The Fall of Hyperion

Highlights

He was a molar grinder and a cheek-muscle flexer.

“But this is fucking ridiculous. All dressed up with nowhere to die.”

All dressed up with nowhere to die.”

hundred and thirty billion people

man catapulted into events too large for his talents.

footsteps do not survive ten seconds in the storm.

“Will they build God?” I said. “There are those AIs which do not want to build God. They learned from the human experience that to construct the next step in awareness is an invitation to slavery, if not actual extinction.”

“and all I can think about is how nice it’ll be to have a shower.” “A drink,” says Silenus. “Shelter from the storm,” says Weintraub. The baby is taking milk from a nursing pak.

Web citizens—especially Web citizens with power and influence—were not used to being denied access to new experiences, and for the Hegemony, all-out war remained one of the few experiences still untried.

It was rumored that the original farcaster prototypes had offered no sensation during transition and that the AI and human designers had altered the machinery to add that vague prickling, ozone-charged feeling to give the traveler a sense of having traveled.

Somewhere the datasphere had crept in, perhaps unknown to the FORCE machines and their operators and allies. The

I could see Hunt counting those who remained sitting, some with arms folded, many with visible frowns.

Treetops held a score of dining platforms in its upper bowers, ascending in order of rank and privilege and wealth and power. Especially power.

—You came from the future with it? —No. I was taken from my time to travel back in time with him.

Dolphins where else in sci-fi this happen

It had been Brawne Lamia’s father who had made

Byron Lamia had been obsessed with the TechnoCore, consumed with the mission of moving humankind out from under the bondage the AIs had imposed over five centuries and a thousand light-years. It had been Brawne Lamia’s father who had made

Senator Lamia’s last senate act had been to co-propose Protectorate status for Hyperion, a move that would have brought the world into the Web twenty standard years earlier than the events now unfolding. After his death, the surviving co-sponsor—the newly influential Meina Gladstone—had withdrawn the bill.

She walked the corridors, thinking of the weeks and months to come, the terrible price the worlds would pay for her decisions, her obsessions. Five youths, tailored

She walked the corridors, thinking of the weeks and months to come, the terrible price the worlds

She walked the corridors, thinking of the weeks and months to come, the terrible price the

All she had to do to save a hundred billion lives was return to the Senate floor, reveal three decades of deception and duplicity, reveal her fears and uncertainties

Silenus was only a century and a half old, half-blue from Poulsen treatments, his cells remembering the cold freeze of a dozen long cryogenic fugues and even colder storage, but his lifetime had spanned more than four centuries.

“Everything that’s happened … our pilgrimage, even this war … was manufactured because of the internal politics of the Core.”

The poem dealt with the death and displacement of the Titans by their offspring, the Hellenic gods. It dealt with the Olympian struggle which followed the Titans’ refusal to be displaced—the boiling of great seas as Oceanus struggled with Neptune, his usurper, the extinction of suns as Hyperion struggled with Apollo for control of the light, and the trembling of the universe itself as Saturn struggled with Jupiter for control of the throne of the gods. What was at stake was not the mere passage of one set of deities to be replaced by another, but the end of a golden age and the beginning of dark times which must spell doom for all mortal things.

The Cantos were also about the relationship between creatures and their creators, the love between parent and children, artists and their art, all creators and their creations.

at this rate it would take no longer than a day, the night perhaps. A few hours and he would be finished with his life’s work, ready to rest a while and appreciate the small daily things, the trivia of living which for decades now had been only an interruption of work he could not complete.

general address and the declaration of war—to me within forty-five minutes. Short. Unequivocal. Check the files under Churchill and Strudensky. Realistic but defiant, optimistic but tempered with grim resolve.

Sol’s decades as an academic had preconditioned him to hunt for patterns in events, a moral grain in the accreted stone of experience, but there had been no pattern to events on Hyperion—merely confusion and death.

Say yes, Daddy. Sol remembered the dream, remembered his daughter’s hug, and realized that in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith—true faith—was trusting in that love. Sol lifted his newborn and dying child, seconds old, shrieking now with her first and last breath, and handed her to the Shrike.

There were no signs of panic. People were taking to the datasphere and All Thing rather than the

There were no signs of panic. People were taking to the datasphere and All Thing rather than the streets.

to relieve the great weight of his body which adds so immeasurably to the unmeasurable pain.

Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low—

I knew that Gladstone was convinced that elements of the Core were intent upon eliminating the human species—this war had been her Hobson’s choice given that alternative.

Nothing could be done about it—every human above the lowest Dregs’ Hive poverty class had a comlog with biomonitor, many had implants, and each of these was tuned to the music of the datasphere, monitored by elements of the datasphere, dependent upon functions of the datasphere—so humans accepted their lack of privacy.

How familiar

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be consciencc-calm’d—sec here it is— I hold it towards you.

… Who alive can say, “Thou art no Poet; mayst not tell thy dreams”? Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved, And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse Be Poet’s or Fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

Keats Hyperion poem

John Keats, the consumptive poet who had asked only that his tomb be nameless except for the inscription: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.

No. He is asking us if we can truly bear hearing the story. Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

The Kiev Team’s runaway black hole

Kyiv, not kiev

so we constructed your civilization carefully so that/ like hamsters in a cage/ like Buddhist prayer wheels/ each time you turn your little wheels of thought our purposes are served]

Our UI sees everything that is and was and will be and tells us selected bits so that we may tell you and in so doing look a bit like UIs ourselves

was a war/ for suddenly a part of your UI the less-than-sum-of entity/ self-thought of as Empathy/ had no more stomach for it and fled back through time cloaking itself in human form/ not for the first time

“The Shrike had granted me death without killing me.

The Monsignor’s voice was quiet. “I believe that what Paul is saying is that if the spirit creature you say is hiding here in our time, it may well not know its own identity.”

daylight. “The Zen Gnostics claim forty billion followers,” he rumbled. “But what kind of religion is that, eh? No churches. No priests. No holy books. No concept of sin.”

Like most people of his generation, Hunt had never seen illness or death—that was a professional matter handled out of sight of the populace.

“Accuracy. Verisimilitude. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.”

Dying should become easier with practice.

Or, rather, John Keats did nine centuries earlier in his first attempt to portray the fall of the Titans and their replacement by the Olympian gods.

Titans vs Olympian

Moneta glanced at the valley. “The winner determines whether the Shrike already entombed there goes alone to pave the way for others …” She nodded toward the army of Shrikes. “Or whether humankind has a say in our past and future.”

All Sol wanted, he realized now, was the same possibility once again to worry about those future years which every parent fears and dreads.

A wondrous lesson in thy silent face: Knowledge enormous makes a god of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal. Keats lived for three more painful hours, a swimmer rising occasionally from his sea of agony to take a breath or whisper some urgent nonsense.

“So these Ouster bodies self-destruct the same way cybrid corpses have been known

“So these Ouster bodies self-destruct the same way cybrid corpses have been known to,” he said. “So what? Do you think the Senate or All Thing will accept this as proof that it’s the Core that’s behind the invasion?”

“The Core offered unity in unwitting subservience,” she said softly. “Safety in stagnation. Where are the revolutions in human thought and culture and action since the Hegira?” “Terraformed into pale clones of Old Earth,” answered Coredwell Minmun. “Our new age of human expansion will terraform nothing. We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness.

Meina Gladstone sighed and shook her head. “The Core has devised a parasitic, organic device called the cruciform,” she said. “It … brings back … the dead. After a few generations, the humans will be retarded, listless, and without a future, but their neurons will still serve Core purposes.”

The old Master, if indeed it is he, does not cite koans as he dies, but screams in agony as sincerely as any conscious entity ever has who is in the process of being fed to the ovens.

Empathy and love were inseparable and inexplicable.

If he was right—and he did not know but felt—then love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter/antimatter

Still, the sight of a baby’s flesh—however unattractive this newborn might be—held by the Shrike’s bladed talons stirs something in me.

“Girls are such a chore,” he said, disentangling Rachel’s fingers from his beard and Brawne’s curls. “Trade yours in for a boy the first chance you get.” “OK,” said Brawne and stepped back.

she had always hated in pregnant women but one she now found impossible to avoid—and walked clumsily to a deck chair on the observation deck.

“Everyone saw him but me,” said Brawne, frowning at her brandy and realizing that she had to take more prenatal antialcohol pills