Hyperion

PROLOGUE


The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's
Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green,
saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below. A thunderstorm was brewing to the
north. Bruise-black clouds silhouetted a forest 0f giant gymnosperms while stratocumulus
towered nine kilometers high in a violent sky. Lightning rippled along the horizon. Closer to the
ship, occasional vague, reptilian shapes would blunder into the interdiction field, cry out, and
then brash away through indigo mists. The Consul concentrated on a difficult section of the
Prelude and ignored the approach of storm and nightfall.

The fatline receiver chimed.

The Consul stopped, fingers hovering above the keyboard, and listened. Thunder rumbled
through the heavy air. From the direction of the gymnosperm forest there came the mournful
ululation of a carrion-breed pack. Somewhere in the darkness below, a smallbrained beast
trumpeted its answering challenge and fell quiet. The interdiction field added its sonic
undertones to the sudden silence. The fatline chimed again.

"Damn," said the Consul and went in to answer it.

While the computer took a few seconds to convert and decode the burst of decaying tachyons, the
Consul poured himself a glass of Scotch. He settled into the cushions of the projection pit just as
the diskey blinked green. "Play," he said.

'You have been chosen to return to Hyperion," came a woman's husky voice. Full visuals had not
yet formed; the air remained empty except for the pulse of transmission codes which told the
Consul that this fatline squirt had originated on the Hegemony administralive world of Tau Ceti Center.
The Consul did not need the transmission coordinates to know this. The aged but still beautiful
voice of Meina Gladstone was unmistakable. "You have been chosen to return to Hyperion as a
member of the Shrike Pilgrimage,"

Dan Simmons

Praise for Dan Simmons and Hyperion

Dan Simmons has brilliantly conceptualized a future 700 years distant. In sheer scope and complexity it matches, and perhaps even surpasses, those of Isaac Asimov and James Blish. The Washington Post Book World 

An unfailingly inventive narrative . . . generously conceived and stylistically sure-handed. The New York Times Book Review

Simmons s own genius transforms space opera into a new kind of poetry. The Denver Post

An essential part of any science fiction collection. Booklist