The fourth pilgrim, the Hegemony Consul, takes an ancient spacecraft whose AI is inhabited with the essence of the dead John Keats cybrid and returns to explore the ruins of the Hegemony. The fifth pilgrim, a priest, dies and is reborn through the cruciform as the Jesuit whose tale he toldnow the pope of a reborn Catholic Church. The final living pilgrimthe seven-hundred-year-old poet, Martin Silenus, who has been telling all this taleremains as obscene and crotchety as ever.
Endymion opens 274 years after the Fall of the Farcasters. Things have gone to hellwhich is usually the case in so-called Dark Ages between empiresbut the Pax, the civil-military arm of the reinvigorated Catholic Church, now extends its dominion to most of the former worlds of the Hegemony. The Churchand the Paxcontrol its citizens through its monopoly of resurrection. Unknown to most, the Church has entered into a Faustian bargain with the now-hidden TechnoCore and utilizes the cruciform symbiotes to bring its followers back to life and into obedience. Suddenly, an eleven-year-old messiah-to-be named Aenea appears on the scene. Aenea is Brawne Lamias daughter, and she has fled across almost three centuries through the Time Tombs only to find the Pax authorities searching for her, and with both the Church and the Core acting on an absolute need to destroy her. The still alive, still obscene, still cranky poet, Martin Silenus, assigns a young soldier and escaped murdererRaul Endymionto rescue the girl and to transport her wherever she wants to go on the now-dead Consuls returned ship. Most of Endymion is a massive chase across human space with the Pax in close pursuit, as Raul, Aenea, and the blue android A. Bettik run for their lives and perhaps the future of humanity. Created by the Core, unleashed by the Church, is a female monstrosity named Rhadamanth Nemes who makes the killing-creature Shrike look like a Sunday-school teacher. At the end of Endymion, Raul, Aenea, and a wounded A. Bettik make it to Old Earthnot destroyed after all, just transported to the Lesser Magellanic Clouds by aliens known only as the Lions and Tigers and Bears. Our trio settles in at Frank Lloyd Wrights Taliesin West while young Aenea trains to be an architect.
The Rise of Endymion picks up four years after the events of Endymion. Aenea, now sixteen, knows that she must return to Pax-dominated space to cany out her role as The One Who Teaches. Raul, her protector and friend, has no wish to go. The idea of martyrdomespecially his beloved Aeneas martyrdomappalls him. Aenea sends Raul ahead by farcaster, but actually his few weeks of traveling allow Aenea to age five years, thanks to the miracle of time dilation and time-debt during Rauls interstellar travels in the old Consuls ship. When they meet again, Aenea is a woman and well along in her role of The One Who Teaches. The Pax is still after her. The Church still needs her dead. The creature Nemes has now been joined by three equally impossibly powerful and destructive siblings. And amidst all this, on the mountaintop-and-cloud world of T'ien Shan, Aenea and Raul become lovers. This makes Raul, our narrator through the two books, even less happy at the thought of his beloveds becoming the messiah so many have predicted. Raul is not the smartest character in these books, but he is absolutely loyal, absolutely in love, and he is smart enough to know the fate of most messiahs.
The Rise of Endymion ends with tragedy, torture, death, and separation, followednot miraculously but inevitablyby great enlightenment and the reunion of Raul and Aenea. The Pax has murdered herthus unwittingly bringing about their own downfall through Aeneas Shared Moment, wherein every human being on every world glimpses the truth behind the Pax, the Church, the cruciform, and the parasitic TechnoCorebut during her absent five years while Raul was traveling, she had come ahead in time with the help of the Shrike to spend one year, eleven months, one week, and six hours with Raul on Old Earth. Earth has been emptied, cleansed, renewed, and returned to its proper place in the solar system by the Lions and Tigers and Bears.
Martin Silenus, the poet and constant character through all the books, dies shortly after Raul and Aenea are wed. Some of the poets final words were to the Consuls ship, which has also come through a thousand years and four fat books"See you in hell, Ship.
As The Rise of Endymion ends, the still-mysterious Shrike stands vigil over Martin Silenuss grave on Old Earth;
thanks to Aeneas sacrifice, humanity has been freed to learn the language of the dead by tapping into the empathic fabric underlying the universeand also by now being able to freecast, that is, personally teleport anywhere; and Raul and Aenea fly off on their ancient hawking mat to celebrate their honeymoon on the empty, virginal Old Earth our new playground, our ancient world our new world our first and future and finest world.
Dan Simmons