Hyperion

“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 Muir.”

Het Masteen explains some of the philosophy of the Templars and how they view the Shrike. This is the first linkage of the Shrike with punishment. Het Masteen also hints at the Templars’ beliefs about nature.

“[…] it would—at the very least—amuse us and give at least a glimpse of our fellow travelers’ souls before the Shrike or some other calamity distracts us. Beyond that, it might just give us enough insight to save all of our lives if we are intelligent enough to find the common thread of experience which binds all our fates to the whim of the Shrike.”

Sol Weintraub proposes that the pilgrims tell their tales. This sets up the frame story with embedded tales, like Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. In addition, the premise creates intrigue, as the reader doesn’t yet know how the diverse stories are linked. Understanding one another better may give the pilgrims an advantage when facing the Shrike.

“[…] the real houses of worship are the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling the fiberplastic shipments from the south, and the Shrike Cult temples where lost souls hide their suicidal hopelessness behind a shield of shallow mysticism. The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.”

Father Duré says these lines. He is disgusted with Keats, Hyperion’s capital. These lines tie into the theme of Religion and Questions of Faith, with various characters questioning the value of faith. This quote also makes the connection between previous Shrike pilgrims being called “suicides.”

“I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis—the God of Abraham.”

Father Duré says this in regard to encountering the Shrike. He fears the terrifying creature, yet at the same time is exultant in the realization that evil incarnate actually exists in physical form—not merely imagination or as a device to frighten people into good behavior. Therefore, its converse must also be true. If there is a demon, there must then be a god.

“After the obscenities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries on Old Earth, when military leaders had committed their nations to strategies wherein entire civilian populations were legitimate targets while their uniformed executioners sat safe in self-contained bunkers fifty meters under the earth, the repugnance of the surviving civilians was so great that for more than a century the word ‘military’ was an invitation to a lynching.”

Colonel Kassad embraces the New Bushido code based on ancient samurai tradition. The code arose out of the need for the military to survive; thus, it had to change from viewing the death of civilians as “collateral damage” to being tasked with protecting civilian life when possible and engaging only with other professional soldiers.

“‘You have been in my dreams for years,’ he told her. ‘Yes. Your past. My future. The shock wave of events moves across time like ripples on a pond.’”

Moneta says the latter lines to Kassad. The mystery around her deepens after the narrative reveals that she has a connection to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Her names allude to memory, with these lines exploring The Power of Memory. It is significant that their meeting is something Kassad looks back on and Moneta looks forward to. Moneta’s statement suggests that certain events may be immutable and have impacts in both directions of time. She uses a simile, comparing the movement of events to “ripples on a pond.”

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.”

The poet Martin Silenus believes in the power of words to create and dissemble. He became a poet while only having a nine-word vocabulary, and he understands that truth is a separate thing and that words can deceive. The name one chooses for a person or group can distort the truth of that entity’s existence.

“So I had told him what I knew about the nineteenth-century Old Earth poet; about his upbringing, training, and early death…but mostly about a life dedicated almost totally to the mysteries and beauties of poetic creation.”

Martin Silenus explains to Sad King Billy who John Keats was prior to the move to Hyperion. Like Keats, Silenus struggles with poetic creation. Many of his poems are trite, but the ones that capture the nuance of human existence, with suffering as part of it, are described as exquisite. Both men concern themselves with what truth is when it comes to art.

“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.”

Silenus’s first published poem was about the death of Old Earth. The theme of humans wrecking planet after planet resonates with him; he sees the Shrike as humanity’s deserved punishment for irresponsible and destructive actions. The fall of the Titans is also central to Keats’s Hyperion.

“I meant only to point out that 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.”

Het Masteen tells the other pilgrims that even in the baggage they carry there could be something to give them hope when up against the fearsome Shrike. He offers Kassad’s weapons and Silenus’s manuscript as examples. He believes that the stories they tell are important and could reveal their strengths, even if the speakers don’t know it themselves.

“And Sol awakened half laughing, half chilled by the dream. Amused by the thought that the entire Talmud and the Old Testament might be nothing more than a cosmic shaggy-dog story.”

Sol dreams of hearing the Shrike in a red-lit cavern and being commanded to offer Rachel as a sacrifice. It reminds him of the biblical story of Abraham; God commanded Abraham to kill his son to show his love and obedience. Whereas God stayed Abraham’s hand, Sol suspects the deity in his dream will do no such thing. Thus, he reckons the religious texts are just anticlimactic stories without a clear point.

“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.”

Having the mysterious Merlin’s disease, Rachel struggles each day to reorient herself to the world that does not align with her memories. When she realizes that so much of her remaining time is taken up with grief, she opts to forget that she is forgetting so that she may live her life in a kind of peace.

“It may well be that Keats’s dreams of Hyperion were some sort of transtemporal communication between his then persona and his now persona. If nothing else, Hyperion is the key mystery of our age—physical and poetic—and it is quite probable that he…that I was born, died, and was born again to explore it.”

Johnny tells Brawne Lamia of his plan to invest his cybrid body with the AI consciousness from the Keats Project, then sever the tie to the datasphere. This would, in essence, make him human, but a human based on the life of someone who had already lived and died. The mystery remains for Lamia why TechnoCore was so against Johnny doing this and going to Hyperion, and why Hyperion is so crucial.

“It was immediately obvious that the so-called Time Tombs were artifacts launched backward in time from a point at least ten thousand years in the galaxy’s future. More disturbing, however, is the fact that Core predictive formulae have never been able to factor the Hyperion variable.”

Johnny explains why TechnoCore is so interested in Hyperion. It is a “nonfactorable variable,” which upsets its predictive capabilities upon which all its power depends. It is known that the anti-entropic fields around the Time Tombs affect time, but it is not common knowledge to humans that someone or something sent them back in time from a far future.

“The result has been two futures—two realities if you will—one in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The other reality sees the Shrike invasion, the coming interstellar war, and the other products of the Time Tombs’ opening as a human fist struck back through time, a final, twilight effort by the Ousters, ex-colonials, and other small bands of humans who escaped the Volatiles’ extinction programs.”

As an AI, Johnny is aware of the different factions of Ais in the TechnoCore. The Volatiles seek to destroy humanity, as opposed to the Stables who work with humans and the Ultimates who play both sides as it suits their purposes. Part of the concern over Hyperion is that it is not known who created the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Therefore, it is unpredictable what the opening of the Tombs will bring.

“And then will come the missionaries. The petroleum geologists. The sea farmers. The developers.”

This quote is from Merin Aspic’s recording about his conversation with Siri about what will happen to Maui-Covenant once the farcaster is open. The Hegemony sold the idea to them as progress because it would allow citizens to travel to other worlds, an ability they lack. Merin does not initially understand Siri’s repeated questions about what will happen to her world; however, this answer gets at her concern. The development of Maui-Covenant could mean its destruction. These lines use short sentence fragments to create a sense of impending dread.

“Sometimes then I thought of the brave and stupid idealists heading out into the great dark in their slow and leaking ships, carrying embryos and ideologies with equal faith and care.”

Merin reflects while on Mars, looking toward where Old Earth once existed. History in the Worldweb is marked by pre-Hegira or post-Hegira, meaning the exodus of people from Earth to other worlds. Humans spread throughout the universe, bringing their traditions and faiths with them, for better or for worse.

“At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the colonists do what they do best—destroy truly indigenous life. […] As the Web expanded, if a species attempted serious competition with humanity’s intellect, that species would be extinct before the first farcaster opened in-system.”

The Consul speaks of his career in the diplomatic corps. He was willing to join the rebellion against the Hegemony to prevent the development of Maui-Covenant. However, his grandfather tasked him to play the long game and become part of the Hegemony in order to eventually take it down. He wrestles with the choice he made to pursue vengeance, which put him in a position to oversee colonial atrocities.

“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 Ousters are considered “interstellar barbarians” by the Hegemony and most people in the Worldweb. However, the Consul believes they have an admirable side. Gladstone sent the Consul to negotiate with the Ousters, the people who killed his wife and son. He learns a great deal about the destruction of Old Earth and the Time Tombs from them. They give him a drug so that he withholds information without detection from Meina Gladstone in his debriefing.

“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. And the Ousters, the only other tribe of humanity free to wander between the stars and the only group not dominated by the TechnoCore, was next on our list of extinction.”

The Ousters inform the Consul that the destruction of Old Earth—what is called the Big Mistake—was not, in fact, an accident but a planned destruction of the planet by parts of TechnoCore and some of the Hegemony leaders. Now these entities are spreading throughout the universe but becoming increasingly wary of each other.

“It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.”

When the Consul got the message from Gladstone to join the pilgrimage, he knew that plans for his role would soon be upon him—whether from the Ousters, TechnoCore, or Gladstone. This quote shows a nihilistic side to the Consul. He believes the events have been set in place, but that it no longer matters who did what.

“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, to see—as I have seen—the motile isles with no place to wander, their feeding grounds destroyed, the Equatorial Shallows scabbed with drilling platforms, the islands themselves burdened with shouting, trammeling tourists smelling of UV lotion and cannabis.”

The Consul has betrayed many people: the Ousters, the Hegemony, colonists on new worlds, and even his own principles. He refers to Keats’s request for his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” (Reynolds, Ian. “‘Writ in water’: The gravestone of John Keats.” Wordsworth.org, 2021). The epitaph hints at Keats’s fear of being forgotten, of his critics having the last word, and of dying so young. The Consul thinks he will be known only in infamy but would rather people think of the worlds that have been destroyed.

“This thing that is going to kill us tomorrow—my muse, our maker, our unmaker—it’s traveled back through time. Well, let it. This time, let it take me and leave Billy alone. Let it take me and let the poem end there, unfinished for all time.”

Martin Silenus believes his poem is creating the future, but that it is the past that needs to change. He has regret about Sad King Billy’s death and the idea that he, Silenus, might have had a part in conjuring the Shrike. In many of the pilgrims’ stories, there is a moment when things could have gone differently, and Silenus greets it as an opportunity for a new version of the past to be created. These lines repeat “let it take me” for emphasis.