second, the only sentient being on an unnamed world. He listened to the
antediluvian night sounds rising from the swamps and he thought about
morning, about setting out in the Vikken EMV at first light, about
spending the day in sunshine, about hunting big game in the fern forests
to the south and then returning to the ship in the evening for a good
steak and a cold beer. The Consul thought about the sharp pleasure of
the hunt and the equally sharp solace of solitude: solitude he had
earned through the pain and nightmare he had
already suffered on Hyperion.
Hyperion.
The Consul went inside, brought the balcony in, and sealed the ship just
as the first heavy raindrops began to fall. He climbed the spiral
staircase to his sleeping cabin at the apex of the ship. The circular
room was dark except for silent explosions of lightning which outlined
rivulets of rain coursing the skylight. The Consul stripped, lay back
on the firm mattress, and switched on the sound system and external
audio pickups. He listened as the fury of the storm blended with the
violence of Wagner's 'Flight of the Valkyries." Hurricane winds buffeted
the ship. The sound of thunderclaps filled the room as the skylight
flashed white, leaving afterimages burning in the Consu!'s retinas.
Wagner is good only for thunderstorms, he thought.
He closed his eyes but the lightning was visible through closed eyelids.
He remembered the glint of ice crystals blowing through the tumbled
ruins on the low hills near the Time Tombs and the colder gleam of steel
on the Shrike's impossible tree of metal thorns. He remembered screams
in the night and the hundred-facet, ruby and-blood gaze of the Shrike
itself.
Hyperion.
The Consul silently commanded the computer to shut off all speakers and
raised his wrist to cover his eyes. In the sudden silence he lay
thinking about how insane it would be to return to Hyperion. During his
eleven years as Consul on that distant and enigmatic world, the
mysterious Church of the Shrike had allowed a dozen barges of offworld
pilgrims to depart for the windswept barrens
around the Time Tombs, north of the mountains. No one had returned. And
that had been in normal times, when the Shrike had been prisoner to the
tides of time and forces no one understood, and the anti-entropic fields
had been contained to a few dozen meters around the Time Tombs. And
there had been no threat of an Ouster invasion.
The Consul thought of the Shrike, free to wander everywhere on Hyperion,
of the millions of indigenies and thousands of Hegemony citizens
helpless before a creature which defied physical laws and which
communicated only through death, and he shivered despite the
warmth of the cabin.
Hyperion.
