The Benares barge arrives at the port city of Naiad to find a charred ruin where there had once been a thriving city of 20,000. The Consul believes the SDF (Self-Defense Force) caused the damage, probably in fighting against the Shrike. He has been drinking all day, as has Martin Silenus, to distance himself from painful memories. Silenus tells his tale.

Martin Silenus arrived on Hyperion two centuries previously with Sad King Billy and many other artists who were part of the Windsor-in-Exile artistic colony on Asquith (Windsor-in-Exile being the official Hyperion government). At that time, the planet had already been “seeded” with the descendants of people who arrived two centuries earlier and had “gone indigenie.” Sad King Billy and the cohort of artists suppressed these existing occupants and forced them to work alongside their androids to build the City of Poets.

Silenus restarts his tale with the story of his origins and how he came to Hyperion. He was born on Old Earth to a wealthy family that stayed behind when most of the planet fled during the Hegira. As the cataclysms on Old Earth worsened, his mother put him on a slower-than-light ship bound for the planet Heaven’s Gate, hoping that when he awakened from cryogenic fugue 167 years later, the money in an off-world bank would have accrued enough interest to pay off the family’s debts and allow Martin to live well.