Abaddon's Gate (Expanse, #3)

by James S.A. Corey

Her atheist friends called it awe in the face of an infinite cosmos. She called it God. That they might be talking about the same thing didn’t bother her at all. It was possible she was hurling her prayers at a cold and unfeeling universe that didn’t hear them, but that wasn’t how it felt. Science had given mankind many gifts, and she valued it. But the one important thing it had taken away was the value of subjective, personal experience. That had been replaced with the idea that only measurable and testable concepts had value. But humans didn’t work that way, and Anna suspected the universe didn’t either.

Arriving at the Ring was a political fiction, but that didn’t keep it from being real. There was no physical boundary to say that this was within the realm of the object. There was no port to dock at. The Behemoth’s sensory arrays had been sucking in data from the Ring since before they’d left Tycho. The Martian science ships and Earth military forces that had been there before the doomed Belter kid had become its first casualty were still there, where they had been, but resupplied now. The new Martian ships had joined them, matched orbit, and were hanging quietly in the sky. The Earth flotilla, like the Behemoth, was in the last part of the burn, pulling up to whatever range they’d chosen to stop at. To say, We have come across the vast abyss to float at this distance and now we are here. We’ve arrived.

It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.

Years before, Anna had taken a seminar on ministering to people with drug addictions. The instructor, a mental health nurse named Andrew Smoot, had made the point over and over that the drugs didn’t only give pleasure and pain. They changed cognition, stripped away the inhibitions, and more often than not, someone’s worst habits or tendencies—what he called their “pathological move”—got exaggerated. An introvert would often withdraw, an aggressive person would grow violent. Someone impulsive would become even more so. Anna had understood the idea intellectually. Almost three hours into her spacewalk, the amphetamines Tilly had given her began to fade and a clarity she hadn’t known she lacked began to return to her. She felt she had a deeper, more personal insight into what her own pathological move might be.

When ancient maritime explorers had climbed into their creaking wooden ships and tried to find ways to cross the great oceans of Earth, had their voyage been any less dangerous than the one the Mormons had been planning to attempt? The end point any less mysterious? But in both cases, they’d been driven to find out what was on the other side of the long trip. Driven by a need to see shores no one else had ever seen before. Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it. A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there. Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.

“I ran away from her until she had a seizure, and then I taped her to a chair. Not very heroic.” “I’m getting a medal for falling into a pressure hatch, sacrificing an arm and a leg to keep seven sailors from being trapped in a compromised part of the ship. I was unconscious at the time, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”

Holden blinked twice, once at Bull, once at the three women sitting cross-legged on the floor. Anna had to suppress a giggle. Holden was so comically earnest, she just wanted to give him a hug and pat him on the head.