Hyperion 4 - Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307781925
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-11T18:30:00+00:00

19

he Dalai Lama is only eight standard years old. I had known that—Aenea and A. Bettik and Theo and Rachel have all mentioned it more than once—but I am still surprised when I see the child sitting on his high, cushioned throne.

There must be three or four thousand people in the immense reception room. Several broad escalators disgorge guests simultaneously into an antechamber the size of a spacecraft hangar—gold pillars rising to a frescoed ceiling twenty meters above us, blue-and-white tiles underfoot with elaborate, inset images from the Bardo Thodrol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as illustrations of the vast seedship migration of the Buddhist Old Earth emigres, huge gold arches under which we pass to enter the reception room—and the reception room is larger still, its ceiling one giant skylight through which the broiling clouds and flickering lightning and lantern-lit mountainside are quite visible. The three or four thousand guests are brilliant in their finery—flowing silk, sculpted linen, draped and dyed wool, profusions of red-black-and-white feathers, elaborate hairdos, subtle but beautifully formed bracelets, necklaces, anklets, earrings, tiaras, and belts of silver, amethyst, gold, jade, lapis lazuli; and a score of other precious metals. And scattered among all this elegance and finery are scores of monks and abbots in their simple robes of orange, gold, yellow, saffron, and red, their closely shaved heads gleaming in the light from a hundred flickering tripod braziers. Yet the room is so large that these few thousand people do not come close to filling it up—the parquet floors gleam in the firelight and there is a twenty-meter space between the first fringes of the crowd and the golden throne.

Small horns blow as the lines of guests step from the escalator staircases to the anteroom tiles. The trumpets are of brass and bone and the line of monks blowing them runs from the stairs to the entrance arches—more than sixty meters of constant noise. The hundreds of horns hold one note for minutes on end and then shift to another low note without signal from trumpeter to trumpeter and as we enter the Main Reception Hall—the antechamber acting as a giant echo chamber behind us—these low notes are taken up and amplified by twenty four-meter-long horns on either side of our procession. The monks who blow these monstrous instruments stand in small alcoves in the walls, resting the giant horns on stands set on the parquet floors, the bell-horn ends curling up like meter-wide lotus blossoms. Added to this constant, low series of notes—rather like an ocean-going ship’s foghorn wrapped within a glacier’s rumble—are the reverberations of a huge gong, at least five meters across, being struck at precise intervals. The air smells of incense from the braziers and the slightest veil of fragrant smoke moves above the jeweled and coiffed heads of the guests and seems to shimmer and shift with the rise and fall of the notes from the trumpets and horns and gong.

All faces are turned toward the Dalai Lama, his immediate retinue, and his guests.

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