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‘We weren’t supposed to put down roots, Scorpio. Ararat was intended to be a temporary stopover. Even the name is a bad joke. You don’t settle a planet with a bad joke for a name.’
‘I’ll be quick, I promise. I’ll be in and out in a few hours.’ A day, more likely, but that was still a ‘few’ hours, wasn’t it? Morwenna would understand.
G
To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin - or meaningful good - than ants, or dust.
More than once it had struck Quaiche that if human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was - how much of it was stitched together not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork - they would go quietly mad.
M
