The Hegemony Consul is alone on a distant planet, when he receives a message that he has been chosen to return to Hyperion. He, along with 6 others will travel there to seal the time vaults before the Ousters can take control of the Time Vaults, one of which she says is a spy.
Father Hoyt is the first to tell his story to the rest of the team after they vote that it’s a way to figure out why they were picked.
Father Hoyt was given the assignment to accompany Father Paul Duré to Hyperion, a trip that would cost him 8 years in time debt.
Father Duré plans to go to Hyperion to study the Bikura, an isolated group on Hyperion, who Duré theorized descended from the survivors of a missing seedship.
Duré’s journal details his travels to find the Bikura on the continent of Aquila. He spends time in seedy cities and traveling along in a riverboat, barely surviving an illness. After 76 days, he finally makes it to his destination, the Cleft.
On the 96th day of his journey, he finds the Bikura and tries to learn more about them, but they seem inscrutable. They never take off their clothes, their appearance makes it hard to tell male from female, they don’t have names, and refuse any medical test.
Duré continues to be baffled about the mysteries of the Bikura, where they go every night down a cliff that he has been told is off limits to him and how their population can only ever be exactly “three score and 10”, the number of people who were on the dropship that they descended from.
Duré describes his secret trip down the cliff face. He finds a temple carved into the cliff, larger and more ancient than any temple he has seen, even older than Christ himself.
Duré is suddenly arrested by the Bikula and they decide that he is to become of the cruciform.
The Bikura take Duré down the cliff again, through the basilica, and down a very long staircase, all the way to the river that is at the bottom of the Cleft. At the bottom he finds an entrance to one of the labyrinths of Hyperion.
Entering the labyrinth, and in total darkness, they have an encounter with a Shrike. The Shrike with multiple arms, each with blades, takes notice of Duré, surrounds him with its blades, and then disappears. The Bikura pluck a luminescent cross from the walls of the labyrinth, and hang it around Duré’s neck. After being carried back up to camp, he discovers that to his horror, he is not able to take it off, and that it is composed of his own DNA. As his scanner reports: he is of the cruciform.
Days later, the Bikura that Duré calls Alpha, falls off the cliff and dies instantly. The Bikura take him to the basilica, where Duré watches over a series of days as his body is broken down and then built back up again until he is alive again and they silently return to the village.
Duré realizes that the cruciform has made the Bikura immortal, but also realizes that he cannot leave the village, since his own cruciform causes him great pain if he tries to leave.
The final entry of the journal tells of Duré building a chapel and planning his final escape from the village.
7 years later, Hoyt had taken an expedition to the Bikura village to find Duré, but only found his body badly burned by the fires and the cruciform destroyed by the tesla trees. Afterwards, the village and basilica were destroyed with shaped nuclear bombs.
The rest of the crew depart for Hyperion, except for Consul, who goes to retrieve Father Hoyt. When he arrives, he sees Hoyt writhing on the floor in pain after his injector had malfunctioned. Consul says he will help him after he tells him the rest of the story. After Hoyt arrived at the village, he actually found that Duré had crucified himself in the flaming forest, and in the 7 years that he had been hanging there, he had died and been brought back to life by the electricity countless times, until he really did eventually die.
After giving Hoyt the ultra morphine to ease his pain, he opens his clothes to find what he expected, a cruciform fused to his body.