Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (1989)

Edouard, I feel very alone tonight. It would help if I knew you were alive, still working in the garden, writing evenings in your study.

Tonight the heavens are especially fertile and when we move onto wide sections of the river we can see a tracery of brilliant meteor trails weaving the stars together.

I sit and listen to the last notes from the canyon wind die, watch the skies simultaneously darken and blaze, smile at the sound of Tuk's snoring, from his bedroll, and I think to myself. If this is exile, so be it.

It must go into the darkness not willingly but well – bravely and firm of faith – like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into the darkness, if not hopefully, then prayerfully that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices.

My hope of seeing you again shall not be placed on this life but on the one to come.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

My early poetry was execrable. As with most bad poets, I was unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave some worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning.

On Heaven's Gate, I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

I explored religions and serious drinking, finding more hope of lasting solace in the latter.

I retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos. It was not about the planet but about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans. It was about the unthinking hubris of a race which dared to murder its homeworld through sheer carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to the stars, only to meet the wrath of a god which humanity had helped to sire.

For Sol it was love at first sight. He stared at the laughing, red-cheeked girl and ignored the expensive dress and affected mandarin nails in favor of the personality which blazed like a beacon to the lonely junior. Sol had not known he was lonely until he met Sarai, but after the first time he shook her hand and spilled fruit salad down the front of her dress he knew that his life would be empty forever if they did not marry.

Sarai had never had an easy time of surrendering the past. Every time she cleaned and folded and put away a set of Rachel's outgrown baby clothes, she had shed secret tears that Sol somehow knew about. Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel's childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unselfconscious flow of little things – the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

The sun seemed to dry up everything, thought Sol, even worries and bad dreams.

There's an old stereotype that says Lusians are as subtle as a stomach pump and about half as pleasant.

The day is perfect and I hate it for being so.

Siri was almost sixteen. I was nineteen. But Siri knew the slow pace of books and cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars.

For years I have carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk. An emptiness begins to grow inside me.

'Merin, I am pregnant. I'm so glad. You've been gone five weeks now and I miss you. Ten years you'll be gone. More than that. Merin, why didn't you think to invite me to go with you? I could not have gone but I would have loved it if you had just invited me. But I'm pregnant, Merin. The doctors say that it will be a boy. I will tell him about you, my love. Perhaps someday you and he will sail in the Archipelago and listen to the songs of the Sea Folk as you and I have done these past few weeks. Perhaps you'll understand them by then. Merin, I miss you. Please hurry back.'

Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.

My father was as weak as my grandmother had been strong.

For you see, I remember my grandmother's dream. I remember the way it could have been.

I remember Siri.