Location from Hyperion by Dan Simmons
A vast chrome tree with three-meter thorns on which the Shrike impales its victims — alive, conscious, their suffering broadcast into the Void Which Binds as a signal that something in the universe is listening.
The Tree of Pain is the Shrike's masterwork and the Cantos' most horrifying image. Victims are impaled on its chrome thorns, kept alive indefinitely, their consciousness broadcast into the Void Which Binds as a signal — a beacon of suffering designed to attract the attention of the Human Ultimate Intelligence's fragment. The Tree is technically a simulation — the victims' physical bodies are in the Shrike Palace — but their pain is real. Martin Silenus was impaled on it for years. Brawne Lamia freed him. The Tree represents the Cantos' central horror: that suffering can be instrumentalized, that pain can serve a cosmic function, and that the universe might be structured in a way that requires it. Whether this makes the universe evil or simply indifferent is the question Simmons never answers.
An enormous structure of chrome steel with three-meter thorns protruding at every angle. Bodies hang from the thorns — alive, in agony, their faces frozen in expressions that are not quite screaming because the pain has gone beyond what screaming can express. It catches light like a cathedral of suffering.
Also known as: Tree of Pain, The Chrome Tree