The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  I open my legs immediately, releasing her.

  She swings her scythe arm, missing my belly by millimeters as I swing back and out, but the motion sends her hurtling forward, farther away from the ledge and rock wall, out over the hole where the platform had been.

  I scrape out and back along the cliff wall, trying to arrest my momentum. The safety line breaks.

  I spread-eagle across the rockface, begin sliding down. My right hand is useless. My left fingers find a narrow hold … lose it … I am sliding faster … my left foot finds a ledge a centimeter wide. That and friction hold me against the rock long enough for me to look over my left shoulder.

  Nemes is twisting as she falls, trying to change her trajectory enough to sink claws or scythe into the remaining edges of the lowest platform.

  She misses by four or five centimeters. A hundred meters farther down, she strikes a rock outcropping and is propelled farther out above the clouds. Steps, posts, beams, and platform pillars are falling into cloud a kilometer below her.

  Nemes screams—a shattered calliope scream of pure rage and frustration—and the echo bounces from rock to rock around me.

  I can no longer hold on. I’ve lost too much blood and had too many muscles torn away. I feel the rock sliding away under my chest, cheek, palm, and straining left foot.

  I look to my left to say good-bye to Aenea, if only with a gaze.

  Her arm catches me as I begin to slide away. She has free-climbed out above me along the sheer face as I watched Nemes fall.

  My heart pounds with the terror that my weight will pull both of us off. I feel myself slipping … feel Aenea’s strong hands slipping … I am covered in blood. She does not let go.

  “Raul,” she says and her voice is shaking, but with emotion, not fatigue or terror.

  With her foot on the ledge the only thing holding us against the cliff, she releases her left hand, sweeps it up, and clamps her safety line on to my dangling carabiner still attached to the piton.

  We both slide off and away, scraping skin. Aenea instantly hugs me with both arms, wraps both legs around me. It is a repeat of my tight embrace of Nemes, but fueled by love and the passion to survive this time, not hate and the urge to destroy.

  We fall eight meters to the end of her safety line. I think that my extra weight will pull the piton out or snap the line.

  We rebound, bounce three times, and hang above nothing. The piton holds. The safety line holds. Aenea’s grip holds.

  “Raul,” she says again. “My God, my God.” I think that she is patting my head, but realize that she is trying to pull my torn scalp back into place, trying to keep my torn ear from coming off.

  “It’s all right,” I try to say, but find that my lips are bleeding and swollen. I can’t enunciate the words I need to say to the ship.

  Aenea understands. She leans forward and whispers into the comthread pickup on my cowl. “Ship—hover and pick us up. Quickly.”

  The shadow descends, moving in as if to crush us. The crowd is on the balcony again, eyes wide, as the giant ship floats to within three meters—gray cliffs on either side of us now—and extrudes a plank from the balcony. Friendly hands pull us in to safety.

  Aenea does not release her grip with arms or legs until we are carried in off the balcony, into the carpeted interior, away from the drop.

  I dimly hear the ship’s voice. “There are warships hurrying in-system toward us. Another is just above the atmosphere ten thousand kilometers to the west and closing …”

  “Get us out of here,” orders Aenea. “Straight up and out. I’ll give you the in-system coordinates in a minute. Go!”

  I feel dizzy and close my eyes to the sound of the fusion engines roaring. I have a faint impression of Aenea kissing me, holding me, kissing my eyelids and bloody forehead and cheek. My friend is crying.

  “Rachel,” comes Aenea’s voice from a distance, “can you diagnose him?”

  Fingers other than my beloved’s touch me briefly. There are stabs of pain, but these are increasingly remote. A coldness is descending. I try to open my eyes but find both of them sealed shut by blood or swelling or both.

  “What looks worse is the least threatening,” I hear Rachel say in her soft but no-nonsense voice. “The scalp wound, ear, broken leg, and so forth. But I think that there are internal injuries … not just the ribs, but internal bleeding. And the claw wounds on his back go to the spinal cord.”

  Aenea is still crying, but her tone is still in command. “Some of you … Lhomo … A. Bettik … help me get him to the doc-in-the-box.”

  “I’m sorry,” comes the ship’s voice, just at the edge of my consciousness, “but all three receptacles in the autosurgeon are in use. Sergeant Gregorius collapsed from his internal injuries and was brought to the third niche. All three patients are currently on full life support.”

  “Damn,” I hear Aenea say under her breath. “Raul? My dear, can you hear me?”

  I start to reply, to say that I’m fine, don’t worry about me, but all I hear from my own swollen lips and dislocated jaw is a garbled moan.

  “Raul,” continues Aenea, “we’ve got to get away from these Pax ships. We’re going to carry you down to one of the cryogenic fugue cubbies, my dear. We’re going to let you sleep awhile until there’s a slot free in the doc-in-the-box. Can you hear me, Raul?”

  I decide against speaking and manage to nod. I feel something loose hanging down on my forehead, like a wet, displaced cap. My scalp.

  “All right,” says Aenea. She leans close and whispers in my remaining ear. “I love you, my dear friend. You’re going to be all right. I know that.”

  Hands lift me, carry me, eventually lay me on something hard and cool. The pain rages, but it is a distant thing and does not concern me.

  Before they slide the lid closed on the cryogenic fugue cubby, I can distinctly hear the ship’s voice saying calmly, “Four Pax warships hailing us. They say that if we do not cut power in ten minutes, they will destroy us. May I point out that we are at least eleven hours from any translation point? And all four Pax warships are within firing distance.”

  I hear Aenea’s tired voice. “Continue on this heading toward the coordinates I gave you, Ship. No reply to Pax warships.”

  I try to smile. We have done this before—trying to outrun Pax ships against great odds. But there is one thing that I am learning that I would love to explain to Aenea, if my mouth worked and if my mind would clear a bit—it’s just that however long one beats those odds, they catch up to you eventually. I consider this a minor revelation, overdue satori.

  But now the cold is creeping over me, into me, through me—chilling my heart and mind and bones and belly. I can only hope that it is the cryogenic fugue coils cycling faster than I remember from my last trip. If it is death, then … well, it’s death. But I want to see Aenea again.

  This is my last thought.

  24

  Falling! Heart pounding wildly, I awoke in what seemed to be a different universe.

  I was floating, not falling. At first I thought that I was in an ocean, a salt ocean with positive buoyancy, floating like a fetus in a sepia-tinged salt sea, but then I realized that there was no gravity at all, no waves or currents, and that the medium was not water but thick sepia light. The ship? No, I was in a large, empty, darkened but light-circled space—an empty ovoid some fifteen meters or more across, with parchment walls through which I could see both the filtered light of a blazing sun and something more complicated, a vast organic structure curving away on all sides. I weakly moved my hands from their floating position to touch my face, head, body, and arms …

  I was floating, tethered by only the lightest harness straps to some sort of sticktite strip on the curved inner wall. I was barefoot and wearing only a soft cotton tunic that I did not recognize—pajamas? hospital gown?

  My face was tender and I could feel new ridges that might be scars. My hair was gone, the flesh above my skull was raw and definitely scarred, and my
ear was there but very tender. My arms had several faint scars that I could see in the dim light. I pulled up my trouser leg and looked at what had been a badly broken lower leg. Healed and firm. I felt my ribs—tender but intact. I had made it to the doc-in-the-box after all.

  I must have spoken aloud, for a dark figure floating nearby said, “Eventually you did, Raul Endymion. But some of the surgery was done the old-fashioned way … and by me.”

  I started—floating up against the sticktite strips. It had not been Aenea’s voice.

  The dark form floated closer and I recognized the shape, the hair, and—finally—the voice. “Rachel,” I said. My tongue was dry, my lips cracked. I croaked the word rather than spoke it.

  Rachel came closer and offered me a squeeze bottle. The first few drops came out as tumbling spheres—most of which splashed me on the face—but I soon got the knack of it and squeezed drops into my open mouth. The water tasted cool and wonderful.

  “You’ve been getting liquids and sustenance via IV for two weeks,” said Rachel, “but it’s better if you drink directly.”

  “Two weeks!” I said. I looked around. “Aenea? Is she … are they …”

  “Everyone’s all right,” said Rachel. “Aenea’s busy. She’s spent much of the last couple of weeks in here with you … watching over you … but when she had to go out with Minmun and the others, she had me stay with you.”

  “Minmun?” I said. I peered through the translucent wall. One bright star—smaller than Hyperion’s sun. The incredible geometries of the structure spreading away, curving out, from this ovoid room. “Where am I?” I said. “How did we get here?”

  Rachel chuckled. “I’ll answer the second question first, let you see the answer to the first yourself in a few minutes. Aenea had the ship jump to this place. Father Captain de Soya, his Sergeant Gregorius, and the officer, Carel Shan, knew the coordinates for this star system. They were all unconscious, but the other survivor—their former prisoner, Hoag Liebler—knew where this place was hiding.”

  I looked through the wall again. The structure seemed huge—a light and shadow latticework stretching out in all directions from this pod. How could they hide anything this large? And who hid it?

  “How did we get to a translation point in time?” I croaked, taking a few more globules of water. “I thought the Pax warships were closing in.”

  “They were,” said Rachel. “They did. We could never have gotten to a Hawking-drive translation point before they destroyed us. Here—you don’t need to be stuck to the wall any longer.” She ripped off the sticktite strips and I floated free. Even in zero-g, I felt very weak.

  Orienting myself so that I could still see Rachel’s face in the dim sepia light, I said, “So how did we do it?”

  “We didn’t translate,” said the young woman. “Aenea directed the ship to a point in space where we farcasted directly to this system.”

  “Farcast? There was an active space farcast portal? Like one of the kinds that the Hegemony FORCE ships used to transit? I didn’t think that any of those had survived the Fall.”

  Rachel was shaking her head. “There was no farcaster portal. Nothing. Just an arbitrary point a few hundred thousand klicks from the second moon. It was quite a chase … the Pax ships kept hailing us and threatening to fire. Finally they did … lance beams leaping toward us from a dozen sources—we wouldn’t even have been a debris field, just gas on a widening trajectory—but then we reached the point Aenea had pointed us toward and suddenly we were … here.”

  I did not say Where is here? again, but I floated to the curved wall and tried to peer through it. The wall felt warm, spongy, organic, and it was filtering most of the sunlight. The resulting interior light was soft and beautiful, but it made it difficult to see out—just the one blazing star was visible and the hint of that incredible geometric structure beyond our pod.

  “Ready to see the ‘where’?” said Rachel.

  “Yeah.”

  “Pod,” said Rachel, “transparent surface, please.”

  Suddenly there was nothing separating us from the outside. I almost shouted in terror. Instead, I flailed my arms and legs trying to find a solid surface to cling to until Rachel kicked closer and steadied me with a firm hand.

  We were in space. The surrounding pod had simply disappeared. We were floating in space—seemed to be floating in space, except for the presence of air to breathe—and we were far out on a branch of a …

  Tree is not the right word. I had seen trees. This was not a tree.

  I had heard much about the old Templar worldtrees, had seen the stump of the Worldtree on God’s Grove—and I’d heard about the kilometers-long shiptrees that had traveled between the star systems back in Martin Silenus’s pilgrim days.

  This was not a worldtree or a shiptree.

  I had heard wild legends—from Aenea actually, so they were probably not legends—of a tree-ring around a star, a fantastical braided ring of living material stretching all the way around an Old Earth System-like sun. I had once tried to calculate how much living material that would require, and decided that it had to be nonsense.

  This was no tree-ring.

  What stretched out on every side of me, curving inward across expanses too large for my planet-formed mind to take in, was a branched and interwoven sphere of living plant material—trunks tens or hundreds of kilometers across, branches klicks wide, leaves hundreds of meters across, trailing root systems stretching like God’s synapses for hundreds, no … thousands of kilometers into space—trellised and wrapped branches stretching out and inward in all directions, trunks the length of Old Earth’s Mississippi River looking like tiny twigs in the distance, tree shapes the size of my home continent of Aquila on Hyperion blending into thousands of other clumps and masses of greenery, all bending inward and away, on all sides, in every direction … there were many black gaps, holes into space, some gaps larger than the trunks and greenery lacing through them … but nowhere were the gaps complete … everywhere the trunks and branches and roots intertwined, opening uncounted billions of green leaves to the star blazing away in the locus of vacuum at the center of …

  I closed my eyes.

  “This can’t be real,” I said.

  “It is,” said Rachel.

  “The Ousters?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Aenea’s friend, the child of the Cantos. “And the Templars. And the ergs. And … others. It’s alive but a construct … a minded thing.”

  “Impossible,” I said. “It would take millions of years to grow this … sphere.”

  “Biosphere,” said Rachel, smiling.

  I shook my head again. “Biosphere is an old term. It’s just the closed vivisystem on and around a planet.”

  “This is a biosphere,” Rachel said again. “Only there are no planets here. Comets, yes, but no planets.” She pointed.

  In the far distance, perhaps hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where the interior of this living sphere began to fade to a green blur even in the unblinking vacuum, a long, white streak moved slowly through the black gap between trunks.

  “A comet,” I repeated stupidly.

  “For watering,” said Rachel. “They have to use millions of them. Luckily there are many billions in the Oört cloud. More billions in the Kuiper Belt.”

  I stared. There were other white specks out there, each with a long, glowing tail. Some moved between the trunks and branches as I watched, giving me some idea of the scale of this biosphere. The comet trajectories were routed through the gaps in the plant material. If this is truly a sphere, the comets would have to pass back through the living globe on their way out-system. What kind of confidence does it take to do such a thing?

  “What is this thing we’re in?” I said.

  “An environmental pod,” said Rachel. “Life bulb. This one is tailored for medical duty. It’s not only been monitoring your IV drip, vital signs, and tissue regeneration, it’s been growing and manufacturing many of the medicines and ot
her chemicals.”

  I reached out and touched the nearly transparent material. “How thick is it?”

  “About a millimeter,” said Rachel. “But very strong. It can shield us from most micrometeorite impacts.”

  “Where do the Ousters get such a material?”

  “They biofacture the genes and it grows itself,” said Rachel. “Do you feel up to going out to see Aenea and meeting some people? Everyone’s been waiting for your awakening.”

  “Yes,” I said, and then, quickly, “no! Rachel?”

  She floated there, waiting. I saw how lustrous her dark eyes were in the amazing light. Much like my darling’s.

  “Rachel …” I began awkwardly.

  She waited, floating, reaching out to touch the transparent pod wall to orient herself heads-up in relation to me.

  “Rachel, we haven’t really talked much …”

  “You didn’t like me,” said the young woman with a slight smile.

  “That’s not true … I mean, it was true, in a way … but it’s because I just didn’t understand things at first. It had been five years for Aenea that I’d been away … it was difficult … I guess that I was jealous.”

  She arched a dark eyebrow. “Jealous, how, Raul? Did you think that Aenea and I were lovers all those standard years you were gone?”

  “Well, no … I mean, I didn’t know …”

  Rachel held up a hand, sparing me further flummoxing. “We aren’t,” she said. “We never were. Aenea would never have considered such a thing. Theo might have entertained the possibility, but she knew from the start that Aenea and I were destined to love certain men.”

  I stared. Destined?

  Rachel smiled again. I could imagine that grin on the little girl Sol Weintraub had talked about in his Hyperion Canto. “Don’t worry, Raul. I happen to know for a fact that Aenea has never loved anyone but you. Even when she was a little girl. Even before she met you. You’ve always been her chosen one.” The young woman’s smile became rueful. “We should all be so lucky.”