The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

“Kayak,” I heard myself say as everything began to feel distant. A great warmth filled me, almost indistinguishable from the sense of relief that surged within me. “Paddled downriver in the kayak,” I babbled. “Through the farcaster. No, I’m not one of the spacers …”

  “Farcaster?” I heard the doctor repeat, her voice puzzled. “What do you mean you came through the farcaster, Raul Endymion? Do you mean you paddled under it the way we did? Just passed by it on your trip downriver?”

  “No,” I said. “I came through it. From offworld.”

  The doctor glanced at the woman in blue and then turned back to me. “You came through the farcaster from offworld? You mean it … functioned? Farcast you here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “From where?” said the doctor, checking my pulse with her left hand.

  “Old Earth,” I said. “I came from Earth.”

  For a moment I floated, blissfully free from pain, while the doctor stepped out into the hall to talk to the ladies. I heard snatches of conversation.

  “… obviously mentally unbalanced,” the doctor’s voice was saying. “Could not have possibly come through the … delusions of Old Earth … possibly one of the spacers on drugs …”

  “Happy to have him stay …”the woman in the blue robe was saying. “Take care of him until …”

  “The priest and one of the guards will stay here …” the doctor’s voice said. “When the medevac skimmer comes to Keroa Tambat we’ll stop by here to fetch him on the way back to the base … tomorrow or the day after tomorrow … don’t let him leave … military police will probably want to …”

  Buoyed up on the rising crest of bliss at the absence of pain, I quit righting the current and allowed myself to drift downstream to the waiting arms of morphia.

  I dreamed of a conversation Aenea and I had shared a few months earlier. It was a cool, high-desert summer night and we were sitting in the vestibule of her shelter, drinking mugs of tea and watching the stars come out. We had been discussing the Pax, but for everything negative I had said about it, Aenea had responded with something positive. Finally I got angry.

  “Look,” I said, “you’re talking about the Pax as if it hadn’t tried to capture you and kill you. As if Pax ships hadn’t chased us halfway across the spiral arm and shot us down on Renaissance Vector. If it hadn’t been for the farcaster there …”

  “The Pax didn’t chase us and shoot at us and try to kill us,” the girl said softly. “Just elements of it. Men and women following orders from the Vatican or elsewhere.”

  “Well,” I said, still exasperated and irritated, “it only takes elements of it to shoot us and kill …” I paused a second. “What do you mean—‘from the Vatican or elsewhere’? Do you think there are others giving orders? Other than the Vatican, I mean?”

  Aenea shrugged. It was a graceful motion, but irritating in the extreme. One of the least endearing of her less-than-endearing teenaged traits.

  “Are there others?” I demanded, more sharply than I was used to speaking to my young friend.

  “There are always others,” Aenea said quietly. “They were right to try to capture me, Raul. Or kill me.”

  In my dream as in reality, I set my mug of tea on the stone foundation of the vestibule and stared at her. “You’re saying that you … and I … should be captured or killed … like animals. That they have that right?”

  “Of course not,” said the girl, crossing her arms in front of her chest, the tea steaming into the cool night air. “I’m saying that the Pax is correct—from its perspective—in using extraordinary measures to try to stop me.”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t heard you say anything so subversive that they should send squadrons of starships after you, kiddo. In fact, the most subversive and heretical thing I’ve heard you say is that love is a basic force of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism. But that’s just …”

  “Bullshit?” said Aenea.

  “Double talk,” I said.

  Aenea smiled and ran her fingers through her short hair. “Raul, my friend, it’s not what I say that’s a danger to them. It’s what I do. What I teach by doing … by touching.”

  I looked at her. I had almost forgotten all that One Who Teaches stuff that her Uncle Martin Silenus had woven into his Cantos epic. Aenea was to be the messiah that the old poet had prophesied in his long, confused poem some two centuries earlier … or so he had me. So far I had seen very little from the girl that suggested messiahhood, unless one counted her trip forward through the Sphinx Time Tomb and the obsession of the Pax to capture or kill her … and me, since I was her guardian during the rough trip out to Old Earth.

  “I haven’t heard you teach much that’s heretical or dangerous,” I said again, my tone almost sullen. “Or seen you do anything that’s a threat to the Pax, either.” I gestured to the night, the desert, and to the distant, lighted buildings of the Taliesin Fellowship, and now—in my ultramorph dream that was more memory than dream—I watched myself make that gesture as if I were observing from the darkness outside the lighted shelter.

  Aenea shook her head and sipped her tea. “You don’t see, Raul, but they do. Already they’ve referred to me as a virus. They’re right … that’s exactly what I could be to the Church. A virus, like the ancient HIV strain on Old Earth or the Red Death that raked through the Outback after the Fall … a virus that invades every cell of the organism and reprograms the DNA in those cells … or at least infects enough cells that the organism breaks down, fails … dies.”

  In my dream, I swooped above Aenea’s canvas-and-stone shelter like a hawk in the night, whirling high among the alien stars above Old Earth, seeing us—the girl and the man—sitting in the kerosene lantern light of the vestibule like lost souls on a lost world. Which is precisely what we were.

  For the next two days I drifted in and out of pain and consciousness the way a skiff cut loose on the ocean would float through rain squalls and patches of sunlight. I drank great volumes of water that the women in blue brought me in glass goblets. I hobbled to the toilet cubby and urinated through a filter, trying to catch the stone that was causing my intermittent agony. No stone. Each time I would hobble back to the bed and wait for the pain to start up again. It never failed to do so. Even at the time, I was aware that this was not the stuff of heroic adventure.

  Before the doctor left to continue downriver to the site of the skimmer crash, I was made to understand that both the Pax guard and the local priest had com units and would radio the base if I caused any trouble whatsoever. Dr. Molina let me know exactly how bad it would be for me if the Pax Fleet commander had to pull a skimmer out of the war games just to fetch a prisoner prematurely. Meanwhile, she said, keep drinking lots of water and peeing every time I could. If the stone didn’t pass, she would get me into the jail infirmary at the base and break it up with sound waves. She left four more shots of ultramorph with the woman in blue and left without a good-bye. The guard—a middle-aged Lusian twice my weight with a flechette pistol in his holster and a come-along neural prod on his belt—peered in, glowered at me, and went back outside to stand by the front door.

  I will stop referring to the head of the household as “the woman in blue.” For the first few hours of agony, that had been all she had been to me—other than my savior, of course—but by the afternoon of the first full day in her home, I knew that she was named Dem Ria; that her primary marriage partner was the other woman, Dem Loa; that the third member of their tripartite marriage was the much younger man, Alem Mikail Dem Alem; that the teenaged girl in the house was Ces Ambre, Alem’s daughter by a previous triune; that the pale boy with no hair—who looked to be about eight standard years old—was named Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem, was the child of the current partnership—although the biological child of which woman, I never discovered—and that he was dying of cancer.

  “Our village medic elder … he died last month and has not been replaced … sent Bin to our own hospital in Keroa Tambat last winter, but t
hey could only administer radiation and chemotherapy and hope for the best,” said Dem Ria as she sat by my bedside that afternoon. Dem Loa sat nearby on another straight-backed chair. I had asked about the boy to shift the subject of conversation away from my own problems. The women’s elaborate robes glowed a deep cobalt blue even as the sunlight behind them lay as thick and red as blood on the interior adobe walls. Lace curtains cut the light and shadows into complex negative spaces. We were chatting in the intervals between the pain. My back hurt then as if someone had struck me there with a heavy club, but this was a dull ache compared to the hot agony when the stone moved. The doctor had said that the pain was a good sign—that the stone was moving when it hurt the most. And the agony did seem to be centered lower in my abdomen. But the doctor had also said that it might take months to pass the stone, if it was small enough to be passed naturally. Many stones, she said, had to be pulverized or removed surgically. I brought my mind back to the health of the child we were discussing.

  “Radiation and chemotherapy,” I repeated, mouthing the words with distaste. It was as if Dem Ria had said that the medic had prescribed leeches and drafts of mercury for the boy. The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall. And what had not been lost had been made too expensive to share with the masses after the WorldWeb went away forever: the Pax Mercantilus carried goods and commodities between the stars, but the process was slow, expensive, and limited. Medicine had slipped back several centuries. My own mother had died of cancer—after refusing radiation and chemotherapy after the diagnosis at the Pax Moors Clinic.

  But why cure a fatal disease when one could recover from it by dying and being resurrected by the cruciform? Even some genetically derived diseases were “cured” by the cruciform during its restructuring of the body during resurrection. And death, as the Church was constantly pointing out, was as much a sacrament as resurrection itself. It could be offered up like a prayer. The average person could now transform the pain and hopelessness of disease and death into the glory of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. As long as the average person carried a cruciform.

  I cleared my throat. “Ah … Bin hasn’t … I mean …” When the boy had waved at me in the night, his loose robe had shown a pale and crossless chest.

  Dem Loa shook her head. The blue cowl of her robe was made of a translucent, silklike fabric. “None of us have yet accepted the cross. But Father Clifton has been … convincing us.”

  I could only nod. The pain in my back and groin was returning like an electric current through my nerves.

  I should explain the different colored robes worn by the citizens of Lock Childe Lamonde on the world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. Dem Ria had explained in her melodic whisper that a little over a century ago, most of the people now living along the long river had migrated here from the nearby star system Lacaille 9352. The world there, originally called Sibiatu’s Bitterness, had been recolonized by Pax religious zealots who had renamed it Inevitable Grace and begun proselytizing the in-digenie cultures that had survived the Fall. Dem Ria’s culture—a gentle, philosophical one stressing cooperation—decided to migrate again rather than convert. Twenty-seven thousand of her people had expended their fortunes and risked their lives to refit an ancient Hegira seedship and transport everyone—men, women, children, pets, livestock—in a forty-nine-year cold-sleep voyage to nearby Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, where the WorldWeb-era inhabitants had died out after the Fall.

  Dem Ria’s people called themselves the Amoiete Spectrum Helix, after the epic philosophical symphony-holo-poem by Halpul Amoiete. In his poem, Amoiete had used colors of the spectrum as a metaphor for the positive human values and shown the helical juxtapositions, interactions, synergies, and collisions created by these values. The Amoiete Spectrum Helix Symphony was meant to be performed, with the symphony, the poetry, and the holoshow all representing the philosophical interplay. Dem Ria and Dem Loa explained how their culture had borrowed the color meanings from Amoiete—white for the purity of intellectual honesty and physical love; red for the passion of art, political conviction, and physical courage; blue for the introspective revelations of music, mathematics, personal therapy to help others and for the design of fabrics and textures; emerald green for resonance with nature, comfort with technology, and the preservation of threatened life-forms; ebony for the creation of human mysteries; and so forth. The triune marriages, nonviolence, and other cultural peculiarities grew partially from Amoiete’s philosophies and largely from the rich cooperative culture the Spectrum people had created on Sibiatu’s Bitterness.

  “So Father Clifton is convincing you to join the Church?” I said as the pain subsided into a lull where I could think and speak once again.

  “Yes,” said Dem Loa. Their tripartner, Alem Mikail Dem Alem, had come in to sit on the adobe windowsill. He listened to the conversation but rarely spoke.

  “How do you feel about that?” I asked, shifting slightly to distribute the ache in my back. I had not asked for ultramorph for several hours. I was very aware of the desire to ask for it now.

  Dem Ria lifted her hand in a complex motion that reminded me of Aenea’s favorite gesture. “If all of us accept the cross, little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem will be entitled to full medical care at the Pax base at Bombasino. Even if they do not cure the cancer, Bin will … return to us … after.” She lowered her gaze and hid her expressive hands in the folds of her robe.

  “They won’t allow just Bin to accept the cross,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” said Dem Loa. “It is always their position that the entire family must convert. We see their point. Father Clifton is very sad about that, but very hopeful that we will accept Jesus Christ’s sacraments before it is too late for Bin.”

  “How does your girl—Ces Ambre—feel about becoming a born-again Christian?” I asked, realizing how personal these questions were. But I was intrigued, and the thought of the painful decision they faced took my mind off my very real but much less important pain.

  “Ces Ambre loves the idea of joining the Church and becoming a full citizen of the Pax,” said Dem Loa, raising her face under the cowl of her soft blue hood. “She would then be allowed to attend the Church academy in Bombasino or Keroa Tambat, and she thinks that the girls and boys there would make much more interesting marriage prospects.”

  I started to speak, stopped myself, and then spoke anyway. “But the triune marriage wouldn’t be … I mean, would the Pax allow …”

  “No,” said Alem from his place by the window. He frowned and I could see the sadness behind his gray eyes. “The Church does not allow same-sex or multiple-partner marriages. Our family would be destroyed.”

  I noticed the three exchange glances for a second and the love and sense of loss I saw in those looks would stay with me for years.

  Dem Ria sighed. “But this is inevitable anyway. I think that Father Clifton is right … that we must do this now, for Bin, rather than wait until he dies the true death and is lost to us forever … and then join the Church. I would rather take our boy to Mass on Sunday and laugh with him in the sunlight after, than go to the cathedral to light a candle in his memory.”

  “Why is it inevitable?” I asked softly.

  Dem Loa made the graceful gesture once again. “Our Spectrum Helix society depends upon all members of it … all steps and components of the Helix must be in place for the interplay to work toward human progress and moral good. More and more of the Spectrum people are abandoning their colors and joining the Pax. The center will not hold.”

  Dem Ria touched my forearm as if to emphasize her next words. “The Pax has not coerced us in any way,” she said softly, her lovely dialect rising and falling like the sound of the wind through the lace curtains behind her. “We respect the fact that they reserve their medicines and their miracle of resurrection for those who join them …” She stopped.

  “But it is hard,” said Dem Loa, her smooth voice suddenly ragged.


  Alem Mikail Dem Alem got up from the window ledge and came over to kneel between the two women. He touched Dem Loa’s wrist with infinite gentleness. He put his arm around Dem Ria. For a moment, the three were lost to the world and me, encircled by their own love and sorrow.

  And then the pain came back like a fiery lance in my back and lower groin, searing through me like a laser. I moaned despite myself.

  The three separated with graceful, purposeful movements. Dem Ria went to get the next ultramorph syringe.

  The dream began the same as before—I was flying at night above the Arizona desert, looking down at Aenea and me as we drank tea and chatted in the vestibule of her shelter—but this time the talk went far beyond the memory of our real conversation that night.

  “How are you a virus?” I was asking the teenager next to me. “How could anything you teach be a threat to something as large and powerful as the Pax?”

  Aenea was looking out into the desert night, breathing in the fragrance of night-blooming blossoms. She did not look at me when she spoke. “Do you know the major error in Uncle Martin’s Cantos, Raul?”

  “No,” I said. She had shown me several mistakes, omissions, or wrongheaded guesses in the past few years, and together we had discovered a few during our voyage to Old Earth.

  “It was twofold,” she said softly. Somewhere in the desert night, a hawk called. “First, he believed what the TechnoCore told my father.”

  “About how they were the ones who had hijacked Earth?” I said.

  “About everything,” said Aenea. “Ummon was lying to the John Keats cybrid.”

  “Why?” I said. “They were just planning to destroy it.”

  The girl looked at me. “But my mother was there to record the conversation,” she said. “And the Core knew that she would tell the old poet.”

  I nodded slowly. “And that he would put it as a fact in the epic poem he was writing,” I said. “But why would they want to lie about …”

  “His second mistake was more subtle and serious,” she said, interrupting me without raising her voice. A pale glow still hung behind the mountains to the north and west. “Uncle Martin believed that the TechnoCore was humanity’s enemy,” she continued.