The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  2

  On the week that Pope Julius died for the ninth time and Father Duré was murdered for the fifth time, Aenea and I were 160,000 light-years away on the kidnapped planet Earth—Old Earth, the real Earth—circling a G-type star that was not the sun in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy that was not the Earth’s home galaxy.

  It had been a strange week for us. We did not know that the Pope had died, of course, since there was no contact between this relocated Earth and Pax space except for the dormant far-caster portals. Actually, I know now, Aenea was aware of the Pope’s demise through means we did not suspect then, but she did not mention events in Pax space to us and no one thought to ask her. Our lives on Earth during those years of exile were simple and peaceful and profound in ways that are now hard to fathom and almost painful to recall. At any rate, that particular week had been profound but not simple or peaceful for us: the Old Architect with whom Aenea had been studying for the last four years had died on Monday, and his funeral had been a sad and hasty affair out on the desert that wintry Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, Aenea had turned sixteen, but the event was overshadowed by the pall of grief and confusion at the Taliesin Fellowship and only A. Bettik and I had tried to celebrate the day with her.

  The android had baked a chocolate cake, Aenea’s favorite, and I had worked for days to whittle an elaborately carved walking stick out of a sturdy branch we had found during one of the Old Architect’s compulsory picnic expeditions to the nearby mountains. That evening we ate the cake and drank some champagne in Aenea’s beautiful little apprentice shelter in the desert, but she was subdued and distracted by the old man’s death and the Fellowship’s panic. I realize now that much of her distraction must have come from her awareness of the Pope’s death, of the violent events that were gathering on the future’s horizon, and of the end of what would be the most peaceful four years we would ever know together.

  I remember the conversation that evening of Aenea’s sixteenth birthday. It had grown dark early and the air was chill. Outside the comfortable stone-and-canvas home she had built four years earlier for her apprenticeship challenge, the dust was blowing and the sagebrush and yucca plants rasped and contorted in the wind’s grip. We sat by the hissing lantern, traded our champagne glasses for mugs of warm tea, and talked softly beneath the hiss of sand on canvas.

  “It’s strange,” I said. “We knew he was old and ill, but no one seemed to believe that he would die.” I was speaking of the Old Architect, of course, not of the distant Pope who meant so little to us. And, like all of us on the exiled Earth, Aenea’s mentor had not carried the cruciform. His death was final in the way the Pope’s could not be.

  “He seemed to know,” Aenea said softly. “He’s been calling in each of his apprentices for the past month. Imparting some last bit of wisdom.”

  “What last bit of wisdom did he share with you?” I asked. “I mean, if it’s not a secret or too personal.”

  Aenea smiled over the steaming mug of tea. “He reminded me that the patron will always agree to pay twice what the bid was if you send along the extra expenses bit by bit once construction has started and the structure is taking shape. He said that was beyond the point of no return, so the client was hooked like a trout on a six-pound line.”

  Both A. Bettik and I laughed. It was not a disrespectful laugh—the Old Architect had been one of those rare creatures, a true genius combined with an overpowering personality—but even when thinking of him with sadness and affection, we could recognize the selfishness and deviousness that had also been part of his personality. And I don’t mean to be coy here by referring to him only as the Old Architect: the cybrid’s personality template had been reconstructed from a pre-Hegira human named Frank Lloyd Wright who had worked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, A.D. But while everyone at the Taliesin Fellowship had referred to him respectfully as Mr. Wright, including even those older apprentices who were his age, I had always thought of him as the Old Architect because of things Aenea had said about her future mentor before we came here to Old Earth.

  As if thinking along these same lines, A. Bettik said, “It’s odd, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?” said Aenea.

  The android smiled and rubbed his left arm where it ended at a smooth stump just below the elbow. It is a habit he had developed over the past few years. The autosurgeon on the dropship that had carried us through the farcaster from God’s Grove had kept the android alive, but his chemistry had been sufficiently different to prevent the ship from growing him a new arm. “I mean,” he said, “that despite the ascendancy of the Church in the affairs of humankind, the question of whether human beings have a soul which leaves the body after death has yet to be definitely answered. Yet in Mr. Wright’s case, we know that his cybrid personality still exists separate from his body—or at least did for some time after the moment of his death.”

  “Do we know that for sure?” I said. The tea was warm and good. Aenea and I bought it—traded for it actually—at the Indian market located in the desert where the city of Scottsdale should have been.

  It was Aenea who answered my question. “Yes. My father’s cybrid personality survived the destruction of his body and was stored in the Schrön Loop in Mother’s skull. Even after that, we know that it had a separate existence in the megasphere and then resided in the Consul’s ship for a time. A cybrid’s personality survives as a sort of holistic wave front propagated along the matrices of the datumplane or megasphere until it returns to the AI source in the Core.”

  I had known this but never understood it. “Okay,” I said, “but where did Mr. Wright’s AI-based personality wave front go? There can’t be any connections to the Core out here in the Magellanic Cloud. There are no dataspheres here.”

  Aenea set down her empty mug. “There has to be a connection, or Mr. Wright and the other reconstructed cybrid personalities assembled here on Earth couldn’t have existed. Remember, the TechnoCore used the Planck space between the farcaster portals as their medium and hiding place before the dying Hegemony destroyed the farcaster openings to it.”

  “The Void Which Binds,” I said, repeating the phrase from the old poet’s Cantos.

  “Yeah,” said Aenea. “Although I always thought that was a dumb name.”

  “Whatever it’s called,” I said, “I don’t understand how it can reach here … a different galaxy.”

  “The medium the Core used for farcasters reaches everywhere,” said Aenea. “It permeates space and time.” My young friend frowned. “No, that’s not right, space and time are bound up in it … the Void Which Binds transcends space and time.”

  I looked around. The lantern light was enough to fill the little tent structure, but outside it was dark and the wind howled. “Then the Core can reach here?”

  Aenea shook her head. We had held this discussion before. I had not understood the concept then. I did not understand it now.

  “These cybrids are connected to AIs which aren’t really part of the Core,” she said. “Mr. Wright’s persona wasn’t. My father … the second Keats cybrid … wasn’t.”

  This was the part I had never understood. “The Cantos said that the Keats cybrids—including your father—were created by Ummon, a Core AI. Ummon told your father that the cybrids were a Core experiment.”

  Aenea stood and walked to the opening of her apprentice shelter. The canvas on either side rippled with the wind, but kept its shape and held the sand outside. She had built it well. “Uncle Martin wrote the Cantos,” she said. “He told the truth as best he could. But there were elements he did not understand.”

  “Me too,” I said and dropped the matter. I walked over and put my arm around Aenea, feeling the subtle changes in her back and shoulder and arm since the first time I had hugged her four years earlier. “Happy birthday, kiddo.”

  She glanced up at me and then laid her head against my chest. “Thank you, Raul.”

  There had been other changes in my youthful friend since f
irst we met when she was just turning twelve, standard. I could say that she had grown to womanhood in the intervening years, but despite the rounding of her hips and obvious breasts beneath the old sweatshirt she wore, I still did not see her as a woman. No longer a child, of course, but not yet a woman. She was … Aenea. The luminous dark eyes were the same—intelligent, questioning, a bit sad with some secret knowledge—and the effect of being physically touched when she turned the attention of her gaze on you was as strong as ever. Her brown hair had grown somewhat darker in the past few years, she had cut it the previous spring—now it was shorter than mine had been when I was in the Home Guard military on Hyperion a dozen years earlier, when I set my hand on her head the hair was barely long enough to rise between my fingers—but I could see some glints of the old blond streaks there, brought out by the long days she spent working in the Arizona sunlight.

  As we stood there listening to the blowing dust scraping canvas, A. Bettik a silent shadow behind us, Aenea took my hand in both of hers. She might have been sixteen that day, a young woman rather than a girl, but her hands were still tiny in my huge palm. “Raul?” she said.

  I looked at her and waited.

  “Will you do something for me?” she said softly, very softly.

  “Yes.” I did not hesitate.

  She squeezed my hand and looked directly into me then. “Will you do something for me tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  Neither her gaze nor the pressure on my hand let up. “Will you do anything for me?”

  This time I did hesitate. I knew what such a vow might entail, even though this strange and wonderful child had never asked me to do anything for her—had not asked that I come with her on this mad Odyssey. That had been a promise I had made to the old poet, Martin Silenus, before I had even met Aenea. I knew that there were things that I could not—in good conscience or bad—bring myself to do. But foremost among those things I was incapable of doing was denying Aenea.

  “Yes,” I said, “I will do anything you ask.” At that moment I knew that I was lost—and resurrected.

  Aenea did not speak then, but only nodded, squeezed my hand a final time, and turned back to the light, the cake, and our waiting android friend. On the next day I was to learn what her request truly meant, and how difficult it would be to honor my vow.

  • • •

  I will stop for a moment. I realize that you might not know about me unless you have read the first few hundred pages of my tale, which, because I had to recycle the microvellum upon which I wrote them, no longer exist except in the memory of this ’scriber. I told the truth in those lost pages. Or at least the truth as I knew it then. Or at least I tried to tell the truth. Mostly.

  After having recycled the microvellum pages of that first attempt to tell the story of Aenea, and because the ’scriber has never been out of my sight, I have to assume that no one has read them. The fact that they were written in a Schrödinger cat box execution egg in exile orbit around the barren world of Armaghast—the cat box being little more than a fixed-position energy shell holding my atmosphere, air and food recycling equipment, bed, table, ’scriber, and a vial of cyanide gas waiting to be released by a random isotope emission—would seem to have insured that you have not read those pages.

  But I am not sure.

  Strange things were happening then. Strange things have happened since. I will reserve judgment on whether those pages—and these—could ever have been, or ever will be, read.

  In the meantime, I will reintroduce myself. My name is Raul Endymion, my first name rhyming with tall—which I am—and my last name deriving from the “abandoned” university city of Endymion on the backwater world of Hyperion. I qualify the word “abandoned” because that quarantined city is where I met the old poet—Martin Silenus, the ancient author of the banned epic poem the Cantos—and that is where my adventure began. I use the word “adventure” with some irony, and perhaps in the sense that all of life is an adventure. For it is true that while the voyage began as an adventure—an attempt to rescue twelve-year-old Aenea from the Pax and to escort her safely to the distant Old Earth—it has since become a full lifetime of love, loss, and wonder.

  Anyway, at the time of this telling, during the week of the Pope’s death, the Old Architect’s death, and Aenea’s inauspicious sixteenth birthday in exile, I was thirty-two years old, still tall, still strong, still trained mostly in hunting, brawling, and watching others lead, still callow, and just teetering on the precipice of falling forever in love with the girl-child I had protected like a little sister and who—overnight, it seemed—had become a girl-woman whom I knew now as a friend.

  I should also say that the other things I write of here—the events in Pax space, the murder of Paul Duré, the retrieval of the female-thing named Rhadamanth Nemes, the thoughts of Father Federico de Soya—are not surmised or extrapolated or made-up in the way that the old fiction novels were in Martin Silenus’s day. I know these things, down to the level of Father de Soya’s thoughts and Councillor Albedo’s apparel that day, not because I am omniscient, but because of later events and revelations that gave access to such omniscience.

  It will make sense later. At least I hope it will.

  I apologize for this awkward reintroduction. The template for Aenea’s cybrid father—a poet named John Keats—said in his last letter of farewell to his friends, “I have always made an awkward bow.” In truth, so have I—whether in departure or greeting or, as is perhaps the case here, in improbable reunion.

  So I will return to my memories and ask your indulgence if they do not make perfect sense at my first attempt to share and shape them.

  The wind howled and the dust blew for three days and three nights after Aenea’s sixteenth birthday. The girl was gone for all that time. Over the past four years I had grown used to her “time-outs,” as she called them, and I usually did not fret the way I had the first few times she had disappeared for days on end. This time, however, I was more concerned than usual: the death of the Old Architect had left the twenty-seven apprentices and the sixty-some support people at the desert camp—which is what the Old Architect called Taliesin West—anxious and uneasy. The dust storm added to that anxiety, as dust storms always do. Most of the families and support staff lived close by, in one of the desert-masonry dormitories Mr. Wright had his interns build south of the main buildings, and the camp complex itself was almost fortlike with its walls and courtyards and covered walkways—good for scuttling between buildings during a dust storm—but each successive day without either sunlight or Aenea made me increasingly nervous.

  Several times each day I went to her apprentice shelter: it was the farthest from the main compound, almost a quarter of a mile north toward the mountains. She was never there—she had left the door untethered and a note telling me not to worry, that it was just one of her excursions and that she was taking plenty of water—but every time I visited I appreciated her shelter more.

  Four years earlier, when she and I had first arrived with a dropship stolen from a Pax warship, both of us exhausted, battered, and burned, not to mention with an android healing in the ship’s autosurgeon, the Old Architect and the other apprentices had greeted us with warmth and acceptance. Mr. Wright had not seemed surprised that a twelve-year-old child had come across world after world via farcaster to find him and to ask to be his apprentice. I remember that first day when the Old Architect had asked her what she knew of architecture—“Nothing,” Aenea had replied quietly, “except that you are the one I should learn from.”

  Evidently this had been the correct response. Mr. Wright had told her that all of the apprentices who had arrived before her—all twenty-six others, as it turned out—had been asked to design and build their own shelters in the desert as a sort of entry exam. The Old Architect had offered some crude materials from the compound—canvas, stone, cement, a bit of cast-off lumber—but the design and effort were up to the girl.

  Before she set to work (not being an
apprentice, I made do with a tent close to the main compound), Aenea and I toured the other apprentice shelters. Most were variations on tent-shacks. They were serviceable and some showed style—one particularly exhibited a nice design flare but, as Aenea pointed out to me, would not keep the sand or rain out with the slightest wind—but none was particularly memorable.

  Aenea worked eleven days on her shelter. I helped her do some of the heavy lifting and a bit of the excavating (A. Bettik was still recovering at that time—first in the autosurgeon, then in the compound’s infirmary), but the girl did all of the planning and most of the work. The result was this wonderful shelter that I visited four times a day during this, her last hiatus in the desert. Aenea had excavated the main sections of the shelter so that most of it was below ground level. Then she had set flagstones in place, making sure that they fit tightly, to create a smooth floor. Over the stones she set colorful rugs and blankets she traded for at the Indian Market fifteen miles away. Around the excavated core of the home she set walls that were about a meter high, but with the sunken main room, they seemed taller. They were constructed of the same rough “desert masonry” that Mr. Wright had used in building the walls and superstructure of the main compound buildings and Aenea used the same technique, although she had never heard him describe it.

  First, she gathered stones from the desert and the many arroyos and washes around the hilltop compound. The rocks were of every size and color—purple, black, rusty reds, and deep umbers—and some held petroglyphs or fossils. After gathering the stones, Aenea built wooden forms and set the larger rocks in with their flat sides against the inside face of the form. She then spent days in the broiling sun, shoveling sand from the washes and carting it back to her building site in wheelbarrows, mixing it there with cement to form the concrete that held the stones in place as the mixture hardened. It was a rough concrete/stone concoction—desert masonry, Mr. Wright called it—but it was strangely beautiful, the colorful rocks showing through the surface of the concrete, fissures and textures everywhere. Once in place, the walls were about a meter high and thick enough to hold out the desert heat in the daytime and hold in the inner heat at night.