Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos < TOP >

I was an Ouster. Not the swarm-creatures of Hegemony propaganda, all claws and chitin, but a child of the void decades: webbed fingers, lungs adapted to argon-methane mix, eyes that saw ultraviolet. I had come to Hyperion not to die, but to understand. The Hegemony believed the Time Tombs were a weapon. The Ouster Clergy believed they were a god.

The Consul knew. That is why he smiled. That is why he did nothing.

I had read Martin Silenus’s Dying Earth cycle. The Hegemony considered it decadent filth. The Ousters considered it prophecy. Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos

The Last Transmission of the Ouster Diplomat

Ouster, it said. Not with sound. With the shape of pain yet to come. I was an Ouster

That night, I left him and walked into the Valley of the Time Tombs alone. The anti-entropic fields made my skin crawl. My internal chronometer—never wrong in forty years—began to stutter. Past and future bled like wet paint.

I wrote the word that killed the first AI, he sent. And the Shrike made me rewrite it. Every day. For three centuries. The Hegemony believed the Time Tombs were a weapon

I found the Shrike’s tree first. It was not a tree at all, but a labyrinth of razorwire and chrome thorns, each branch ending in a hook. Impaled upon the lowest branch was a figure—human, male, still breathing. His eyes had been replaced with crystal lenses. His mouth was stitched shut with fiber-optic thread.