The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (280 page)

The storm lasted more than eight hours. Darkness lasted another eight. I survived the first. I slept through the last. When I awoke, shaken and thirsty, filled with dreams of light and noise, still partially deafened, badly needing to urinate and worried about falling out of the cockpit while I knelt to do so, I saw that morning light was painting the opposite side of the cloud pillars that had replaced the temple columns from the night before. Sunrise was simpler than sunset: the brilliant white and gold crawled down from the cirrus ceiling, along the roiling sides of the cumulus and nimbus, down to my layer where I sat shaking from the cold. My skin and clothes and hair were wet. Sometime during that night’s bedlam, it had rained on me and rained hard.

I got to my knees on the padded floor of the hull, held tight to the cockpit rim with my left hand, made sure that the kayak’s swaying had steadied somewhat, and attended to business. The thin, gold stream glinted in morning light as it dropped into infinity. The depths were black, purple, and inscrutable once again. My lower back hurt and I remembered the kidney stone nightmare of the previous few days. That seemed like another life to me now, long ago and far away.
Well
, I thought,
if there’s another tiny stone being passed, I’m not going to catch it today
.

I was buttoning up and settling back into the cockpit, trying to stretch my aching legs without actually falling out, thinking about the impossibility of finding another farcaster ring anywhere in this endless sky after that night of being blown off course—as if I
had
ever had a course—when I suddenly realized that I was not alone.

Living things were rising from the depths and circling around me.

•   •   •

At first I saw only one creature and had no scale with which to judge the size of the visitor. The thing could have been a few centimeters across and only meters from my floating kayak, or many kilometers across and far, far away. Then the organism swam between a distant cloud pillar and a more distant cumulus tower, and I realized that kilometers was a more reasonable guess of size. As it came closer, I saw the myriad of smaller forms accompanying it through the morning sky.

Before I attempt to describe the things, I have to say that little in the history of humankind’s expansion in this arm of the galaxy had prepared us to describe large alien organisms. On the hundreds of worlds explored and colonized during and after the Hegira, most of the indigenous life discovered had been plants and a few very simple organisms, such as the radiant gossamers on Hyperion. The few large, evolved animal forms—the Lantern Mouths on Mare Infinitus, say, or the zeplins of Whirl—tended to be hunted to extinction. The more common result was a world filled with a few indigenous life-forms and a myriad of human-adapted species. Humanity had terraformed all these worlds, bringing its bacteria and earthworms and fish and birds and land animals in raw DNA form, defrosting embryos in the early seedships, building birthing factories in the later expansions. The result had been much as on Hyperion—vital indigenous plants such as the tesla trees and chalma and weirwood and some surviving local insects coexisting with thriving Old Earth transplants and biotailored adapts such as triaspen, everblues, oak trees, mallards, sharks, hummingbirds, and deer. We were not used to alien animals.

And these were definitely alien animals rising to meet me.

The largest one reminded me of the cuttlefish—again, one of Old Earth’s adapts—that thrived in the warm shallows of the Great South Sea on Hyperion. This creature was squidlike but almost transparent, its internal organs quite visible, although I admit that it was difficult to determine its exterior from its interior as it pulsed and throbbed and changed shape from second to second, almost like a starship morphing for battle. The thing had no head as such, not even a flattened, squidlike extension that might be considered a head, but I could make out a variety of tentacles, although fronds or filaments might be better words for the constantly swaying, retracting, extending, and quivering appendages. But these filaments were inside the pale, clear body as much as outside, and I was not sure if the creature’s
movement through the clear air was a result of the swimming motion of the filaments or because of gases expelled as the giant cuttlefish expanded and contracted.

As far as I could recall from old books and Grandam’s explanations, the zeplins on Whirl were much simpler in appearance—blimp-shaped gasbags, mere medusalike cells to hold their mix of hydrogen and methane, storing and metabolizing helium in their crude liftsacs, giant jellyfish floating in the hydrogen-ammonia-methane atmosphere of Whirl. As best I could remember, the zeplins ate a sort of atmospheric phytoplankton that floated in the noxious atmosphere like so much airborne manna. There were no predators on Whirl … until humans arrived in their floating bathyscaphes to harvest the rarer gases.

As the cuttlefish creature grew closer, I saw the complexity of its innards: pale, pulsing outlines of organs and intestine-looking coils and what might be feeding filaments and tubes that might be for reproduction or elimination, and there were some appendages that might be sex organs, or perhaps eyes. And all the while it folded in on itself, retracted its curling filaments, then pulsed forward, tentacles extended fully, like a squid swimming through clear water. It was five or six hundred meters long.

I began to notice the other things. Around the cuttlefish swarmed hundreds or thousands of golden, disc-shaped creatures, ranging in size from tiny ones perhaps as large as my hand to others larger than the heavy river mantas used to pull barges on Hyperion’s rivers. These things were also nearly transparent, although their insides were clouded by a sort of greenish glow that might have been an inert gas excited to luminescence by the animal’s own bio-electrical field. These things swarmed around the cuttlefish, at times appearing to be swallowed or absorbed by some orifice or another, only to reappear outside again. I could not swear that I saw the cuttlefish
eating
any of the swarming discs, but at one point I thought that I could see a cloud of the green-glowing things moving along the inside of the cuttlefish’s gut like ghostly platelets in a clear vein.

The monster and its cloud of companions floated closer, rising until the sunlight passed through its body on its way to light my kayak and parasail. I revised its size upward—it must be at least a klick long and a third that in width when it expanded to its widest. The living discs floated to each side of me now. I could see that they were spinning as well as curling like mantas.

I tugged out the flechette pistol Alem had given me and
clicked off its safety. If the monster attacked, I would fire half the magazine of slivers into its pale side, hoping that it was as thin as it was transparent. Maybe there was a chance that I could spill whatever lift gases allowed it to float in this band of oxygen atmosphere.

At that moment, the thing’s hydralike filaments flashed out in all directions, some missing my parasail by mere meters, and I realized that I could never kill or sink the monster before it destroyed my sail with one thrash of one tentacle. I waited, half expecting to be pulled into the cuttlefish’s maw—if it had a maw—at any second.

Nothing happened. My kayak floated in the direction I thought of as westward, the parasail rising on thermals and descending on colder downdrafts, the clouds towering around me, and the cuttlefish and its companions—I thought of them as parasites for no good reason—stood off a few hundred meters to the “north” and a hundred meters or so above me. I wondered if the thing was following me out of curiosity or hunger. I wondered if the green platelets drifting around me might attack at any moment.

Capable of doing nothing else, I laid the useless flechette pistol on my lap, nibbled on the last of my biscuits from my pack, and sipped from my water bottle. I had less than another day’s supply of water. I cursed myself for not trying to catch rainwater during the night’s terrible storm, although I had no idea if this world’s water was potable.

The long morning grew into a long afternoon. Several times the drifting parasail took me into a cloud tower and I raised my face to the dripping fog, licking droplets from my lips and chin. The water tasted like water. Each time I emerged from the fog, I expected the cuttlefish to have departed, but each time it remained on station to my right and above me. Once, just after the halo that was the sun above had passed the zenith, the kayak was blown into a particularly rough patch of climbing cloud, and the parasail almost folded in the violent updraft. But it stabilized itself and when I emerged from the cloud that time, I was some kilometers higher. The air was thinner and colder. The cuttlefish had followed me up.

Perhaps it’s not hungry yet. Perhaps it feeds after dark
. I reassured myself with a series of these thoughts.

I kept scanning the empty sky between clouds for another farcaster ring, but none appeared. It seemed folly to expect to find one—the air currents blew me generally westward but the
vagaries of the jet stream sent me klicks north and south. How could I thread such a small needle after a day and night and day of blowing around like this? It did not seem likely. But still I searched the sky.

In midafternoon I realized that there were other living things visible far below to the south. More cuttlefish moving about the base of an immense cloud tower, the sunlight piercing the depths enough to illuminate their clear bodies against the black of the broiling depths beneath them. There must be scores—no, hundreds—of the pulsing, swimming things along the base of that one cloud. I was too far away to make out the platelet parasites around them, but a sense of diffused light there—like dust floating—suggested their presence by the thousands or millions. I wondered if the monsters usually kept to the lower atmospheric levels and this one—still keeping pace with me within feeding-filament range—had ventured up out of curiosity.

My muscles were cramping. I pulled myself out of the cockpit and tried stretching along the top of the kayak’s hull, hanging on to the parasail risers to keep my balance. It was dangerous, but I had to stretch. I lay on my back and pedaled an imaginary bicycle with my raised legs. I did push-ups, clinging to the rim of the cockpit for balance. When I had worked most of the cramps out, I crawled back into the cockpit and half dozed.

Perhaps it is odd to admit, but my mind wandered all that afternoon, even while the alien cuttlefish swam alongside within swallowing range and alien platelet creatures danced and hovered within meters of the kayak and parasail. The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.

I began thinking about the past few days and the past months and the past years. I thought of Aenea—of leaving her behind—and of all the other people I had left behind: A. Bettik and the others at Taliesin West, the old poet on Hyperion, Dem Loa and Dem Ria and their family on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Father Glaucus in the frozen air tunnels of Sol Draconi Septem, Cuchiat and Chiaku and Cuchtu and Chichticu and the other Chitchatuk on that same world—Aenea had been sure that Father Glaucus and our Chitchatuk friends had been murdered after we left that world, although she had never explained how she could know that—and I thought about others I had left behind, working my way back to my last sight of Grandam and
the Clan members waving as I left for Home Guard service many years ago. And always my thoughts returned to leaving Aenea.

I’ve left too many people. And let too many people do my work and fighting for me. From now on I will fight for myself. If I ever find the girl again, I will stay with Aenea forever
. The resolution burned like anger through me, fueled by the hopelessness of finding another farcaster ring in this endless cloud-scape.

The words were not carried by sound nor heard by my ears. Rather, they were like blows to the inside of my skull. I literally reeled, gripping the sides of the kayak to keep from falling out.

Every word was a migraine blow. Each struck with the force of brain hemorrhage. The words were shouted inside my skull in my own voice. Perhaps I was going mad.

Wiping away tears, I peered at the giant cuttlefish and its swarm of green-platelet parasites. The larger organism pulsed, contracted, extended coiling filaments, and swam through the chilly air. I could not believe that these words were coming from that creature. It was too biological. And I did not believe in telepathy. I looked at the swarming discs, but their behavior showed no more sense of higher consciousness than dust motes in a shaft of light—less than the synchronized shifting of a school offish or the flocking of bats. Feeling foolish, I shouted, “Who are you? Who is speaking?”

I squinted in preparation for the blast of words against my brain, but there was no response from the giant organism or its companions.

“Who spoke?” I shouted into a rising wind. There was no answering sound except for the slap of the risers against the canvas of the parasail.

The kayak slewed to the right, righted itself, and slewed again. I swiveled to my left, half expecting to see another cuttlefish monster attacking me, but instead saw something infinitely more malevolent approaching.

While I had been focusing on the alien creature to the north, a billowing, black cumulus had all but surrounded me to the south. Wind-tattered streamers of black whirled out from the heat-driven storm cloud and roiled under me like ebony rivers. I could see lightning flashing in the depths below and surging spheres of ball lightning being spit from the black column of storm. Closer, much closer, hanging from the river of black cloud flowing above me, curled a dozen or more tornadoes, their funnel clouds striking toward me like scorpion tails. Each funnel was the size of the cuttlefish monster or larger—vertical kilometers of whirling madness—and each was spawning its own cluster of smaller tornadoes. There was no way that my flimsy parasail could withstand even a close miss by one of these vortexes—and there was no way that the funnels were going to miss me.