The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (279 page)

Until now.

The fall was stopped. Now the kayak hung under a delta-shaped parasail, supported by a dozen nylon-10 risers that rose
from strategic positions along the upper hull. The boat and I were still descending, but in a gradual swoop now rather than a headlong fall. I looked up—the memory cloth was clear enough to see through—but the farcaster ring was too far behind me and hidden by clouds. The winds and air currents were carrying me away from the farcaster.

I suppose that I should have been grateful to my friends, the girl and the android, for somehow foreseeing this and preparing the kayak appropriately, but my first thought was an overwhelming
Goddamn you!
This was too much. Being dropped into a world of clouds and air, with no ground, was too damned much. If Aenea had known that I was being ’cast here, why didn’t she …

No ground?
I leaned over the edge of the kayak and looked below. Perhaps the plan was for me to float gently down to some unseen surface.

No. There were kilometers of empty air beneath me, and below that, the lower layers were purple and black, a darkness relieved only by fierce slashes of lightning. The pressure down there must be terrible. Which brought up another point: if this was a Jovian world—Whirl or Jupiter or one of the others—how was it that I was breathing oxygen? As far as I knew, all of the gas giants that humanity had encountered were made up of unfriendly gases—methane, ammonia, helium, carbon monoxide, phosphine, hydrogen cyanide, other nasties, with trace amounts of water. I had never heard of a gas giant with breathable oxygen-nitrogen mix, but I was breathing. The air was thinner here than on the other worlds I had traveled through, and it stank a bit of ammonia, but I was definitely breathing air. Then it must not be a gas giant. Where the hell was I?

I lifted my wrist and spoke to the comlog, “Where the hell am I?”

There was a hesitation and for a moment I thought the thing had been broken on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. Then it spoke in the ship’s supercilious voice, “Unknown, M. Endymion. I have some data, but it is incomplete.”

“Tell me.”

There followed a rapid-fire listing of temperatures in Kelvin, atmospheric pressure in millibars, estimated mean density in grams per centimeter cubed, probable escape velocity in kilometers per second, and perceived magnetic field in gauss, followed by a long list of atmospheric gases and element ratios.

“Escape velocity of fifty-four point two klicks per second,” I said. “That’s gas-giant territory, isn’t it?”

“Most assuredly,” said the ship’s voice. “Jovian baseline is fifty-nine point five kilometers per second.”

“But the atmosphere isn’t like a gas giant’s?” I could see the stratocumulus ahead of me building, like a nature holo run at accelerated speeds. The towering cloud must have reached ten klicks above me, its base disappearing in the purple depths below. Lightning flickered at its base. The sunlight on its far side seemed rich and low: evening light.

“The atmosphere is unlike anything in my records,” said the comlog. “Carbon monoxide, ethane, acetylene, and other hydrocarbons violating Solmev equilibrium values can be easily explained by Jovian-style molecular kinetic energy and solar radiation breaking down methane, and the presence of carbon monoxide is a standard result of methane and water vapor mixing at deep layers where the temperature exceeds twelve hundred degrees Kelvin, but the oxygen and nitrogen levels …”

“Yes?” I prompted.

“Indicate life,” said the comlog.

I turned completely around, inspecting the clouds and sky as if something were sneaking up on me. “Life on the surface?” I said.

“Doubtful,” came the flat voice. “If this world follows Jovian-Whirl norms, the pressure at the so-called surface would be under seventy million Old Earth atmospheres with a temperature of some twenty-five thousand degrees Kelvin.”

“How high are we?” I said.

“Uncertain,” said the instrument, “but with the current atmospheric pressure of point seven six Old Earth standard, on a standard Jovian world I would estimate that we were above the troposphere and tropopause, actually in the lower reaches of the stratosphere.”

“Wouldn’t it be colder that high? That’s almost outer space.”

“Not on a gas giant,” said the comlog in its insufferable professorial voice. “The greenhouse effect creates a thermal inversion layer, heating layers of the stratosphere to almost human-optimum temperatures. Although the difference of a few thousand meters may show pronounced temperature increases or drops.”

“A few thousand meters,” I said softly. “How much air is above and below us?”

“Unknown,” said the comlog again, “but extrapolation would suggest that equatorial radius from the center of this world to its upper atmosphere would be approximately seventy thousand kilometers with this oxygen-nitrogen-carbon-dioxide layer extending for some three to eight thousand kilometers approximately two thirds of the distance from the planet’s hypothetical center.”

“A three- to eight-thousand-klick layer,” I repeated stupidly. “Some fifty thousand klicks above the surface …”

“Approximately,” said the comlog, “although it should be noted that at near-core pressures, molecular hydrogen becomes a metal …”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s enough for now.” I felt like I was going to be sick over the side of the kayak.

“I should point out the anomaly that the interesting coloration in the nearby stratocumulus suggests the presence of ammonium monosulfide or polysulfides, although at apotropospheric altitudes, one would assume only the presence of ammonia cirrus clouds with true water clouds not forming until depths reach some ten standard atmospheres because of …”

“Enough,” I said.

“I only point this out because of the interesting atmospheric paradox involving …”

“Shut up,” I said.

It got cold after the sun went down. The sunset itself I shall remember until I die.

High, high above me, glimpses of what might be blue sky had darkened to a Hyperion-like deep lapis and then deepened further to dark purple. The clouds all around me grew brighter as the sky far above and the depths far below both grew darker. I say clouds, but the generic term is laughably unequal to conveying the power and grandeur of what I watched. I grew up in a nomadic-shepherd caravan on the treeless moors between Hyperion’s Great South Sea and the Pinion Plateau: I know clouds.

Far above me, feathered cirrus and rippled cirrocumulus caught the twilight in a pastel riot of soft pinks, rose glows, violet tinges, and golden backlighting. It was as if I were in a temple with a high, rosy ceiling supported by thousands of irregular columns and pillars. The columns and pillars were towering mountains of cumulus and cumulonimbus, their anvil-shaped
bases disappearing in the darkening depths hundreds or thousands of kilometers below my floating kayak, their rounded summits billowing high into the halo-tinged cirrostratus hundreds or thousands of kilometers above me. Each column of cloud caught the low, rich light passing through openings in the cloud many thousands of klicks to the west, and the light seemed to ignite the clouds as if their surfaces were made of wildly flammable material.

“Monosulfide or polysulfides,” the comlog had said: well, whatever constituted these tawny cumulus in the diffuse daylight, sunset set them afire with rust-red light, brilliant crimson streaks, bloody tractus streaming away from the main cloud masses like crimson pennants, rose-colored fibratus weaving together the cirrus ceiling like muscle strands under the flesh of a living body, billowing masses of cumulus so white that they made me blink as if snowblinded, golden, striated cirroform spilling out from the boiling cumulonimbus towers like masses of blond hair blowing back from pale, upturned faces. The light deepened, richened, became so intense that it brought tears to my eyes, and then it became even more brilliant. Great, nearly horizontal shafts of Godlight burned between the columns, illuminating some here, casting others into shadow there, passing through ice clouds and bands of vertical rain on their way, spilling hundreds of simple rainbows and a thousand multiple rainbows. Then shadows moved up from the bruise-black depths, shading more and more of the still-writhing billows of cumulus and nimbus, finally climbing into the high cirrus and pond-rippled altocumulus, but at first the shadows brought not grayness or darkness, but an infinite palette of subtleties: gleaming gold dimming to bronze, pure white becoming cream and then dimming to sepia and shade, crimson with the boldness of spilled blood slowly darkening to the rust-red of dried blood, then fading to an autumnal tawny russet. The hull of my kayak lost its glint and the parasail above me quit catching the light as this vertical terminator moved past and above me. Slowly these shadows crept higher—it must have taken at least thirty minutes, although I was too absorbed in watching to check my comlog—and when they reached the cirrus ceiling, it was as if someone had dimmed all the lights in the temple.

It was one hell of a sunset.

I remember blinking then, overwhelmed by the interplay of light and cloud shadow and the oddly disturbing kinetic restlessness of all those broiling cloud masses, ready to rest my
eyes while true darkness fell and to gather my thoughts. And that is when the lightning and aurora began playing.

There had been no aurora borealis on Hyperion—or if there had been, I had never seen it. But I had seen an example of Old Earth’s northern lights on a peninsula that had once been the Scandinavian Republic while on my round-the-world dropship tour of that planet: they had been shimmering and gooseflesh-producing, rippling and dancing along the northern horizon like the filmy gown of a ghost dancer.

This world’s aurora held none of that subtlety. Bands of light, solid striations of light—as discrete and discernible as the keys of a vertical piano—began dancing high in the sky in the direction I thought of as south. Other curtains of green, gold, red, and cobalt began shimmering against the dark world of air beneath me. These grew longer, broader, taller, stretching to meet and blend with other curtains of leaping electrons. It was as if the planet were cutting paper dolls out of shimmering light. Within minutes, every part of the sky was alive and dancing with vertical, slanted, and near-horizontal ribbons of banded color. The cloud towers became visible again, billows and pennants reflecting the strobe of thousands of these cold lights. I could almost hear the hiss and rasp of solar particles being driven along the terrifying lines of magnetic force banding this giant world.

I
could
hear them: crashes, rumbles, snappings, loud pops, long chains of cracking sounds. I swiveled in my little cockpit and leaned over the hull to look straight down. The lightning and thunder had begun.

I had seen enough lightning storms as a child on the moors. On Old Earth, Aenea, A. Bettik, and I regularly used to sit outside her shelter in the evening and watch the great electrical storms move over the mountains to the north. Nothing had prepared me for this.

The depths, as I had called them, had been little more than a dark floor so far below me as to be laughable, a broiling promise of terrible pressures and more terrible heat. But now those depths were alive with light, leaping with lightning storms that moved from one visible horizon to the rest like a chain of nuclear bombs going off. I could imagine entire hemispheres of cities being destroyed in one of those rumbling chain reactions of light. I gripped the side of the kayak and reassured myself that the storms were hundreds of klicks below me.

The lightning moved up the towers of cumulonimbus.
Flashes of internal white light vied with the shimmers of colored light from the connecting auroras. The thunder-noise was subsonic, then sonic, subtly terrifying at first, then not subtle, but even more terrifying. The kayak and its parasail bucked and rocked in sudden downdrafts and elevator-quick lifts of thermals. I gripped the sides with mad strength and wished to God that I were on any other world but this.

Then the lightning discharges began flashing from cloud tower to cloud tower.

The comlog and my own reasoning had evaluated the scale of this place—an atmosphere tens of thousands of klicks deep, a horizon so far away that I could have dropped scores of Old Earths or Hyperions between me and the sunset—but the lightning bolts finally convinced me that this was a world made for giants and gods, not for humankind.

The electrical discharges were wider than the Mississippi and longer than the Amazon. I had seen those rivers and I could see these bolts. I
knew
.

I hunkered down in my little cockpit as if that would help me when one of these bolts caught my little flying kayak. The hairs on my forearms were standing straight up and I realized that the crawling sensation I felt on my neck and scalp was precisely that—the hair on my head was writhing like a nest of snakes. The comlog was flashing overload alarms on its diskey plate. It was probably shouting at me as well, but I could not have heard a laser cannon firing ten centimeters from my ear in that maelstrom. The parasail rippled and tore at the risers as heated air and imploding vacuums battered us. At one point, riding the wake of a bolt that blinded me, the kayak swung above horizontal, higher than the parasail. I was sure that the risers were going to collapse, the kayak and I were going to fall into the parasail shroud, and we would fall for minutes—hours—until pressure and heat ended my screaming.

The kayak rocked back, then back again, then continued swinging like a maddened pendulum—but
under
the sail.

In addition to the storm of lightning beneath me, in addition to the rising chain of explosions in every tower of cumulus, in addition to the searing bolts that now laced the towers like a web of firing neurons in a brain gone berserk, bundles of ball lightning and chain lightning suddenly began breaking loose from the clouds and floating in the dark spaces where my kayak flew.

I watched one of these rippling, surging spheres of electricity
drift not a hundred meters beneath me: it was the size of a small, round asteroid—an electric moonlet. The noise it made was beyond description, but memories surged unbidden of being caught in a forest fire in the Aquila fens, of the tornado that skipped over our caravan on the moors when I was five years old, of plasma grenades detonating against the great blue glacier on the Claw Iceshelf. No combination of these memories could match the energy violence tumbling along beneath the kayak like some runaway boulder made of blue and gold light.