The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (149 page)

with power/

technology/

beads and trinkets

of devices you could neither build

nor understand

The Hawking drive would have been yours/

but the farcaster/

the fatline transmitters and receivers/

the megasphere/

the deathwand>

Never

Like the Sioux with rifles/ horses/

blankets/ knives/ and beads/

you accepted them/

embraced us

and lost yourselves

But like the white man

distributing smallpox blankets/

like the slave owner on his

plantation/

or in his Werkschutze Dechenschule

Gusstahlfabrik/

we lost ourselves

The Volatiles want to end

the symbiosis

by cutting out the parasite/

humankind]

—
And the Ultimates? They’re willing to die? To be replaced by your voracious UI?

[They think

as you thought

or had your sophist Sea God

think]

And Ummon recites poetry which I had abandoned in frustration, not because it did not work as poetry, but because I did not totally believe the message it contained.

That message is given to the doomed Titans by Oceanus, the soon-to-be-dethroned God of the Sea. It is a paean to evolution written when Charles Darwin was nine years old. I hear the words I remember writing on an October evening nine centuries earlier, worlds and universes earlier, but it is also as if I am hearing them for the first time:

[O ye/ whom wrath consumes! who/ passionstung/

Writhe at defeat/ and nurse your agonies!

Shut up your senses/ stifle up your ears/

My voice is not a bellows unto ire

Yet listen/ ye who will/ whilst I bring proof

How ye/ perforce/ must be content to stoop/

And in the proof much comfort will I give/

If ye will take that comfort in its truth

We fall by course of Nature’s law/ not force

Of thunder/ or of Jove
Great Saturn/ thou

Hast sifted well the atom universe/

But for this reason/ that thou art the King/

And only blind from sheer supremacy/

One avenue was shaded from thine eyes/

Through which I wandered to eternal truth

And first/ as thou wast not the first of powers/

So art thou not the last/
it cannot be