The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  Or … and this is the explanation I have come to accept … I wrote that note myself while totally immersed, although “possessed” might be a better word, in Aenea’s persona as I pursued its essence through the Void and my own memories. This theory is the least pleasing to me, but it conforms with Aenea’s only expressed view of the afterlife, based as it was more or less on the Judaic tradition of believing that people live on after death only in the hearts and memories of those they loved and those they served and those they saved.

  At any rate, I wrote for more months, began to see the true immensity—and futility—of Aenea’s brave quest and hopeless sacrifice, and then I finished the frenzied scribbling, found the courage to describe Aenea’s terrible death and my own helplessness as she died, wept as I printed out the last few pages of microvellum, read them, recycled them, ordered the ’scriber to keep the complete narrative in its memory, and shut the stylus off for what I thought was the final time.

  Aenea did not appear. She did not lead me out of captivity. She was dead. I felt her absence from the universe as clearly as I had felt any resonance from the Void Which Binds since my communion.

  So I lay in my Schrödinger cat box, tried to sleep, forgot to eat, and waited for death.

  Some of my explorations among the voices of the dead had led to revelations that had no direct relevance to my narrative. Some were personal and private—waking dreams of my long-dead father hunting with his brothers, for instance, and an insight into the generosity of that quiet man I had never known, or chronicles of human cruelty that, like the memories of Jacob Schulmann from the forgotten twentieth century, acted only as subtext for my deeper understanding of today’s barbarisms.

  But other voices …

  So I had finished the narrative of my life with Aenea and was waiting to die, spending longer and longer sleep periods, hoping that the decisive quantum event would occur while I was asleep, aware of the text in the memory of my ’scriber and wondering vaguely if anyone would ever figure out a way through the fixed-to-explode-if-tampered-with shell of my Schrödinger box and find my narrative someday, perhaps centuries hence, when I fell asleep again and had this dream. I knew at once that this was not a regular dream—that wave-front dance of possibilities—but was a call from one of the voices of the dead.

  In my dream, the Hegemony Consul was playing the Steinway on the balcony of his ebony spaceship—that spaceship that I knew so well—while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the nearby swamps. He was playing Schubert. I did not recognize the world beyond the balcony, but it was a place of huge, primitive plants, towering storm clouds, and frightening animal roars.

  The Consul was a smaller man than I had always imagined. When he was finished with the piece, he sat quietly for a moment in the twilight until the ship spoke in a voice I did not recognize—a smarter, more human voice.

  “Very nice,” said the ship. “Very nice indeed.”

  “Thank you, John,” said the Consul, rising from the bench and bringing the balcony into the ship with him. It was beginning to rain.

  “Do you still insist on going hunting in the morning?” asked the disembodied voice that was not the ship’s as I knew it.

  “Yes,” said the Consul. “It is something I do here upon occasion.”

  “Do you like the taste of dinosaur meat?” asked the ship’s AI.

  “Not at all,” said the Consul. “Almost inedible. It is the hunt I enjoy.”

  “You mean the risk,” said the ship.

  “That too.” The Consul chuckled. “Although I do take care.”

  “But what if you don’t come back from your hunt tomorrow?” asked the ship. His voice was of a young man with an Old Earth British accent.

  The Consul shrugged. “We’ve spent—what?—more than six years exploring the old Hegemony worlds. We know the pattern … chaos, civil war, starvation, fragmentation. We’ve seen the fruit of the Fall of the Farcaster system.”

  “Do you think that Gladstone was wrong in ordering the attack?” asked the ship softly.

  The Consul had poured himself a brandy at the sideboard and now carried it to the chess table set near the bookcase. He took a seat and looked at the game pieces already engaged in battle on the board in front of him. “Not at all,” he said. “She did the right thing. But the result is sad. It will be decades, perhaps centuries before the Web begins to weave itself together in a new form.” He had been warming the brandy and sloshing it gently as he spoke, now he inhaled it and sipped. Looking up, the Consul said, “Would you like to join me for the completion of our game, John?”

  The holo of a young man appeared in the seat opposite. He was a striking young man with clear hazel-colored eyes, low brow, hollow cheeks, a compact nose and stubborn jaw, and a wide mouth that suggested both a calm masculinity and a hint of pugnaciousness. The young man was dressed in a loose blouse and high-cut breeches. His hair was auburn-colored, thick, and very curly. The Consul knew that his guest had once been described as having “… a brisk, winning face,” and he put that down to the easy mobility of expression that came with the young man’s great intelligence and vitality.

  “Your move,” said John.

  The Consul studied his options for several moments and then moved a bishop.

  John responded at once, pointing to a pawn that the Consul obediently moved one rank forward for him. The young man looked up with sincere curiosity in his eyes. “What if you don’t come back from the hunt tomorrow?” he said softly.

  Startled out of his reverie, the Consul smiled. “Then the ship is yours, which it obviously is anyway.” He moved his bishop back. “What will you do, John, if this should be the end of our travels together?”

  John gestured to have his rook moved forward at the same lightning speed with which he replied. “Take it back to Hyperion,” he said. “Program it to return to Brawne if all is well. Or possibly to Martin Silenus, if the old man is still alive and working on his Cantos.”

  “Program it?” said the Consul, frowning at the board. “You mean you’d leave the ship’s AI?” He moved his bishop diagonally another square.

  “Yes,” said John, pointing to have his pawn advanced again. “I will do that in the next few days, at any rate.”

  His frown deepening, the Consul looked at the board, then at the hologram across from him, and then at the board again. “Where will you go?” he said and moved his queen to protect his king.

  “Back into the Core,” said John, moving the rook two spaces.

  “To confront your maker again?” asked the Consul, attacking again with his bishop.

  John shook his head. His bearing was very upright and he had the habit of clearing his forehead of curls with an elegant, backward toss of his head. “No,” he said softly, “to start raising hell with the Core entities. To accelerate their endless civil wars and internecine rivalries. To be what my template had been to the poetic community—an irritant.” He pointed to where he wanted his remaining knight moved.

  The Consul considered that move, found it not a threat, and frowned at his own bishop. “For what reason?” he said at last.

  John smiled again and pointed to the square where his rook should next appear. “My daughter will need the help in a few years,” he said. He chuckled. “Well, in two hundred and seventy-some years, actually. Checkmate.”

  “What?” said the Consul, startled, and studied the board. “It can’t be …”

  John waited.

  “Damn,” said the Hegemony Consul at last, tipping over his king. “Goddamn and spit and hell.”

  “Yes,” said John, extending his hand. “Thank you again for a pleasant game. And I do hope that tomorrow’s hunt turns out more agreeably for you.”

  “Damn,” said the Consul and, without thinking, attempted to shake the hologram’s thin-fingered hand. For the hundredth time, his solid fingers went through the other’s insubstantial palm. “Damn,” he said again.

  That night in the Schrödinger cell,
I awoke with two words echoing in my mind. “The child!”

  The knowledge that Aenea had been married before our relationship had become a full-fledged love affair, the knowledge that she had given birth to a child, had burned in my soul and gut like a painful ember, but except for my almost obsessive curiosity about who and why—curiosity unsatisfied by my questioning of A. Bettik, Rachel, and the others who had seen her leave during her Odyssey with them but who had no idea themselves where she had gone or with whom—I had not considered the reality of that child alive somewhere in the same universe I inhabited. Her child. The thought made me want to weep for several reasons.

  “The child is nowhere I can find it now,” Aenea had said.

  Where might that child be now? How old? I sat on my bunk in the Schrödinger cat box and pondered this. Aenea had just turned twenty-three standard years old when she died … correction: when she had been brutally murdered by the Core and its Pax puppets. She had disappeared from sight for the one year, eleven months, one week, and six hours when she had just turned twenty years old. That would make the infant about three standard years old … plus the time I had spent here in the Schrödinger execution egg … eight months? Ten? I simply did not know, but if the child were still alive, he or she … my God, I had never asked Aenea whether her baby had been a boy or girl and she had not mentioned it the one time she had discussed the matter with me. I had been so involved with my own hurt and childish sense of injustice that I had not thought to ask her. What an idiot I had been. The child—Aenea’s son or Aenea’s daughter—would now be about four Standard years old. Walking … certainly. Talking … yes. My God, I realized, her child would be a rational human being at this point, talking, asking questions … a lot of questions if my few experiences with young children were any indication … learning to hike and fish and to love nature …

  I had never asked Aenea her child’s name. My eyes burned and my throat closed with the painful recognition of this fact. Again, she had shown no inclination to talk about that period in her life and I had not asked, telling myself in the weeks we had had together afterward that I did not want to upset her with questions or probings that would make her feel guilty and make me feel murderous. But Aenea had shown no guilt when she had briefly told me about her marriage and child. To be honest, that is part of the reason I’d felt so furious and helpless at the knowledge. But somehow, incredibly, it had not stopped us from being lovers … how had it been phrased on the note I had found on my stylus screen months ago, the note I was sure was from Aenea? “Lovers of whom the poets would sing.” That was it. The knowledge of her brief marriage and the child had not stopped us from feeling toward one another like lovers who had never experienced such emotion with another person.

  And perhaps she had not, I realized. I had always assumed that her marriage was one of sudden passion, almost impulse, but now I looked at it in another way. Who was the father? Aenea’s note had said that she loved me backward and forward in time, which is precisely the way I had discovered I felt about her—it was as if I had always loved her, had waited my entire life to discover the reality of that love. What if Aenea’s marriage had not been one of love or passion or impulse but … convenience? No, not the right word. Necessity?

  It had been prophesied by the Templars, the Ousters, the Shrike Cult Church of the Final Atonement and others that Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia, would bear a child—the One Who Teaches—Aenea, as it turned out. According to the old poet’s Cantos, on the day that the second John Keats cybrid had died a physical death and Brawne Lamia had fought her way to the Shrike Temple for refuge, the Shrike cultists had chanted—“Blessed be the Mother of Our Salvation—Blessed be the Instrument of Our Atonement”—the salvation being Aenea herself.

  What if Aenea had been destined to have a child to continue this line of prophets … of messiahs? I had not heard any of these prophecies of another in Aenea’s line, but there was one thing I had discovered beyond argument during my months writing of Aenea’s life—Raul Endymion was slow and thick-witted, usually the last to understand anything. Perhaps there had been as many prophecies of another One Who Teaches as there had been preceding Aenea herself. Or perhaps this child would have completely different powers and insights that the universe and humanity had been awaiting.

  Obviously I would not be the father of such a second messiah. The union of the second John Keats cybrid and Brawne Lamia had been, by Aenea’s own accounts, the great reconciliation between the best elements of the TechnoCore and humanity itself. It had taken the abilities and perceptions of both AIs and human beings to create the hybrid ability to see directly into the Void Which Binds … for humanity finally to learn the language of the dead and of the living. Empathy was another name for that ability, and Aenea had been the Child of Empathy, if any title suited her.

  Who could the father of her child be?

  The answer struck me like a thunderbolt. For a second there in the Schrödinger cat box, I was so shaken by the logic of it that I was sure that the particle detector clicking away periodically in the frozen-energy wall of my prison had detected the emitted particle at exactly the right time and the cyanide had been released. What irony to figure things out and to die in the same moment.

  But it was not poison in the air, only the growing strength of my certainty on this matter and the even stronger impulse to some action.

  There was one other player in the cosmic chess game Aenea and the others had been playing for three hundred standard years now: that near-mythical Observer from the alien sentient races whom Aenea had mentioned briefly in several different contexts. The Lions and Tigers and Bears, the beings so powerful that they could kidnap Old Earth to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud rather than watch it be destroyed, had—according to Aenea—sent among us one or more Observers over the past few centuries, entities who had, according to my interpretation of what Aenea had said, taken on human form and walked among us for all this time. This would have been relatively easy during the Pax era with the virtual immortality of the cruciform so widespread. And there were certainly others who, like the ancient poet Martin Silenus, had stayed alive through a combination of WorldWeb-era medicine, Poulsen treatments, and sheer determination.

  Martin Silenus was old, that was certain, perhaps the oldest human being in the galaxy—but he had not been the Observer, that was equally certain. The author of the Cantos was too opinionated, too active, too visible to the public at large, too obscene, and generally just too damned cantankerous to be a cool observer representing alien races so powerful that they could destroy us in an eye blink. Or so I hoped.

  But somewhere—probably somewhere I had never visited and could not imagine—that Observer had been waiting and watching in human form. It made sense that Aenea might have been compelled—by both prophecy and the necessity of unhindered human evolution she had taught about and believed in—to ’cast away from her Odyssey to that distant world where the Observer waited, meet him, mate with him, and bring that child into the universe. Thus would be reconciled the Core, humanity, and the distant Others.

  The idea was unsettling, definitely disturbing to me, but also exciting in a way that nothing had been since Aenea’s death.

  I knew Aenea. Her child would be a human child—filled with life and laughter and a love of everything from nature to old holodramas. I had never understood how Aenea could have left her child behind, but now I realized that she would have had no choice. She knew the terrible fate that awaited her in the basement cell of Castel Sant’ Angelo. She knew that she would die by fire and torture while surrounded by inhuman enemies and the Nemes monsters. She had known this since before she was born.

  The fact of this made my knees weak. How could my dear friend have laughed with me so often, gone optimistically into new days so happily, celebrated life so thoroughly, when she knew that every day passing was another day closer to such a terrible death? I shook my head at the strength of will this implied. I did not have it—this I knew. Aenea
had.

  But she could not have kept the child with her, knowing when and how this terrible ending would take place. Presumably then, the father was raising the child. The Other in human form. The Observer.

  I found this even more upsetting than my earlier revelations. I was struck then with the additional certainty that Aenea would have wanted me to have some role in her child’s life if she had thought it possible. Her own glimpses into possible futures presumably ended with her own death. Perhaps she did not know that I would not be executed at the same time. But then, she had asked me to scatter her ashes on Old Earth … which assumed my survival. Perhaps she had thought it too much of a request to make—for me to find her child and to help in any way I could as the boy or girl came of age, to help protect it in a universe of sharp edges.

  I realized that I was weeping—not softly, but with great, ragged sobs. It was the first time I had wept like this since Aenea’s death, and—oddly enough—it was not primarily out of grief for Aenea’s absence, but at the thought of this second chance to hold a child’s hand as I had once held Aenea’s when she was still twelve standard, of protecting this child of my beloved’s as I had tried to protect my beloved.

  And failed. The indictment was my own.