The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  I started to speak, hesitated.

  Rachel’s smile faded. “Oh. She told you about the one-year eleven-month one-week six-hour interregnum?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And about her having …” I stopped. It would be foolish to choke up in front of this strong woman. She would never look at me the same again.

  “A baby?” finished Rachel quickly.

  I looked at her as if trying to find some answer in her handsome features. “Did Aenea tell you about it?” I said, feeling like I was betraying my dear friend somewhat by trying to get this information from someone else. But I could not stop. “Did you know at the time what …”

  “Where she was?” said Rachel, returning my intense gaze. “What was happening to her? That she was getting married?”

  I could only nod.

  “Yes,” said Rachel. “We knew.”

  “Were you there with her?”

  Rachel seemed to hesitate, as if weighing her answer. “No,” she said at last. “A. Bettik, Theo, and I waited for almost two years for her to return. We carried on her … ministry? Mission?… Whatever it is, we carried it on while she was gone … sharing some of her lessons, finding people who wished to partake of communion, letting them know when she would return.”

  “So you knew when she would return?”

  “Yes,” said Rachel. “To the day.”

  “How?”

  “That’s when she had to return,” said the dark-haired woman. “She had taken every possible minute that she could without jeopardizing her mission. The Pax was hunting for us the next day … they would have seized all of us if Aenea had not returned and farcast us away.”

  I nodded, but was not thinking about close calls with the Pax. “Did you meet … him?” I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep my tone neutral.

  Rachel’s expression remained serious. “Father to their child, you mean? Aenea’s husband?”

  I felt that Rachel was not trying to be cruel, but the words tore at me far worse than had Nemes’s claws. “Yes,” I said. “Him.”

  Rachel shook her head. “None of us had met him when she went away.”

  “But you do know why she chose him to be the father of her child?” I persisted, feeling like the Grand Inquisitor we had left behind on T’ien Shan.

  “Yes,” said Rachel, returning my gaze, giving me no more.

  “Was it something to do with her … her mission?” I said, feeling my throat growing tighter and tighter, my voice more strained. “Is it something she had to do … some reason the child had to be born to them? Can you tell me anything, Rachel?”

  She took my wrist then, gripping it strongly. “Raul, you know that Aenea will explain this when it’s time to do so.”

  I pulled away, making a rude noise. “When it’s time,” I growled. “Jesus H. Christ, I’m sick of hearing that phrase. And I’m sick of waiting.”

  Rachel shrugged. “Confront her then. Threaten to beat her up if she doesn’t tell you. You clobbered that Nemes-thing … Aenea shouldn’t be a problem.”

  I glowered at the woman.

  “Seriously, Raul, this is between you and Aenea. All I can tell you is that you are the only man she has ever talked about, and—as far as I can tell—the only man she has ever loved.”

  “How the hell can you …” I began angrily and then forced myself to shut up. I patted her arm awkwardly, the motion making me begin to pivot around the center of my own axis. It was hard to stay near someone in zero-g without touching them. “Thank you, Rachel,” I said.

  “Ready to go see everyone?”

  I took a breath. “Almost,” I said. “Can this pod surface be made reflective?”

  “Pod,” said Rachel, “ninety percent translucence. High interior reflectivity.” To me she said, “Checking in the mirror before your big date?”

  The surface had become about as reflective as a still puddle of water—not a perfect mirror, but clear enough and bright enough to show me a Raul Endymion with scars on his face and bare scalp, the skin on his skull a babyish pink, traces of bruise and swelling under and around his eyes, and thin … very thin. The bones and muscles of my face and upper body seemed to have been sketched in bold pencil strokes. My eyes looked different.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I said again.

  Rachel made a motion with her hand. “The autosurgeon wanted you for another week, but Aenea couldn’t wait. The scars aren’t permanent … at least most of them. The pod medicine in the IV is taking care of the regeneration. Your hair will start growing back in two or three standard weeks.”

  I touched my scalp. It was like patting the scarred and especially tender butt of an ugly newborn. “Two or three weeks,” I said. “Great. Fucking great.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” said Rachel. “I think it looks rather dashing, actually. I’d keep that look if I were you, Raul. Besides, I hear that Aenea is a pushover for older men. And right now, you certainly look older.”

  “Thanks,” I said dryly.

  “You’re welcome,” said Rachel. “Pod. Open iris. Access to main pressurized stem connector.”

  She led the way out, kicking and floating ahead of me through the irising wall.

  Aenea hugged me so hard when I came into the room … pod … that I wondered if my broken ribs might have given way again. I hugged her back just as hard.

  The trip through the pressurized stem connector had been commonplace enough, if one counted being shot down a flexible, translucent, two-meter-wide pipeline at speeds up to what I estimated as sixty klicks per hour—they used currents of oxygen flowing at high speeds in opposite directions to give a boost to one’s kicking and swimming through air—all the while other people, mostly very thin, hairless, and exceptionally tall other people, whizzed by silently in the opposite direction at closing speeds in excess of 120 klicks per hour, missing us by centimeters.

  Then there were the hub pods, into which Rachel and I were accelerated at high speed, like corpuscles being blasted into ventricles and auricles of a huge heart, and through which we tumbled, kicked, avoided other high-speed travelers, and exited via one of a dozen other stem connector openings. I was lost within minutes, but Rachel seemed to know her way—she pointed out that there were subtle colors embedded in the plant flesh over each exit—and soon we had entered a pod not much larger than mine, but crowded with cubbies, sticktite seating areas, and people. Some of the people—like Aenea, A. Bettik, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, and Lhomo Dondrub—I knew well: other people there—Father Captain de Soya, obviously renewed and recovered from his terrible wounds and wearing a priest’s black trousers, tunic, and Roman collar, Sergeant Gregorius in his Swiss Guard combat fatigues—I had met recently and knew by sight; other people, like the long, thin, otherworldly Ousters and the hooded Templars were wondrous and strange, but well within my range of understanding; while still other individuals there—quickly introduced by Aenea as the Templar True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen and the former Hegemony FORCE Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, I knew of but did not actually believe I was meeting. More than Rachel or the fact of Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia, these were figures not just from the old poet’s Cantos but archetypes from deep myth, long dead at the very least, and probably never real to begin with in the fixed, everyday, eat-sleep-and-use-the-toilet firmament of things.

  And finally in this zero-gravity Ouster pod there were the other people who were not people at all, at least from my frame of reference: such as the willowy green beings who were introduced by Aenea as LLeeoonn and OOeeaall, two of the few surviving Seneschai empaths from Hebron—alien and intelligent beings. I looked at these strange creatures—the palest cypress-green skin and eyes; bodies so thin that I could have encircled their torso with my fingers; symmetrical like us with two arms, two legs, a head, but, of course, not really like us at all; limbs articulated more like single, unbroken, fluid lines than evolved of hinged bone and gristle; splayed digits like toads’ hands; and heads more like a human fetus’s than a human adult’s. Their eyes were
little more than shadowy spots on the green flesh of their faces.

  The Seneschai had been reported to have died out during the early days of the Hegira … they were little more than legend, even less real than the tale of the soldier Kassad or the Templar Het Masteen.

  One of these green legends brushed its three-fingered hand over my palm as we were introduced.

  There were other non-human, non-Ouster, non-android entities in the pod.

  Floating near the translucent wall of the pod were what looked to be large, greenish-white platelets—soft, shuddering saucers of soft material—each almost two meters across. I had seen these life-forms before … on the cloud world where I had been eaten by the sky squid.

  Not eaten, M. Endymion, came surges of language echoing in my head, only transported.

  Telepathy? I thought, half directing the query to the platelets. I remembered the surge of language-thought on the cloud world, and how I had wondered where it had originated.

  It was Aenea who answered. “It feels like telepathy,” she said softly, “but there’s nothing mystical about. The Akerataeli learned our language the old-fashioned way—their zeplin symbiotes heard the sound vibrations and the Akerataeli broke it down and analyzed it. They control the zeplins by a form of long-distance, very tightly focused microwave pulses …”

  “The zeplin was the thing that swallowed me on the cloud world,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Aenea.

  “Like the zeplins on Whirl?”

  “Yes, and in Jupiter’s atmosphere as well.”

  “I thought that they were hunted to extinction during the early Hegira years.”

  “They were eradicated on Whirl,” said Aenea. “And even before the Hegira on Jupiter. But you weren’t paragliding your kayak on Jupiter or Whirl … but on another oxygen-rich gas giant six hundred light-years into the Outback.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry I interrupted. You were saying … microwave impulses …”

  Aenea made that graceful throwing-away gesture I’d known since she was a child. “Just that they control their zeplin symbiote partners’ actions by precise microwave stimulation of certain nerve and brain centers. We’ve given the Akerataeli permission to stimulate our speech centers so that we ‘hear’ their messages. I take it that it’s rather like playing a complicated piano for them …”

  I nodded but did not really understand.

  “The Akerataeli are also a spacefaring race,” said Father Captain de Soya. “Over the eons, they have colonized more than ten thousand oxygen-rich gas giant worlds.”

  “Ten thousand!” I said. I think that for a moment my jaw actually hung slack. In humankind’s more than twelve hundred years of traveling in space we had explored and settled on less than ten percent of that number of planets.

  “The Akerataeli have been at it longer than we,” said de Soya softly.

  I looked at the gently vibrating platelets. They had no eyes that I could see, certainly no ears. Were they hearing us?. They must … one of them had responded to my thoughts. Could they read minds as well as stimulate language-thoughts?

  While I was staring at them, the conversation between the humans and Ousters in the room resumed.

  “The intelligence is reliable,” said the pale Ouster whom I later learned was named Navson Hamnim. “There were at least three hundred archangel-class ships gathering at System Lacaille 9352. Each ship has a representative of the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem or Malta. It is definitely a major Crusade.”

  “Lacaille 9352,” mused de Soya. “Sibiatu’s Bitterness. I know the place. How old is this intelligence?”

  “Twenty hours,” said Navson Hamnim. “The data was sent via the only Gideon-drive courier drone we have left … of the three drones captured during your raids, two have been destroyed. We are fairly sure that the scoutship which sent this drone was detected and destroyed seconds after launching the courier.”

  “Three hundred archangels,” said de Soya. He rubbed his cheeks. “If they are aware we know about them, they could make a Gideon jump this direction within days … hours. Assume two days’ resurrection time, we may have less than three days to prepare. Have defenses been improved since I left?”

  Another Ouster whom I later knew as Systenj Coredwell opened his hands in a gesture that I would discover meant “in no way.” I noticed that there was webbing between the long fingers. “Most of the fighting ships have had to jump to the Great Wall salient to hold off their Task Force HORSEHEAD. The fighting is very bitter there. Few of the ships are expected to return.”

  “Does your intelligence say whether the Pax knows what you have here?” asked Aenea.

  Navson Hamnim opened his hands in a subtle variation of Coredwell’s gesture. “We think not. But they know now that this has been a major staging area for our recent defensive battles. I would venture that they think this is just another base—perhaps with a partial orbital forest ring.”

  “Is there anything we can do to break up the Crusade before it jumps this way?” said Aenea, speaking to everyone in the room.

  “No.” The flat syllable came from the tall man who had been introduced as Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. His Web English had a strange accent. He was a tall man, extremely thin but muscular, with an equally thin beard along his jawline and around his mouth. In the old poet’s Cantos, Kassad had been described as a reasonably young man, but this warrior was in his standard sixties, at least, with heavy lines around his thin mouth and small eyes, his dark complexion burned even darker by long exposure to desert-world sun or deep-space UV, the spiked hair on top of his head rising like short silver nails.

  Everyone looked at Kassad and waited.

  “With de Soya’s ship destroyed,” said the Colonel, “our only chance at successful hit-and-run operations is gone. The few Hawking-drive warships we have left would take a time-debt of at least two months to jump to Lacaille 9352 and back. The Crusade archangels would almost certainly be here and gone by then … and we would be defenseless.”

  Navson Hamnim kicked away from the pod wall and oriented himself right side up in relation to Kassad. “These few warships do not offer us a defense in any case,” he said softly, his own Web English more musical than accented. “Should we not consider dying while on the attack?”

  Aenea floated between the two men. “I think that we should consider not dying at all,” she said. “Nor allowing the biosphere to be destroyed.”

  A positive sentiment, a voice spoke in my head. But not all positive sentiments can be supported by updrafts of possible action.

  “True,” said Aenea, looking at the platelets, “but perhaps in this case the updrafts will build.”

  Good thermals to you all, said the voice in my head. The platelets moved toward the pod wall, which irised open for them. Then they were gone.

  Aenea took a breath. “Shall we meet on the Yggdrasill to share the main meal in seven hours and continue this discussion? Perhaps someone will have an idea.”

  There was no dissension. People, Ousters, and Seneschai exited by a score of openings that had not been there a moment before.

  Aenea floated over and hugged me again. I patted her hair.

  “My friend,” she said softly. “Come with me.”

  It was her private living pod—our private living pod, she informed me—and it was much like the one in which I awoke, except that there were organic shelves, niches, writing surfaces, storage cubbies, and facilities for comlog interface. Some of my clothes from the ship were folded neatly in a cubby and my extra boots were in a fiberplastic drawer.

  Aenea pulled food from a cold-box cubby and began making sandwiches. “You must be hungry, my dear,” she said, tearing off pieces of rough bread. I saw zygoat cheese on the sticktite zero-g work surface, some wrapped pieces of roast beef that must have come from the ship, bulbs of mustard, and several tankards of T’ien Shan rice beer. Suddenly I was starved.

  The sandwiches were large and thick. She set them on catch-plates made of som
e strong fiber, lifted her own meal and a beer bulb, and kicked toward the outer wall. A portal appeared and began to iris open.

  “Uh …” I said alertly, meaning—Excuse me, Aenea, but that’s space out there. Aren’t we both going to explosively decompress and die horribly?

  She kicked out through the organic portal and I shrugged and followed.

  There were catwalks, suspension bridges, sticktite stairways, balconies, and terraces out there—made of steel-hard plant fiber and winding around the pods, stalks, branches, and trunks like so much ivy. There was also air to breathe. It smelled of a forest after a rain.

  “Containment field,” I said, thinking that I should have expected this. After all, if the Consul’s ancient starship could have a balcony …

  I looked around. “What powers it?” I said. “Solar receptors?”

  “Indirectly,” said Aenea, finding us a sticktite bench and mat. There were no railings on this tiny, intricately woven balcony. The huge branch—at least thirty meters across—ended in a profusion of leaves above us and the latticework web of the trunks and branches “beneath” us convinced my inner ear that we were many kilometers up on a wall made of crisscrossed, green girders. I resisted the urge to throw myself down on the sticktite mat and cling for dear life. A radiant gossamer fluttered by, followed by some type of small bird with a v-shaped tail.

  “Indirectly?” I said, my mouth full as I took a huge bite of sandwich.

  “The sunlight—for the most part—is converted to containment fields by ergs,” continued my friend, sipping her beer and looking out at the seemingly infinite expanse of leaves above us, below us, to all sides of us, their green faces all turned toward the brilliant star. There was not enough air to give us a blue sky, but the containment field polarized the view toward the sun just enough to keep us from being blinded when we glanced that direction.

  I almost spit my food out, managed to swallow instead, and said, “Ergs? As in Aldebaren energy binders? You were serious? Ergs like the one taken on the last Hyperion pilgrimage?”