The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  Meanwhile, knowing none of these details, I stared. My eyes were open—I could not close them against the cloying force of the crash field—and I was watching the external video monitors set along the foot of the bed as well as looking out through the still-transparent hull apex as the farcaster portal flickered to life amid the steam and sunlight poured over the river’s surface, until suddenly we were through the steam cloud and once again smashing against rock and river bottom, then hitting a beach beneath blue sky and sun.

  Then the monitors went off and the hull went dull. For several minutes we were trapped in this cave blackness—I was floating in midair, or would have been had it not been for the gelatinous crash field—my arms were thrown wide, my right leg was half-bent in a running posture behind me, my mouth was open in a silent scream, and I could not blink. At first the fear of suffocation was very strong—the crash field was in my open mouth—but I soon realized that my nose and throat were receiving oxygen. The crash field, it turns out, worked much like the expensive osmosis masks used for deep-sea diving during the Hegemony days: air leached through the field mass pressing against one’s face and throat. It was not a pleasant experience—I’ve always detested the thought of choking—but my anxiety was manageable. More disturbing was the blackness and claustrophobic sense of being caught in a giant, sticky web. During those long minutes in the darkness, I had thoughts of the ship being stuck there forever, disabled, with no way to relax the crash fields, and the three of us starving to death in our undignified postures, until someday the ship’s energy banks would be depleted, the crash field would collapse, and our whitened skeletons would drop and rattle around the interior hull of the ship like so many bones being cast by an invisible fortune-teller.

  As it was, the field slowly folded away less than five minutes later. The lights came on, flickered, and were replaced by red emergency lighting even as we were gently lowered to what had been the wall a short while before. The outer hull became transparent once again, but very little light filtered in through the mud and debris.

  I had not been able to see A. Bettik and Aenea while stuck in place—they had been just out of my frozen field of sight—but now I saw them as the field lowered them to the hull with me. I was amazed to hear a scream issue from my throat and realized that it was the shout that had welled up in me the instant of the crash.

  For a moment the three of us just sat on the curved hull wall, rubbing and testing our own arms, legs, and heads to make sure we weren’t injured. Then Aenea spoke for us all. “Holy shit,” she said, and stood up on the curving floor of the hull. Her legs were shaky.

  “Ship!” called the android.

  “Yes, A. Bettik.” The voice was as calm as ever.

  “Are you damaged?”

  “Yes, A. Bettik,” said the ship. “I have just completed a full damage assessment. Field coils, repulsors, and Hawking translators have suffered extensive damage, as have sections of the aft hull and two of the four landing fins.”

  “Ship,” I said, struggling to my feet and looking out through the transparent nose of the hull. There was sunlight coming through the curved wall above us, but most of the exterior hull was opaque with mud, sand, and other debris. The dark river came two-thirds the way up the sides and was sloshing against us. It looked as if we had run aground on a sandy bank, but not before plowing through many meters of river bottom. “Ship,” I tried again, “are your sensors working?”

  “Only radar and visual,” it replied.

  “Is there any pursuit?” I said. “Did any Pax ships come through the farcaster with us?”

  “Negative,” said the ship. “There are no inorganic ground or air targets within my radar range.”

  Aenea walked to the vertical wall that had been the carpeted floor. “No troopers even?” she asked.

  “No,” said the ship.

  “Is the farcaster still operational?” asked A. Bettik.

  “Negative,” said the ship. “The portal ceased functioning eighteen nanoseconds after we transited it.”

  I relaxed a bit then and looked at the girl, trying to make sure just by staring that she hadn’t been injured. Except for wildly disarrayed hair and the excitement in her eyes, she looked normal enough. She grinned at me. “So how do we get out of here, Raul?”

  I looked up and saw what she meant. The central stairwell was about three meters above our heads. “Ship?” I said. “Can you turn the internal fields back on long enough for us to get out of the ship?”

  “I’m sorry,” said the ship. “The fields are down and will not be repaired for some time.”

  “Can you morph an opening in the hull above us?” I said. The feeling of claustrophobia was coming back.

  “I am afraid not,” said the ship. “I am functioning on battery power at the moment, and morphing would demand far more energy than I have available. The main air lock is functional. If you can get to that, I will open it.”

  The three of us exchanged glances. “Great,” I said at last. “We get to crawl thirty meters back through the ship while everything’s cattywampus.”

  Aenea was still looking up at the stairwell opening. “The gravity’s different here—feel it?”

  I realized that I did. There was a lightness to everything. I must have been noticing it but putting it down to a variation in the internal field—but there was no more internal field. This was a different world, with different gravity! I found myself staring back at the child.

  “So are you saying we can fly up there?” I said, pointing to the bed hanging on the wall above us and the stairwell next to it.

  “No,” said Aenea, “but the gravity here seems a little less than Hyperion’s. You two boost me up there and I’ll drop something down to you and we’ll crawl back to the air lock.”

  And that is precisely what we did. We made a stirrup with our hands and boosted Aenea to the bottom lip of the stairwell opening, where she balanced, reached out and plucked the loosely hanging blanket from the bed, tied it around the balustrade and dropped the other end down to us, and then, after A. Bettik and I pulled our way up, all three of us walked precariously on the central dropshaft post, hanging on to the circular stairs to the side and above to keep our balance, and gradually made our way through the red-lit mess of a ship—through the library, where books and cushions had fallen to the lower hull despite the cord restraints on the shelves, through the holopit area, where the Steinway was still in place because of its restraining locks, but where our loose personal belongings had tumbled to the bottom of the ship. Here we made a stop while I lowered myself to the cluttered hull bottom and retrieved the pack and weapons I had left on the couch. Strapping the pistol on my belt, tossing up the rope I had stored in the pack, I felt more prepared for the next eventuality than I had a moment before.

  When we got to the corridor, we could see that whatever had damaged the drive area below had also played havoc with the storage lockers: parts of the corridor were blackened and buckled outward, the contents of the lockers were scattered along the torn walls. The inner air lock was open but was now several meters directly above us. I had to free-climb the last vertical expanse of corridor and toss the rope down to the others while I crouched just within the inner lock. Jumping up onto the outer hull and pulling myself out into the bright sunlight, I reached into the red-lit air lock, found Aenea’s wrist, and pulled her out. A second later I did the same for A. Bettik. Then we all took time to look around.

  A strange new world! I will never be able to explain the thrill that jolted through me at that moment—despite our crash, despite our predicament, despite everything—I was looking at a new world! The effect on me was more profound than I had expected in all my anticipation of interworld travel. This planet was very Hyperion-like: breathable air, blue sky—although a much lighter blue than Hyperion’s lapis—wisps of clouds overhead, the river behind us—wider than the river had been on Renaissance Vector—and jungle on both banks, stretching as far away as I could see to the right,
and back beyond the overgrown farcaster portal to our left. Ahead of us, the bow of the ship had indeed plowed up the river bottom and beached itself on a sandy spit, and then the jungle began again, hanging over everything like a tattered green curtain above a narrow stage.

  But as familiar as this sounds, it was all strange: the scents in the air were alien, the gravity felt odd, the sunlight was a bit too bright, the “trees” in the jungle were unlike anything I had ever seen—feathery green gymnosperms was how I would have described them then—and overhead, flights of frail white birds of a sort I had never seen flapped away from the sound of our clumsy entrance to this world.

  We walked up the hull toward the beach. Soft breezes ruffled Aenea’s hair and tugged at my shirt. The air smelled of subtle spices—traces of cinnamon and thyme, perhaps—although softer and richer than these. The bow of the ship was not transparent from the outside, although I did not know at the time whether the ship had opaqued its skin again or whether it never looked transparent from the outside. Even lying on its side, the hull would have been too high and too steep to slide from if it had not plowed such a deep furrow in the beach sand; I used my rope again to lower A. Bettik to the sand, then we lowered the girl, and finally I shouldered my pack—the plasma rifle folded and strapped atop it—and slid down on my own, rolling as I hit the tightly packed soil.

  My first footstep on an alien world, and it was no footstep at all—just a mouth full of sand.

  The girl and the android helped me to my feet. Aenea was squinting up at the hull. “How do we get back up?” she said.

  “We can build a ladder, drag a fallen tree over, or”—I tapped my pack—“I brought the hawking mat.”

  We turned our attention to the beach and jungle. The former was narrow—only a few meters across from the bow to the forest, the sand gleaming more red than sand-colored in the bright sunlight—and the latter was dense and dark. The breeze was cool here on the beach, but the heat was palpable under the thickly packed trees. Twenty meters above, the gymnosperm fronds rustled and quaked like the antennae of some great insects.

  “Wait here a minute,” I said, and stepped under the cover of the trees. The underbrush was thick, a type of clinging fern for the most part, and the soil was made up of so much humus that it was more sponge than dirt. The jungle smelled of dampness and decay, but of a whole different scent than the fens and swamps of Hyperion. I thought of the dracula ticks and biting gar in my own little tame bit of wilderness, and watched where I stepped. Vines spiraled down from the gymnosperm trunks and created a ropey latticework ahead of me in the gloom. I realized that I should have added a machete to my list of basic gear.

  I had not penetrated the woods ten meters when suddenly a tall shrub holding heavy red leaves a meter in front of my face exploded into motion and the “leaves” flapped away beneath the jungle canopy, the creatures’ leathery wings sounding much like the large fruit bats our Hyperion ancestors had brought on their seedships.

  “Damn,” I whispered, and shoved and battered my way out of the dank tangle. My shirt was torn when I staggered onto the beach sand. Aenea and A. Bettik looked expectantly at me.

  “It’s a jungle in there,” I said.

  We walked to the water’s edge, sat on a partially submerged stump there, and looked at our spaceship. The poor thing looked like a great beached whale from some Old Earth wildlife holo.

  “I wonder if it will ever fly again,” I mused, breaking a chocolate bar into pieces and handing one to the child and the other to the blue-skinned man.

  “Oh, I think I will,” said a voice on my wrist.

  I admit that I levitated a dozen or so centimeters. I’d forgotten about the comlog bracelet.

  “Ship?” I said, raising my wrist and speaking directly into the bracelet the way I would have used a portable radio in the Home Guard.

  “You don’t have to do that,” said the ship’s voice. “I can hear everything quite clearly, thank you. Your question was—would I ever fly again? The answer is—almost certainly. I had more complicated repairs to carry out upon my arrival in the city of Endymion after my return to Hyperion.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m glad you can … ah … repair yourself. Will you need raw materials? Replacement parts?”

  “No, thank you, M. Endymion,” said the ship. “It is mostly a matter of reallocating existing materials and redesigning certain damaged units. The repairs should not take long.”

  “How long is not long?” asked Aenea. She finished her chocolate bar and licked her fingers.

  “Six standard months,” said the ship. “Unless I run into unforeseen difficulties.”

  The three of us exchanged glances. I looked back at the jungle. The sun seemed lower now, its horizontal rays illuminating the tops of the gymnosperms and casting the shadows beneath into deeper gloom. “Six months?” I said.

  “Unless I run into unforeseen difficulties,” repeated the ship.

  “Ideas?” I said to my two comrades.

  Aenea rinsed her fingers in the river’s edge, tossed some water onto her face, and brushed back her wet hair. “We’re on the River Tethys,” she said. “We’ll just go downstream until we find the next farcaster portal.”

  “You can do that trick again?” I said.

  She brushed water from her face and said, “What trick?”

  I made a dismissive gesture with my hand. “Oh, nothing … making a machine work that’s been dead for three centuries. That trick.”

  Her dark eyes were earnest. “I wasn’t sure that I could do that, Raul.” She looked at A. Bettik, who was watching us impassively. “Honest.”

  “What would have happened if you hadn’t been able to do it?” I asked softly.

  “They would have caught us,” said Aenea. “I think they would have let you two go. They would have brought me back to Pacem. That would have been the last you or anyone else would have heard of me.”

  Something about the flat, emotionless way she said that gave me chills. “All right,” I said, “it worked. But how did you do it?”

  She made that slight-movement-of-her-hand gesture with which I was becoming familiar. “I’m not … certain,” she said. “I knew from the dreams that the portal would probably let me through.…”

  “Let you through?” I said.

  “Yes. I thought it would … recognize me … and it did.”

  I set my hands on my knees and straightened my legs, the heels of my boots digging into the red sand. “You talk about the farcaster as if it’s an intelligent, living organism,” I said.

  Aenea looked back at the arch half a klick behind us. “In a way it is,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “But you’re sure that the Pax troops can’t follow us through?”

  “Oh, yes. The portal will not activate for anyone else.”

  My eyebrows raised a bit. “Then how did A. Bettik and I … and the ship … get through?”

  Aenea smiled. “You were with me.”

  I stood up. “All right, we’ll hash this out later. First, I think we need a plan. Do we reconnoiter now, or get our stuff out of the ship first?”

  Aenea looked down at the dark water of the river. “And then Robinson Crusoe stripped naked, swam out to his ship, filled his pockets with biscuits, and swam back to shore.…”

  “What?” I said, hefting my pack and frowning at the child.

  “Nothing,” she said, getting to her feet. “Just an old pre-Hegira book that Uncle Martin used to read to me. He used to say that proofreaders have always been incompetent assholes—even fourteen hundred years ago.”

  I looked at the android. “Do you understand her, A. Bettik?”

  He showed that slight twitch of his thin lips that I was learning to take as a smile. “It is not my role to understand M. Aenea, M. Endymion.”

  I sighed. “All right, back to the subject.… Do we reconnoiter before it gets dark, or dig the stuff out of the ship?”

  “I vote that we look around,” sa
id Aenea. She looked at the darkening jungle. “But not through that stuff.”

  “Uh-uh,” I agreed, pulling the hawking mat from its space atop my pack and unrolling it on the sand. “We’ll see if this works on this world.” I paused, raised the comlog closer. “What world is this, anyway? Ship?”

  There was a second’s hesitation, as if the ship was busy mulling over its own problems. “I’m sorry, I can’t identify it given the state of my memory banks. My navigation systems could tell us, of course, but I will need a star sighting. I can tell you that there are no unnatural electromagnetic or microwave transmissions currently broadcasting on this area of the planet. Nor are there relay satellites or other man-made objects in synchronous orbit overhead.”

  “All right,” I said, “but where are we?” I looked at the girl.

  “How should I know?” said Aenea.

  “You brought us here,” I said. I realized that I was being short-tempered with her, but I felt short-tempered right then.

  Aenea shook her head. “I just activated the farcaster, Raul. My big plan was to get away from Father Captain Whatshisname and all those ships. That was it.”

  “And find your architect,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Aenea.

  I looked around the jungle and river. “It doesn’t look like a promising place to find an architect. I guess you’re right … we’ll just have to keep moving down the river to the next world.” The vine-shrouded arch of the farcaster we’d passed through caught my eye. I saw now why we’d plowed ashore: the river took a bend to the right here, about half a kilometer from the portal. The ship had come through and just kept going straight, right up through the shallows and onto the beach.