Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons [Simmons, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-78188-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

THE SCHOLAR’S TALE:

THE RIVER LETHE’S TASTE IS BITTER

Sol Weintraub and his wife Sarai had enjoyed their life even before the birth of their daughter; Rachel made things as close to perfect as the couple could imagine.

Sarai was twenty-seven when the child was conceived, Sol was twenty-nine. Neither of them had considered Poulsen treatments because neither of them could afford it, but even without such care they looked forward to another fifty years of health.

Both had lived their entire lives on Barnard’s World, one of the oldest but least exciting members of the Hegemony. Barnard’s was in the Web, but it made little difference to Sol and Sarai since they could not afford frequent farcaster travel and had little wish to go at any rate. Sol had recently celebrated his tenth year With Nightenhelser College, where he taught history and classical studies and did his own research on ethical evolution. Nightenhelser was a small school, fewer than three thousand students, but its academic reputation was outstanding and it attracted young people from all over the Web. The primary complaint of these students was that Nightenhelser and its surrounding community of Crawford constituted an island of civilization in an ocean of corn. It was true; the college was three thousand flat kilometers away from the capital of Bussard and the terraformed land in between was given over to farming. There had been no forests to fell, no hills to deal with, and no mountains to break the flat monotony of cornfields, beanfields, cornfields, wheatfields, cornfields, rice paddies, and cornfields. The radical poet Salmud Brevy had taught briefly at Nightenhelser before the Glennon-Height Mutiny, had been fired, and upon farcasting to Renaissance Vector had told his friends that Crawford County on South Sinzer on Barnards World constituted the Eighth Circle of Desolation on the smallest pimple on the absolute ass-end of Creation.

Sol and Sarai Weintraub liked it. Crawford, a town of twenty-five thousand, might have been reconstructed from some nineteenth-century mid-American template. The streets were wide and overarched with elms and oaks. (Barnard’s had been the second extrasolar Earth colony, centuries before the Hawking drive and Hegira, and the seedships then had been huge.) Homes in Crawford reflected styles ranging from early Victorian to Canadian Revival, but they all seemed to be white and set far back on well-trimmed lawns.

The college itself was Georgian, an assemblage of red brick and white pillars surrounding the oval common. Sol’s office was on the third floor of Placher Hall, the oldest building on campus, and in the winter he could look out on bare branches which carved the common into complex geometries. Sol loved the chalk-dust and old-wood smell of the place, a smell which had not changed since he was a freshman there, and each day climbing to his office he treasured the deeply worn grooves in the steps, a legacy of twenty generations of Nightenhelser students.

Sarai had been born on a farm halfway between Bussard and Crawford and had received her PhD in music theory a year before Sol earned his doctorate.

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