Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1)

by Alastair Reynolds

It was the way the virtually immortal rich kept ennui at bay, forcing their behaviour patterns out of predictable ruts - and ending up with something to brag about when they outlived the contract, as the majority did.

‘Assuming stupidity is an inherited trait,

Khouri had heard that it sometimes rained, but so far she had been spared this particular piece of meteorological verisimilitude.

Khouri assumed that his presence had made other people decide to wait for the next car in the endless paternoster which rode between the hub and the rim.

but the loss of face would be much harder to amortise.

Space only approximated a vacuum at slow speeds. Up near lightspeed - which was where these ships spent most of their time - it was like cutting through a howling gale of atmosphere. That was why they looked like daggers: conic hull tapering to a needle-sharp prow to punch the interstellar medium, with two Conjoiner engines braced at the back on spars like an ornate hilt.

Of course - it was you who pointed out the phenomenological difficulty with the TE dating method used on the rock.’

That was one of the odd, persistent defects of simulations: no matter how precise they became, the participant remained aware that they were not reality.

Over the subsequent three years . . . their auguries have become clearer, now.’

Would she have felt compelled to make the weapon just because she could; just because it was elegant and she wanted her peers to see what fabulous creatures could spring forth from her mind; what Byzantine engines of war?

That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth.

newly starfaring humans, the Shrouders saw echoes of what they had once been. Something of the same psychosis, almost: the simultaneous craving for solitude and companionship; the need for the comfort of society and the open steppes of space; a schism which drove them onwards, outwards.