The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  We all sat on the carpeted holopit steps then. I realized that I still had the sealed tube that de Soya had given me. I rotated it through my hands.

  “Go ahead and open it,” said Sergeant Gregorius. The big man was slowly removing the outer layers of his scarred combat armor. Lance burns had melted the lower layers. I was afraid to see his chest and left arm.

  I hesitated! I had said that I’d wait until the priest-captain had recovered.

  “Go ahead,” Gregorius said again. “The Captain’s been waiting to give this back to you for nine years.”

  I had no idea what it could be. How could this man have known he would see me someday? I owned nothing … how could he have something of mine to return?

  I broke the seal on the tube and looked within. Some sort of tightly rolled fabric. With a slow realization, I pulled the thing out and unrolled it on the floor.

  Aenea laughed delightedly. “My God,” she said. “In all my various dreams about this time, I never foresaw this. How wonderful.”

  It was the hawking mat … the flying carpet that had carried Aenea and me from the Valley of the Time Tombs almost ten years earlier. I had lost it … it took me a second or two to remember. I had lost it on Mare Infinitus nine years ago when the Pax lieutenant I had been fighting had pulled a knife, cut me, pushed me off the mat into the sea. What had happened next? The lieutenant’s own men on the floating sea platform had mistakenly killed him with a cloud of flechette darts, the dead man had fallen into the violet sea, and the hawking mat had flown on … no, I remembered that someone on the platform had intercepted it.

  “How did the father-captain get it?” I asked, knowing the answer as soon as I articulated the question. De Soya had been our relentless pursuer then.

  Gregorius nodded. “The Father-Captain used it to find your blood and DNA samples. It’s how we got your Pax service record from Hyperion. If we’d had pressure suits, I would have used the damn thing to get us off that airless mountain.”

  “You mean it works?” I tapped the flight threads. The hawking mat—more tattered than I remembered it—hovered ten centimeters off the floor. “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “We’re rising to the fissure at the coordinates you gave me,” came the ship’s voice.

  The holopit view cleared and showed the Jo-kung ridge rushing past. We slowed and hovered a hundred meters out. We had returned to the same forested valley fissure where the ship had dropped me more than three months earlier. Only now the green valley was filled with people. I saw Theo, Lhomo, many of the others from the Temple Hanging in Air. The ship floated lower, hovered, and waited for directions.

  “Lower the escalator,” said Aenea. “Let them all aboard.”

  “May I remind you,” said the ship, “that I have fugue couches and life support for a maximum of six people for an extended interstellar jump? There are at least fifty people there on the …”

  “Lower the escalator and let them all aboard,” commanded Aenea. “Immediately.”

  The ship did as it was told without another word. Theo led the refugees up the ramp and the circular stairs to where we waited.

  Most of those who had stayed behind at the Temple Hanging in Air were there: many of the temple monks, the Tromo Trochi of Dhomu, the ex-soldier Gyalo Thondup, Lhomo Dondrub—we were delighted to see that his paraglider had brought him safely back, and from his grins and hugs, the delight was reciprocated—Abbot Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi, Chim Din, Jigme Taring, Kuku and Kay, George and Jigme, the Dalai Lama’s brother Labsang, the brickworkers Viki and Kim, Overseer Tsipon Shakabpa, Rimsi Kyipup—less dour than I had ever seen him—and high riggers Haruyuki and Kenshiro, as well as the bamboo experts Voytek and Janusz, even the Mayor of Jo-kung, Charles Chi-kyap Kempo. But no Dalai Lama. And the Dorje Phamo was also missing.

  “Rachel went back to fetch them,” said Theo, the last to come aboard. “The Dalai Lama insisted on being the last to leave and the Sow stayed behind to keep him company until it was time to go. But they should have been back by now. I was just ready to go back along the ledge to check …”

  Aenea shook her head. “We’ll all go.”

  There was no way to get everyone seated or situated. People milled on the stairways, stood around the library level, had wandered up to the bedroom at the apex of the ship to look outside via the viewing walls, while others were on the fugue cubby level and down in the engine room.

  “Let’s go, Ship,” said Aenea. “The Temple Hanging in Air. Make a direct approach.”

  For the ship, a direct approach was a burst of thruster fire, a lob fifteen klicks into the atmosphere, and then a vertical drop with repellors and main engine burning at the last second. The entire process took about thirty seconds, but while the internal containment field kept us from being smashed to jelly, the view through the clear apex walls must have been disorienting for those watching upstairs. Aenea, A. Bettik, Theo, and I were watching the holopit and even that small view almost sent me to clutching the bulkheads or clinging to the carpet. We dropped lower and hovered fifty meters above the temple complex.

  “Ah, damn,” said Theo.

  The view had shown us a man falling to his death in the clouds below. There was no possibility of swooping down to catch him. One second he was freefalling, the next he had been swallowed by the clouds.

  “Who was it?” said Theo.

  “Ship,” said Aenea. “Playback and enhance.”

  Carl Linga William Eiheji, the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard.

  A few seconds later several figures emerged from the Right Meditation pavilion onto the highest platform, the one I had helped build to Aenea’s plans less than a month ago.

  “Shit,” I said aloud. The Nemes-thing was carrying the Dalai Lama in one hand, holding him over the edge of the platform. Behind her … behind it … came her male and female clone-siblings. Then Rachel and the Dorje Phamo stepped out of the shadows onto the platform.

  Aenea gripped my arm. “Raul, do you want to come outside with me?”

  She had activated the balcony beyond the Steinway, but I knew that this was not all that she meant. “Of course,” I said, thinking, Is this her death? Is this what she has foreseen since before birth? Is it my death? “Of course I’ll come,” I said.

  A. Bettik and Theo started out onto the ship’s balcony with us. “No,” said Aenea. “Please.” She took the android’s hand for a second. “You can see everything from inside, my friend.”

  “I would prefer to be with you, M. Aenea,” said A. Bettik.

  Aenea nodded. “But this is for Raul and me alone.”

  A. Bettik lowered his head a second and returned to the holopit image. None of the rest of the score of people in the library level and on the spiral stairs said a word. The ship was dead silent. I walked out onto the balcony with my friend.

  Nemes still held the boy out over the drop. We were twenty meters above her and her siblings now. I wondered idly how high they could jump.

  “Hey!” shouted Aenea.

  Nemes looked up. I was reminded that the effect of her gaze was like being stared at by empty eye sockets. Nothing human lived there.

  “Put him down,” said Aenea.

  Nemes smiled and dropped the Dalai Lama, catching him with her left hand at the last second. “Be careful what you ask for, child,” said the pale woman.

  “Let him and the other two go and I’ll come down,” said Aenea.

  Nemes shrugged. “You won’t leave here anyway,” she said, her voice not raised but perfectly audible across the gap.

  “Let them go and I’ll come down,” repeated Aenea.

  Nemes shrugged but threw the Dalai Lama across the platform like an unwanted wad of paper.

  Rachel ran to the boy, saw that he was hurt and bleeding but alive, lifted him, and turned back angrily toward Nemes and her siblings.

  “NO!” shouted Aenea. I had never heard her use that tone before. It froze both Rachel and me in our tracks.

  “Rachel,” said Aenea,
her voice level again, “please bring His Holiness and the Dorje Phamo up to the ship now.” It was polite, but an imperative that I could not have resisted. Rachel did not.

  Aenea gave the command and the ship dropped lower, morphing and extending a stairway from the balcony. Aenea started down. I hurried to follow her. We stepped onto the bonsai cedar platform … I had helped to place all of the planks … and Rachel led the child and old woman past us, up the stairway. Aenea touched Rachel’s head as the other woman went past. The stairway flowed uphill and shaped itself back into a balcony. Theo and A. Bettik joined Rachel and the Dorje Phamo on it. Someone had taken the bleeding child into the ship.

  We stood two meters from Rhadamanth Nemes. Her siblings stepped up to the creature’s side.

  “This is not quite complete,” said Nemes. “Where is your … ah, there.”

  The Shrike flowed from the shadows of the pavilion. I say “flowed,” for although it moved, I had not seen it walk.

  I was clenching and unclenching my hands. Everything was wrong for this showdown. I had peeled off my therm jacket in the ship, but still wore the stupid skinsuit and climbing harness, although most of the hardware had been left in the ship. The harness and multiple layers would still slow me down.

  Slow me down from what? I thought. I had seen Nemes fight. Or rather, I had not seen her. When she and the Shrike had struggled on God’s Grove, there had been a blur, then explosions, then nothing. She could decapitate Aenea and have my guts for garters before I got my hands clenched into fists.

  Fists. The ship was unarmed, but I had left it with Sergeant Gregorius’s Swiss Guard assault rifle still on the library level. The first thing they had taught us in the Home Guard was never to fight with fists when you could scrounge up a weapon.

  I looked around. The platform was clean and bare, not even a railing I could wrench free to use as a club. This structure was too well built to rip anything loose.

  I glanced at the cliff wall to our left. No loose rocks there. There were a few pitons and climbing bolts still imbedded in the fissures there, I knew—we had clipped on to them while building this level and pavilion and we hadn’t got around to clearing all of them—but they were driven in far too tight for me to pull out and use as a weapon, although Nemes could probably do so with one finger. And what good would a piton or chock nut do against this monster?

  There were no weapons to find here. I would die barehanded. I hoped that I would get one blow in before she took me down … or at least one swing.

  Aenea and Nemes were looking only at each other. Nemes did not spare more than a glance at the Shrike ten paces to her right. The female-thing said, “You know that I am not going to take you back to the Pax, don’t you, child bitch?”

  “Yes,” said Aenea. She returned the creature’s stare with a solid intensity.

  Nemes smiled. “But you believe that your spiked creature will save you again.”

  “No,” said Aenea.

  “Good,” said Nemes. “Because it will not.” She nodded to her clone-siblings.

  I know their names now—Scylla and Briareus. And I know what I saw next.

  I should not have been able to see it, for all three of the Nemes-things phase-shifted at that instant. There should have been the briefest glimpse of a chrome blur, then chaos, then nothing … but Aenea reached over and touched the back of my neck, there was the usual electric tingle I received whenever her skin touched mine, and suddenly the light was different—deeper, darker—and the air was as thick as water around us. I realized that my heart did not seem to be beating and that I did not blink or take a breath. As alarming as that sounds, it seemed irrelevant then.

  Aenea’s voice whispered from the hearpatch on my folded-back skinsuit cowl … or perhaps it spoke directly through her touch on my neck. I could not tell. We cannot phase-shift with them or use it to fight them, she said. It is an abuse of the energy of the Void Which Binds. But I can help us watch this.

  And what we watched was incredible enough.

  At Nemes’s command, Scylla and Briareus threw themselves at the Shrike, while the Hyperion demon raised four arms and threw itself in the direction of Nemes—only to be intercepted by the siblings. Even with our altered vision—the ship hanging frozen in midair, our friends on the balcony frozen into unblinking statues, a bird above the cliff face locked in to the thick air like an insect in amber—the sudden movement of the Shrike and the two cloned creatures was almost too fast to follow.

  There was a terrible impact just a meter short of Nemes, who had turned into a silver-surfaced effigy of herself, and who did not flinch. Briareus threw a blow that I am convinced would have split our ship in two. It reverberated off the Shrike’s thorned neck with a sound like an underwater earthquake played back in slow motion, and then Scylla kicked the Shrike’s legs out from under it. The Shrike went down, but not before two of its arms seized Scylla and two other razor-fingered claws sank deep into Briareus.

  The Nemes siblings seemed to welcome the embrace, throwing themselves onto the tumbling Shrike with clacking teeth and flying nails. I could see that the hurtling edges of their rigid hands and forearms were razor-sharp, guillotine surfaces sharper than the Shrike’s blades and thorns.

  The three beat and chewed on each other in a wild frenzy, rolling across the platform, throwing bonsai cedar chips three meters into the air, and slamming against the rock wall. In a second, all three were on their feet, the Shrike’s great jaws clamping on Briareus’s neck even as Scylla slashed at one of the creature’s four arms, bent it backward, and seemed to break it at a joint. Still holding Briareus in its jaws, the huge teeth chewing and scraping at the silver form’s head, the Shrike whirled to confront Scylla, but by then both clone-siblings had their hands on the blades and thorns on the Shrike’s skull, bending it backward until I waited to hear the neck snap and see its head roll away.

  Instead, Nemes somehow communicated, Now! Do it! and without an instant’s hesitation, the two siblings threw themselves away from the cliff face, toward the railing at the abyss-end side of the platform. I saw what they were going to do—throw the Shrike into space, just as they had done to the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard.

  Perhaps the Shrike saw this as well, for the tall creature slammed the two chrome bodies against it, its chest spikes and wrist thorns sinking deep into the forcefields around the struggling, clawing siblings. The trio whirled and tumbled and bounced up like some demented, three-part wind-up toy locked into hyperfast berserk mode, until finally the Shrike with its kicking, clawing, visibly impaled forms slammed into the sturdy cedar railing, tore through it as though it were wet cardboard, and went hurtling out over and into the drop, still fighting.

  Aenea and I watched as the tall silver form with flashing spikes and the shorter silver forms with flailing limbs fell, fell, grew smaller and smaller, fell into clouds, and were swallowed. I knew that those watching from the ship would have seen nothing except a sudden disappearance of three of the figures on our platform, and then a broken railing and an emptier platform with just Nemes, Aenea, and me remaining. The silver thing that was Rhadamanth Nemes turned its featureless chrome face toward us.

  The light changed. The breeze blew again. The air thinned. I felt my heart suddenly beating again … pounding loudly … and I blinked rapidly.

  Nemes was in her human form again. “So,” she said to Aenea, “shall we finish this little farce?”

  “Yes,” said Aenea.

  Nemes smiled and went to phase-shift.

  Nothing happened. The creature frowned and seemed to concentrate. Still nothing occurred.

  “I can’t stop you from phase-shifting,” said Aenea. “But others can … and have.”

  Nemes looked irritated for a second but then laughed. “Those who created me will attend to that in a second, but I do not wish to wait that long, and I do not need to shift up to kill you, bitch child.”

  “That’s true,” said Aenea. She had stood her ground through all of this viol
ence and confusion, her legs apart, feet firmly planted, arms easy at her sides.

  Nemes showed her small teeth, but I saw that these teeth were elongating, growing sharper, as if being extruded farther from her gums and jawbone. There were at least three rows of them.

  Nemes held up her hands and her fingernails—already pale and long—extended another ten centimeters, flowing into gleaming spikes.

  Nemes reached down with those sharpened nails and peeled back the skin and flesh of her right forearm, revealing some sort of metallic endoskeleton that was the color of steel but which looked infinitely sharper.

  “Now,” said Nemes. She stepped toward Aenea.

  I stepped between them.

  “No,” I said, and raised my fists like a boxer ready to start.

  Nemes showed all of her rows of teeth.

  23

  Time and motion seem to slow again, as if I can once again see in the phase-shift mode, but this time it is merely the effect of adrenaline and total concentration. My mind shifts into overdrive. My senses become preternaturally alert. I see, feel, and calculate every microsecond with uncanny clarity.

  Nemes takes a step … more toward Aenea to my left than toward me.

  This is a chess match more than a fight. I win if I kill the unfeeling bitch or fling her off the platform long enough for us to escape. She does not have to kill me to win … only neutralize me long enough to kill Aenea. Aenea is her target. Aenea has always been her target. This monster was created to kill Aenea.

  Chess match. Nemes has just sacrificed two of her strongest pieces—her monster siblings—to neutralize our knight, the Shrike. Now all three pieces are off the board. Only Nemes—the dark queen—Aenea, humankind’s queen, and Aenea’s lowly pawn … me.

  This pawn may have to sacrifice himself, but not without taking out the dark queen. Of that he is determined.

  Nemes is smiling. Her teeth are sharp and redundant. Her arms are still at her sides, long nails gleaming, her right forearm exposed like some obscene surgical exhibit … the interior not human … no, not human at all. The cutting edge of her forearm endoskeleton catches the afternoon sunlight.