Hyperion by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online Page A

sun and ignites like burning coral.

There is no sound except for the faintest hum of the electric turbines. Three hundred meters below, the shadow of a huge, mantalike undersea creature keeps pace with the dirigible. A second ago an insect or bird the size and color of a hummingbird but with gossamer wings a meter across paused five meters out to inspect me before diving toward the sea with folded wings.

Edouard, 1 feel very alone tonight.!t would help if 1 knew you were alive, still wbrking in the garden, writing evenings in your study. I 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.4 vant are joined, but no such renewal is forthcoming.

It is growing dark. I am growing old. I feel something ·.. not yet remorse… at my sin of falsifying the evidence on the Armaghast dig.

But, Edouard, Your Excellency, if the artifacts had indicated the presence of a Christoriented culture there, six hundred light-years from Old Earth, almost three thousand years before man left the surface of the homeworld…

Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a way which would have meant the resurgence of Christianity in our life-time?

Yes, it was. But not, I think, because of the sin of tampering with the data, but the deeper sin of thinking that Christianity could be saved. The Church is dying, Edouard.

And not merely our beloved branch of the Holy Tree, but all of its offshoots, vestiges and cankers.

The entire Body of Christ is dying as surely as this poorly used body of mine, Edouard.

You and I knew this in Armaghast, where the blood-sun illuminated only dust and death.

We knew it that cool, green summer at the College when we took our first vows. We knew it as boys in the quiet playfields of Villefranche-sur-SaSne. We know it now.

The light is gone now; I must write by the slight glow from the salon windows a deck above. The stars lie in strange constellations.

The Middle Sea glows at night with a greenish, unhealthy phosphorescence. There is a dark mass on the horizon to the southeast. It may be a storm or it may be the next island in the chain, the third of the nine 'tails." (What mythology deals with a cat with nine tails? I know of none.) For the sake of the bird I saw earlier – if it was a bird – I pray that it is an island ahead and not a storm.

Day 28:

I have been in Port Romance eight days and I have seen three dead men.

The first was a beached corpse, a bloated, white parody of a man, that had washed up on the mud flats beyond the mooring tower my first evening in town.

Children threw stones at it.

The second man I watched being pulled from the burned wreckage of a methane-unit shop in the poor section of town near my hotel. His body was charred beyond recognition and shrunken by the heat, his arms and legs pulled tight in the prizefighter posture burning victims have been reduced to since time immemorial. I had been fasting all day and I confess with shame that I began to salivate when the air filled with the rich, frying-fat odor of burned flesh.

The third man was murdered not three meters from me. I had just emerged from the hotel onto the maze of mud-splattered planks that serve as sidewalks in this miserable town when shots rang out and a man several paces ahead of me lurched as if his foot had slipped, spun toward me with a qui=ical look on his face, and fell sideways into the mud and sewage.

He had been shot three times with some sort of projectile weapon. Two of the bullets had struck his chest, the third entered just below the left eye.

Incredibly, he was still breathing when I reached him.

Without thinking about it, I removed my stole from my carrying bag, fumbled for the vial of holy water 1 had carried for so long, and proceeded to perform the sac-rameut of Extreme Unction. No one in the gathering crowd objected. The fallen man stirred once,