Dan Simmons - Hyperion

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

receding as ravaged by radiation, and he felt he was looking at a man

who had been ill for years. Still, the Consul was surprised that behind

that mask of concealed pain there remained the physical echo of the boy

in the man - the faintest remnants of the round face, fair skin, and

soft mouth which had belonged to a younger, healthier, less cynical

Lenar Hoyt.

Next to the priest sat a man whose image had been familiar to most

citizens of the Hegemony some years before. The Consul wondered if the

collective attention span in the Worldweb was as short now as it had

been when he had lived there. Shorter, probably. If so, then Colonel

Fedmahn Kassad, the so-called Butcher of South Bressia, was probably no

longer either infamous or famous. To the Consul's generation and to all

those who lived in the slow, expatriate fringe of things, Kassad was not

someone one was likely to forget.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad was tall- almost tall enough to look the

two-meter Her Masteen in the eye - and dressed in FORCE black with no

rank insignia or citations showing. The black uniform was oddly similar

to Father Hoyt's garb, but there was no real resemblance between the two

men. In lieu of Hoyt's wasted appearance, Kassad was brown, obviously

fit, and whip-handle lean, with strands of muscle showing in shoulder,

wrist, and throat. The Colone!'s eyes were small, dark, and as

all-encompassing as the lenses of some primitive video camera. His face

was all angles: shadows, planes, and facets. Not gaunt like Father

Hoyt's, merely carved from cold stone. A thin line of beard along his

jawline served to accent the sharpness of his countenance as surely as

blood on a knife blade.

The Colonel's intense, slow movements reminded the Consul of an

Earth-bred jaguar he had seen in a private seedship zoo on Lusus many

years before. Kassad's voice was soft but the Consul did not fail to

notice that even the Colone!'s silences commanded attention.

Most of the long table was empty, the group clustered at one end. Across

from Fedmahn Kassad sat a man introduced as the poet Martin Silenus.

Silenus appeared to be quite the opposite of the military *****man

across from him. Where Kassad was lean and tall, Martin Silenus was

short and visibly out of shape.

Countering Kassad's stone-cut features, the poet's face was as mobile

and expressive as an Earth primate's. His voice was a loud, profane

rasp. There was something, thought the Consul, almost pleasantly

demonic about Martin Silenus, with his ruddy cheeks, broad mouth,

pitched eyebrows, sharp ears, and constantly moving hands sporting

fingers long enough to serve a concert pianist.

Or a strangler. The poet' s silver hair had been cropped into

rough-hewn bangs.

Martin Silenus seemed to be in his late fifties, but the Consul noticed

the telltale blue tinge to throat and palms and suspected that the man

had been through more than a few Poulsen treatments. Silenus's true age

might be anywhere from ninetytoa hundred and fiftystandard years. I f

he were close to the latter age, the Consul knew, the odds were that the

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poet was quite mad.

As boisterous and animated as Martin Silenus seemed upon first

encounter, so the next guest at the table exuded an immediate and

equally impressive sense of intelligent reticence. Sol Weintranb looked

up upon introduction and the Consul noted the short gray beard, lined

forehead, and sad, luminous eyes of the we!i-known scholar. The Consul

had heard tales of the Wandering Jew and his hopeless quest, but he was

shocked to realize that the old man now held the infant in his arms -

his daughter Rachel, no more than a few weeks old. The Consul looked

away.

The sixth pilgrim and only woman at the table was Brawne Lamia. When

introduced, the detective stared at the Consul with such intensity that

he could feel the pressure of her gaze even after she looked away.

A former citizen of the 1.3-g world of Lusus, Brawne Lamia was no taller

than the poet two chairs to her right, but even her loose corduroy

shipsuit did not conceal the heavy layers of muscle on her compact form.

Black curls reached to her shoulders, her eyebrows were two dark lines

dabbed horizontally across a wide brow, and her nose was solid and

sharp, intensifying the aquiline quality of her stare. Lamia's mouth

was wide and expressive to the point of being sensuous, curled slightly

at the coruers in a slight smile which might be cruel or merely playful.

The woman's dark eyes seemed to dare the observer to discover which was

the case.

It occurred to the Consul that Brawne Lamia might well be considered

beautiful.

Introductions completed, the Consul cleared his throat and turned toward

the Templar. 'Het Masteen, you said that there were seven pilgrims. Is

Weintraub's child the seventh?"

Het Masteen's hood moved slowly from side to side.

'No. Only those who make a conscious decision to seek the Shrike may be

counted among the pilgrims."

The group at the table stirred slightly. Each must know what the Consul

knew; only a group comprising a prime number of pilgrims might make the

Shrike Church-sponsored trip north.

'I am the seventh,' said Het Masteen, captain of the Templar treeship

ggdrasill and the True Voice of the Tree. In the silence which followed

the announcement, Her Masteen gestured and a group of crew clones began

serving the pilgrims their last meal before planetfall.

'So the Ousters are not in-system yet?" asked Brawne Lamia. Her voice

had a husky, throaty quality which strangely stirred the Consul.

'No,' said Het Masteen. 'But we cannot be more than a few standard days

ahead of them. Our instruments

have detected fusion skirmishes within the system's OOrt cloud."

'Will there be war."?" asked Father Hoyt. His voice seemed as fatigued

as his expression. When no one volunteered a response, the priest

turned to his right as if retroactively directing the question to the

Consul.

The Consul sighed. The crew clones had served wine; he wished it had

been whiskey. 'Who knows what the Ousters will do?" he said. 'They no

longer appear to be motivated by human logic."

Martin Silenus laughed loudly, spilling his wine as he gestured. 'As if

we fucking humans were ever motivated by human logic!" He took a deep

drink, wiped his mouth, and laughed again.

Brawne Lamia frowned. 'If the serious fighting starts too soon,' she

said, 'perhaps the authorities will not allow us to land."

'We will be allowed to pass,; said Her Masteen. Sunlight found its way

past folds in his cowl to fall on yellowish skin.

'Saved from certain death in war to be delivered to certain death at the

hands of the Shrike,' murmured Father Hoyt.

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'There is no death in all the Universe!" intoned Martin Silenus in a

voice which the Consul felt sure could have awakened someone deep in

cryogenic fugue. The poet drained the last of his wine and' raised the

empty goblet in an apparent toast to the stars:

'No smellof death = there shall be no death, moan, moan; Moan, Cybele,

moan;for t hy pernicious Babes

Have changed a god into a shaking palsy.

Moan, brethren, moan, for l have no strength left;

Freak as the reed - weak - feeble as my voice- Oh, oh, thepain, thepain

of feebleness.

Moan, moan, for still l thaw..."

.Silenus abruptly broke off and poured more wine, belching once into

the silence which had followed his recitation.

The other six looked at one another. The Consul noticed that Sol

Weintraub was smiling slightly until the baby in his arms stirred and

distracted him.

'Well,' said Father Hoyt hesitantly, as if trying to retrieve an earlier

strand of thought, 'if the Hegemony convoy leaves and the Ousters take

Hyperion, perhaps the occupation will be bloodless and they'll let us go

about our business."

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad laughed softly. 'The Ousters don't want to

occupy Hyperion,' he said. 'If they take the planet they'll loot what

they want and then do what they do best. They'll burn the cities into

charred rubble, break the rubble into smaller' pieces, and then bake the

pieces until they glow. They'll melt the poles, boil the oceans, and

then use the residue to salt what's left of the continents so nothing

will ever grow there again."

'Well..." began Father Hoyt and then trailed off.

There was no conversation as the clones cleared the soup and salad

dishes and brought on the main course.

'You said that there was a Hegemony warship escorting us,' the Consul

said to Het Masteen as they finished their roast beef and boiled sky

squid.

The Templar nodded and pointed. The Consul squinted but could make out

nothing moving against the rotating starfield.

'Here,' said Fedmahn Kassad and leaned across Father Hoyt to hand the

Consul a collapsible pair of military binoculars.

The Consul nodded his thanks, thumbed on the power, and scanned the

patch of sky Het Masteen had indicated. Gyroscopic crystals in the

binoculars hummed slightly as they stabilized the optics and swept the

area in a programmed search pattern. Suddenly the image froze, blurred,

expanded, and steadied.

The Consul c6uld not avoid an involuntary intake of breath as the

Hegemony ship filled the viewer. Neither the expected field-blurred

seed of a solo ramscout nor the bulb of a torchship, the electronically

outlined image was of a matte-black attack carrier. The thing was

impressive in the way only warships through the centuries had succeeded

in being. The Hegemony spinship was incongruously streamlined with its

four

sets of boom arms retracted in battle readiness, its sixty-meter command

probe sharp as a Clovis point, and its Hawking drive and fusion blisters

set far back along the launch shaft like feathers on an arrow.

The Consul handed the binoculars back to Kassad without comment. If the

task force was using a full attack carrier to escort the Yggdrasili,

what kind of firepower were they setting in place to meet the Ouster

invasion?

'How long until we land?" askedBrawne Lamia. She had been using her

cornlog to access the treeship's datasphere and obviously was frustrated

with what she had found. Or had not found.

'Four hours until orbit,' murmured Het Masteen. 'A few minutes more by

dropship. Our consular friend has offered his private craft to ferry

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you down."

'To Keats?" said Sol Weintraub. It was the first time the scholar had

spoken since dinner had been served.

The Consul nodded. 'It's still the only spaceport on Hyperion set to

handle passenger vehicles,' he said.

'Spaceport?" Father Hoyt sounded angry. 'I thought that we were going

straight to the north. To the Shrike's realm."

Het Mssteen patiently shook his head. 'The pilgrimage always begins

from the capital,' he said. 'It will take several days to reach the

Time Tombs."

'Several days,' snapped Brawne Lamia. 'That's absurd."

'Perhaps,' agreed Het Mssteen, 'but it is the case, nonetheless."

Father Hoyt looked as if something in the meal had caused him

indigestion even though he had eaten almost nothing. 'Look,' he said,

'couldn't we change the rules this once - I mean, given the war scare

and all? And just !and near the Time Tombs or wherever and get it over

with?"

The Consul shook his head. 'Spacecraft and aircraft have been trying to

take the short route to the northern moors for almost four hundred

years,' he said. 'l know of none who made it."

'May one inquire,' said Martin Silenus, happily raising his hand like a

schoolboy, 'just what the gibbering fuck happens to these legions of

ships?"

Father Hoyt frowned at the poet. Fedmahn Kassad smiled slightly. Sol

Weintraub said, 'The Consul did not mean to suggest that the area is

inaccessible. One may travel by ship or various !and routes. Nor do

spacecraft and aircraft disappear. They easily land near the ruins or

the Time Tombs and just as easily return to whatever point their

computers command. It is merely the pilots and passengers who are never

seen again." Weintraub lifted the sleeping baby from his lap and set her

in an infant carrier slung around his neck.

'So the tired old legend goes,' said Brawne Lamia.

'What do the ship logs show?"

'Nothing,' said the Consul. 'No violence. No forced entry. No

deviation from course. No unexplained time lapses. No unusual energy

emissions or depletions. No physical phenomena of any sort."

'No passengers,' said Het Masteen.

The Consul did a slow double take. If Het Masteen had, indeed, just

attempted a joke, it was the first sign in all of the Consu!'s decades

of dealing with the Templars that one of them had shown even a nascent

sense of humour. What the Consul could see of the Captain's vaguely

oriental features beneath the cowl gave no hint that a joke had been

attempted.

'Marvelous melodrama,' laughed Silenus. 'A real-life, Christ-weeping

Sargasso of Souls and we're for it.

Who orchestrates this shitpot of a plot, anyway?"

'Shut up,' said Brawne Lamia. 'You're drunk, old man."

The Consul sighed. The group had been together for less than a standard

hour.

Crew clones swept away the dishes and brought dessert trays showcasing

sherbets, coffees, treeship fruit, draums, tortes, and concoctions made

of Renaissance chocolate. Martin Silenus waved away the desserts and

told the clones to bring him another bottle of wine. The Consul

reflected a few seconds and then asked for a whiskey.

'It occurs to me,' Sol Weintraub said as the group was finishing

dessert, 'that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another."

'What do you mean?" asked Brawne Lamia.

Weintraub unconsciously rocked the child sleeping against his chest.

'For instance, does anyone here know why he or she was chosen by the

Shrike Church and the

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All Thing to go on this voyage?"

No one spoke.

'I thought not,' said Weintraub. 'Even more fascinating, is anyone here

a member or follower of the Church of the Shrike7 I, for one, am a Jew,

and however confused my religious notions have become these days, they

do not include the worship of an organic killing machine." Weintraub

raised eyebrows and looked around the table.

'1 am the True Voice of the Tree,' said Het Masteen.

'While many Templars believe that the Shrike is the Avatar of punishment

for those who do not feed from the root, I must consider this a heresy

not founded in the Covenant or the writings of the Muir."

To the Captain's left, the Consul shrugged. 'I am an atheist,' he said,

holding the glass of whiskey to the light. '1 have never been in

contact with the Shrike cult."

Father Hoyt smiled without humor. 'The Catholic Church ordained me,' he

said. 'Shrike-worship contradicts everything the Church defends."

Colonel Kassad shook his head, whether in refusal to respond or to

indicate that he was not a member of the Shrike Church, it was not

clear.

Martin Silenus made an expansive gesture. '1 was baptized a Lutheran,'

he said. 'A subset which no longer exists. I helped create Zen

Gnosticism before any of your parents were born. i have been a

Catholic, a revelationist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a Bound

Shaker, a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake's Nada, and a

dues-paying subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now, I

am happy to say, I am a simple pagan." He smiled at everyone. 'To a

pagan,' he concluded, 'the Shrike is a most acceptable deity."

'1 ignore religions,' said Brawne Lamia. 'I do not succumb to them."

'My point has been made, I believe,' said Sol Weintraub. 'None of us

admits to subscribing to the Shrike cult dogma, yet the elders of that

perceptive group have chosen us over many millions of the petitioning

faithful to visit the Time Tombs... and their fierce god... in what

may be the last such pilgrimage."

The Consul shook his head. 'Your point may be made, M. Weintraub,' he

said, 'but I fail to see it."

The scholar absently stroked his beard. 'It would seem that our reasons

for returning to Hyperion are so compelling that even the Shrike Church

and the Hegemony probability intelligences agree that we deserve to

return,' he said. 'Some of these reasons - mine, for instance - may

appear to be public knowledge, but I am certain that none are known in

their entirety except to the individuals at this table. I suggest that

we share our stories in the few days remaining to us."

'Why?" said Colonel Kassad. 'It would seem to serve no purpose."

Weintraub smiled. 'On the. contrary, it would - at the very least -

amuse us and give at least a glimpse of our fellow travelers' souls

before the Shrike or some other calamity distracts us. Beyond that, it

might just give us enough i .nsight to save all of our lives if we are

intelligent enough to find the common thread of experience which binds

all our fates to the whim of the Shrike."

Martin Silenus laughed and closed his eyes. He said:

'Straddling each a dolphin's back

And steadied by a fin,

Those Innocents re-live their death,

Their wounds open again. '

'That's Lenista, isn't it?" said Father Hoyt. '1 studied her in

seminary."

'Close,' said Silenus, opening his eyes and pouring more wine. 'It's

Yeats. Bugger lived five hundred years before Lenista tugged at her

mother's metal teat."

'Look,' said Lamia, 'what good would telling each other stories do? When

we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the

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Dan Simmons - Hyperion

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