“We’re leaving here, Raul, my darling,” she whispered in the darkness last night. “Not soon, but as soon as you finish our tale. As soon as you remember it all and understand it all.”
I reached for her then, but her warmth was receding. When the lights came on, my egg-shaped world was empty.
I admit that I paced back and forth until the normal waking time arrived. My greatest fear these days or months has not been death—Aenea had taught me how to put death in perspective—but insanity. Madness would rob me of clarity, of memory … of Aenea.
Then I saw something that stopped me. The text slate was activated. The stylus was lying not in its usual place, but tucked behind the slate cover, much as Aenea had kept her pen folded away in her journal during our voyages after leaving Earth. My fingers shaking, I recycled yesterday’s writings and activated the printer port.
Only one page emerged, crowded with handwritten lines. It was Aenea’s writing; I know it well.
This is a turning point for me. Either I am truly insane and none of this matters, or I am saved and everything matters very much.
I read this, as you do, with hope for my sanity and hope for salvation, not of my soul, but salvation of self in the renewed certainty of reunion—real reunion, physical reunion—with the one whom I remember and love above all others.
And this is the best reason to read.
60
Raul, consider this a postscript to the memories you wrote about today, and which I read tonight. Years ago, years ago … those last three hours of our first journey together, when you, my darling Raul, and dear sleeping A. Bettik and I flew the dropship southwest toward Taliesin West and my long apprenticeship there, I longed to tell you everything that day—the dreams that showed us being lovers of whom the poets would sing, visions of the great dangers that lay ahead, dreams of the discovery of friends, dreams of the deaths of friends, certainty of unspeakable sorrow to be borne, certainty of unimaginable triumphs still unborn.
I said nothing.
Do you remember? We dozed during our flight. How strange life is that way … our last few hours alone together, this ending to one of the most intimate periods of our life together, the end of my childhood and the beginning of our time as equals, and we spent most of our last minutes sleeping. In separate couches. Life is brutal that way … the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
But we were tired. It had been a rough few days.
As the dropship was beginning to descend over the southwestern desert toward Taliesin West and my new life, I took a page from my soiled journal—it had survived the water and flames when most of my clothing had not—and wrote a hasty note to you. You were sleeping. Your face was against the vinyl of the acceleration chair and you were drooling slightly. Your eyelashes were burned away, as was a patch of hair at the crown of your head, and the effect was to make you look comical—a clown surprised in the act of sleeping. (We later talked of clowns, remember, Raul? During our Ouster odyssey. You had seen clowns at a circus in Port Romance as a teenager; I had seen clowns in Jacktown during the annual First Settlers Fair.)
The burns and burn ointment we had liberally applied to your cheeks and temples, eyes and upper lip, looked for all the world like clown makeup—red and white. You were beautiful. I loved you then. I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.
I wrote my note hurriedly, tucked it in what was left of the pocket on your ruined shirt, and kissed you ever so softly on the corner of your mouth, in the one spot that was not burned or salved. You stirred but did not wake. You did not mention the note the next day—nor ever again—and I always wondered if you found it, or if it fell out of the pocket, or was tossed away unread when you threw away the shirt at Taliesin.
The words were my father’s. He wrote them centuries ago. Then he died, was reborn—after a fashion—as a cybrid persona, and died again as a man. But still he lived in essence, his persona roving through metaspace, and eventually leaving Hyperion with the Consul, in the DNA coils of the ship’s AI. His final spoken words to my mother will never be known, despite Uncle Martin’s creative license in the Cantos. But these words were discovered in my mother’s text stylus when she awoke that morning after he left forever, and she kept the original printout for the rest of her life. I know … I used to sneak into her room in Jacktown on Hyperion and read the hurried handwriting on that yellowed slip of vellum, at least once a week from the time I was two.
These were the words that I gave to you with a sleeping kiss that last hour of our last day of our first voyage, my darling Raul. These are the words I leave tonight with a waking kiss. These are the words I will claim from you when I return next, when the tale is complete and our final voyage begins.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
And so, Raul Endymion, until we meet again on your pages, in wild ecstasy, I bid you adieu—
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the tales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
For now, my love, I wish you sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Simmons’s first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award, his science fiction novel Hyperion received the Hugo, and the Horror Writers of America awarded him its highest honor for his novel Carrion Comfort.
Simmons is also the author of Phases of Gravity, Hugo and Nebula Awards finalist The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man, his “Elm Haven triptych”—Summer of Night, Children of the Night, and Fires of Eden—and two collections of short fiction, Prayers to Broken Stones and Lovedeath. He lives in Colorado along the Front Range of the Rockies.
Dan Simmons, Endymion
(Series: Hyperion Cantos # 3)
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