Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos -

“And you?” I asked. “What is your story?”

I had read Martin Silenus’s Dying Earth cycle. The Hegemony considered it decadent filth. The Ousters considered it prophecy. Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos

Step through, it said, and you will see the war’s true cause. Not the Hegemony. Not the Ousters. Not even the AIs. “And you

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. The Ousters considered it prophecy

The enemy is not out there. The enemy is the need for an enemy.

I was an Ouster. Not the swarm-creatures of Hegemony propaganda, all claws and chitin, but a child of the void decades: webbed fingers, lungs adapted to argon-methane mix, eyes that saw ultraviolet. I had come to Hyperion not to die, but to understand. The Hegemony believed the Time Tombs were a weapon. The Ouster Clergy believed they were a god.

The Tombs had not yet opened when I arrived on Hyperion. That is what the Hegemony Consul told me, his voice flat as a creased farcaster ticket. He was old—not with the dignified age of a poet, but the weary decay of a man who had outlived his own lies.