The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

Aenea nodded. The wind was roaring now, as thin as it was, as we actually climbed into the jet stream. Each of us was moving forward and up with our heads bowed and our bodies arched, as if carrying a heavy load. I wondered what A. Bettik was thinking about.

  “Why don’t we just call the ship and get the hell out of here,” I said. “If we’re going to bail out, let’s get it over with.”

  I could see Aenea’s dark eyes behind the mask that reflected the deepening blue sky. “When we call the ship, there’ll be two dozen Pax warships descending on us like harpy crows,” said Aenea. “We can’t do it until we’re ready.”

  I gestured up the steep staircase. “And climbing this will make us ready?”

  “I hope so,” she said softly. I could hear the rasp of her breathing through my hearpatches.

  “What’s up here, kiddo?”

  We had reached the next three hundredth step. All three of us stopped and panted, too tired to appreciate the view. We had climbed into the edge of space. The sky was almost black. Several of the brighter stars were visible and I could see one of the smaller moons hurtling toward the zenith. Or was it a Pax ship?

  “I don’t know what we’ll find, Raul,” said Aenea, her voice tired. “I glimpse things … dream things again and again … but then I dream the same thing in a different way. I hate to talk about it until I see which reality presents itself.”

  I nodded understanding, but I was lying. We began climbing again. “Aenea?” I said.

  “Yes, Raul.”

  “Why don’t you let me take … you know … communion?”

  She made a face behind the osmosis mask. “I hate calling it that.”

  “I know, but that’s what everyone calls it. But tell me this, at least … why don’t you let me drink the wine?”

  “It’s not time for you to, Raul.”

  “Why not?” I could feel the anger and frustration just below the surface again, mixing with the roiling current of love that I felt for this woman.

  “You know the four steps I talk about …” she began.

  “Learning the language of the dead, learning the language of the living … yeah, yeah, I know the four steps,” I said almost dismissively, setting my very real foot on a very physical marble step and taking another tired pace up the endless stairway.

  I could see Aenea smile at my tone. “Those things tend to … preoccupy the person first encountering them,” she said softly. “I need your full attention right now. I need your help.”

  That made sense to me. I reached over and touched her back through the thermal jacket and skinsuit material. A. Bettik looked across at us and nodded, as if approving of our contact. I reminded myself that he could not have heard our skinsuit transmissions.

  “Aenea,” I said softly, “are you the new messiah?”

  I could hear her sigh. “No, Raul. I never said I was a messiah. I never wanted to be a messiah. I’m just a tired young woman right now … I’ve got a pounding headache … and cramps … it’s the first day of my period …”

  She must have seen me blink in surprise or shock. Well, hell, I thought, it’s not every day that you get to confront the messiah only to hear that she’s suffering from what the ancients used to call PMS.

  Aenea chuckled. “I’m not the messiah, Raul. I was just chosen to be the One Who Teaches. And I’m trying to do it while … while I can.”

  Something about her last sentence made my stomach knot in anxiety. “Okay,” I said. We reached the three hundredth step and paused together, wheezing more heavily now. I looked up. Still no South Gate of Heaven visible. Even though it was midday, the sky was space black. A thousand stars burned. They barely twinkled. I realized that the hiss and roar of the jet stream had gone away. T’ai Shan was the highest peak on T’ien Shan, extending into the highest fringes of the atmosphere. If it had not been for our skinsuits, our eyes, eardrums, and lungs would have exploded like overinflated balloons. Our blood would be boiling. Our …

  I tried to shift my thoughts onto something else.

  “All right,” I said, “but if you were the messiah, what would your message to humanity be?”

  Aenea chuckled again, but I noticed that it was a reflective chuckle, not a derisive one. “If you were a messiah,” she said between breaths, “what would your message be?”

  I laughed out loud. A. Bettik could not have heard the sound through the near vacuum separating us, but he must have seen me throw my head back, for he looked over quizzically. I waved at him and said to Aenea, “I have no fucking clue.”

  “Exactly,” said Aenea. “When I was a kid … I mean a little kid, before I met you … and I knew that I’d have to go through some of this stuff … I was always wondering what message I was going to give humankind. Beyond the things I knew I’d have to teach, I mean. Something profound. Sort of a Sermon on the Mount.”

  I looked around. There was no ice or snow at this terrible altitude. The clear, white steps rose through shelves of steep, black rock. “Well,” I said, “here’s the mount.”

  “Yeah,” said Aenea, and I could hear the fatigue once again.

  “So what message did you come up with?” I said, more to keep her talking and distracted than to hear the answer. It had been a while since she and I had just talked.

  I could see her smile. “I kept working on it,” she said at last, “trying to get it as short and important as the Sermon on the Mount. Then I realized that was no good—like Uncle Martin in his manic-poet period trying to outwrite Shakespeare—so I decided that my message would just be shorter.”

  “How short?”

  “I got my message down to thirty-five words. Too long. Then down to twenty-seven. Still too long. After a few years I had it down to ten. Still too long. Eventually I boiled it down to two words.”

  “Two words?” I said. “Which two?”

  We had reached the next resting point … the seventieth or eightieth three hundredth step. We stopped gratefully and panted. I bent over to rest my skinsuit-gloved hands on my skinsuit-sheathed knees and concentrated on not throwing up. It was bad form to vomit in an osmosis mask. “Which two?” I said again when I got some wind back and could hear the answer over my pounding heart and rasping lungs.

  “Choose again,” said Aenea.

  I considered that for a wheezing, panting moment. “Choose again?” I said finally.

  Aenea smiled. She had caught her wind and was actually looking down at the vertical view that I was afraid even to glance toward. She seemed to be enjoying it. I had the friendly urge to toss her off the mountain right then. Youth. It’s intolerable sometimes.

  “Choose again,” she said firmly.

  “Care to elaborate on that?”

  “No,” said Aenea. “That’s the whole idea. Keep it simple. But name a category and you get the idea.”

  “Religion,” I said.

  “Choose again,” said Aenea.

  I laughed.

  “I’m not being totally facetious here, Raul,” she said. We began climbing again. A. Bettik seemed lost in thought.

  “I know, kiddo,” I said, although I had not been sure. “Categories … ah … political systems.”

  “Choose again.”

  “You don’t think that the Pax is the ultimate evolution of human society? It’s brought interstellar peace, fairly good government, and … oh, yeah … immortality to its citizens.”

  “It’s time to choose again,” said Aenea. “And speaking of our views of evolution …”

  “What?”

  “Choose again.”

  “Choose what again?” I said. “The direction of evolution?”

  “No,” said Aenea, “I mean our ideas about whether evolution has a direction. Most of our theories about evolution, for that matter.”

  “So, do you or don’t you agree with Pope Teilhard … the Hyperion pilgrim, Father Duré … when he said three centuries ago that Teilhard de Chardin had been right, that the universe was evolving toward consciousness and a conjunctio
n with the Godhead? What he called the Omega Point?”

  Aenea looked at me. “You did do a lot of reading in the Taliesin library, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I don’t agree with Teilhard … either the original Jesuit or the short-lived Pope. My mother knew both Father Duré and the current pretender, Father Hoyt, you know.”

  I blinked. I guess I had known that, but being reminded of the reality of that … of my friend’s connections across the last three centuries … set me back a bit.

  “Anyway,” continued Aenea, “evolutionary science has really taken a bite in the butt over the last millennium. First the Core actively opposed investigation into it because of their fear of rapid human-designed genetic engineering—an explosion of our species into variant forms upon which the Core could not be parasitic. Then evolution and the biosciences were ignored by the Hegemony for centuries because of the Core’s influence, and now the Pax is terrified of it.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why is the Pax terrified of biological and genetic research?”

  “No,” I said, “I think I understand that. The Core wants to keep human beings in the form and shape they’re comfortable with and so does the Church. They define being human largely by counting arms, legs, and so forth. But I mean why redefine evolution? Why open up the argument about direction or nondirection and so forth? Doesn’t the ancient theory hold up pretty well?”

  “No,” said Aenea. We climbed several minutes in silence. Then she said, “Except for mystics such as the original Teilhard, most early evolution scientists were very careful not to think of evolution in terms of ‘goals’ or ‘purposes.’ That was religion, not science. Even the idea of a direction was anathema to the pre-Hegira scientists. They could only speak in terms of ‘tendencies’ in evolution, sort of statistical quirks that kept recurring.”

  “So?”

  “So that was their shortsighted bias, just as Teilhard de Chardin’s was his faith. There are directions in evolution.”

  “How do you know?” I said softly, wondering if she would answer.

  She answered quickly. “Some of the data I saw before I was born,” she said, “through my cybrid father’s connections to the Core. The autonomous intelligences there have understood human evolution for many centuries, even while humans stayed ignorant. As hyper-hyperparasites, the AIs evolve only toward greater parasitism. They can only look at living things and their evolutionary curve and watch it … or try to stop it.”

  “So what are the directions in evolution?” I asked. “Toward greater intelligence? Toward some sort of godlike hive mind?” I was curious about her perception of the Lions and Tigers and Bears.

  “Hive mind,” said Aenea. “Ugghh. Can you conceive of anything more boring or distasteful?”

  I said nothing. I had rather imagined that this was the direction of her teachings about learning the language of the dead and all that. I made a note to listen better the next time she taught.

  “Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing,” said my young friend. “A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere … consensual idiocy.”

  “Okay,” I said, still confused. “What direction does evolution take?”

  “Toward more life,” said Aenea. “Life likes life. It’s pretty much that simple. But more amazingly, nonlife likes life as well … and wants to get into it.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Aenea nodded. “Back on pre-Hegira Old Earth … in the 1920s … there was a geologist from a nation-state called Russia who understood this stuff. His name was Vladimir Vernadsky and he coined the phrase ‘biosphere,’ which—if things happen the way I think they will—should take on new meaning for both of us soon.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “You’ll see, my friend,” said Aenea, touching my gloved hand with hers. “Anyway, Vernadsky wrote in 1926—‘Atoms, once drawn into the torrent of living matter, do not readily leave it.’ ”

  I thought about this for a moment. I did not know much science—what I had picked up came from Grandam and the Taliesin library—but this made sense to me.

  “It was phrased more scientifically twelve hundred years ago as Dollo’s Law,” said Aenea. “The essence of it is that evolution doesn’t back up … exceptions like the Old Earth whale trying to become a fish again after living as a land mammal are just the rare exception. Life moves on … it constantly finds new niches to invade.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Such as when humanity left Old Earth in its seedships and Hawking-drive vessels.”

  “Not really,” said Aenea. “First of all, we did that prematurely because of the influence of the Core and the fact that Old Earth was dying because of a black hole in its belly … also the Core’s work. Secondly, because of the Hawking drive, we could jump through our arm of the galaxy to find Earth-like worlds high on the Solmev Scale … most of which we terraformed anyway and seeded with Old Earth life-forms, starting with soil bacteria and earthworms and moving up to the ducks you used to hunt in the Hyperion fens.”

  I nodded. But I was thinking, How else should we have done it as a species moving out into space? What’s wrong with going to places that looked and smelled somewhat like home … especially when home wasn’t going to be there to go back to?

  “There’s something more interesting in Vernadsky’s observations and Dollo’s Law,” said Aenea.

  “What’s that, kiddo?” I was still thinking about ducks.

  “Life doesn’t retreat.”

  “How so?” As soon as I asked the question I understood.

  “Yeah,” said my friend, seeing my understanding. “As soon as life gets a foothold somewhere, it stays. You name it … arctic cold, the Old Mars frozen desert, boiling hot springs, a sheer rockface such as here on T’ien Shan, even in autonomous intelligence programs … once life gets its proverbial foot in the door, it stays forever.”

  “So what are the implications of that?” I said.

  “Simply that left to its own devices … which are clever devices … life will someday fill the universe,” said Aenea. “It will be a green galaxy to begin with, then off to our neighboring clusters and galaxies.”

  “That’s a disturbing thought,” I said.

  She paused to look at me. “Why, Raul? I think it’s beautiful.”

  “Green planets I’ve seen,” I said. “A green atmosphere is imaginable, but weird.”

  She smiled. “It doesn’t have to be just plants. Life adapts … birds, men and women in flying machines, you and me in paragliders, people adapted to flight …”

  “That hasn’t happened yet,” I said. “But what I meant was, well, to have a green galaxy, people and animals and …”

  “And living machines,” said Aenea. “And androids … artificial life of a thousand forms …”

  “Yeah, people, animals, machines, androids, whatever … would have to adapt to space … I don’t see how …”

  “We have,” said Aenea. “And more will before too long.” We reached the next three hundredth step and paused to pant.

  “What other directions are there in evolution that we’ve ignored?” I said when we began to climb again.

  “Increasing diversity and complexity,” said Aenea. “Scientists argued back and forth about these directions for centuries, but there’s no doubt that evolution favors—in the very long run—both these attributes. And of the two, diversity is the more important.”

  “Why?” I said. She must have been growing tired of that syllable. I sounded like a three-year-old child even to myself.

  “Scientists used to think that basic evolutionary designs kept multiplying,” said Aenea. “That’s called disparity. But that turned out not to be the case. Variety in basic plans tends to decrease as life’s antientropic potential—evolution—increases. Look at all the orphans of Old Earth,
for instance—same basic DNA, of course, but also the same basic plans: evolved from forms with tubular guts, radial symmetry, eyes, feeding mouths, two sexes … pretty much from the same mold.”

  “But I thought you said diversity was important,” I said.

  “It is,” said Aenea. “But diversity is different than basic-plan disparity. Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design … thousands of related species … tens of thousands.”

  “Trilobites,” I said, getting the idea.

  “Yes,” said Aenea, “and when …”

  “Beetles,” I said. “All those goddamn species of beetles.”

  Aenea grinned at me through her mask. “Precisely. And when …”

  “Bugs,” I said. “Every world I’ve been on has the same goddamn swarms of bugs. Mosquitoes. Endless varieties of …”

  “You’ve got it,” said Aenea. “Life shifts into high gear when the basic plan for an organism is settled and new niches open up. Life settles into those new niches by tweeking the diversity within the basic shape of those organisms. New species. There are thousands of new species of plants and animals that have come into existence in just the last millennium since interstellar flight started … and not all bio-engineered, some just adapted at a furious rate to the new Earth-like worlds they were dumped down on.”

  “Triaspens,” I said, remembering just Hyperion. “Ever-blues. Womangrove root. Tesla trees?”

  “They were native,” said Aenea.

  “So the diversity’s good,” I said, trying to find the original threads of this discussion.

  “Diversity’s good,” agreed Aenea. “As I said, it lets life shift into high gear and get on with its mindless business of greening up the universe. But there’s at least one Old Earth species that hasn’t diversified much at all … at least not on the friendly worlds it colonized.”

  “Us,” I said. “Humans.”

  Aenea nodded grimly. “We’ve been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals,” she said. “Now it’s our chance to diversify rapidly, and institutions like the Hegemony, the Pax, and the Core are stopping it.”