The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (30 page)

In the ten standard months Helenda and I are together we spend little time in our home, preferring instead to move with friends among the resorts and vacation arcologies and night spots of the Worldweb. Our “friends” are the former farcaster set, now calling themselves the Caribou Herd after an extinct, Old Earth migratory mammal. This herd consists of other writers, a few successful visual artists, Concourse intellectuals, All Thing media representatives, a few radical ARNists and cosmetic gene splicers, Web aristocrats, wealthy farcaster freaks and Flashback addicts, a few holie and stage directors, a scattering of actors and performance artists, several Mafia dons gone straight, and a revolving list of recent celebrities … myself included.

Everyone drinks, uses stims and autoimplants, takes the wire, and can afford the best drugs. The drug of choice is Flashback. It is definitely an upper-class vice: one needs the full range of expensive implants to fully experience it. Helenda has seen to it that I have been so fitted: biomonitors, sensory extenders, and internal comlog, neural shunts, kickers, metacortex processors, blood chips, RNA tapeworms … my mother wouldn’t have recognized my insides.

I try Flashback twice. The first time is a glide—I target my ninth birthday party and hit it with the first salvo. It is all there: the servants singing on the north lawn at daybreak, don Balthazar grudgingly canceling classes so I can spend the day with Amalfi in my EMV, streaking across the gray dunes of the Amazon Basin in gay abandon; the torchlight procession that evening as representatives of the other Old Families arrive at dusk, their brightly wrapped presents gleaming
under the moon and the Ten Thousand Lights. I rise from nine hours in Flashback with a smile on my face. The second trip almost kills me.

I am four and crying, seeking my mother through endless rooms smelling of dust and old furniture. Android servants seek to console me but I shake off their hands, running down hallways soiled with shadows and the soot of too many generations. Breaking the first rule I ever learned, I throw open the doors to Mother’s sewing room, her sanctum sanctorum to which she retires for three hours every afternoon and from which she emerges with her soft smile, the hem of her pale dress whispering across the carpet like the echo of a ghost’s sigh.

Mother is sitting there in the shadows. I am four and my finger has been hurt and I rush to her, throwing myself into her arms.

She does not respond. One of her elegant arms remains reclined along the back of the chaise longue, the other remains limp on the cushion.

I pull back, shocked by her cool plasticity. I tug open the heavy velvet drapes without rising from her lap.

Mother’s eyes are white, rolled back in her head. Her lips are slightly open. Drool moistens the corners of her mouth and glints on her perfect chin. From the gold threads of her hair—done up in the Grande Dame style she favors—I see the cold steel gleam of the stim wire and the duller sheen of the skull socket she has plugged it into. The patch of bone on either side is very white. On the table near her left hand lies the empty Flashback syringe.

The servants arrive and pull me away. Mother never blinks. I am pulled screaming from the room.

I wake screaming.

   Perhaps it was my refusal to use Flashback again which hastened Helenda’s departure, but I doubt it. I was a toy to her—a primitive who amused her by my innocence about a life she had taken for granted for many decades. Whatever the case, my refusal to Flashback left me with many days without her; the time spent in replay
is real time and Flashback users often die having spent more days of their lives under the drug than they ever experienced conscious.

At first I entertained myself with the implants and technotoys which had been denied to me as a member of an Old Earth Family. The datasphere was a construct delight that first year—I called up information almost constantly, living in a frenzy of full interface. I was as addicted to raw data as the Caribou Herd were to their stims and drugs. I could imagine don Balthazar spinning in his molten grave as I gave up long-term memory for the transient satisfaction of implant omniscience. It was only later that I felt the loss—Fitzgerald’s
Odyssey
, Wu’s
Final March
, and a score of other epics which had survived my stroke now were shredded like cloud fragments in a high wind. Much later, freed of implants, I painstakingly learned them all again.

For the first and only time in my life I became political. Days and nights would pass with me monitoring the Senate on farcaster cable or lying tapped into the All Thing. Someone once estimated that the All Thing deals with about a hundred active pieces of Hegemony legislation per day, and during my months spent screwed into the sensorium I missed none of them. My voice and name became well known on the debate channels. No bill was too small, no issue too simple or too complex for my input. The simple act of voting every few minutes gave me a false sense of having
accomplished
something. I finally gave up the political obsession only after I realized that accessing the All Thing regularly meant either staying home or turning into a walking zombie. A person constantly busy accessing on his implants makes a pitiful sight in public and it didn’t take Helenda’s derision to make me realize that if I stayed home I would turn into an All Thing sponge like so many millions of other slugs around the Web. So I gave up politics. But by then I had found a new passion: religion.

I joined religions. Hell, I helped
create
religions. The Zen Gnostic Church was expanding exponentially and I became a true believer, appearing on HTV talk shows and searching for my Places of Power with all of the devoutness of a pre-Hegira Muslim pilgrimaging to Mecca. Besides, I loved farcasting. I had earned almost a hundred
million marks from royalties for
The Dying Earth
, and Helenda had invested well, but someone once figured that a farcaster home such as mine cost more than fifty thousand marks a day just to keep in the Web and I did not limit my farcasting to the thirty-six worlds of my home. Transline Publishing had qualified me for a gold universal card and I used it liberally, farcasting to unlikely corners of the Web and then spending weeks staying in luxury accommodations and leasing EMVs to find my Places of Power in remote areas of backwater worlds.

I found none. I renounced Zen Gnosticism about the same time Helenda divorced me. By that time the bills were piling up and I had to liquidate most of the stocks and long-term investments remaining to me after Helenda had taken her share. (I was not only naive and in love when she had had her attorneys draw up the marriage contract … I was stupid.)

Eventually, even with such economies as cutting down my farcasting and dismissing the android servants, I was facing financial disaster.

I went to see Tyrena Wingreen-Feif.

   “No one wants to read poetry,” she said, leafing through the thin stack of
Cantos
I had written in the past year and a half.

“What do you mean?” I said.
“The Dying Earth
was poetry.”

“
The Dying Earth
was a fluke,” said Tyrena. Her nails were long and green and curved in the latest mandarin fashion; they curled around my manuscript like the claws of some chlorophyll beast. “It sold because the mass subconscious was ready for it.”

“Maybe the mass subconscious is ready for this,” I said. I was beginning to get angry.

Tyrena laughed. It was not an altogether pleasant sound. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said. “This is
poetry
. You’re writing about Heaven’s Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what comes across is loneliness, displacement, angst, and a cynical look at humanity.”

“So?”

“So no one wants to
pay
for a look at another person’s angst,” laughed Tyrena.

I turned away from her desk and walked to the far side of the room. Her office took up the entire four hundred and thirty-fifth floor of the Transline Spire in the Babel section of Tau Ceti Center. There were no windows; the circular room was open from floor to ceiling, shielded by a solar-generated containment field which showed no shimmer whatsoever. It was like standing between two gray plates suspended halfway between the sky and earth. I watched crimson clouds move between the lesser spires half a kilometer below and I thought about hubris. Tyrena’s office had no doorways, stairways, elevators, field lifts, or trapdoors: no connection to the other levels at all. One entered Tyrena’s office through the five-faceted farcaster which shimmered in midair like an abstract holosculpture. I found myself thinking about tower fires and power failures as well as hubris. I said, “Are you saying that you won’t publish it?”

“Not at all,” smiled my editor. “You’ve earned Transline several billion marks, Martin. We will publish it. All I am saying is that no one will buy it.”

“You’re wrong!” I shouted. “Not everyone recognizes fine poetry, but there are still enough people who read to make it a bestseller.”

Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was
before
the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments. By the Hegira, ninety-eight percent of the Hegemony’s population had no reason to read anything. So they didn’t bother learning how to. It’s worse today. There are more than a hundred billion human beings in the Worldweb and less than one percent of them bothers to hardfax any printed material, much less
read
a
book.
”

“
The Dying Earth
sold almost three billion copies,” I reminded her.

“Mm-hmm,” said Tyrena. “It was the Pilgrim’s Progress Effect.”

“The what?”

“Pilgrim’s Progress Effect. In the Massachusetts Colony of … what was it!—seventeenth-century Old Earth, every decent family
had to have a copy in the household. But, my heavens, no one had to
read
it. It was the same with Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
or Stukatsky’s
Visions in the Eye of a Decapitated Child.
”

“Who was Hitler?” I said.

Tyrena smiled slightly. “An Old Earth politician who did some writing.
Mein Kampf
is still in print … Transline renews the copyright every hundred and thirty-eight years.”

“Well, look,” I said, “I’m going to take a few weeks to polish up the
Cantos
and give it my best shot.”

“Fine,” smiled Tyrena.

“I suppose you’ll want to edit it the way you did last time?”

“Not at all,” said Tyrena. “Since there’s no core of nostalgia this time, you might as well write it the way you want.”

I blinked. “You mean I can keep in the blank verse this time?”

“Of course.”

“And the philosophy?”

“Please do.”

“And the experimental sections?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll print it the way I write it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Is there a
chance
it’ll sell?”

“Not a hope in hell.”

   My “few weeks to polish up the
Cantos
” turned into ten months of obsessive labor. I shut off most of the rooms in the house, keeping only the tower room on Deneb Drei, the exercise room on Lusus, the kitchen, and the bathroom raft on Mare Infinitus. I worked a straight ten hours a day, took a break for some vigorous exercise followed by a meal and a nap, and then returned to my writing table for another eight-hour stint. It was similar to the time five years before when I was recovering from my stroke and it sometimes took an hour or a day for a word to come to me, for a concept to sink its roots into the firm soil of language. Now it was an even slower process as I agonized over the perfect word, the precise rhyme
scheme, the most playful image, and the most ineffable analog to the most elusive emotion.

After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

“What do you think?” I asked Tyrena as she read through the first copy.

Her eyes were blank, bronze disks in that week’s fashion, but this did not hide the fact that there were tears there. She brushed one away. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

“I tried to rediscover the voice of some of the Ancients,” I said, suddenly shy.

“You succeeded brilliantly.”

“The Heaven’s Gate Interlude is still rough,” I said.

“It’s perfect.”

“It’s about loneliness,” I said.

“It is loneliness.”

“Do you think it’s ready?” I asked.

“It’s perfect … a masterpiece.”

“Do you think it’ll sell?” I asked.

“No fucking way.”

   They planned an initial run of seventy million hardfax copies of
Cantos
. Transline ran ads throughout the datasphere, placed HTV commercials, transmitted software inserts, successfully solicited blurbs from best-selling authors, made sure it was reviewed in the
New New York Times Book Section
and the
TC
²
Review
, and generally spent a fortune on advertising.

The
Cantos
sold twenty-three thousand hardfax copies during the first year it was in print. At ten percent royalties of the 12MK cover price, I had earned back 13,800MK of my 2,000,000MK advance from Transline. The second year saw a sale of 638 hardfax copies; there were no datasphere rights sold, no holie options, and no book tours.

What the
Cantos
lacked in sales it made up for in negative reviews:
“Indecipherable … archaic … irrelevant to all current concerns,” said the
Times Book Section
. “M. Silenus has committed the ultimate act of noncommunication,” wrote Urban Kapry in the
TC
²
Review
, “by indulging himself in an orgy of pretentious obfuscation.” Marmon Hamlit on “AllNet Now!” issued the final deathblow: “Oh, the poetry thing from Whathisname—couldn’t read it. Didn’t try.”