Nearly three centuries after the Fall, the farcasters are dead and a resurgent Church called the Pax rules human space, offering the faithful literal resurrection. On backwater Hyperion, Raul Endymion, a young hunting guide facing execution, receives a stranger sentence: protect Aenea, a girl about to step out of the Time Tombs from a past age, and carry her across the old web of worlds. An android named A. Bettik and a very familiar starship come along; Father Captain de Soya, decent and relentless, hunts them from world to world. Simmons trades the Cantos' epic frame for a river-borne chase and a slow-growing bond.