of the old AIs on line—in a reduced capacity—the way they had planned to keep a few billion humans in reserve.”

  Suddenly the fatline babble ceased as if cut off by a knife.

  “Ship?” queried the Consul, suspecting a power failure somewhere in the receiver!

  “All fatline messages have ceased, most in midtransmission,” said the ship.

  The Consul felt his heart pounding as he thought The deathwand device. But no, he realized at once, that couldn’t affect all of the worlds at once. Even with hundreds of such devices detonating simultaneously, there would be lag time as FORCE ships and other far-flung transmission sources got in their final messages. But what then?

  “The messages appear to have been cut off by a disturbance in the transmission medium,” said the ship. “Which is, to my current knowledge, impossible.”

  The Consul stood. A disturbance in the transmission medium? The fatline medium, as far as humans understood it, was the hyperstring Planck-infinite topography of space-time itself: what AIs had cryptically referred to as the Void Which Binds. There could be no disturbance in that medium.

  Suddenly the ship said, “Fatline message coming in—transmission source, everywhere; encryption base, infinite; squirt rate, real-time.”

  The Consul opened his mouth to tell the ship to quit spouting nonsense when the air above the holopit misted in something neither image nor data column, and a voice spoke:

  “THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL, YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE.”

  The three men sat in silence unbroken except for the reassuring rush of ventilator fans and the myriad soft noises of a ship under way. Finally the Consul said, “Ship, please send out a standard fatline time-location squirt without encoding. Add ‘receiving stations respond.’ ”

  There was a pause of seconds—an impossibly long response time for the AI-caliber computer that was the ship. “I’m sorry, that is not possible,” it said at last.

  “Why not?” demanded the Consul.

  “Fatline transmissions are no longer being … allowed. The hyperstring medium is no longer receptive to modulation.”

  “There’s nothing on the fatline?” asked Theo, staring at the empty space above the holopit as if someone had turned off a holie just as it was getting to the exciting part.

  Again the ship paused. “To all intents and purposes, M. Lane,” it said, “there is no fatline any longer.”

  “Jesus wept,” muttered the Consul. He finished his drink in one long gulp and went to the bar for another. “It’s the old Chinese curse,” he muttered.

  Melio Arundez looked up. “What’s that?”

  The Consul took a long drink. “Old Chinese curse,” he said. “May you live in interesting times.”

  As if compensating for the loss of fatline, the ship played audio of in-system radio and intercepted tightbeam babble while it projected a real-time view of the blue-and-white sphere of Hyperion turning and growing as they decelerated toward it at two hundred gravities.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I escape the Web datasphere just before escape ceases to be an option.

  It is incredible and oddly disturbing, the sight of the megasphere swallowing itself. Brawn Lamia’s view of the megasphere as an organic thing, a semisentient organism more analagous to an ecology than a city, was essentially correct. Now, as the farcaster links cease to be and the world inside those avenues folds and collapses upon itself, the external datasphere simultaneously collapsing like a burning big-top tent suddenly without poles, wires, guys, or stakes, the living megasphere devours itself like some ravenous predator gone mad—chewing its own tail, belly, entrails, forepaws, and heart—until only the mindless jaws are left, snapping on emptiness.

  The metasphere remains. But it is more wilderness than ever now.

  Black forests of unknown time and space.

  Sounds in the night.

  Lions.

  And tigers.

  And bears.

  When the Void Which Binds convulses and sends its single, banal message to the human universe, it is as if an earthquake has sent ripples through solid rock. Hurrying through the shifting metasphere above Hyperion, I have to smile. It is as if the God-analog has grown tired of the ants scribbling graffiti on Its big toe.

  I don’t see God—either one of them—in the metasphere. I don’t try. I have enough problems of my own.

  The black vortexes of the Web and Core entrances are gone now, erased from space and time like warts removed, vanished as thoroughly as whirlpools in water when the storm has passed.

  I am stuck here unless I want to brave the metasphere.

  Which I do not. Not yet.

  But this is where I want to be. The datasphere is all but gone here in Hyperion System, the pitiful remnants on the world itself and in what remains of the FORCE fleet drying up like tidepools in the sun, but the Time Tombs glow through the metasphere like beacons in the gathering darkness. If the farcaster links had been black vortexes, the Tombs blaze like white holes shedding an expanding light.

  I move toward them. So far, as the One Who Comes Before, all I have accomplished is to appear in others’ dreams. It is time to do something.

  Sol waited.

  It had been hours since he had handed his only child to the Shrike. It had been days since he had eaten or slept. Around him the storm had raged and abated, the Tombs had glowed and rumbled like runaway reactors, and the time tides had whipped him with tsunami force. But Sol had clung to the stone steps of the Sphinx and waited through it all. He waited now.

  Half conscious, pummeled by fatigue and fear for his daughter, Sol found that his scholar’s mind was working at a rapid pace.

  For most of his life and for all of his career, Sol Weintraub the historian-cum-classicist-cum-philosopher had dealt with the ethics of human religious behavior. Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. Sol’s most fa
mous book, finally titled Abraham’s Dilemma when it was brought out in a mass-market edition in numbers he had never dreamed of while producing volumes for academic presses, had been written when Rachel was dying of Merlin’s sickness and dealt, obviously enough, with Abraham’s hard choice of obeying or disobeying God’s direct command for him to sacrifice his son.

  Sol had written that primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice—as in the dark nights of the ovens which pocked Old Earth history—and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever form God now took in human consciousness—whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution—humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God’s name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.

  Yet hours ago, ages ago, Sol Weintraub had handed his only child to a creature of death.

  For years the voice in his dreams had commanded him to do so. For years Sol had refused. He had agreed, finally, only when time was gone, when any other hope was gone, and when he had realized that the voice in his and Sarai’s dreams all those years had not been the voice of God, nor of some dark force allied with the Shrike.

  It had been the voice of their daughter.

  With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so.

  It was not obedience.

  It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son.

  Abraham was testing God.

  By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.

  Sol shuddered as he thought of how no posturing on Abraham’s part, no shamming of his willingness to sacrifice the boy, could have served to forge that bond between greater power and humankind. Abraham had to know in his own heart that he would kill his son. The Deity, whatever form it then took, had to know Abraham’s determination, had to feel that sorrow and commitment to destroy what was to Abraham the most precious thing in the universe.