Redemption Ark (Revelation Space, #2)

by Alastair Reynolds

It was one of the earliest and most chilling lessons of space warfare: in space, the dead were often difficult to tell from the living.

It was his experience that crises in space fell into two categories: those that killed you immediately, usually without much warning, and those that gave you plenty of time to ruminate on the problem, even if no solution was very likely.

He brought up certain rarely used neural routines that allowed him to slow his own metabolism, so that he would use as little air and power as possible. There was no real point in staying conscious; it gained him nothing except the opportunity to endlessly reflect on whether he was going to live or die.

In Clavain’s experience, it was the less comforting possibility that generally turned out to be the case. It was the way the universe worked.

Clavain saw it all with sudden, heart-stopping clarity: all that mattered was the here and now. All that mattered was survival. Sentience that bowed down and accepted its own extinction - no matter what the long-term arguments, no matter how good the greater cause - was not the kind of sentience he was interested in preserving.