How It Unfolds (The Far Reaches, #1)

by James S.A. Corey

It’s just that he’s going to be on some other planet trying to figure out how to restart the human race, and I’m going to be here worrying about my taxes.

Sandor had given a tipsy speech about the nobility of the human soul and the work of becoming not just a multiplanetary but a multisystem species and started weeping.

“Bringing men at all was a mistake,” Emily said. “No offense, Roy. But every male in the package is one less uterus. And there are, what? Fifteen hundred sperm samples? We’re going to kick founder effect’s ass.”

“It’s going to have to be a game-day decision,” Bao said. “Every situation is going to be different. And really, Emily, do you want to commit to living the rest of your life without cock?”

“Everything moves, everything ages, everything changes. That’s normal. Stars shift spectra; they move in relation to each other.”

I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. But fuck, I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.

“It’s beautiful out there,” she said. “I mean in an austere, no-one-lives-here kind of way.” “It’s nothing a few centuries of atmospheric scrubbing won’t fix.”

All praise to the ancestors. May their newer children serve them better than we have.

“We can’t die until I build a greenhouse and a hatchery,” she said. “I want to be buried with a gut full of chicken curry.”

“Three active now. But others may have survived for centuries. Millennia. How long does something have to last for us to call it a success? They rose, they lasted for a while, they fell. Things don’t have to last forever.”

And, I mean, at some point, Jupiter blew up. I can’t explain that one, but it really fucked up the outer solar system.

The stars glimmered—billions of them—as did the visible smear of the Milky Way, glowing like a promise.