Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos 📥

I am transmitting this from inside the Shrike’s chest. The door led to a library. Not of books, but of possible pasts . I see now that the Hegemony-Ouster War was never about resources, or territory, or even ideology. It was a sacrifice. A ritual feeding. The Shrike does not kill for pleasure or strategy. It kills because we need it to kill. Without the Shrike, the Hegemony would have no enemy to unite against. Without the Shrike, the Ousters would have no martyr to worship. Without the Shrike, the TechnoCore would have no chaos to optimize.

The Shrike is coming back through the door. I have perhaps three of your seconds.

He smiled. It was a terrible expression. “I am the one who could have stopped it. I chose not to.”

The Last Transmission of the Ouster Diplomat Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos

“What, then?” I whispered.

I was an Ouster. Not the swarm-creatures of Hegemony propaganda, all claws and chitin, but a child of the void decades: webbed fingers, lungs adapted to argon-methane mix, eyes that saw ultraviolet. I had come to Hyperion not to die, but to understand. The Hegemony believed the Time Tombs were a weapon. The Ouster Clergy believed they were a god.

It did not move. It replaced space. One moment it stood before the Tombs; the next, it was behind me, a blade resting against my spine. I am transmitting this from inside the Shrike’s chest

Yes.

The Consul told me the old story: the priest who crucified himself on the tesla trees, the soldier who fell in love with a cyborg, the poet who sold his soul for a single perfect verse. He told it well—with the hollow music of a man reciting a litany he no longer believed.

He laughed without sound. The thorns trembled. I see now that the Hegemony-Ouster War was

The Shrike tilted its head. A gesture almost human. Almost.

Transmission ends.

“I am an envoy,” I said, my voice steady only because my lungs had been bred for vacuum. “My people wish to know: are you a god, or a machine?”

The Tombs had not yet opened when I arrived on Hyperion. That is what the Hegemony Consul told me, his voice flat as a creased farcaster ticket. He was old—not with the dignified age of a poet, but the weary decay of a man who had outlived his own lies.