Dan Simmons: The Abominable: A Novel

I’m not a religious man, but I’d brought a bottle of the Macallan twenty-five-year-old single-malt Scotch and two small glasses that day. I filled both glasses, left one on the small headstone that said only JACOB WILLIAM PERRY April 2, 1902–May 28, 1992, and lifted the other.

Long ago, just for the hell of it, I’d memorized the English translation of some of Virgil’s lines from his Eclogues. Now, holding my Scotch glass high toward the San Juan Mountain peaks catching the last slanting rays of the fall day’s sunlight beyond little Ridgway, I recited some of those lines as best I could remember them—

“As long as rivers shall run down to the sea, or shadows touch the mountain slopes, or stars gaze in the vault of heaven, so long shall your honor, your name, your praise endure.”

And I drank my fine whisky in one swallow, left the bottle and the other glass on the headstone, turned my car north and east, and drove back out and away from the snow-topped high peaks toward home.

THE END

Colorado

May 2011–September 2012

About the Author

Dan Simmons is the award-winning author of several best-selling novels, including Olympos, The Terror, Drood, and Black Hills. He lives along the Front Range of Colorado and sometimes at Windwalker near Longs Peak on the Continental Divide.

dansimmons.com

Books by Dan Simmons

The Abominable

Darwin’s Blade

The Crook Factory

Flashback

Black Hills

Drood

The Terror

Olympos

Hard as Nails

Ilium

Worlds Enough & Time

Hard Freeze

Hardcase

A Winter Haunting

The Rise of Endymion

Endymion

Fires of Eden

Lovedeath

Summer Sketches

Children of the Night

The Hollow Man

Summer of Night

Prayers to Broken Stones

The Fall of Hyperion

Hyperion

Carrion Comfort

Phases of Gravity

Song of Kali

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2013 by Dan Simmons

Author photograph by Karen Simmons

Cover design by Allison J. Warner

Cover photograph © Karl Maret/Corbis

Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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First ebook edition: October 2013

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ISBN 978-0-316-19885-1

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.