Dan Simmons - Endymion

An exemplary specimen of an all-too-rare subgenre: literate space opera, replete with believable characters facing hard moral choices.

The New York Times Book Review

A major work Simmons doesnt just promise; he delivers.

Science Fiction Chronicle

Almost a sure bet to bring home a Hugo and a Nebula.

Rocky Mountain News

Thought-provoking, moving and unrelenting in its desire to entertain. Like the readers of Dickens in his day, I hungrily await the next installment from this modern master of narrative.

Des Moines Sunday Register

Simmons own genius transforms space opera into a new kind of poetry.

The Denver Post

The novel proves a worthy follow-up to Hyperion.

San Francisco Chronicle

BOOKS BY DAN SIMMONS

Song of Kali
Carrion Comfort
* Hyperion
* The Fall of Hyperion
Entropys Bed at Midnight
Summer of Night
* The Hollow Man
Children of the Night
Summer Sketches
Fires of Eden
* Endymion
* The Rise of Endymion

* Available from Bantam Books

ENDYMION

A Bantam Spectra Book

SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed s are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1995 by Dan Simmons.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-33191.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78191-8

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

v3.1

We must not forget that the human soul,
however independently created
our philosophy represents it as being,
is inseparable
in its birth and in its growth
from the universe into which it is born.

T EILHARD DE C HARDIN

Give us gods. Oh give them us!
Give us gods.
We are so tired of men
and motor-power.

D. H. L AWRENCE

Y ou are reading this for the wrong reason.

If you are reading this to learn what it was like to make love to a messiahour messiahthen you should not read on, because you are little more than a voyeur.

If you are reading this because you are a fan of the old poets Cantos and are obsessed with curiosity about what happened next in the lives of the Hyperion pilgrims, you will be disappointed. I do not know what happened to most of them. They lived and died almost three centuries before I was born.

If you are reading this because you seek more insight into the message from the One Who Teaches, you may also be disappointed. I confess that I was more interested in her as a woman than as a teacher or messiah.

Finally, if you are reading this to discover her fate or even my fate, you are reading the wrong document. Although both our fates seem as certain as anyones could be, I was not with her when hers was played out, and my own awaits the final act even as I write these words.

If you are reading this at all, I would be amazed. But this would not be the first time that events have amazed me. The past few years have been one improbability after another, each more marvelous and seemingly inevitable than the last. To share these memories is the reason that I am writing. Perhaps the motivation is not even to shareknowing that the document I am creating almost certainly will never be foundbut just to put down the series of events so that I can structure them in my own mind.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say? wrote some pre-Hegira writer. Precisely. I must see these things in order to know what to think of them. I must see the events turned to ink and the emotions in print to believe that they actually occurred and touched me.

If you are reading this for the same reason that I am writing itto bring some pattern out of the chaos of the last years, to impose some order on the essentially random series of events that have ruled our lives for the past standard decadesthen you may be reading this for the right reason, after all.

WHERE TO START? WITH A DEATH SENTENCE, PERHAPS. But whosemy death sentence or hers? And if mine, which of mine? There are several from which to choose. Perhaps this final one is appropriate. Begin at the ending.

I am writing this in a Schrdinger cat box in high orbit around the quarantined world of Armaghast. The cat box is not much of a box, more of a smooth-hulled ovoid a mere six meters by three meters. It will be my entire world until the end of my life. Most of the interior of my world is a spartan cell consisting of a black-box air-and-waste recycler, my bunk, the food-synthesizer unit, a narrow counter that serves as both my dining table and writing desk, and finally the toilet, sink, and shower, which are set behind a fiberplastic partition for reasons of propriety that escape me. No one will ever visit me here. Privacy seems a hollow joke.

I have a text slate and stylus. When I finish each page, I transfer it to hard copy on microvellum produced by the recycler. The low accretion of wafer-thin pages is the only visible change in my environment from day to day.

The vial of poison gas is not visible. It is set in the static-dynamic shell of the cat box, linked to the air-filtration unit in such a way that to attempt to fiddle with it would trigger the cyanide, as would any attempt to breach the shell itself. The radiation detector, its timer, and the isotope element are also fused into the frozen energy of the shell. I never know when the random timer activates the detector. I never know when the same random timing element opens the lead shielding to the tiny isotope. I never know when the isotope yields a particle.

But I will know when the detector is activated at the instant the isotope yields a particle. There should be the scent of bitter almonds in that second or two before the gas kills me.

I hope that it will be only a second or two.

Technically, according to the ancient enigma of quantum physics, I am now neither dead nor alive. I am in the suspended state of overlapping probability waves once reserved for the cat in Schrdingers thought experiment. Because the hull of the cat box is little more than position-fused energy ready to explode at the slightest intrusion, no one will ever look inside to see if I am dead or alive. Theoretically, no one is directly responsible for my execution, since the immutable laws of quantum theory pardon or condemn me from each microsecond to the next. There are no observers.

But I am an observer. I am waiting for this particular collapse of probability waves with something more than detached interest. In the instant after the hissing of cyanide gas begins, but before it reaches my lungs and heart and brain, I will know which way the universe has chosen to sort itself out.

At least, I will know so far as I am concerned. Which, when it comes right down to it, is the only aspect of the universes resolution with which most of us are concerned.