Simmons, Dan - Hyperion

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Hyperion

by Dan Simmons

Hyperion is the tale of seven people who make a pilgrimmage to a

terrifying creature called the Shrike in an attempt to save mankind.

Stunningly written and beautifully crafted, Simmons's Hyperion resonates

with technical achievement and the excitement and wonder found only in

the best SF.

Dan Simmons, a former teacher and director of programmes for gifted

children, now writes full time. · He lives with his wife and daughter in

Colorado, USA. He has always been interested in writing, composing his

first short stories at the age of nine.

Since then he has been co-winner of the first Twilight Zone Magazine

short story contest, winner of the Rod Serling Memorial Award, and

winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel with Song of Kali. He

is also the author of the much-acclaimed horror novel Carrion Comfort,

winner of the 1990 Brain Stoker Aw.ard, the Locus Award for Best Horror

Novel and the British Fantasy Award.

Hyperion is the winner of the 1990 Hugo Award and Locus Award for Best

Science Fiction Novel.

Also by Dan Simmons

SONG OF KALI

Winner of the Worm Fantasy Award

CARRION COMFORT

Winner of the British Fantasy Society Award

Winner of the Brain Stoker Award

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel

THE FALL OF THE HYPERION

Winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel

PHASES OF GRAVITY

PRAYERS TO BROKEN STONES

Winner of the Btam Stoker Award

SUMMER OF NIGHT

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel

CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel

THE HOLLOW MAN LOVEDEATH

FIRES OF EDEN ENDYMION

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

The right of Dan Simmons to be identified as the Author of the Work has

been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain 1990

by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

First published in paperback in 1990

by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

First HEADLINE FEATURE paperback in 1991

10987

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on

the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to

real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 0 7472 3482 5

Typeset in 10/10h pt English Times

by Coiset Private Limited, Singapore

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING A division of Hodder Headline PLC 338 Euston

Road

London NW1 3BH

This is for Ted

PROLOGUE

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played

Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but

well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and

bellowed in the swamps below. A thunderstorm was brewing to the north.

Bruise-black clouds silhouetted a forest of giant gymnosperms while

stratocumulus towered nine kilometers high in a violent sky. Lightning

rippled along the horizon. Closer to the ship, occasional vague,

reptilian shapes would blunder into the interdiction field, cry out, and

then crash away through indigo mists. The Consul concentrated on a

difficult section of the Prelude and ignored the approach of storm and

nightfall.

The fatline receiver chimed.

The Consul stopped, fingers hovering above the keyboard, and listened.

Thunder rumbled through the heavy air. From the direction of the

gymnosperm forest there came the mournful ululation of a carrion-breed

pack. Somewhere in the darkness below, a small-brained beast trumpeted

its answering challenge and fell quiet.

The interdiction field added its sonic undertones to the sudden silence.

The fatline chimed again.

'Damn,' said the Consul and went in to answer it.

While the computer took a few seconds to convert and decode the burst of

decaying tachyons, the Consul poured himself a glass of Scotch. He

settled into the cushions of the projection pit just as the diskey

blinked green. 'Play,' he said.

'You have been chosen to return to Hyperion,' came a woman's husky

voice. Full visuals had not yet formed; the air remained empty except

for the pulse of transmission

codes which told the Consul that this fatline squirt had originated on

the Hegemony administrative world of Tau Ceti Center. The Consul did

not need the transmission coordinates to know this. The aged but still

beautiful voice of Meina Gladstone was unmistakable.

'You have been chosen to return to Hyperion as a member of the Shrike

Pilgrimage,' continued the voice.

The hell you say, thought the Consul and rose to leave the pit.

'You and six others have been selected by the Church of the Shrike and

confirmed by the All Thing,' said Meina Gladstone. 'It is in the

interest of the Hegemony that you accept."

The Consul stood motionless in the pit, his back to the flickering

transmission codes. Without turning, he raised his glass and drained

the last of the Scotch.

'The situation is very confused,' said Meina Gladstone. Her voice was

weary. 'The consulate and Home Rule Council fatlined us three standard

weeks ago with the news that the Time Tombs showed signs of opening. The

anti-entropic fields around them were expanding rapidly and the Shrike

has begun ranging as far south as the Bridle Range."

The Consul turned and dropped into the cushions. A hoio had formed of

Meina Gladstone's ancient face. Her eyes looked as tired as her voice

sounded.

'A FORCE:space task force was immediately dispatched from Parvati to

evacuate the Hegemony citizens on Hyperion before the Time Tombs open.

Their time-debt will be a little more than three Hyperion years." Meina

Gladstone paused. The Consul thought he had never seen the Senate CEO

look so grim. 'We do not know if the evacuation fleet will arrive in

time,' she said, 'but the situation is even more complicated. An Ouster

migration cluster of at least four thousand... units...

has been detected approaching the Hyperion system.

Our evacuation task force should arrive only a short while before the

Ousters."

The Consul understood Gladstone's hesitation. An Ouster migration

cluster might consist of ships ranging in size from single-person

ramscouts to can cities and comet forts holding tens of thousands of the

interstellar barbarians.

'The FORCE joint chiefs believe that this is the Ousters' big push,'

said Meina Gladstone. The ship's computer had positioned the holo so

that the woman's sad brown eyes seemed to be staring directly at the

Consul.

'Whether they seek to control just Hyperion for the Time Tombs or

whether this is an all-out attack on the Worldweb remains to be seen. In

the meantime, a full FORCE:space battle fleet complete with a fareaster

construction battalion has spun up from the Camn System to join the

evacuation task force, but this fleet may be recalled depending upon

circumstances."

The Consul nodded and absently raised the Scotch to his lips. He

frowned at the empty glass and dropped it onto the thick carpeting of

the holopit. Even with no military training he understood the difficult

tactical decision Gladstone and the joint chiefs were faced with.

Unless a military fareaster were hurriedly constructed in the Hyperion

system- at staggering expense- there would be no way to resist the

Ouster invasion. Whatever secrets the Time Tombs might hold would go to

the Hegemony's enemy. If the fleet did construct a farcaster in time

and the Hegemony committed the total resources of FORCE to defending the

single, distant, colonial world of Hyperion, the Worldweb ran the

terrible risk of suffering an Ouster attack elsewhere on the perimeter,

or- in a worst-case scenario- having the barbarians actually seizing the

farcaster and penetrating the Web itself. The Consul tried to imagine

the reality of armored Ouster troops stepping through farcaster portals

into the undefended home cities on a hundred worlds.

The Consul walked through the holo of Meina Gladstone, retrieved his

glass, and went to pour another Scotch.

'You have been chosen to join the pilgrimage to the Shrike,' said the

image of the old CEO whom the press loved to compare to Lincoln or

Churchill or Alvarez-Temp or whatever other pre-Hegira legend was in

historical vogue at the time. 'The Templars are sending their treeship

Yggdrasil!,' said Gladstone, 'and the

evacuation task force commander has instructions to let it pass. With a

three-week time-debt, you can rendezvous with the Yggdrasill before it

goes quantum from the Parvati system. The six other pilgrims chosen by

the Shrike Church will be aboard the treeship. Our intelligence reports

suggest that at least one of the seven pilgrims is an agent of the

Ousters. We do not... at this time... have any way of knowing which

one it is."

The Consul had to smile. Among all the other risks Gladstone was

taking, the old woman had to consider the possibility that he was the

spy and that she was fatlining crucial information to an Ouster agent.

Or had she given him any crucial information? The fleet movements were

detectable as soon as the ships used their Hawking drives, and if the

Consul were the spy, the CEO's revelation might be a way to scare him

off. The Consul's smile faded and he drank his Scotch.

'Sol Weintraub and Fedmahn Kassad are among the seven pilgrims chosen,'

said Gladstone.

The Consul's frown deepened. He stared at the cloud of digits

flickering like dust motes around the old woman's image. Fifteen

seconds of fatline transmission time remained.

'We need your help,' said Meina Gladstone. 'It is essential that the

secrets of the Time Tombs and Shrike be uncovered. This pilgrimage may

be our last chance. If the Ousters conquer Hyperion, their agent must

be eliminated and the Time Tombs sealed at all cost. The fate of the

Hegemony may depend upon it."

The transmission ended except for the pulse of rendezvous coordinates.

'Response?" asked the ship's computer.

Despite the tremendous energies involved, the spacecraft was capable of

placing a brief, coded squirt into the incessant babble of FTL bursts

which tied the human portions of the galaxy together.

'No,' said the Consul and went outside to lean on the balcony railing.

Night had fallen and the clouds were low. No stars were visible. The

darkness would have been absolute except for the intermittent flash of

lightning to the north and a soft phosphorescence rising from the

marshes. The Consul was suddenly very aware that he was, at that

second, the only sentient being on an unnamed world. He listened to the

antediluvian night sounds rising from the swamps and he thought about

morning, about setting out in the Vikken EMV at first light, about

spending the day in sunshine, about hunting big game in the fern forests

to the south and then returning to the ship in the evening for a good

steak and a cold beer. The Consul thought about the sharp pleasure of

the hunt and the equally sharp solace of solitude: solitude he had

earned through the pain and nightmare he had

already suffered on Hyperion.

Hyperion.

The Consul went inside, brought the balcony in, and sealed the ship just

as the first heavy raindrops began to fall. He climbed the spiral

staircase to his sleeping cabin at the apex of the ship. The circular

room was dark except for silent explosions of lightning which outlined

rivulets of rain coursing the skylight. The Consul stripped, lay back

on the firm mattress, and switched on the sound system and external

audio pickups. He listened as the fury of the storm blended with the

violence of Wagner's 'Flight of the Valkyries." Hurricane winds buffeted

the ship. The sound of thunderclaps filled the room as the skylight

flashed white, leaving afterimages burning in the Consu!'s retinas.

Wagner is good only for thunderstorms, he thought.

He closed his eyes but the lightning was visible through closed eyelids.

He remembered the glint of ice crystals blowing through the tumbled

ruins on the low hills near the Time Tombs and the colder gleam of steel

on the Shrike's impossible tree of metal thorns. He remembered screams

in the night and the hundred-facet, ruby and-blood gaze of the Shrike

itself.

Hyperion.

The Consul silently commanded the computer to shut off all speakers and

raised his wrist to cover his eyes. In the sudden silence he lay

thinking about how insane it would be to return to Hyperion. During his

eleven years as Consul on that distant and enigmatic world, the

mysterious Church of the Shrike had allowed a dozen barges of offworld

pilgrims to depart for the windswept barrens

around the Time Tombs, north of the mountains. No one had returned. And

that had been in normal times, when the Shrike had been prisoner to the

tides of time and forces no one understood, and the anti-entropic fields

had been contained to a few dozen meters around the Time Tombs. And

there had been no threat of an Ouster invasion.

The Consul thought of the Shrike, free to wander everywhere on Hyperion,

of the millions of indigenies and thousands of Hegemony citizens

helpless before a creature which defied physical laws and which

communicated only through death, and he shivered despite the

warmth of the cabin.

Hyperion.

The night and storm passed. Another stormfront raced ahead of the

approaching dawn. Gymnosperms two hundred meters tall bent and whipped

before the coming torrent. Just before first light, the Consul's ebony

spaceship rose on a tail of blue plasma and punched through thickening

clouds as it climbed toward space and rendezvous.

ONE

The Consul awoke with the peculiar headache, dry throat, and sense of

having forgotten a thousand dreams which only periods in cryogenic fugue

could bring. He blinked, sat upright on a low couch, and groggily

pushed away the last sensor tapes clinging to his skin. There were two

very short crew clones and one very tall, hooded Templar with him in the

windowless ovoid of a room. One of the clones offered the Consul the

traditional post-thaw glass of orange juice. He accepted it and drank

greedily.

'The Tree is two light-minutes and five hours of travel from Hyperion,'

said the Templar, and the Consul realized that he was being addressed by

Het Masteen, captain of the Templar treeship and True Voice of the Tree.

The Consul vaguely realized that it was a great honor to be awakened by

the Captain, but he was too groggy and disoriented from fugue to

appreciate it.

'The others have been awake for some hours,' said Het Masteen and

gestured for the clones to leave them.

'They have assembled on the foremost dining platform."

'Hhrghn,' said the Consul and took a drink. He cleared his throat and

tried again. 'Thank you, Het Masteen,' he managed. Looking around at

the egg-shaped room with its carpet of dark grass, translucent walls,

and support ribs of continuous, curved weirwood, the Consul realized

that he must be in one of the smaller environment pods. Closing his

eyes, he tried to recall his memories of rendezvous just before the

Templar ship went quantum.

The Consul remembered his first glimpse of the kilometer-long treeship

as he closed for rendezvous, the treeship's details blurred by the

redundant machine and

erg-generated containment fields which surrounded it like a spherical

mist, but its leafy bulk clearly ablaze with thousands of lights which

shone softly through leaves and thin-walled environment pods, or along

countless platforms, bridges, command decks, stairways, and bowers.

Around the base of the treeship, engineering and cargo spheres clustered

like oversized galls while blue and violet drive streamers trailed

behind like ten-kilometer-long roots.

'The others await,' Her Masteen said softly and nodded toward low

cushions where the Consul's luggage lay ready to open upon his command.

The Templar gazed thoughtfully at the weirwood rafters while the Consul

dressed in semiformal evening wear of loose black trousers, polished

ship boots, a white silk blouse which ballooned at waist and elbows,

topaz collar cinch, black demi-coat complete with slashes of Hegemony

crimson on the epaulets, and a soft gold tricorne. A section of curved

wall became a mirror and the Consul stared at the image there: a more

than middle-aged man in semi-formal evening wear, sunburned skin but

oddly pale under the sad eyes. The Consul frowned, nodded, and turned

away.

Het Masteen gestured and the Consul followed the tall, robed figure

through a dilation in the pod onto an ascending walkway which curved up

and out of sight around the massive bark wall of the treeship's trunk.

The Consul paused, moved to the edge of the walkway, and took a quick

step back. It was at least six hundred meters down- down being created

by the one-sixth standard gravity being generated by the singularities

imprisoned at the base of the tree - and there were no railings.

They resumed their silent ascent, turning off from the main trunk

walkway thirty meters and half a trunk-spiral later to cross a flimsy

suspension bridge to a five-meter-wide branch. They followed this

outward to where the riot of leaves caught the glare of Hyperion's sun.

'Has my ship been brought out of storage?" asked the Consul.

'It is fueled and ready in sphere eleven,' said Her Masteen. They

passed into the shadow of the trunk and stars became visible in the

black patches between the dark latticework of leaves. 'The other

pilgrims have agreed to ferry down in your ship if the FORCE authorities

give permission,' added the Templar.

The Consul rubbed his eyes and wished that he had been allowed more time

to retrieve his wits from the cold grip of cryonic fugue. 'You've been

in touch with the task force?"

'Oh, yes, we were challenged the moment we tunneled down from quantum

leap. A Hegemony warship is...

escorting us.. · this very moment." Het Masteen gestured toward a patch

of sky above them.

The Consul squinted upward but at that second segments of the upper

tiers of branches revolved out of the treeship's shadow and acres of

leaves ignited in sunset hues. Even in the still shadowed places,

glowbirds nestled like Japanese lanterns above lighted walkways, glowing

swingvines, and illuminated hanging bridges, while fireflies from Old

Earth and radiant gossamers from Maul-Covenant blinked and coded their

way through labyrinths of leaves, mixing with constellations

sufficiently to fool even the most starwise traveler.

Het Masteen stepped into a basket lift hanging from a whiskered-carbon

cable which disappeared into the three hundred meters of tree above

them. The Consul followed and they were borne silently upward. He

noted that the walkways, pods, and platforms were conspicuously empty

except for a few Templars and their diminutive crew clone counterparts.

The Consul could recall seeing no other passengers during his rushed

hour between rendezvous and fugue, but he had put that down to the

imminence of the treeship going quantum, assuming then that the

passengers were safe in their fugue couches. Now, however, the treeship

was traveling far below relativistic velocities and its branches should

be crowded with gawking passengers. He mentioned his observation to the

Templar.

'The six of you are our only passengers,' said Het Masteen. The basket

stopped in a maze of foliage and

the treeship captain led the way up a wooden escalator worn with age.

The Consul blinked in surprise. A Templar treeship normally carried

between two and five thousand passengers; it was easily the most

desirable way to travel between the stars. Treeships rarely accrued

more than a four- or five-month time-debt, making short, scenic

crossings where star systems were a very few light-years apart, thus

allowing their affluent passengers to spend as little time as necessary

in fugue. For the treeship to make the trip to Hyperion and back,

accumulating six years of Web time with no paying passengers would mean

a staggering financial loss to the Templars.

Then the Consul realized, belatedly, that the treeship would be ideal

for the upcoming evacuation, its expenses ultimately to be reimbursed by

the Hegemony.

Still, the Consul knew, to bring a ship as beautiful and vulnerable as

the Yggdrasill - one of only five of its kind - into a war zone was a

terrible risk for the Templar Brotherhood.

'Your fellow pilgrims,' announced Het Masteen as he and the Consul

emerged onto a broad platform where a small group waited at one end of a

long wooden table.

Above them the stars burned, rotating occasionally as the treeship

changed its pitch or yaw, while to either side a solid sphere of foliage

curved away like the green skin of some great fruit. The Consul

immediately recognized the setting as the Captain's dining platform,

even before the five other passengers rose to let Her Masteen take his

place at the head of the table. The Consul found an empty chair waiting

for him to the left of the Captain.

When everyone was seated and quiet, Het Masteen made formal

introductions. Although the Consul knew none of the others from

personal experience, several of the names were familiar and he used his

diplomat's long training to file away identities and impressions.

To the Consul's left sat Father Lenar Hoyt, a priest of the old-style

Christian sect known as Catholic. For a second the Consul had forgotten

the significance of the black clothing and Roman collar, but then he

remembered St Francis Hospital on Hebron where he had

received alcohol trauma therapy after his disastrous first diplomatic

assignment there almost four standard decades earlier. And at the

mention of Hoyt's name he remembered another priest, one who had

disappeared on Hyperion halfway through his own tenure there.

Lenar Hoyt was a young man by the Consul's reckoning - no more than his

early thirties - but it appeared that something had aged the man

terribly in the not too distant past. The Consul looked at the thin

face, cheekbones pressing against sallow flesh, eyes large but hooded in

deep hollows, thin lips set in a permanent twitch of muscle too

downturned to be called even a cynical smile, the hairline not so much

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Simmons, Dan - Hyperion

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