Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos File

The Shrike’s hand is on my shoulder now. The blades are warm.

The Hegemony believed the Shrike was a weapon left by the TechnoCore. The Ousters believed it was the final evolution of the human soul. Both were fragments of a larger lie.

Transmission ends.

“I am an envoy,” I said, my voice steady only because my lungs had been bred for vacuum. “My people wish to know: are you a god, or a machine?” Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos

“What, then?” I whispered.

Tell the Ouster Clergy: the Tombs are not a god. They are a theater . Tell the Hegemony: the war is not a strategy. It is a compulsion . And tell the poets: the one perfect verse already exists. It is this:

He smiled. It was a terrible expression. “I am the one who could have stopped it. I chose not to.” The Shrike’s hand is on my shoulder now

I wrote the word that killed the first AI, he sent. And the Shrike made me rewrite it. Every day. For three centuries.

“You’ll hear them singing,” he said, pouring a glass of genuine Château Chiavari. “The Shrike’s tree. The steel thorns. Don’t go into the Valley at night.”

The enemy is not out there. The enemy is the need for an enemy. The Ousters believed it was the final evolution

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.

Yes.

I understand at last. The Consul did not betray us. He simply finished reading the story—and refused to turn the page.

I had read Martin Silenus’s Dying Earth cycle. The Hegemony considered it decadent filth. The Ousters considered it prophecy.