The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle Read Online Free PDF

fire. “Your friend has old-fashioned tastes,” he said, “if he still keeps a written journal.”
    “Yes,” said Hoyt. “If you’re all ready, I will begin.”
    The group at the table nodded. Beneath the dining platform, a kilometer of treeship drove through the cold night with the strong pulse of a living thing. Sol Weintraub lifted his sleeping child from the infant carrier and carefully set her on a cushioned mat on the floor near his chair. He removed his comlog, set it near the mat, and programmed the diskey for white noise. The week-old infant lay on her stomach and slept.
    The Consul leaned far back and found the blue and green star which was Hyperion. It seemed to grow larger even as he watched.Het Masteen drew his cowl forward until only shadows showed for his face. Sol Weintraub lighted a pipe. Others accepted refills of coffee and settled back in their chairs.
    Martin Silenus seemed the most avid and expectant of the listeners as he leaned forward and whispered:
    “He seyde, ‘Syn I shal bigynne the game
,
What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name!

Now lat us ryde, and herkneth what I seye.’

And with that word we ryden forth oure weye;

And he bigan with right a myrie cheere

His tale anon, and seyde as ye may heere
.”
    THE PRIEST’S TALE:
“THE MAN WHO CRIED GOD”
    “Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,” said Father Lenar Hoyt.
    So began the priest’s story. Later, dictating the tale into his comlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the timeless failings of human speech.
    Lenar Hoyt had been a young priest, born, raised, and only recently ordained on the Catholic world of Pacem, when he was givenhis first offworld assignment: he was ordered to escort the respected Jesuit Father Paul Duré into quiet exile on the colony world of Hyperion.
    In another time, Father Paul Duré certainly would have become a bishop and perhaps a pope. Tall, thin, ascetic, with white hair receding from a noble brow and eyes too filled with the sharp edge of experience to hide their pain, Paul Duré was a follower of St. Teilhard as well as an archaeologist, ethnologist, and eminent Jesuit theologian. Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what amounted to a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the mainstream of Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite. Nor had Father Duré lost his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church continued to be humankind’s last, best hope for immortality.
    To Lenar Hoyt as a boy, Father Duré had been a somewhat godlike figure when glimpsed during his rare visits to the preseminary schools, or on the would-be seminarian’s even rarer visits to the New Vatican. Then, during the years of Hoyt’s study in seminary, Duré had been on an important Church-sponsored archaeological dig on the nearby world of Armaghast. When the Jesuit returned, a few weeks after Hoyt’s ordination, it had been under a cloud. No one outside the highest circles of the New Vatican knew precisely what had happened, but there were whispers of excommunication and even of a hearing before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, dormant the four centuries since the confusion following the death of Earth.
    Instead, Father Duré had asked for a posting to Hyperion, a world most people knew of only because of the bizarre Shrike cult which had originated there, and Father Hoyt had been chosen to accompany him. It would be a thankless job, traveling in a role which combined the worst aspects of apprentice, escort, and spy without even the satisfaction of seeing a new world; Hoyt was under orders to see Father Duré down to the Hyperion spaceport and then reboard the same spinship for its return voyage to the Worldweb. What the bishopric was offering Lenar Hoyt was twenty months in cryogenic fugue, a few weeks of in-system travel at