"Hyperion"
Apr. 23rd, 2024 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeOut of the six pilgrims' stories, the scholar/father and the detective ones are my favorite. The rest can be a slog. Dan Simmons was more into painting pictures of the scenes than moving the plot forward, thus leaving me to use https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/ to find out what happens after.
第三章 Dedication
◆ 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 Yggdrasill,’
◆ Wagner is good only for thunderstorms, he thought.
第四章 One
◆ 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,
◆ 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 Maui-Covenant blinked and coded their way through labyrinths of leaves, mixing with constellations sufficiently to fool even the most starwise traveler.
◆ 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.
◆ 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 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.
◆ Martin Silenus laughed loudly, spilling his wine as he gestured. ‘As if we fucking humans were ever motivated by human logic!’
◆ ‘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.’
◆ ‘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?’
◆ ‘I 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.’
◆ Weintraub opened his hand in a gesture which included everyone at the table. ‘Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.’
◆ then they were flying silently some sixty kilometers above dark cloud masses and starlit seas with the hurtling terminator of Hyperion’s sunrise rushing toward them like a spectral tidal wave of light.
◆ either 426 A.D.C. (after dropship crash!) or the hundred and twenty-eighth year of the reign of Sad King Billy, who has not reigned for at least a hundred of those years.
◆ the so-called Old City although it dates back only four centuries, all polished stone and studied sterility... its facade is pocked with remnants of the mournful, apocalyptic statuary of the post-Hegira expansionist period.
◆ but for a single, tangible proof of her presence. There in the cool darkness burned a lone red votive candle, its tiny flame flickering to unseen drafts and currents.
◆ Hyperion is a poet’s world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy
◆ The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.
◆ thought my travels would stir my old beliefs in St Teilhard’s concept of the God in Whom the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal, the En Haut and the En Avant are joined, but no such renewal is forthcoming.
◆ the pounding of the dredge-hammer sounding like the booming of this vile city’s heart, the distant susurration of the surf its wet breathing. Tonight I listen to the city breathe and cannot help but give it the flayed face of the murdered man.
◆ Tonight the heavens are especially fertile and when we move onto wide sections of the river we can see a tracery of brilliant meteor trails weaving the stars together. Their images burn the retina after a while and I look down at the river only to see the same optic echo there in the dark waters.
◆ we came into the flame forest proper with its groves of tall prometheus, trailers of ever present phoenix, and round stands of amber lambents.
◆ The tesla tree, still half a kilometer away, stood at least a hundred meters tall, half again as high as the tallest prometheus. Near its crown it bulged with the distinctive onion-shaped dome of its accumulator gall. The radial branches above the gall trailed dozens of nimbus vines, each looking silver and metallic against the clear green and lapis sky. The whole thing made me think of some elegant High Muslim mosque on New Mecca irreverently garlanded with tinsel.
◆ Instantly half a dozen bolts of lightning from the nearest tesla arced to the hapless animal. For a mad second I could have sworn I saw the beast’s skeleton glowing through boiling flesh and then it spasmed high into the air and simply ceased to be.
◆ spray rising in shifting curtains of mist to multiply the setting sun into a dozen violet spheres and twice that many rainbows. I watched as each spectrum was born, rose toward the darkening dome of sky, and died. As the cooling air settled into the cracks and caverns of the plateau and the warm air rushed skyward, pulling leaves, twigs, and mist upward in a vertical gale, a sound ebbed up out of the Cleft as if the continent itself was calling with the voices of stone giants, gigantic bamboo flutes, church organs the size of palaces, the clear, perfect notes ranging from the shrillest soprano to the deepest bass.
◆ Four meters high, three meters wide, carved in the old style of the elaborate crucifixes of Old Earth, the cross faced the stained-glass wall as if awaiting the sun and the explosion of light that would ignite the inlaid diamonds, sapphires, blood crystals, lapis beads, queen’s tears, onyxes, and other precious stones that I could make out in the light of the flashlight as I approached.
◆ This was, without a doubt, the cruciform of which the Bikura spoke. And it had been set here a minimum of many thousands of years ago – perhaps tens of thousands – long before mankind first left Old Earth. Almost certainly before Christ taught in Galilee.
◆ I had found an entrance to Hyperion’s labyrinth.
◆ ‘Did you know that Hyperion was one of the nine labyrinthine worlds?’ someone had asked me on the dropship. Yes, it was the young priest named Hoyt. I had said yes and dismissed the fact. I was interested in the Bikura – actually more in the self-inflicted pain of my own exile – not the labyrinths or their builders.
◆ The cave walls and ceiling were encrusted with crosses ranging in size from a few millimeters to almost a meter long. Each glowed with a deep, pink light of its own. Invisible in the torchlight, these glowing crosses now suffused the tunnel with light. I approached one embedded in the wall nearest me. Thirty or so centimeters across, it pulsed with a soft, organic flow. This was not something that had been carved out of stone or attached to the wall; it was definitely organic, definitely alive, resembling soft coral. It was slightly warm to the touch.
◆ glinted on the curved metal blades protruding from the thing’s forehead, four wrists, oddly jointed elbows, knees, armored back, and thorax. It flowed between the kneeling Bikura, and when it extended four long arms, hands extended but fingers clicking into place like chrome scalpels, I was absurdly reminded of His Holiness on Pacem offering a benediction to the faithful. <> I had no doubt that I was looking at the legendary Shrike.
At that moment I must have moved or made a sound, for large red eyes turned my way and I found myself hypnotized by the dance of light within the multifaceted prisms there: not merely reflected light but a fierce, blood-bright glow which seemed to burn within the creature’s barbed skull and pulse in the terrible gems set where God meant eyes to be... its oddly jointed arms encircling me in a fence of body-blades and liquid silver steel. Panting hard but unable to take a breath, I saw my own reflection, face white and distorted, dancing across the surface of the thing’s metallic shell and burning eyes.
◆ Forged in Jesuit logic and tempered in the cold bath of science. I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession, the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot, and the almost erotic surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance.
◆ Excess ganglia radiate from a thick nucleus above my sternum to filaments everywhere – a nightmare of nematodes. As well as I can tell with my simple field scanner, the nematodes terminate in the amygdala and other basal ganglia in each cerebral hemisphere.
◆ I caught a glimpse of the network of filaments and nematodes holding the disintegrating body together like metal fibers in a sculptor’s melting model. The flesh flowed.
◆ The one I have tagged as Theta looks the same and acts the same, but now carries two cruciforms embedded in his flesh. I have no doubt that this is one Bikura who will tend toward corpulence in coming years, swelling and ripening like some obscene E coli cell in a petri dish. When he/she/it dies, two will leave the tomb and the Three Score and Ten will be complete once more.
◆ I now understand the need for faith – pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith – as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.
◆ Muscles on his exposed forearms writhed like living creatures moving beneath his pale tarp of a skin.
◆ His left arm . . . he’d pounded the stake between the radius and ulna . . . missed veins . . . just like the goddamned Romans. Very secure as long as his skeleton was intact. Other hand . . . right hand . . . palm down. He’d driven the spike first
◆ The cruciform . . . forcing him to live again. Electricity . . . surging through him every second of those . . . those seven years. Flames.
◆ Once a parent to a child now dead, the Consul walked on, knowing once again the sensation of bearing a sleeping son to bed.
第五章 Two
◆ But the heralds and historians would later agree that the outcome had been sealed somewhere in the confusion during the first French infantry charge. The French died in their thousands. English dominion on that part of the Continent would continue for a while. The day of the armored man-at-arms, the knight, the embodiment of chivalry, was over – hammered into history’s coffin by a few thousand ragtag peasant archers carrying longbows.
◆ a lively group of heralds, both French and English, met in conclave with much pointing and animated conversation. Kassad knew that they had to decide upon a name for the battle so that their respective records would agree.
◆ The OCS:HTN was part of the Worldweb All Thing, the real-time network which governed Hegemony politics, fed information to tens of billions of data-hungry citizens, and had evolved a form of autonomy and consciousness all its own.
◆ ‘The HTN stuff doesn’t simulate,’ whined Cadet Radinski, the best AI expert Kassad could find and bribe to explain, ‘it dreams, dreams with the best historical accuracy in the Web – way beyond the sum of its parts ’cause it plugs in holistic insight as well as facts – and when it dreams, it lets us dream with it.’
◆ She came to him on the second day of Gettysburg and again at Borodino, where the clouds of powder smoke hung above the piles of bodies like a vapor congealed from departing souls.
◆ As a member of the minority who still called themselves Palestinians, he and his family had lived in the slums of Tharsis, human testimony to the bitter legacy of the terminally dispossessed.
◆ an ancient vein of honor in the young Kassad’s soul secretly resonated to the thought of a samurai class whose life and work revolved around duty, self-respect, and the ultimate value of one’s word.
◆ sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty invisible but very coherent beams. The ancient defense sats were not designed for atmospheric use and had an effective destructive radius of less than a millimeter. Luckily, that was all that was needed. Not all of the targeting beams penetrated whatever stood between the mullahs and the sky. Fifteen thousand seven hundred and eighty-four did.
◆ it demanded a return to Old Earth medieval concepts of set battles between small, professional forces at a mutually agreed-upon time in a place where destruction of public and private property would be kept to a minimum.
◆ FORCE doctrine held that, while a world could be reduced from orbit, actual military invasion of an industrialized planet was an impossibility; the problems with landing logistics, the immense area to be occupied, and the unwieldy size of the invading army were considered to be the ultimate arguments against invasion.
◆ While other FORCE commanders were all but ceasing to function, frozen into indecision by this violation of the New Bushido, Kassad – in command of his regiment and in temporary command of his division after the nuking of Command Group Delta – was trading men for time and calling for the release of fusion weapons to spearhead his own counterattack.
◆ he could see a score or more of bodies, naked and torn, each moving with the deceptive underwater-ballet grace of the zero-gravity dead.
◆ Kassad was dimly aware that the seat was projecting its own containment field as it tumbled. Flame was centimeters from his face.
◆ ‘Moneta,’ said his dream, ‘or Mnemosyne, whichever name pleases you more.’
◆ This is as far as you can go,’ Moneta said as they neared the cliff at the head of the valley. ‘The time tides are strong today.’
◆ Kassad followed her through the fringes of the time tides, avoiding the ebb and flow of the anti-entropic field the way children would play tag with an ocean surf on a broad beach. Kassad felt the pull of the time tides like waves of déjà vu tugging at every cell of his body.
◆ ‘Yes. Your past. My future. The shock wave of events moves across time like ripples on a pond.’
◆ Kassad moved to embrace her and felt their surfaces flow together like magnetized fluid. Under the connected fields, his flesh touched hers.
◆ Behind her, the Shrike moved slowly through the chaos, choosing victims as if he were harvesting.
◆ Oceans of superheated air swelling like warm skin rising to a lover’s touch.
第六章 Three
◆ Occasionally the Consul would see the mud towers of architect ants, some of their serrated structures near the river reaching almost ten meters in height.
◆ Francis Bacon once said, ‘There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.’
◆ But, in the end, it was none of these things, of course. It was only Hrothgar’s claustrophobic mead hall with the monster waiting in the darkness without. We had our Grendel, to
◆ Dislinear plotting and non-contiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum.
◆ The presymphony hush of first light followed by the cymbal crash of sunrise. Oranges and russets igniting to gold, the long, cool descent to green:
◆ Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day
◆ the balconies and maze of exterior stairways along the east porticoes playing Escher games with afternoon’s shadows.
◆ during what we quaintly called ‘periods of remission’ – stretches of ten to eighteen quiet months between planet-wide spasms as the Kiev Team’s goddamn little black hole digested bits of the Earth’s center and waited for its next feast.
◆ The rest included the renegade ARNists who plied their trade by resurrecting species of plants and animals long absent from their antediluvian North American haunts, the ecology engineers, licensed primitives such as the Ogalalla Sioux or the Hell’s Angel Guild,
◆ My memories of Mother are oddly stylized, as if she were another fictional construct from one of my Dying Earth novels.
◆ so I never knew the mind-stunting shortcuts of RNA medication, datasphere immersion, systemic flashback training, stylized encounter groups, ‘higher-level thinking skills’ at the expense of facts, or preliterate programming.
◆ I drank toasts to ‘the confusion of mathemetics’ and mourned the destruction of the poetry of the rainbow by M. Newton’s prying prism. The early distrust and actual hatred of all things scientific and clinical served me well in later life.
◆ Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality . . .
◆ Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
◆ William Gass, once said in an interview; ‘Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.’
◆ Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion,
◆ the Word was made flesh in the weave of the human universe. And only the poet can expand this universe, finding shortcuts to new realities the way the Hawking drive tunnels under the barriers of Einsteinian space/time.
◆ I seasoned the mixture with a dash of Yeats’s brilliant cynicism and a pinch of Pound’s obscure, scholastic arrogance. I chopped, diced, and added such ingredients as Eliot’s control of imagery, Dylan Thomas’s feel for place, Delmore Schwartz’s sense of doom, Steve Tem’s touch of horror, Salmud Brevy’s plea for innocence, Daton’s love of the convoluted rhyme scheme, Wu’s worship of the physical, and Edmond Ki Fererra’s radical playfulness.
◆ Tyrena pointed out that the timing had been perfect . . . that the original trauma shock of the death of Old Earth had meant a century of denial, almost as if Earth had never existed, followed by a period of revived interest culminating in the Old Earth nostalgia cults which could now be found on every world in the Web.
◆ or perhaps the guest bathroom, which consists of toilet, bidet, sink and shower stall on an open, wall-less raft afloat on the violet seaworld of Mare Infinitus.
◆ the time spent in replay is real time and Flashback users often die having spent more days of their lives under the drug than they ever experienced conscious.
◆ I could imagine don Balthazar spinning in his molten grave as I gave up long-term memory for the transient satisfaction of implant omniscience. It was only later that I felt the loss – Fitzgerald’s Odyssey, Wu’s Final March, and a score of other epics which had survived my stroke now were shredded like cloud fragments in a high wind.
◆ ‘So no one wants to pay for a look at another person’s angst,’ laughed Tyrena.
◆ This week’s fashions included a hairdo which sent black spikes thrusting half a meter above her forehead and a body field opaciter which left shifting currents of color concealing – and revealing – the nudity beneath.
◆ Arturo Redgrave, the dashing blockade runner (what blockade?!),
◆ for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
◆ all awaited a visit from Hyperion’s only resident satyr or arranged one themselves. I learned what ‘priapic’ and ‘satyriasis’ really mean.
◆ I hesitated. ‘Not really,’ I said at last. ‘More like one of the universe’s worst nightmares come to life. Sort of like the Grim Reaper, but with a penchant for sticking souls on a giant thorn tree . . . while the people’s souls are still in their bodies.’
◆ I retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos. It was not about the planet but about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans. It was about the unthinking hubris of a race which dared to murder its homeworld through sheer carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to the stars, only to meet the wrath of a god which humanity had helped to sire.
◆ The Shrike Temple had renewed the Shrike pilgrimages by this time, and on my trips I would use their elaborate avenue to death in reverse – the walk to Chronos Keep, the aerial tram across the Bridle Range, the windwagons, and the Charon barge down the Hoolie.
◆ some mad logic-loop by the data artist Carolus or perhaps a print by Escher: the Shrike had come into existence because of the incantatory powers of my poem but the poem could not have existed without the threat/presence of the Shrike as muse.
◆ gazing at my lighted palace tower like David Hume peering in his own windows and solemnly deciding that he wasn’t home.
◆ Fingers like steel thorns pierced his arms and chest and thighs, but he still writhed and my Cantos burned in his fists. The Shrike held him out like a father offering his son for baptism.
◆ I saw Billy blink and splutter, I saw the slickness on the Shrike’s chiseled muzzle reflect the meteor-brightened sky, and then the dying embers of burned pages in Billy’s still clenched fists ignited the kerosene.
◆ For a second the pyre was a perfect sculpture of flame, a blue and yellow Pietà with a four-armed madonna holding a blazing Christ figure.
第七章 Four
◆ Martin Silenus whirled and clenched his fists as if to strike the woman. Then he smiled. ‘All right then, lady, what do we do? Maybe if we sacrifice someone to a grass serpent the transportation gods will smile on us.’
Brawne Lamia’s stare was arctic. ‘I thought burned offerings were more your style, little man.’
◆ in hopelessness there is always hope. We have learned much from the stories so far. Yet each of us has some seed of promise buried even deeper than we have admitted.’
◆ Crawford County on South Sinzer on Barnard’s World constituted the Eighth Circle of Desolation on the smallest pimple on the absolute ass-end of Creation.
◆ the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.
◆ ignoring spiders and googlepeds,
◆ According to the sensors, the Sphinx had suddenly grown a dozen new chambers, some larger than the total structure. Rachel keyed displays and the air misted with models that changed as she watched. Corridor schematics twisted back on themselves like rotating Möbius strips. The external sensors indicated the upper structure twisting and bending like polyflex in the wind – or like wings.
◆ The problem is that her body appears to have absorbed . . . that is, the anti-entropic field appears to have contaminated her.’
◆ ‘I’m recording this on the twelfth day of Tenmonth, year 457 of the Hegira, AD 2739 old reckoning. Yes, I know that’s half a standard year from the last thing you remember. Listen.
‘Something happened in the Sphinx. You got caught up in the time tide. It changed you. You’re aging backward, as dumb as that sounds.
◆ that true time had ended for the human race when Old Earth died and that the four centuries since had been ‘false time’. Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions.
◆ Sol set aside the book he was working on – an analysis of Kierkegaard’s theories of ethics as compromise morality as applied to the legal machinery of the Hegemony –
◆ She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unselfconscious flow of little things – the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
◆ Sol began to see as never before the flexibility of children. He now imagined Rachel living on the breaking crest of the wave of time, not seeing the murky depths of the sea beyond, keeping her balance with her small store of memories and a total commitment to the twelve to fifteen hours of now allowed her each day.
◆ Sol wanted to know how any ethical system – much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it – could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son.
◆ Sarai gripped his hand. ‘Do you think you’re the only one who has had the dream?’
‘Dream?’ managed Sol.
◆ The world had hinged upon each day their child lived and no thought had been given to the chance of accident, the perverse antilogic of a sharp-edged universe.
◆ Language was the hardest for him. Her vocabulary loss was like the burning of a bridge between them, the severing of a final line of hope.
◆ ‘Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.’
◆ Sol smiled at his seven-week-old daughter. She smiled back.
It was her last and her first smile.
第八章 Five
◆ ‘I thought ergs were those forcefield critters that Templars use on their treeships.’
‘They are,’ said the Consul. ‘The things were found about three centuries ago living on asteroids around Aldebaran. Bodies about as big as a cat’s spine, mostly a piezoelectric nervous system sheathed in silicon gristle, but they feed on . . . and manipulate . . . forcefields as large as those generated by small spinships.’
◆ The Colonel took a deep breath and smiled grimly. ‘There was a dead man’s brake. I had to rig the lever with a sandbag. I didn’t want to bring the car back for a second try.’
◆ they rose above a sea of clouds from which rose an island chain of mountains, they were treated to a brilliant sunset. Hyperion’s sky had deepened from its daytime glaucous glare to the bottomless lapis lazuli of evening while a red-gold sun ignited cloud towers and great summits of ice and rock.
◆ a type of weapon known in the Core as an AIDS II virus.’
◆ Johnny said nothing. There was something about his face that I found incredibly attractive – a sort of masculine strength combined with a feminine sense of awareness.
◆ ‘Well, I am . . . or was . . . an earlier and much more complicated retrieval project. My core persona was based on a pre-Hegira Old Earth poet. Ancient. Born late eighteenth century Old Calendar.’
◆ ‘Writings,’ said Johnny. ‘His letters. Diaries. Critical biographies. Testimony of friends. But mostly through his verse. The sim recreates the environment, plugs in the known factors, and works backward from the creative products. Voilà – a persona core.
◆ Our first attempt was a twentieth-century poet named Ezra Pound. Our persona was opinionated to the point of absurdity, prejudiced beyond rationality, and functionally insane. It took a year of tinkering before we discovered that the persona was accurate; it was the man who had been nuts.
◆ The trace pellet I’d dissolved in Johnny’s second German beer had had more than enough time to work. The UV-positive microspores were almost hanging in the air by now – I could almost follow the trail of exhalations he had left.
◆ I’d known him in college when he was a pure cyberpuke, a twentieth-generation hacker, cortically shunted when he was twelve standard.
◆ ‘Okay,’ I said, cutting him off before he lapsed into cyberpukese, ‘
◆ He smiled . . . or at least his lips did. The hazel eyes still seemed troubled. ‘It’s called Hyperion. It’s difficult to describe what it’s about. Artistic failure, I suppose. Keats never finished it.’
◆ Having a persona based upon a retrieval template no more makes me Keats than having the name Lamia makes you a monster.
◆ ‘You said I reminded you of Fanny.’
‘An echo of a dream. Less. You’ve taken RNA learning medication, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s like that. Memories which feel . . . hollow.’
◆ simple entities like personal accounts or corporate files blazing like burning refineries in the night.
◆ the thirty worlds where the Templar ecologists had preserved some bit of nature which they thought would please the Muir.
◆ then the brief glory of growing into the full maturation of his poetic powers just as he fell prey to the ‘consumption’ which had claimed his mother and his brother Tom. Then sent off to exile in Italy, reputedly ‘for his health’ while knowing all the while it meant a lonely, painful death at the age of twenty-six.
◆ Keats said:
‘May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine. By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone – though erroneous they may be fine – This is the very thing in which consists poetry.’
‘You think the . . . Keats Project . . . was evil?’ I asked.
◆ ‘It is . . . something they consider irrelevant to humanity.’
I shook my head, a futile gesture in the darkness. ‘The re-creation of Old Earth . . . the resurrection of . . . how many? . . . human personalities as cybrids on this re-created world . . . AIs killing AIs . . . irrelevant!’
◆ Any more than there is a simple answer to the question of why humankind has sought God in a million guises for ten thousand generations. But with the Core, the interest lies more in the quest for more efficiency, more reliable ways to handle . . . variables.’
◆ said was the Atlantic Ocean. Except for lights of the occasional floating city or drilling platform, the only illumination came from the stars and the broad, swimming-pool glows of the undersea colonies.
◆ ‘Your mention of Hyperion gave me a clue,’ he said. ‘The fact that I had no knowledge of it. Its absence said that it was important.’
‘The strange case of the dog barking in the night,’ I said.
◆ but it’s only within that milieu that I can claim “consciousness” or operate sensors or remotes such as this cybrid.’
I set my coffee cup down and stared at the thing I had loved as a man during the night just past. ‘Yes?’
◆ ‘It means,’ said Johnny, smiling gently, ‘that I know what decision I made and why I made it. I wanted to cease being a cybrid and become a man. I wanted to go to Hyperion. I still do.’
◆ the TechnoCore has been obsessed with Hyperion for centuries. When CEO Yevshensky allowed King Billy of Asquith to recolonize the planet, it almost precipitated a true secession of AIs from the Web. Recently the establishment of our fatline transmitter there brought about a similar crisis.’
◆ ‘Initially. View it as a way to force the issue between the TechnoCore and ourselves, Brawne. We will either have to incorporate the Hyperion system into the Web to allow it FORCE protection, or it will fall to a race which despises and distrusts the Core and all AIs.’
I didn’t mention Johnny’s comment that the Core had been in touch with the Ousters. I said, ‘A way to force the issue. Fine. But who manipulated the Ousters into attacking?’
◆ ‘When I self-destruct my AI persona,’ said Johnny, ‘the shift to cybrid consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but during that time my section of the Core perimeter defenses will drop. The security phages will fill the gap before too many more nanoseconds pass, but during the time . . .’
◆ I could hear the black threats of the hulking security phages; I could smell death on the breath of the counterthrust tapeworm viruses even through the ice screens; I could feel the weight of the AIs’ wrath above us – we were insects under elephants’ feet
◆ ... into what? Frozen fountains of fireworks. Transparent mountain ranges of data, endless glaciers of ROMworks, access ganglia spreading like fissures, iron clouds of semisentient internal process bubbles, glowing pyramids of primary source stuff, each guarded by lakes of black ice and armies of black-pulse phages.
◆ ‘Hyperion is a rent in the entire predictive fabric of the Core’s existence. It is the penultimate oxymoron – a nonfactorable variable. Impossible as it seems, Hyperion appears to be exempt from the laws of physics, history, human psychology, and AI prediction as practiced by the Core.
◆ The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections.
◆ I felt him die then. I also felt the surge as his hand found the neural shunt, the white-light warmth of the surge to the Schrön loop as everything Johnny Keats ever was or would be exploded into me; almost, almost it was like his orgasm inside me two nights earlier, the surge and throb and sudden warmth and stillness after, with the echo of sensation there.
◆ I’m pregnant twice. Once with Johnny’s child and once with the Schrön-loop memory of what he was. I don’t know if the two are meant to be linked. It will be months before the child is born and only days before I face the Shrike.
第九章 Six
◆ we’re a mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform carrying the ghost of Paul Duré. Our “semisentient” erg in the box there. Colonel Kassad with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if we are to believe her tale, carrying not only an unborn child but a dead Romantic poet. Our scholar with the child his daughter used to be. Me with my muse. The Consul with whatever fucking baggage he’s brought to this insane trek.
◆ the aurora shimmer of defense fields leaping and dying under the assault of terrible energies only to be reborn nanoseconds later. Amid it all, the blue-white fusion tails of torchships and larger warships slicing perfectly true lines across the sky like diamond scratches on blue glass.
◆ ‘Of course,’ said the Consul. ‘If the Ousters are attacking Hyperion to prevent the opening of the Time Tombs, as M. Lamia’s tale suggests,
◆ Nature is stupid, I think and sit in the soft grass. Nature sets the stage all wrong for such a day and then it is insensitive enough to throw in a bird searching for prey
◆ But Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars.
◆ Her silk pants catching on a weave of willowgrass. There was a child’s modesty then; the slight hesitation of something given prematurely. But also pride.
◆ but it was Siri – Siri of the straight back and proud eyes, who turned her face to the wall and said through tears, ‘Go away. Go away, Merin. I don’t want you to see me. I’m a crone, all slack and sagging. Go away.’
◆ Dangerous to handle, a waste of shielded monofilaments, almost impossible to deal with in controlled airspace, hawking mats had become curiosities reserved for bedtime stories, museums, and a few colony worlds.
◆ I could feel the strength in hers. I imagined it as the strength of years I had not shared. ‘You have to live to really know things, my love. Having Alón has helped me to understand that. There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.’
◆ when we saw the first of the motile isles. Racing before the storm, treesails billowing, the islands sailed up from their southern feeding grounds in seemingly endless procession.
◆ No, not sorrow, not yet, but a sharp-toothed sadness which soon will open into grief. For years I have carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk.
◆ ‘Sure.’ I was dubious. More than three centuries of effort had not raised much of a dialogue between man and sea mammal. Mike had once told me that the thought structures of Old Earth’s two groups of orphans were too different, the referents too few
◆ I can sense in him the open honesty which often takes the place of intelligence in some people.
◆ Develop?’ Siri’s voice showed surprise for the first time. ‘How can they develop the isles? Even the First Families must ask permission of the Sea Folk to build our tree-house retreats there.’
I smiled at Siri’s use of the local term for the dolphins. The Maui-Covenant colonists were such children when it came to their damned dolphins.
◆ I stared at the gaunt outlines of ribs and breastbone and remembered the sixteen-year-old girl with baby fat and skin like warm velvet.
◆ There in the Master’s Rock, where perfect satori had eluded so many much worthier pilgrims, I achieved it through the memory of a not quite sixteen-year-old womanchild’s body lying next to mine while moonlight spilled from a Thomas Hawk’s wings.
◆ There is something there that belies the callowness and thoughtless egotism which you wear so well. A caring, perhaps. A respect for caring, if nothing else.
◆ At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the colonists do what they do best – destroy truly indigenous life. It is no accident that in six centuries of interstellar expansion the Hegemony has encountered no species considered intelligent on the Drake-Turing-Chen Index.
◆ The essence of the plan was that the Ousters had to be provoked into attacking the Hegemony. The focus of that attack was to be Hyperion itself. I was made to understand that the resulting battle had more to do with internal Web politics than with the Ousters.
◆ Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.
◆ The Worldweb, the All Thing, the Hegemony of Man – all of them had been built on the most vicious type of patricide. Now they were being maintained by a quiet and deliberate policy of fratricide – the murder of any species with even the slightest potential of being a competitor.
◆ the Ousters saw it as a tool of human devising, sent back through time to deliver humanity from the TechnoCore.
◆ But when the time comes to judge, to understand a betrayal which will spread like flame across the Web, which will end worlds, I ask you not to think of me – my name was not even writ on water as your lost poet’s soul said – but to think of Old Earth dying for no reason, to think of the dolphins, their gray flesh drying and rotting in the sun,
◆ ‘Do you want to read it? Do you want me to read it to you? It’s flowing again. Read the old parts. Read the Cantos I wrote three centuries ago and never published. It’s all here. We’re all here. My name, yours, this trip. Don’t you see . . . I’m not creating a poem, I’m creating the future!’
第三章 Dedication
◆ 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 Yggdrasill,’
◆ Wagner is good only for thunderstorms, he thought.
第四章 One
◆ 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,
◆ 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 Maui-Covenant blinked and coded their way through labyrinths of leaves, mixing with constellations sufficiently to fool even the most starwise traveler.
◆ 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.
◆ 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 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.
◆ Martin Silenus laughed loudly, spilling his wine as he gestured. ‘As if we fucking humans were ever motivated by human logic!’
◆ ‘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.’
◆ ‘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?’
◆ ‘I 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.’
◆ Weintraub opened his hand in a gesture which included everyone at the table. ‘Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.’
◆ then they were flying silently some sixty kilometers above dark cloud masses and starlit seas with the hurtling terminator of Hyperion’s sunrise rushing toward them like a spectral tidal wave of light.
◆ either 426 A.D.C. (after dropship crash!) or the hundred and twenty-eighth year of the reign of Sad King Billy, who has not reigned for at least a hundred of those years.
◆ the so-called Old City although it dates back only four centuries, all polished stone and studied sterility... its facade is pocked with remnants of the mournful, apocalyptic statuary of the post-Hegira expansionist period.
◆ but for a single, tangible proof of her presence. There in the cool darkness burned a lone red votive candle, its tiny flame flickering to unseen drafts and currents.
◆ Hyperion is a poet’s world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy
◆ The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.
◆ thought my travels would stir my old beliefs in St Teilhard’s concept of the God in Whom the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal, the En Haut and the En Avant are joined, but no such renewal is forthcoming.
◆ the pounding of the dredge-hammer sounding like the booming of this vile city’s heart, the distant susurration of the surf its wet breathing. Tonight I listen to the city breathe and cannot help but give it the flayed face of the murdered man.
◆ Tonight the heavens are especially fertile and when we move onto wide sections of the river we can see a tracery of brilliant meteor trails weaving the stars together. Their images burn the retina after a while and I look down at the river only to see the same optic echo there in the dark waters.
◆ we came into the flame forest proper with its groves of tall prometheus, trailers of ever present phoenix, and round stands of amber lambents.
◆ The tesla tree, still half a kilometer away, stood at least a hundred meters tall, half again as high as the tallest prometheus. Near its crown it bulged with the distinctive onion-shaped dome of its accumulator gall. The radial branches above the gall trailed dozens of nimbus vines, each looking silver and metallic against the clear green and lapis sky. The whole thing made me think of some elegant High Muslim mosque on New Mecca irreverently garlanded with tinsel.
◆ Instantly half a dozen bolts of lightning from the nearest tesla arced to the hapless animal. For a mad second I could have sworn I saw the beast’s skeleton glowing through boiling flesh and then it spasmed high into the air and simply ceased to be.
◆ spray rising in shifting curtains of mist to multiply the setting sun into a dozen violet spheres and twice that many rainbows. I watched as each spectrum was born, rose toward the darkening dome of sky, and died. As the cooling air settled into the cracks and caverns of the plateau and the warm air rushed skyward, pulling leaves, twigs, and mist upward in a vertical gale, a sound ebbed up out of the Cleft as if the continent itself was calling with the voices of stone giants, gigantic bamboo flutes, church organs the size of palaces, the clear, perfect notes ranging from the shrillest soprano to the deepest bass.
◆ Four meters high, three meters wide, carved in the old style of the elaborate crucifixes of Old Earth, the cross faced the stained-glass wall as if awaiting the sun and the explosion of light that would ignite the inlaid diamonds, sapphires, blood crystals, lapis beads, queen’s tears, onyxes, and other precious stones that I could make out in the light of the flashlight as I approached.
◆ This was, without a doubt, the cruciform of which the Bikura spoke. And it had been set here a minimum of many thousands of years ago – perhaps tens of thousands – long before mankind first left Old Earth. Almost certainly before Christ taught in Galilee.
◆ I had found an entrance to Hyperion’s labyrinth.
◆ ‘Did you know that Hyperion was one of the nine labyrinthine worlds?’ someone had asked me on the dropship. Yes, it was the young priest named Hoyt. I had said yes and dismissed the fact. I was interested in the Bikura – actually more in the self-inflicted pain of my own exile – not the labyrinths or their builders.
◆ The cave walls and ceiling were encrusted with crosses ranging in size from a few millimeters to almost a meter long. Each glowed with a deep, pink light of its own. Invisible in the torchlight, these glowing crosses now suffused the tunnel with light. I approached one embedded in the wall nearest me. Thirty or so centimeters across, it pulsed with a soft, organic flow. This was not something that had been carved out of stone or attached to the wall; it was definitely organic, definitely alive, resembling soft coral. It was slightly warm to the touch.
◆ glinted on the curved metal blades protruding from the thing’s forehead, four wrists, oddly jointed elbows, knees, armored back, and thorax. It flowed between the kneeling Bikura, and when it extended four long arms, hands extended but fingers clicking into place like chrome scalpels, I was absurdly reminded of His Holiness on Pacem offering a benediction to the faithful. <> I had no doubt that I was looking at the legendary Shrike.
At that moment I must have moved or made a sound, for large red eyes turned my way and I found myself hypnotized by the dance of light within the multifaceted prisms there: not merely reflected light but a fierce, blood-bright glow which seemed to burn within the creature’s barbed skull and pulse in the terrible gems set where God meant eyes to be... its oddly jointed arms encircling me in a fence of body-blades and liquid silver steel. Panting hard but unable to take a breath, I saw my own reflection, face white and distorted, dancing across the surface of the thing’s metallic shell and burning eyes.
◆ Forged in Jesuit logic and tempered in the cold bath of science. I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession, the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot, and the almost erotic surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance.
◆ Excess ganglia radiate from a thick nucleus above my sternum to filaments everywhere – a nightmare of nematodes. As well as I can tell with my simple field scanner, the nematodes terminate in the amygdala and other basal ganglia in each cerebral hemisphere.
◆ I caught a glimpse of the network of filaments and nematodes holding the disintegrating body together like metal fibers in a sculptor’s melting model. The flesh flowed.
◆ The one I have tagged as Theta looks the same and acts the same, but now carries two cruciforms embedded in his flesh. I have no doubt that this is one Bikura who will tend toward corpulence in coming years, swelling and ripening like some obscene E coli cell in a petri dish. When he/she/it dies, two will leave the tomb and the Three Score and Ten will be complete once more.
◆ I now understand the need for faith – pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith – as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.
◆ Muscles on his exposed forearms writhed like living creatures moving beneath his pale tarp of a skin.
◆ His left arm . . . he’d pounded the stake between the radius and ulna . . . missed veins . . . just like the goddamned Romans. Very secure as long as his skeleton was intact. Other hand . . . right hand . . . palm down. He’d driven the spike first
◆ The cruciform . . . forcing him to live again. Electricity . . . surging through him every second of those . . . those seven years. Flames.
◆ Once a parent to a child now dead, the Consul walked on, knowing once again the sensation of bearing a sleeping son to bed.
第五章 Two
◆ But the heralds and historians would later agree that the outcome had been sealed somewhere in the confusion during the first French infantry charge. The French died in their thousands. English dominion on that part of the Continent would continue for a while. The day of the armored man-at-arms, the knight, the embodiment of chivalry, was over – hammered into history’s coffin by a few thousand ragtag peasant archers carrying longbows.
◆ a lively group of heralds, both French and English, met in conclave with much pointing and animated conversation. Kassad knew that they had to decide upon a name for the battle so that their respective records would agree.
◆ The OCS:HTN was part of the Worldweb All Thing, the real-time network which governed Hegemony politics, fed information to tens of billions of data-hungry citizens, and had evolved a form of autonomy and consciousness all its own.
◆ ‘The HTN stuff doesn’t simulate,’ whined Cadet Radinski, the best AI expert Kassad could find and bribe to explain, ‘it dreams, dreams with the best historical accuracy in the Web – way beyond the sum of its parts ’cause it plugs in holistic insight as well as facts – and when it dreams, it lets us dream with it.’
◆ She came to him on the second day of Gettysburg and again at Borodino, where the clouds of powder smoke hung above the piles of bodies like a vapor congealed from departing souls.
◆ As a member of the minority who still called themselves Palestinians, he and his family had lived in the slums of Tharsis, human testimony to the bitter legacy of the terminally dispossessed.
◆ an ancient vein of honor in the young Kassad’s soul secretly resonated to the thought of a samurai class whose life and work revolved around duty, self-respect, and the ultimate value of one’s word.
◆ sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty invisible but very coherent beams. The ancient defense sats were not designed for atmospheric use and had an effective destructive radius of less than a millimeter. Luckily, that was all that was needed. Not all of the targeting beams penetrated whatever stood between the mullahs and the sky. Fifteen thousand seven hundred and eighty-four did.
◆ it demanded a return to Old Earth medieval concepts of set battles between small, professional forces at a mutually agreed-upon time in a place where destruction of public and private property would be kept to a minimum.
◆ FORCE doctrine held that, while a world could be reduced from orbit, actual military invasion of an industrialized planet was an impossibility; the problems with landing logistics, the immense area to be occupied, and the unwieldy size of the invading army were considered to be the ultimate arguments against invasion.
◆ While other FORCE commanders were all but ceasing to function, frozen into indecision by this violation of the New Bushido, Kassad – in command of his regiment and in temporary command of his division after the nuking of Command Group Delta – was trading men for time and calling for the release of fusion weapons to spearhead his own counterattack.
◆ he could see a score or more of bodies, naked and torn, each moving with the deceptive underwater-ballet grace of the zero-gravity dead.
◆ Kassad was dimly aware that the seat was projecting its own containment field as it tumbled. Flame was centimeters from his face.
◆ ‘Moneta,’ said his dream, ‘or Mnemosyne, whichever name pleases you more.’
◆ This is as far as you can go,’ Moneta said as they neared the cliff at the head of the valley. ‘The time tides are strong today.’
◆ Kassad followed her through the fringes of the time tides, avoiding the ebb and flow of the anti-entropic field the way children would play tag with an ocean surf on a broad beach. Kassad felt the pull of the time tides like waves of déjà vu tugging at every cell of his body.
◆ ‘Yes. Your past. My future. The shock wave of events moves across time like ripples on a pond.’
◆ Kassad moved to embrace her and felt their surfaces flow together like magnetized fluid. Under the connected fields, his flesh touched hers.
◆ Behind her, the Shrike moved slowly through the chaos, choosing victims as if he were harvesting.
◆ Oceans of superheated air swelling like warm skin rising to a lover’s touch.
第六章 Three
◆ Occasionally the Consul would see the mud towers of architect ants, some of their serrated structures near the river reaching almost ten meters in height.
◆ Francis Bacon once said, ‘There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.’
◆ But, in the end, it was none of these things, of course. It was only Hrothgar’s claustrophobic mead hall with the monster waiting in the darkness without. We had our Grendel, to
◆ Dislinear plotting and non-contiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum.
◆ The presymphony hush of first light followed by the cymbal crash of sunrise. Oranges and russets igniting to gold, the long, cool descent to green:
◆ Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day
◆ the balconies and maze of exterior stairways along the east porticoes playing Escher games with afternoon’s shadows.
◆ during what we quaintly called ‘periods of remission’ – stretches of ten to eighteen quiet months between planet-wide spasms as the Kiev Team’s goddamn little black hole digested bits of the Earth’s center and waited for its next feast.
◆ The rest included the renegade ARNists who plied their trade by resurrecting species of plants and animals long absent from their antediluvian North American haunts, the ecology engineers, licensed primitives such as the Ogalalla Sioux or the Hell’s Angel Guild,
◆ My memories of Mother are oddly stylized, as if she were another fictional construct from one of my Dying Earth novels.
◆ so I never knew the mind-stunting shortcuts of RNA medication, datasphere immersion, systemic flashback training, stylized encounter groups, ‘higher-level thinking skills’ at the expense of facts, or preliterate programming.
◆ I drank toasts to ‘the confusion of mathemetics’ and mourned the destruction of the poetry of the rainbow by M. Newton’s prying prism. The early distrust and actual hatred of all things scientific and clinical served me well in later life.
◆ Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality . . .
◆ Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
◆ William Gass, once said in an interview; ‘Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.’
◆ Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion,
◆ the Word was made flesh in the weave of the human universe. And only the poet can expand this universe, finding shortcuts to new realities the way the Hawking drive tunnels under the barriers of Einsteinian space/time.
◆ I seasoned the mixture with a dash of Yeats’s brilliant cynicism and a pinch of Pound’s obscure, scholastic arrogance. I chopped, diced, and added such ingredients as Eliot’s control of imagery, Dylan Thomas’s feel for place, Delmore Schwartz’s sense of doom, Steve Tem’s touch of horror, Salmud Brevy’s plea for innocence, Daton’s love of the convoluted rhyme scheme, Wu’s worship of the physical, and Edmond Ki Fererra’s radical playfulness.
◆ Tyrena pointed out that the timing had been perfect . . . that the original trauma shock of the death of Old Earth had meant a century of denial, almost as if Earth had never existed, followed by a period of revived interest culminating in the Old Earth nostalgia cults which could now be found on every world in the Web.
◆ or perhaps the guest bathroom, which consists of toilet, bidet, sink and shower stall on an open, wall-less raft afloat on the violet seaworld of Mare Infinitus.
◆ the time spent in replay is real time and Flashback users often die having spent more days of their lives under the drug than they ever experienced conscious.
◆ I could imagine don Balthazar spinning in his molten grave as I gave up long-term memory for the transient satisfaction of implant omniscience. It was only later that I felt the loss – Fitzgerald’s Odyssey, Wu’s Final March, and a score of other epics which had survived my stroke now were shredded like cloud fragments in a high wind.
◆ ‘So no one wants to pay for a look at another person’s angst,’ laughed Tyrena.
◆ This week’s fashions included a hairdo which sent black spikes thrusting half a meter above her forehead and a body field opaciter which left shifting currents of color concealing – and revealing – the nudity beneath.
◆ Arturo Redgrave, the dashing blockade runner (what blockade?!),
◆ for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
◆ all awaited a visit from Hyperion’s only resident satyr or arranged one themselves. I learned what ‘priapic’ and ‘satyriasis’ really mean.
◆ I hesitated. ‘Not really,’ I said at last. ‘More like one of the universe’s worst nightmares come to life. Sort of like the Grim Reaper, but with a penchant for sticking souls on a giant thorn tree . . . while the people’s souls are still in their bodies.’
◆ I retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos. It was not about the planet but about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans. It was about the unthinking hubris of a race which dared to murder its homeworld through sheer carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to the stars, only to meet the wrath of a god which humanity had helped to sire.
◆ The Shrike Temple had renewed the Shrike pilgrimages by this time, and on my trips I would use their elaborate avenue to death in reverse – the walk to Chronos Keep, the aerial tram across the Bridle Range, the windwagons, and the Charon barge down the Hoolie.
◆ some mad logic-loop by the data artist Carolus or perhaps a print by Escher: the Shrike had come into existence because of the incantatory powers of my poem but the poem could not have existed without the threat/presence of the Shrike as muse.
◆ gazing at my lighted palace tower like David Hume peering in his own windows and solemnly deciding that he wasn’t home.
◆ Fingers like steel thorns pierced his arms and chest and thighs, but he still writhed and my Cantos burned in his fists. The Shrike held him out like a father offering his son for baptism.
◆ I saw Billy blink and splutter, I saw the slickness on the Shrike’s chiseled muzzle reflect the meteor-brightened sky, and then the dying embers of burned pages in Billy’s still clenched fists ignited the kerosene.
◆ For a second the pyre was a perfect sculpture of flame, a blue and yellow Pietà with a four-armed madonna holding a blazing Christ figure.
第七章 Four
◆ Martin Silenus whirled and clenched his fists as if to strike the woman. Then he smiled. ‘All right then, lady, what do we do? Maybe if we sacrifice someone to a grass serpent the transportation gods will smile on us.’
Brawne Lamia’s stare was arctic. ‘I thought burned offerings were more your style, little man.’
◆ in hopelessness there is always hope. We have learned much from the stories so far. Yet each of us has some seed of promise buried even deeper than we have admitted.’
◆ Crawford County on South Sinzer on Barnard’s World constituted the Eighth Circle of Desolation on the smallest pimple on the absolute ass-end of Creation.
◆ the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.
◆ ignoring spiders and googlepeds,
◆ According to the sensors, the Sphinx had suddenly grown a dozen new chambers, some larger than the total structure. Rachel keyed displays and the air misted with models that changed as she watched. Corridor schematics twisted back on themselves like rotating Möbius strips. The external sensors indicated the upper structure twisting and bending like polyflex in the wind – or like wings.
◆ The problem is that her body appears to have absorbed . . . that is, the anti-entropic field appears to have contaminated her.’
◆ ‘I’m recording this on the twelfth day of Tenmonth, year 457 of the Hegira, AD 2739 old reckoning. Yes, I know that’s half a standard year from the last thing you remember. Listen.
‘Something happened in the Sphinx. You got caught up in the time tide. It changed you. You’re aging backward, as dumb as that sounds.
◆ that true time had ended for the human race when Old Earth died and that the four centuries since had been ‘false time’. Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions.
◆ Sol set aside the book he was working on – an analysis of Kierkegaard’s theories of ethics as compromise morality as applied to the legal machinery of the Hegemony –
◆ She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unselfconscious flow of little things – the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
◆ Sol began to see as never before the flexibility of children. He now imagined Rachel living on the breaking crest of the wave of time, not seeing the murky depths of the sea beyond, keeping her balance with her small store of memories and a total commitment to the twelve to fifteen hours of now allowed her each day.
◆ Sol wanted to know how any ethical system – much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it – could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son.
◆ Sarai gripped his hand. ‘Do you think you’re the only one who has had the dream?’
‘Dream?’ managed Sol.
◆ The world had hinged upon each day their child lived and no thought had been given to the chance of accident, the perverse antilogic of a sharp-edged universe.
◆ Language was the hardest for him. Her vocabulary loss was like the burning of a bridge between them, the severing of a final line of hope.
◆ ‘Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.’
◆ Sol smiled at his seven-week-old daughter. She smiled back.
It was her last and her first smile.
第八章 Five
◆ ‘I thought ergs were those forcefield critters that Templars use on their treeships.’
‘They are,’ said the Consul. ‘The things were found about three centuries ago living on asteroids around Aldebaran. Bodies about as big as a cat’s spine, mostly a piezoelectric nervous system sheathed in silicon gristle, but they feed on . . . and manipulate . . . forcefields as large as those generated by small spinships.’
◆ The Colonel took a deep breath and smiled grimly. ‘There was a dead man’s brake. I had to rig the lever with a sandbag. I didn’t want to bring the car back for a second try.’
◆ they rose above a sea of clouds from which rose an island chain of mountains, they were treated to a brilliant sunset. Hyperion’s sky had deepened from its daytime glaucous glare to the bottomless lapis lazuli of evening while a red-gold sun ignited cloud towers and great summits of ice and rock.
◆ a type of weapon known in the Core as an AIDS II virus.’
◆ Johnny said nothing. There was something about his face that I found incredibly attractive – a sort of masculine strength combined with a feminine sense of awareness.
◆ ‘Well, I am . . . or was . . . an earlier and much more complicated retrieval project. My core persona was based on a pre-Hegira Old Earth poet. Ancient. Born late eighteenth century Old Calendar.’
◆ ‘Writings,’ said Johnny. ‘His letters. Diaries. Critical biographies. Testimony of friends. But mostly through his verse. The sim recreates the environment, plugs in the known factors, and works backward from the creative products. Voilà – a persona core.
◆ Our first attempt was a twentieth-century poet named Ezra Pound. Our persona was opinionated to the point of absurdity, prejudiced beyond rationality, and functionally insane. It took a year of tinkering before we discovered that the persona was accurate; it was the man who had been nuts.
◆ The trace pellet I’d dissolved in Johnny’s second German beer had had more than enough time to work. The UV-positive microspores were almost hanging in the air by now – I could almost follow the trail of exhalations he had left.
◆ I’d known him in college when he was a pure cyberpuke, a twentieth-generation hacker, cortically shunted when he was twelve standard.
◆ ‘Okay,’ I said, cutting him off before he lapsed into cyberpukese, ‘
◆ He smiled . . . or at least his lips did. The hazel eyes still seemed troubled. ‘It’s called Hyperion. It’s difficult to describe what it’s about. Artistic failure, I suppose. Keats never finished it.’
◆ Having a persona based upon a retrieval template no more makes me Keats than having the name Lamia makes you a monster.
◆ ‘You said I reminded you of Fanny.’
‘An echo of a dream. Less. You’ve taken RNA learning medication, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s like that. Memories which feel . . . hollow.’
◆ simple entities like personal accounts or corporate files blazing like burning refineries in the night.
◆ the thirty worlds where the Templar ecologists had preserved some bit of nature which they thought would please the Muir.
◆ then the brief glory of growing into the full maturation of his poetic powers just as he fell prey to the ‘consumption’ which had claimed his mother and his brother Tom. Then sent off to exile in Italy, reputedly ‘for his health’ while knowing all the while it meant a lonely, painful death at the age of twenty-six.
◆ Keats said:
‘May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine. By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone – though erroneous they may be fine – This is the very thing in which consists poetry.’
‘You think the . . . Keats Project . . . was evil?’ I asked.
◆ ‘It is . . . something they consider irrelevant to humanity.’
I shook my head, a futile gesture in the darkness. ‘The re-creation of Old Earth . . . the resurrection of . . . how many? . . . human personalities as cybrids on this re-created world . . . AIs killing AIs . . . irrelevant!’
◆ Any more than there is a simple answer to the question of why humankind has sought God in a million guises for ten thousand generations. But with the Core, the interest lies more in the quest for more efficiency, more reliable ways to handle . . . variables.’
◆ said was the Atlantic Ocean. Except for lights of the occasional floating city or drilling platform, the only illumination came from the stars and the broad, swimming-pool glows of the undersea colonies.
◆ ‘Your mention of Hyperion gave me a clue,’ he said. ‘The fact that I had no knowledge of it. Its absence said that it was important.’
‘The strange case of the dog barking in the night,’ I said.
◆ but it’s only within that milieu that I can claim “consciousness” or operate sensors or remotes such as this cybrid.’
I set my coffee cup down and stared at the thing I had loved as a man during the night just past. ‘Yes?’
◆ ‘It means,’ said Johnny, smiling gently, ‘that I know what decision I made and why I made it. I wanted to cease being a cybrid and become a man. I wanted to go to Hyperion. I still do.’
◆ the TechnoCore has been obsessed with Hyperion for centuries. When CEO Yevshensky allowed King Billy of Asquith to recolonize the planet, it almost precipitated a true secession of AIs from the Web. Recently the establishment of our fatline transmitter there brought about a similar crisis.’
◆ ‘Initially. View it as a way to force the issue between the TechnoCore and ourselves, Brawne. We will either have to incorporate the Hyperion system into the Web to allow it FORCE protection, or it will fall to a race which despises and distrusts the Core and all AIs.’
I didn’t mention Johnny’s comment that the Core had been in touch with the Ousters. I said, ‘A way to force the issue. Fine. But who manipulated the Ousters into attacking?’
◆ ‘When I self-destruct my AI persona,’ said Johnny, ‘the shift to cybrid consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but during that time my section of the Core perimeter defenses will drop. The security phages will fill the gap before too many more nanoseconds pass, but during the time . . .’
◆ I could hear the black threats of the hulking security phages; I could smell death on the breath of the counterthrust tapeworm viruses even through the ice screens; I could feel the weight of the AIs’ wrath above us – we were insects under elephants’ feet
◆ ... into what? Frozen fountains of fireworks. Transparent mountain ranges of data, endless glaciers of ROMworks, access ganglia spreading like fissures, iron clouds of semisentient internal process bubbles, glowing pyramids of primary source stuff, each guarded by lakes of black ice and armies of black-pulse phages.
◆ ‘Hyperion is a rent in the entire predictive fabric of the Core’s existence. It is the penultimate oxymoron – a nonfactorable variable. Impossible as it seems, Hyperion appears to be exempt from the laws of physics, history, human psychology, and AI prediction as practiced by the Core.
◆ The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections.
◆ I felt him die then. I also felt the surge as his hand found the neural shunt, the white-light warmth of the surge to the Schrön loop as everything Johnny Keats ever was or would be exploded into me; almost, almost it was like his orgasm inside me two nights earlier, the surge and throb and sudden warmth and stillness after, with the echo of sensation there.
◆ I’m pregnant twice. Once with Johnny’s child and once with the Schrön-loop memory of what he was. I don’t know if the two are meant to be linked. It will be months before the child is born and only days before I face the Shrike.
第九章 Six
◆ we’re a mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform carrying the ghost of Paul Duré. Our “semisentient” erg in the box there. Colonel Kassad with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if we are to believe her tale, carrying not only an unborn child but a dead Romantic poet. Our scholar with the child his daughter used to be. Me with my muse. The Consul with whatever fucking baggage he’s brought to this insane trek.
◆ the aurora shimmer of defense fields leaping and dying under the assault of terrible energies only to be reborn nanoseconds later. Amid it all, the blue-white fusion tails of torchships and larger warships slicing perfectly true lines across the sky like diamond scratches on blue glass.
◆ ‘Of course,’ said the Consul. ‘If the Ousters are attacking Hyperion to prevent the opening of the Time Tombs, as M. Lamia’s tale suggests,
◆ Nature is stupid, I think and sit in the soft grass. Nature sets the stage all wrong for such a day and then it is insensitive enough to throw in a bird searching for prey
◆ But Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars.
◆ Her silk pants catching on a weave of willowgrass. There was a child’s modesty then; the slight hesitation of something given prematurely. But also pride.
◆ but it was Siri – Siri of the straight back and proud eyes, who turned her face to the wall and said through tears, ‘Go away. Go away, Merin. I don’t want you to see me. I’m a crone, all slack and sagging. Go away.’
◆ Dangerous to handle, a waste of shielded monofilaments, almost impossible to deal with in controlled airspace, hawking mats had become curiosities reserved for bedtime stories, museums, and a few colony worlds.
◆ I could feel the strength in hers. I imagined it as the strength of years I had not shared. ‘You have to live to really know things, my love. Having Alón has helped me to understand that. There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.’
◆ when we saw the first of the motile isles. Racing before the storm, treesails billowing, the islands sailed up from their southern feeding grounds in seemingly endless procession.
◆ No, not sorrow, not yet, but a sharp-toothed sadness which soon will open into grief. For years I have carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk.
◆ ‘Sure.’ I was dubious. More than three centuries of effort had not raised much of a dialogue between man and sea mammal. Mike had once told me that the thought structures of Old Earth’s two groups of orphans were too different, the referents too few
◆ I can sense in him the open honesty which often takes the place of intelligence in some people.
◆ Develop?’ Siri’s voice showed surprise for the first time. ‘How can they develop the isles? Even the First Families must ask permission of the Sea Folk to build our tree-house retreats there.’
I smiled at Siri’s use of the local term for the dolphins. The Maui-Covenant colonists were such children when it came to their damned dolphins.
◆ I stared at the gaunt outlines of ribs and breastbone and remembered the sixteen-year-old girl with baby fat and skin like warm velvet.
◆ There in the Master’s Rock, where perfect satori had eluded so many much worthier pilgrims, I achieved it through the memory of a not quite sixteen-year-old womanchild’s body lying next to mine while moonlight spilled from a Thomas Hawk’s wings.
◆ There is something there that belies the callowness and thoughtless egotism which you wear so well. A caring, perhaps. A respect for caring, if nothing else.
◆ At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the colonists do what they do best – destroy truly indigenous life. It is no accident that in six centuries of interstellar expansion the Hegemony has encountered no species considered intelligent on the Drake-Turing-Chen Index.
◆ The essence of the plan was that the Ousters had to be provoked into attacking the Hegemony. The focus of that attack was to be Hyperion itself. I was made to understand that the resulting battle had more to do with internal Web politics than with the Ousters.
◆ Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.
◆ The Worldweb, the All Thing, the Hegemony of Man – all of them had been built on the most vicious type of patricide. Now they were being maintained by a quiet and deliberate policy of fratricide – the murder of any species with even the slightest potential of being a competitor.
◆ the Ousters saw it as a tool of human devising, sent back through time to deliver humanity from the TechnoCore.
◆ But when the time comes to judge, to understand a betrayal which will spread like flame across the Web, which will end worlds, I ask you not to think of me – my name was not even writ on water as your lost poet’s soul said – but to think of Old Earth dying for no reason, to think of the dolphins, their gray flesh drying and rotting in the sun,
◆ ‘Do you want to read it? Do you want me to read it to you? It’s flowing again. Read the old parts. Read the Cantos I wrote three centuries ago and never published. It’s all here. We’re all here. My name, yours, this trip. Don’t you see . . . I’m not creating a poem, I’m creating the future!’
