Hyperion (Simmons Novel) - Plot Summary - Part Six, The Consul's Tale: "Remembering Siri"

Part Six, The Consul's Tale: "Remembering Siri"

Like Father Hoyt, the Consul tells another tale before his own. This is entitled "Remembering Siri", and is a largely unmodified version of the short story of the same name in Prayers to Broken Stones (where Simmons mentions that this story provided the seed around which the Hyperion universe was created).

The Consul's grandparents had been Merin Aspic (of Lusus) and Siri (of the lush ocean-planet Maui-Covenant). Aspic had signed a long-term contract to engage in several voyages aboard a spinship (with all the years lost to relativistic time dilation that that implies), which would make multiple trips to Maui-Covenant to build a farcaster portal, thereby connecting Maui-Covenant to the waiting voracious hordes of Hegemony tourists. Eventually he falls in love with the beautiful girl named Siri. However, his best friend is killed by a Covenanter who disagrees violently with Maui-Covenant joining the WorldWeb (the events parallel those of Romeo and Juliet).

Siri and Merin meet six more times, but each time Merin – due to the relativistic time delation of his journeys – is only a little older, while Siri ages at the usual rate, a difference which grows ever more pronounced until the eighth visit (Seventh Reunion), in which Merin returns to find Siri dead of old age, and the farcaster about to be activated. The flood of Hegemony visitors and the induction of Maui-Covenant fully into the WorldWeb would, as prophesied, utterly ruin the ecology and all the dolphin, human, and motile isle settlers hold dear. Faced with this bleak reality, Merin chooses to sabotage the farcaster, beginning "Siri's War", a hopeless resistance against the Hegemony.

In crushing the rebellion, the military destroys the ecology as thoroughly as the tourists would have, but far more violently: all the dolphins die, as do a large proportion of the original Maui-Covenant colonists. The latter Consul was forbidden by Merin to join in the fighting, and so he survived to thrive with distinction in the Hegemony diplomatic corps. There he aids the Hegemony in destroying whatever resistance the Hegemony encounters. He bides his time, waiting for a chance to betray the Hegemony and achieve revenge.

When he is sent as an agent to the Ousters he becomes their agent, but betrays them too when he prematurely activates mysterious Ouster devices intended to release the Shrike from the Time Tombs when it would have a chance to enter the WorldWeb. He knows of the many deaths this action will cause and was driven to this by the Ouster's irrefutable evidence that the Big Mistake that destroyed Earth was deliberately planned by elements of the TechnoCore and the Hegemony, and that the Hegemony was deliberately killing off any species which might become a rival to man in order to maintain its place, and that the 'Core feared Ousters who were out of their control, and sought to use the Hyperion system as bait in order to eliminate them.