52 pages • 1 hour read
Dan SimmonsHyperion
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Scholar’s Tale: ‘The River Lethe’s Taste is Bitter’”
The pilgrims arrive at the small, mostly deserted port of Edge where the barge’s android crew leaves in a launch after the pilgrims unload their baggage. The pilgrims will cross the vast plain of the Sea of Grass in a windwagon, which resembles a sailing vessel and has not yet arrived; they light a bonfire to signal their presence. Het Masteen points out that there is probably something useful or meaningful in their baggage for their eventual meeting with the Shrike, such as Silenus’s manuscript or Kassad’s weapons. Het Masteen carries a Möbius cube, which could contain anything from an ancient artifact to a nuclear explosion, but he does not say what is in it. The windwagon arrives, though it does not have a crew. Sol Weintraub is next to tell his story.
Sol Weintraub lived on the planet of Barnard’s World, which had a good university named Nightenhelser in the middle of agricultural fields. He and his wife Sarai had one child, a daughter named Rachel, who was bright and sensitive. After her university studies, she became an archaeologist and joined a research mission to Hyperion to study the Time Tombs, specifically the Sphinx. Her lover, Melio Arundez, led the mission.
The Sphinx Tomb was presumed to be safe from the time tides, the anti-entropic fields that emanate from the Tombs and create “time tides” or temporal distortions; they had sensors set up all around the area to monitor the flow of the tides. One night, Rachel was alone, deep in the honeycomb of the Sphinx Tomb to monitor data coming in to detect possible niches in the rock above the tomb, when the instruments started showing vast spaces above her. She heard footsteps and all of the lights, including the ones that did not require electricity to run, went out. She was found in a coma and brought to a medical center on the planet of Renaissance Vector.
Sol and Sarai visited her there and learned that Rachel was aging backward, what became known as Merlin’s disease. After she sleeps, or every 30 hours or so, she forgets a day of her life. She made a recording for herself to play every morning to remind her of her condition and of the things she might start forgetting. There was nothing any doctors could do for her, for her condition was unknown in the entire universe. Resigned, Rachel went to live with Melio and continue graduate school for a while. Eventually, she had to break up with him and drop out of school because every morning he was a stranger to her and day by day she would forget the things she had just learned. She returned home to live with her parents.
Sol had a recurring dream where he was in a dark cavern lit by two red orbs. A voice told him that he must take Rachel to Hyperion to serve as a “burnt offering.” Sol argued with the voice. When awake, Sol started to argue with God, specifically around the story of Abraham, whom God told to sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of his faith.
On Rachel’s 21st birthday, she told Sol that the recordings she viewed every morning were just too painful. They made her realize all that she had lost and was losing. She convinced her parents to let her just be, to live without remembering the trauma that was happening to her. They agreed and even got Poulsen treatments to make them appear younger and to help Rachel not be so confused when she awoke each morning.
Melio visited when Rachel had reverted to a pre-teen to tell Sol that he would continue the research in order to help Rachel. Seeing her disturbed him so much that he never visited again. Sol then went to the Church of the Shrike on Lusus for help. However, the bishop said that the Avatar (the Shrike) had chosen Rachel and there was nothing they could do for her. Sol was thrown out of the temple and barred from entering any other Shrike churches.
When Rachel turned seven, the media latched onto her story, and her plight became a sensation. The family moved to Hebron to live on a Jewish kibbutz in order to avoid press intrusions and have some privacy. Though it was peaceful there, Rachel kept losing memories, age, skills, and abilities. Sarai admitted to Sol that she had had the same dream of the red-lit cavern, though there was also a “golem” in her dream that Rachel had seen in the tomb. She said that they should take Rachel to Hyperion and offer themselves as sacrifice instead of her. Sol refused. Sarai then visited her sister on another planet and died in an accident.
Alone and unable to grieve his wife in front of young Rachel, Sol started doing media events to put pressure on the Hegemony and the Shrike Temple to allow him to take Rachel to Hyperion. (Further research into the Time Tombs had been banned after Rachel’s accident.) In Sol’s next dream, he refused to make sacrifices to any gods. By the time he started on the pilgrimage, Rachel was only a few weeks old.
After his tale, Kassad and the Consul take the first night watch on the windwagon.
Chapter 4 Analysis
Sol wrestles with faith and the pain of memory. He describes Barnard’s World as boring, but had a fulfilling life there prior to the onset of Rachel’s condition. Afterward, the Weintraub family had to cope with either consoling Rachel on a daily basis when she would learn anew what had befallen her or play the part of their younger selves to ease their daughter’s confusion, all while trying to keep the interstellar media out of their lives. Though Rachel’s malady is fantastical, Sol and Sarai’s struggle represents the helplessness and challenges parents face when dealing with a child’s illness.
The Jewish settlement on Hebron offers solace to the family; it is not the religious aspect of the kibbutz that comforts them but human kindness. This echoes Sol’s reckoning of religious faith. He did not grow up in an especially religious household, but he becomes interested in the demands that religion can put on people. Sol’s Jewish upbringing helps him see the connection between his dreams in the cavern and the story of Abraham.
In discussion with Sarai, Sol wonders why someone would follow a god that demanded human sacrifice, even if it was just a test of faith. In his own musings, he concludes that “any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil” (290). This is true even if the “future of humankind depends upon your obedience in this matter” (253), as the voice in his dreams tells him. In his final dream before the pilgrimage, he rails against the voice, declaring: “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” (307). For Sol, divinity now lies within humanity, in kindness. This is further emphasized when he shouts for the voice (believed to be the Shrike) to either leave them alone or “join us as a father rather than a receiver of sacrifices” (307).
The Church of the Shrike is known by its followers as the Church of the Final Atonement, yet it is unclear to Sol and other outsiders what sins they are supposed to atone for. The bishop deems Rachel the “most blessed and most cursed” of people, as she “has been chosen by the Avatar to atone in a way which all sinners and nonbelievers must someday suffer” (281). His words are enigmatic, not offering any clarification on why Rachel was chosen or what sins she was chosen for. The cold treatment Sol receives from the Shrike Temple suggests that, most likely, the Shrike cultists also do not understand what happened to her; perhaps they are jealous that their deity chose a non-follower. Their devoutness shows Sol that they are just as clueless about divine interactions with humanity as anyone else.
The subtitle of his tale—“The River Lethe’s Taste is Bitter”—highlights The Power of Memory. The River Lethe in Greek mythology is one of the five rivers of the underworld and is the river of forgetfulness. Rachel suffers every day with the knowledge of what she has lost and is losing, feeling the full bitterness of forgetting. Melio, however, has the pain of being forgotten by the one he loves, and after Sarai dies, Sol must bear the pain of knowing that Rachel has forgotten her mother’s death.
When she regresses to the age of 21, Rachel decides to give in to the forgetting in order to avoid pain. For her then, forgetfulness can serve as a balm; she realizes that pain that one can do nothing about nor grow from is pain worth avoiding. Though it gets easier for Sol to manage Rachel’s condition as she gets younger, it carries its own kind of pain, akin to having a loved one with Alzheimer’s or dementia: It was “not so much different from watching a loved one falling into old age. Only worse. A thousand times worse” (303). Sol cannot forget the tragedies of his family, nor would he want to. It is now his burden to bear.
