The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle Read Online Free PDF Page B

either end of the voyage, and a time-debt which would return him to Pacem eight years behindhis former classmates in the quest for Vatican careers and missionary postings.
    Bound by obedience and schooled in discipline, Lenar Hoyt accepted without question.
    Their transport, the aging spinship
HS Nadia Oleg
, was a pockmarked metal tub with no artificial gravity of any sort when it was not under drive, no viewports for the passengers, and no on-board recreation except for the stimsims piped into the datalink to keep passengers in their hammocks and fugue couches. After awakening from fugue, the passengers—mostly offworld workers and economy-rate tourists with a few cult mystics and would-be Shrike suicides thrown in for good measure—slept in those same hammocks and fugue couches, ate recycled food in featureless mess decks, and generally tried to cope with spacesickness and boredom during their twelve-day, zero-g glide from their spinout point to Hyperion.
    Father Hoyt learned little from Father Duré during those days of forced intimacy, nothing at all about the events on Armaghast which had sent the senior priest into exile. The younger man had keyed his comlog implant to seek out as much data as it could on Hyperion and, by the time they were three days out from planetfall, Father Loyt considered himself somewhat of an expert on the world.
    “There are records of Catholics coming to Hyperion but no mention of a diocese there,” said Hoyt one evening as they hung talking in their zero-g hammocks while most of their fellow passengers lay tuned into erotic stimsims. “I presume you’re going down to do some mission work?”
    “Not at all,” replied Father Duré. “The good people of Hyperion have done nothing to foist their religious opinions on me, so I see no reason to offend them with my proselytizing. Actually, I hope to travel to the southern continent—Aquila—and then find a way inland from the city of Port Romance. But not in the guise of a missionary. I plan to set up an ethnological research station along the Cleft.”
    “Research?” Father Hoyt had echoed in surprise. He closed his eyes to key his implant. Looking again at Father Duré, he said, “That section of the Pinion Plateau isn’t inhabited, Father. The flame forests make it totally inaccessible most of the year.”
    Father Duré smiled and nodded. He carried no implant and his ancient comlog had been in his luggage for the duration of the trip. “Not quite inaccessible,” he said softly. “And not quite uninhabited. The Bikura live there.”
    “Bikura,” Father Hoyt said and closed his eyes. “But they’re just a legend,” he said at last.
    “Hmmm,” said Father Duré. “Try cross-indexing through Mamet Spedling.”
    Father Hoyt closed his eyes again. General Index told him that Mamet Spedling had been a minor explorer affiliated with the Shackleton Institute on Renaissance Minor who, almost a standard century and a half earlier, had filed a short report with the Institute in which he told of hacking his way inland from the then newly settled Port Romance, through swamplands which had since been reclaimed for fiberplastic plantations, passing through the flame forests during a period of rare quietude, and climbing high enough on the Pinion Plateau to encounter the Cleft and a small tribe of humans who fit the profile of the legendary Bikura.
    Spedling’s brief notes hypothesized that the humans were survivors of a missing seedship colony from three centuries earlier and clearly described a group suffering all of the classic retrograde cultural effects of extreme isolation, inbreeding, and overadaptation. In Spedling’s blunt words, “… even after less than two days here it is obvious that the Bikura are too stupid, lethargic, and dull to waste time describing.” As it turned out, the flame forests then began to show some signs of becoming active and Spedling had
not
wasted any more time observing his discovery but had