The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  We soon settled into a schedule on the ship, adopting Hyperion’s day and night schedules roughly as waking and sleeping times. I began to see why the old Hegemony habit of keeping the twenty-four-hour Old Earth system as standard had been so important in the Web days: I’d read somewhere that almost ninety percent of the Earth-like or terraformed worlds of the Web had held days that fell within three hours of the Old Earth standard day.

  Aenea still liked to extend the balcony and play the Steinway out under the Hawking-space sky, and I would sometimes stay out there and listen for a few minutes, but I preferred the sense of being surrounded that the interior of the ship gave me. None of us complained about the effects of the C-plus environment, although we felt it—the occasional lurching of emotion and balance, a constant sense that someone was watching us, and very strange dreams. My own dreams awakened me with the pounding heart, dry mouth, and sweat-soaked sheets that only the worst nightmares could cause. But I never remembered the dreams. I wanted to ask the others about their dreams, but A. Bettik never mentioned his—I did not know if androids could dream—and although Aenea acknowledged the strangeness of her dreams and said that she did remember them, she never discussed them.

  On the second day, while we were sitting in the library, Aenea suggested that we “experience” space travel. When I asked her how we could experience it more than we were—I had the Hawking fractals in mind when I said that—she only laughed and asked the ship to cancel the internal containment field. Immediately, we were weightless.

  As a boy, I had dreamed of zero-g. Swimming in the salty South Sea as a young soldier, I had closed my eyes, floated effortlessly, and wondered if this was what space travel in the olden days had been like.

  I can tell you it is not.

  Zero-g, especially sudden zero-g such as the ship granted upon Aenea’s request, is terrifying. It is, quite simply, falling.

  Or so it first seems.

  I gripped the chair, but the chair was also falling. It was precisely as if we had been sitting in one of the huge Bridle Range cable cars for the past two days, when suddenly the cable broke. My middle ear protested, trying to find a horizon line that was honest. None was.

  A. Bettik kicked up from wherever he had been below and said calmly, “Is there a problem?”

  “No,” laughed Aenea, “we’re just going to experience space for a while.”

  A. Bettik nodded and then pulled himself headfirst down the stairway pit to get back to whatever he was working on.

  Aenea followed him to the stairwell, kicking over to the central opening. “See?” she said. “This stairwell becomes a central dropshaft when the ship is in zero-g. Just like in the old spinships.”

  “Isn’t this dangerous?” I asked, switching my grip from the back of a chair to a bookshelf. For the first time I noticed the elastic cords that held the books in place. Everything else that was not attached—the book I had set on the table, the chairs around the table, a sweater I’d left thrown over the back of another chair, pieces of the orange I had been eating—was floating.

  “Not dangerous,” said Aenea. “Messy. Next time we get everything shipshape before we cancel the internal field.”

  “But isn’t the field … important?”

  Aenea was floating upside down, from my perspective. My inner ear liked this even less than the rest of the experience. “The field keeps us from being squashed and thrown around when we’re moving in normal space,” she said, pulling herself to the center of the twenty-meter drop by grabbing the stairway railing, “but we can’t speed up or slow down in C-plus space, so … here goes!” She grabbed a handhold along the rod that ran the length of the ship in the center of what had been the open stairwell and catapulted herself out of sight, headfirst.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, pushed away from the bookcase, bouncing off the opposite bulkhead, and followed her down the central dropshaft.

  For the next hour we played in zero-g: zero-g tag, zero-g hide-and-seek (finding that one could hide in the oddest places when gravity was not a restraint), zero-g soccer using one of the plastic space helmets from a locker on the storage/corridor deck, and even zero-g wrestling, which was harder than I would have imagined. My first attempt to grab the child sent both of us tumbling and crashing through the length, breadth, and height of fugue deck.

  In the end, exhausted and sweaty (the perspiration hung in the air until one moved or a trickle of air from the ventilators moved it, I discovered), Aenea ordered the balcony opened again—I shouted in fear when she did so, but the ship quietly reminded me that the exterior field was quite intact—and we floated out above the bolted-down Steinway, floated to the railing and beyond, into that no-man’s-land between the ship and the field, floated ten meters out and looked back at the ship itself, surrounded by exploding fractals, glowing in the cold fireworks glory of it as Hawking space folded and contracted around us several billion times a second.

  Finally we kicked and swam our way back in (a difficult and awkward feat, I discovered, when there was nothing to push against), warned A. Bettik over the intercom to find a floor, and brought back the one-g internal field. Both the child and I giggled as sweaters, sandwiches, chairs, books, and several spheres of water from a glass that had been left out came crashing down to the carpet.

  It was that same day, night rather, for the ship had dimmed the lights for sleep period, that I padded down the spiral stairs to the holopit level to fix a midnight snack and heard soft sounds through the opening to the fugue deck below.

  “Aenea?” I said, speaking softly. There was no answer. I went to the head of the stairs, looking at the dark drop in the center of the stairwell and smiling as I remembered our midair antics there a few hours before. “Aenea?”

  There still came no answer, but the soft sounds continued. Wishing I had a flashlight, I padded down the metal stairs in my sock feet.

  There was a soft glow from the fugue-sleep monitors above the couches tucked in their cubbies. The soft sound was coming from Aenea’s cubby. She had her back to me. The blanket was pulled to her shoulders, but I could see the collar of the Consul’s old shirt that she had appropriated for use as a nightshirt. I walked over, my sock feet making no noise on the soft floor, and knelt by the couch. “Aenea?” The girl was crying, obviously trying to muffle her sobs.

  I touched her shoulder and she finally turned. Even in the dim instrument glow I could see that she had been weeping for some time; her eyes were red and puffy, her cheeks streaked with tears.

  “What’s wrong, kiddo?” I whispered. We were two decks above where A. Bettik slept in his hammock in the engine room, but the stairwell was open.

  For a moment Aenea did not respond, but eventually the sobs slowed, then stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said at last.

  “It’s all right. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Give me a tissue and I will,” said the girl.

  I rummaged in the pockets of the old robe the Consul had left. I had no tissue, but I had been using a napkin with the cake I’d been eating upstairs. I handed her the linen.

  “Thanks.” She blew her nose. “I’m glad we’re not still in zero-g,” she said through the cloth. “There’d be snot floating everywhere.”

  I smiled and squeezed her shoulder. “What’s wrong, Aenea?”

  She made a soft noise that I realized was an attempt at a laugh. “Everything,” she said. “Everything’s wrong. I’m scared. Everything I know about the future scares the shit out of me. I don’t know how we’re going to get past the Pax guys that I know will be waiting for us in a few days. I’m homesick. I can never go back, and everybody I knew except Martin is gone forever. Mostly, though, I guess I just miss my mother.”

  I squeezed her shoulder. Brawne Lamia, her mother, was the stuff of legend—a woman who had lived and died two and a half long centuries ago. A few of her bones had already turned to dust, wherever they were buried. For this child, her mother’s death was only two weeks in the past.

 
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and squeezed her shoulder again, feeling the texture of the Consul’s old shirt. “It’ll be all right.”

  Aenea nodded and took my hand. Hers was still moist. I noticed how tiny her palm and fingers were against my huge paw.

  “Want to come up to the galley and have some chalmaroot cake and milk with me?” I whispered. “It’s good.”

  She shook her head. “I think I’ll sleep now. Thanks, Raul.” She squeezed my hand again before relinquishing it, and in that second I realized the great truth: the One Who Teaches, the new messiah, whatever Brawne Lamia’s daughter would turn out to be, she was also a child—one who giggled in zero-gravity antics and who wept in the night.

  I went softly up the stairs, stopping to look back at her before my head rose above the level of the next deck. She was huddled under her blanket, her face turned away again, her hair catching only a bit of the console glow from above her cubby. “Good night, Aenea,” I whispered, knowing that she would not hear me. “It will be all right.”

  22

  Sergeant Gregorius and his two troopers are waiting in the open sally-port air lock of the Raphael as the archangel-class starship closes on the unidentified spacecraft that has just translated from C-plus. Their spacesuit armor is cumbersome and—with their reactionless rifles and energy weapons slung—the three men fill the air lock. Parvati’s sun gleams on their gold visors as they lean out into space.

  “I’ve got it locked,” comes Father Captain de Soya’s voice in their earphones. “Distance, one hundred meters and closing.” The needle-shaped craft with fins on the stern fills their vision as the two ships close. Between the spacecraft, defensive containment fields blur and flash, dissipating high-energy CPB and lance attacks faster than the eye can follow. Gregorius’s visor opaques, clears, and then opaques as the close-in battle flares.

  “All right, inside their minimum lance range,” says de Soya from his perch on the Combat Control Center couch. “Go!”

  Gregorius gives a hand signal and his men kick off at the precise instant he does. Needle thrusters in their suits’ reaction paks spurt tiny blue flames as they correct their arc.

  “Disrupting fields … now!” cries de Soya.

  The clashing containment fields cancel each other for only a few seconds, but it is enough: Gregorius, Kee, and Rettig are in the other ship’s defensive egg now.

  “Kee,” says Gregorius over the tightbeam, and the smaller figure tweaks thrusters and hurtles toward the bow of the decelerating ship. “Rettig.” The other suit of combat armor accelerates toward the lower third of the ship. Gregorius himself waits until the final second to kill his forward velocity, does a complete forward roll at the last instant, applies full thruster, and feels his heavy soles touch hullplate with hardly a tap. He activates the magties in his boots, feels the connection, widens his stance, and then crouches on the hull with only one boot in contact.

  “On,” comes Corporal Kee’s voice on tightbeam.

  “On,” says Rettig a second later.

  Sergeant Gregorius pulls the line of boarding collar from around his waist, sets it against the hull, activates the sticktight, and continues kneeling in it. He is within a black hoop a little more than a meter and a half in diameter.

  “On the count from three,” he says into his mike. “Three … two … one … deploy.” He touches his wristcontroller and blinks as a microthin canopy of molecular polymer spins up from the hoop, closes over his head, and continues to bulge above him. Within ten seconds he is within a twenty-meter transparent bag, like a combat-armored shape crouching within a giant condom.

  “Ready,” says Kee. Rettig echoes the word.

  “Set,” says Gregorius, slapping a charge against the hull and setting his gauntleted finger back against his wristplate. “From five …” The ship is rotating under them now, firing thrusters and its main engines almost at random, but the Raphael has it locked in a containment-field death grip, and the men on its hull are not thrown free. “Five … four … three … two … one … now!”

  The detonation is soundless, of course, but is also without flash or recoil. A 120-centimeter circle of hull flies inward. Gregorius can see only the gossamer hint of Kee’s polymer bag around the curve of the hull, sees the sunlight strike it as it inflates. Gregorius’s bag also inflates like a giant balloon as atmosphere rushes out of the hullbreech and fills the space around him. He hears a hurricane screech through his external pickups for five seconds, then silence as the space around him—now filled with oxygen and nitrogen according to his helmet sensors—fills with dust and detritus blown out during the brief pressure differential.

  “Going in … now!” cries Gregorius, unslinging his reactionless plasma rifle as he kicks his way into the interior.

  There is no gravity. That is a surprise to the sergeant—he is ready to hit the decks rolling—but he adapts within seconds and twists in a circle, peering around.

  Some sort of common area. Gregorius sees seat cushions, some sort of ancient vid screen, bookshelves with real books—

  A man floats up the central dropshaft.

  “Halt!” cries Gregorius, using common radio bands and his helmet loudspeaker. The figure—little more than a silhouette—does not halt. The man has something in his hand.

  Gregorius fires from the hip. The plasma slug bores a hole ten centimeters wide through the man. Blood and viscera explode outward from the tumbling figure, some of the globules spattering on Gregorius’s visor and armored chestplate. The object falls from the dead man’s hand, and Gregorius glances at it as he kicks by to the stairwell. It is a book. “Shit,” mutters the sergeant. He has killed an unarmed man. He will lose points for this.

  “In, top level, no one here,” radios Kee. “Coming down.”

  “Engine room,” says Rettig. “One man here. Tried to run and I had to burn him. No sign of the child. Coming up.”

  “She must be on the middle level or the air-lock level,” snaps the sergeant into his mike. “Proceed with care.” The lights go out, and Gregorius’s helmet searchlight and the penlight on his plasma rifle come on automatically, beams quite visible through air filled with dust, blood spheres, and tumbling artifacts. He stops at the top of the stairwell.

  Someone or something is drifting up toward him. He shifts his helmet, but the light on the plasma rifle illuminates the shape first.

  It is not the girl. Gregorius gets a confused impression of great size, razor wire, spikes, too many arms, and blazing red eyes. He must decide in a second or less: if he fires plasma bolts down the open dropshaft, he might hit the child. If he does nothing, he dies—razor talons reach for him even as he hesitates.

  Gregorius has lashed the deathwand to his plasma rifle before making the ship-to-ship jump. Now he kicks aside, finds an angle, and triggers the wand.

  The razor-wire shape floats past him, four arms limp, the red eyes fading. Gregorius thinks, The goddamn thing isn’t invulnerable to deathwands. It has synapses. He catches a glimpse of someone above him, swings the rifle, identifies Kee, and the two men kick down the dropshaft headfirst. Embarrassing if someone turns the internal field back on now and gravity comes on, thinks Gregorius. Make a note of that.

  “I’ve got her,” calls Rettig. “She was hiding in one of the fugue cubbies.”

  Gregorius and Kee float down past the common level and kick out into the fugue level. A massive figure in combat armor is holding the child. Gregorius notes the brown-blond hair, the dark eyes, and the small fists flailing uselessly against Rettig’s chest armor.

  “That’s her,” he says. He keys the tightbeam to the ship. “Cleared the ship. We have the girl. Only two defenders and the creature this time.”

  “Affirmative,” comes de Soya’s voice. “Two minutes fifteen seconds. Impressive. Come on out.”

  Gregorius nods, takes a final glance at the captive child—no longer struggling—and keys his suit controls.

  He blinks and sees the other two lying next to him, their
suits connected umbilically to VR tactical. De Soya has actually turned off the internal fields in the Raphael, better to maintain the illusion. Gregorius removes his helmet, sees the other two sweaty faces as they do the same, and begins to help Kee remove his clumsy armor.

  The three meet de Soya in the wardroom cubby. They could meet as easily in the stimsim of tactical space, but they prefer physical reality for their debriefings.

  “It was smooth,” says de Soya as they take their places around the small table.

  “Too smooth,” says the sergeant. “I don’t believe that deathwands are going to kill the Shrike thing. And I screwed up with the guy on the navigation deck.… He just had a book.”

  De Soya nods. “You did the right thing, though. Better to take him out than to take chances.”

  “Two unarmed men?” says Corporal Kee. “I doubt it. This is about as unrealistic as the dozen armed guys on the third run-through. We should play more of the Ouster encounters … Marine-level lethality, at least.”

  “I don’t know,” mutters Rettig.

  They look at him and wait.

  “We keep getting the girl without any harm coming to her,” says the man at last.

  “That fifth sim …,” begins Kee.

  “Yeah, yeah,” says Rettig. “I know we accidentally killed her then. But the whole ship was wired to blow in that one. I doubt if that will happen.… Who ever heard of a hundred-million-mark spacecraft having a self-destruct button? That’s stupid.”

  The other three look at one another and shrug.

  “It is a silly idea,” says Father Captain de Soya, “but I programmed the tacticals for wide parameters of …”

  “Yeah,” interrupts Lancer Rettig, his thin face as sharp and menacing as a knife blade, “I just mean that if it does come to a firefight, the chances of the girl getting burned are a lot greater than our sims suggest. That’s all.”

  This is the most the other three have heard Rettig say in weeks of living and rehearsing on the small ship.