Cibola Burn (Expanse, #4)

by James S.A. Corey

One of my teachers back in school always used to say that contagion was the one absolute proof of community. People could pretend there weren’t drug users and prostitutes and unvaccinated children all they wanted, but when the plague came through, all that mattered was who was actually breathing your air.”

“The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster,” she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray. To make sense of what she saw. To comfort herself. To give the world some sense of purpose or meaning. Species rose in an environment, and that environment changed. It was the nature of the universe, as true here as it had been on Earth.

It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless. The rain under his clothes had started to warm up, leaving him feeling covered in slime.

“That man’s an asshole.” “He’s scared and he’s trying to exercise control over… well, anything he can actually exercise control over.”

I’d know I was taking a risk. I did know. Of course I’d get on that ship.” “What if you knew it was going to be like this? What if you could look into some crystal ball and see us here, the way it’s all happened?” “If we could do that, we’d never explore anything,” she said.

All the tragedy and pain of Ilus would have been merely sad and distressing to see from a bar on Ceres Station. From where he was, the fear had stopped being an emotion and turned into an environment.

But it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.

That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. The calculus of all human power was changing, and the models she used to make sense of it shifted with them, and she had to keep reminding herself that the past was a different place. She didn’t live there anymore.