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You wish to know of our first encounter with the enemy, but it seems more likely to me that there were many first encounters spread across the face of distance and time in ways that simultaneity cannot map.
really gives the feeling of a galaxy spanning empire
Later, at the end of things, Dafyd would be amazed at how many of the critical choices in his life seemed small at the time. How many overwhelming problems had, with the distance of time, proved trivial. Even when he sensed the gravity of a situation, he often attributed it to the wrong things. He dreaded going to the end-of-year celebration at the Scholar’s Common that last time. But not, as it turned out, for any of the reasons that actually mattered.
It seemed like a small choice. It seemed trivial.
Llaren Morse’s expression went professional and formal so quickly, Dafyd almost heard the click.
Dafyd listened because he was good at listening. He had a lot of practice. It kept the spotlight off him, people broadly seemed more hungry to be heard than they knew, and usually by the end of it, they found themselves liking him.
He moved up the concentration of power like a microbe heading toward sugar, his hands in his pockets and his smile polite and blank.
She looked at him, her eyes flat as a shark’s. Then, a moment later, the same tiny, mirthless smile she had when she lost a hand of cards.
Small moments, unnoticed at the time, change the fate of empires.
As much as their success promised, as many accolades as they’d won, part of Jessyn still treasured the magic of that hour.
We’ll still lose something. We always lose something. But giving a different way forward is a stronger argument than just saying no to the one that’s on the table.
I know that all the literature talks about reinvention and remaking your career every ten years, but I don’t know if I have it in me to start over.
Jessyn shoved her fists into her pockets and waited for a long breath, then another, giving Irinna time to get ahead and avoid the awkwardness of walking together and also apart.
It would have been a pretty life, if it had been possible.
He could come across as frivolous, but was intelligent and as expert in his field as Tonner was in hers.
Jellit answered with a shrug and a grin. “But we’re aliens on this world. Maybe it’s our long-lost brothers come to find us?”
Mostly, he’d listened, and when he did talk, it was often about the difficulty of living as a very small part of a very large universe.
Looked at in a wide enough frame, maybe her problems weren’t so large. They just seemed that way when she held them up against her eyes where they’d block out all the light.
Dafyd noticed the little vulnerability, tucked it away for later, and went back to being distracted and scared.
“It could be that our new friends have some periodicity?” he said. “Or that something’s happened that the governing council wants to keep to themselves,” Else said. Campar made a small, soft sound. Almost a cough. “I’m a little surprised they let it go this long without stepping in.
“It’s status competition. Almost everything is status competition.” “Why are you in research? You’re the wrong kind of smart. You should have been administration.”
The universe tells every being exactly the same implacable truth. The Carryx listen and thrive, where others squirm and express opinions and then are crushed and forgotten. The truth is this: That which is, is.
If there is a moral question in that, it is the same moral question a species asks when its star novas and melts its world to glass.
Why me? is not something the universe ever answers.
The seventeen Carryx colony ships had passed through the terrifying improbability of asymmetric space, which only the cold illogic of the navigation half-minds could master.
The star glow of the galactic disk showed the plane of the ecliptic, and the colonization half-mind drank in the light of the local star and a thousand others, comparing spectra and spacing, confirming that the transit had taken them where they intended.
The half-mind was not capable of joy, but there was still a clinical satisfaction in tasks well completed.
If Anjiin had a protector, this was the moment they would arrive. Anjiin had no protector. Nothing arrived.
The half-mind dipped into the flow of chatter that was in one sense below the node matrix, in another sense inside it. The early scouting of the void tendrils had sent back volumes of information deeper than oceans. Without them, the half-mind might have taken days to understand all that it needed to know. Instead, it confirmed what it already assumed, changing only superficial expressions. The grammar fit into channels worn by a million other grammars. Analogies came together with a depth so profound it approached sentience without ever quite reaching it.
Vast and trembling, fighting against the high, thin winds of the atmosphere and burning through the long-chain hydrocarbons that were the fuel of their lifetimes, their membranes unfolded, stabilized, and turned with something like devotion to the half-mind. Under its direction, they shuddered, the pressure waves of their trembling designed to harmonize as they reached the surface of the planet into a single, clear, and unechoing voice.
Else and Tonner were putting together a hole for him and for Synnia to hide in, should things go poorly enough that a hardened room underground would help, but not so poorly that it wouldn’t matter. Considering the size of the attack fleet and their apparent level of technology, the safe space between those two error bars seemed incredibly narrow.
The vast silver arches, the hypnotic shimmering lights, the dark grid against the sky. In the distance, a huge platform rose up the side of one of the ziggurats, moving as smoothly as a key turning in a lock. It was breathtaking. “We never had a chance,” he said. “Look at all this. We never stood a chance against this.”
can hear the gladiator rome theme
“We’d have fought anyway,” he said, thinking of Ostencour and his improvised knife. Synnia wrestling down the guard. “It’s what we do.” “I don’t know if that idea is stupid or noble,” Else said. “Human,” Dafyd said. “It’s just human. We don’t stop just because there’s no hope.” Else nodded, stopped with her brow furrowed. A tear dropped from her eye unnoticed, and she shrugged. “There’s always hope for something. Just not always… not always what we want.”
He liked to think of himself as a man who could build a wall or dig a ditch if the occasion called for it, and the implication that he wasn’t annoyed him.
The species that exist long enough to achieve higher orders of intelligence do so only by relentlessly out-competing the other species around them.
humans are a new species, while other species are ancient
Your people, like many of the subject species we’ve encountered, believed that there is a tipping point where the constant fight for supremacy becomes unethical. Where peace becomes the new norm. As though it is possible through intellect or philosophy to transcend the fundamental nature of all life.
He could dream of perfection without being fettered by it. He desired peace and destroyed countless worlds to take it. He held both these ideas in his mind at the same time, and instead of this dissonance ripping him apart, it made him powerful.
The path back to the rooms felt shorter than the walk out had been. Rickar had noticed that before in other, less exotic circumstances. The first walk through a new neighborhood, the first commute in a new city, the first time finding his way to a new address to meet someone, and the anxiety of walking with them to a café that he was only halfway sure he could find. First times always expanded the experience of the space for him. Going back was faster, the distance shorter, because it was known.
A leader must be utterly decisive, especially when giving orders that conflict with the ones from the day before. He didn’t recall who’d said it, but he had the sense it was some famous leader. He hadn’t understood it then. He did, maybe, now. The others grabbed onto Tonner’s certainty like it was an umbrella and they were caught in a hailstorm. Rickar watched their bodies shift into calmer, more familiar postures.
It was a good insight. It felt like an accomplishment, and an accomplishment felt like a little sip of power in an ocean of powerlessness. Nothing could be normal, but work could sustain them.
The half-mind re-formed and deepened the data points into something akin to insight.
The violence to come was not a victory, but a growth pang. The displacement of a species that had grown in the universe directionless and feral discovering its purpose within the Carryx and being shaped into utility.
The Sinen burbled, and the translation half-mind at its throat took the wet, sibilant noises and turned them into language.
Ekur-Tkalal rechecked the information, but the half-mind—passionless and incapable of meaningful surprise—remained adamant.
“They are unrelated to the planetary ecosystem. Manufactured life-forms intended to trick us into believing they are the indigenous species,” the prime said. “This is a trap.”
The strategic half-mind marked each one as it appeared, delivering something like knowledge to the librarian.
The librarian moved a duplicate of the strategic half-mind into the body of a low-status Sinen, erasing the animal’s mind in the process. The living corpse that the half-mind now inhabited would be fed into a message casing and sent through asymmetric space alone.
The chain of identifications on the message was longer than it had seen before, tracing its origin back to the center of the empire and the librarians with the broadest scope. The battle that the dactyl fought here was part of a vastly larger action, playing out across space and time in ways that Ekur-Tkalal would not know because it was not called upon to know.
The librarian passed the relevant directions on to the secondary librarians under it, adding its mark to the chain of identifications as it did so.
The half-mind had been observing them carefully, but had not yet gained context enough to communicate with them beyond the simplest levels.
If any of the Carryx ships survived, they would rejoin the librarian later. If not, then it was better for the species that they had died. What is, is. It can be nothing else.
