Hyperion by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online Page B

cleared his throat as if he were about to speak, and died. The crowd dispersed even before the body was removed. The man was middle-aged, sandy-haired, and slightly overweight. carried no identification, not even a universal card or comlog. were six silver coins in his pocket. He There For some reason, I elected to stay with the body the rest of that day. The doctor was a short and cynical man who allowed me to stay during the required autopsy.! suspect that he was starved for conversation. 'This is what the whole thing's worth,' he said as he opened the poor man'd belly like a pink satchel, pulling the folds of skin and muscle back and pinning them down like tent flaps.

'What thing?" I asked.

'His life,' said the doctor and pulled the skin of the corpse's face up and back like a greasy mask. 'Your life.

My life." The red and white stripes of overlapping muscle turned to blue bruise around the ragged hole just above the cheekbone.

'There has to be more than this,' I said.

The doctor looked up from his grim work with a bemused smile. 'Is there?" he said.

'Please show me." He lifted the man's heart and seemed to weigh it in one hand. 'In the Web worlds, this'd be worth some money on the open market. There're those too poor to keep vat-grown, cloned parts in store, but too well off to die just for want of a heart.

But out here it's just offal." 'There has to be more,' I said, although I felt little conviction. I remembered the funeral of His Holiness Pope Urban XV shortly before I left Pacem. As has been the custom since pre-Heglra days, the corpse was not embalmed. It waited in the anteroom off the main basilica to be fitted for the plain wooden coffin. As I helped Edouard and Monsignor Frey place the vestments on the stiffened corpse I noticed the browning skin and slackening mouth.

The doctor shrugged and finished the perfunctory autopsy. There was the briefest of formal inquiries. No suspect was found, no motive put forward. A description of the murdered man was sent to Keats but the man himself was buried the next day in a pauper's field between the mud flats and the yellow jungle.

Port Romance is a jumble of yellow, weirwood structures set on a maze of scaffolds and planks stretching far out onto the tidal mud flats at the mouth of the Kans.

The river is almost two kilometers wide here where it spills out into Toschahai Bay, but only a few channels are navigable and the dredging goes on day and night.! lie awake each night in my cheap room with the window open to 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.

The companies keep a skimmerport on the edge of town to ferry men and matriel inland to the larger plantations, but 1 do not have enough money to bribe my way aboard.

Rather, I could get myself aboard but cannot afford to transport my three trunks of medical and scientific gear. I am still tempted. My service among the Bikura seems more absurd and irrational now than ever before. Only my strange need for a destination and a certain masochistic determination to complete the terms of my self-imposed exile keep me moving upriver.

There is a riverboat departing up the Kans in two days. I have booked passage and will move my trunks onto it tomorrow. It will not be hard to leave Port Romance behind.

Day 41:

The Emporotic Girandole continues its slow progress upriver. No sight of human habitation since we left Melton's Landing two days ago. The jungle presses down to the riverbank like a solid wall now; more, it almost completely overhangs us in places where the river narrows to thirty or forty meterS. The light itself is yellow, rich as liquid butter, filtered as it is through foliage and fronds eighty meters above the brown surface of the Kans. I sit on the rusted tin roof of the center passenger