Character from Hyperion by Dan Simmons
The Consul's grandmother — a Mauian woman who loved a spacefarer across time dilation, aged decades between his visits, and died in a revolution sparked by that inequality.
Siri loved Merin Aspic — a young spacefarer who traveled between stars at relativistic speeds. Each time Merin returned to Maui-Covenant, months had passed for him and years had passed for Siri. She aged. He didn't. Their love story is the Consul's Tale — romance as tragedy, relativistic physics as metaphor for every relationship where one person changes faster than the other. Siri died during the Maui-Covenant revolution against the Hegemony — a revolution she helped spark, driven partly by political conviction and partly by the fury of a woman whose love was structurally impossible. Their story shaped the Consul's entire life and his eventual decision to betray the Hegemony.
We see Siri at every age — young and beautiful when Merin first arrives, aging through the decades of his relativistic absences, old and fierce during the revolution. The Consul's Tale shows her across a lifetime compressed into the intervals of a spacefarer's schedule.
Also known as: Siri