The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War #1)

by James S.A. Corey

No place to open it, no way to access its interior, nothing that showed where it took its power from. When it functioned, the whole body of the thing vibrated and grew cool, like its effort drew in more energy than it put out.

We built palace worlds and temples to our own ingenuity with roots that sank to the planetary mantle and rose to the edge of space. They lived, those buildings. They held worlds within them, and we were proud, or that is the history. We were proud, and the proud are brought down, our philosophers warned, though now we call them prophets.

All of this you see, we built. Not the Carryx. They live well within it. They make use of it. Even then, they see only its use, not its spirit. They have no soul for it.

The voices and sounds of a thousand individuals from hundreds of worlds filled the air, and it sounded weirdly like a train station. As if all the hubbub, however exotic the setting and the source, was on some level also all the same.

Dafyd saw another of the Phylarchs of Astrdeim lumbering gently among the bodies, and it was almost like recognizing a friend. The eeriness wasn’t gone, but it was less because he knew something.

Look, I understand that we don’t have much freedom. We are powerless to choose most of the things that shape our lives. But what we do have? What we can have? I want.

“I mean, we’re not absolutely powerless. We’re just… mostly powerless.” “A deep and subtle difference.”

“Look at them. The physiology and size. Classic aquatic markers. But something drove them out of the sea at some point in their past into the high-oxygen atmosphere of this planet. It’s the only thing that allows a creature of that size to—”

There’s not a goddamned thing any of us can do about it. Dafyd sat in his usual spot watching the play of alien traffic through the cathedral. There had been a joy in it before. He had wanted to share it. Wanted someone to be at his side while they admired the grandeur and strangeness of it all.

Think of a billion tiny machines that can take over a living host. Hide inside it. The other side, they didn’t give it a lot of information in case the Carryx found it. Just enough for it to perform a mission. Connect itself to someone who would be taken back into Carryx territory. Sneak in… here.

“There’s hope. That’s the thing. There is hope, but it’s a long kind of hope. A slow one. It will take a lot of suffering along the way, but—”

And life—even the joyful part that he would have thought was the first to wither and the last to return—was still there.

It’s not a rational position, and a rational argument cannot dislodge it. Not without time, and they have no time.

We can’t save everyone, it says. That was never an option. But we can save the people it is possible to save. We can do the best that we can do.

reminds me of the debate between resigning in protest and actually losing all influence on the situation, and continuing on to fight the bad thing in a hard way

Dafyd Alkhor is an easy man to underestimate.

Dafyd thought there should have been a limit. The universe could only change so many times, could only reveal so many unexpected, inconceivable aspects of itself before he got used to it.

A ship or an animal or some alien artifact that didn’t fit his understanding of how things worked.

A spike of rage flowed up through Dafyd, starting in his gut and rising up, thickening his chest and neck, clamping down his jaw. It was gone as quickly as it came.

When he turned to Dafyd and Campar, his face was a mixture of rage and triumph.

The genius of the Carryx is that we brought the peculiar and often idiosyncratic brilliance of a thousand different species into a central system of control. We conquered asymmetric space by harnessing the birth shrieks of the Temperantiae of Au. We built machines of loyalty by harvesting the poem-patterns of Janantie moss gardens. We built world-palaces designed by the Phylarchs of Astrdeim, communication networks woven from the bodies of the Void Dragons that eat the foam at the edge of black holes, battleships strengthened by the living shells that choked the oceans of Sinyas and Vau. What would these have been without our guidance? Glories, but lost glories. Feral glories. The Carryx are the bones and nerve fibers of the unconscious universe. We are the scaffold and mind that shapes the nature and extent of its deterministic will. Humans are structureless. They live in conflict with themselves and each other. Their great genius is rationalization: lying into mirrors until they bully and seduce themselves into things they would never otherwise do. They are creatures of self-delusion, regret, and desire. That is their way, and for a time we harnessed it as we did everything. For a time.

If he didn’t know what the Carryx was thinking, what it was likely to do, the best hope he had was to mirror it, only calmer.

“Yeah,” she said. “Curiosity dies last, I guess.” “I was thinking less curiosity and more the unending drive to feel competent at something. But maybe that’s two ways of making the same point. D’you

“What we need,” Allstin said, “is weapons and a place to make a stand.”

in the end, the rebellion group got what they wanted, so does it really matter the inciting event

The organism claimed to be artificial: a half-mind built from living tissue.

The pilot wasn’t an animal, but a Carryx artificer successful enough that it was still male.

It was the first time they’d been outside a building since they’d arrived.

When it approached a different building, or maybe a different arm of the same vast world-palace, Dafyd had to fight the sense that they were being swallowed.

The chorus reached some deep part of his brain that said predator, and made him want to stay very still.

The difficulty that the system had suffered trying to change a single, unified Carryx idea into something a human could understand: essential nature and place in society. An animal doesn’t choose that. And neither did the Carryx. Carryx changed with their social status. Their place in society literally determining the form of the bodies. The ones who were victorious were better suited. The ones that failed were inferior because they had failed. Possibility was an illusion. That was what the librarian had said, but what it meant was choice. What happened, happened. What didn’t, didn’t. A species was useful to the Carryx, or it was not. They ruled their universe because they did. The other species didn’t because they didn’t. For a moment, Dafyd Alkhor saw the universe the way a Carryx would, and it was beautifully simple and utterly horrific.

Dafyd didn’t think about it. As if by instinct, he stood, lifted his knee, and stomped down on Tonner’s elbow with his full weight. The snap of bone and Tonner’s pained shriek filled the air. The Carryx paused. “I take responsibility for his correction,” Dafyd said. “He is humbled.”

He didn’t know what gestures and habits were common to all the Carryx and which had been idiosyncrasies of the one individual. He’d find out, though.

Your assignments will not be uniform. You will not have a voice in what your place within the moieties will be. The stability and advancement of the Carryx is your only path to a pleasant day-to-day life. If, as a subject species, your use to the Carryx changes, your place within the moieties will also change. With greater usefulness, your access to resources will increase. With less, it will decrease. As your keeper-librarian, my position will vary with your own. In this way, we remain certain that your interests and mine are aligned.

I understand that it is comforting to you to believe your efforts have meaning, and that comfort improves your function. In that spirit, know that through your efforts, we have determined that the world from which you were taken is better preserved than unmade. The cities your kind built stand for the time being. The lineages that produced you continue to exist. The artifacts of your culture are permitted and will be incorporated into the moieties as they are found useful. In this way, you have achieved the possibility that your species will spread to thousands of worlds you would otherwise never have known and can flourish under the protection of the Carryx. Your people will be granted space to be fruitful and fecund as servants of the Carryx beyond anything they could have managed on their own. They will be given guidance and structure that will keep them safe from dangers that would have erased them from the universe had they stumbled into them.

“And what you expect of us.” The librarian paused, as if this were a new thought for it. Dafyd didn’t understand what the hesitation meant.

If Dafyd had had this position before, he could have stopped Ostencour’s rebellion without losing anyone. He could have found an argument for something besides open rebellion or total obedience.

“There was no punishment. There is no punishment. That one was given great honor, being touched by the Sovran. But it was saved by an animal. There is no place in the moieties for a Carryx that was saved by an animal.

“The team scattered to the winds is a strange look for victory,” Campar said.

The building around them ticked, and a thin wind muttered at the window. In the distance, something wide and dark rose from the top of a ziggurat. A Carryx warship stretching its wings, preparing for another battle, another Anjiin, another wave in the permanent war that had eaten them. A moment later, another rose. And then another one after that. The endless violence of subjugation and conflict unfurled before Dafyd’s eyes. The resistance. The purge that followed. The death after death after death. It was a strange moment to discover peace, but there peace was. And more than peace, a clarity that seemed to reach deep into his mind and reorder him. The feeling that flowed through him was what he imagined the release was in the last breath of life. The moment when the end was obviously inevitable. How odd that it should come at the beginning of something too. “There’s a war, you know,” he said. “There is,” Jellit agreed. “And if there’s a war, there’s an enemy. Something out there that wants the Carryx dead.”

“No. I don’t know,” Dafyd said. “If we’re part of this grand mechanism of theirs, then maybe we can be the grit in its gears too.” “You’re starting to sound like Ostencour,” Jellit said. “More patient. I’m more patient. Ostencour wasn’t wrong, he was just too fast about it all. He wanted a final battle when it was still something he’d lose,” Dafyd said, thinking it through as he spoke. Finding words for the shape of his revelation. “So we all get sent off to who knows where while you fight your patient war?” Rickar said. “Now you’re the high priest of the human race?” Everyone was staring at him. Rickar was right. The Carryx had made him their high priest, the only voice between them and a vicious, capricious god. So, he needed a prophecy, then. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us all,” Dafyd said. “But I just want to say while we’re still in the same place, while we’re here together, that I’m going to find a way to kill them.” The faces in the circle were sober, filled with doubt, but yearning to believe. “I’m going to learn everything about them. I’m going to figure out how to get in their heads. And I’m going to kill them all and burn their fucking towers to the ground. It’s my war now.”

It remembers him, full of focus and purpose and a steely cold swearing himself against the Carryx, and it lets itself dream. The minds of the two women it has lived as have taught it to do that. To imagine fictions, and place itself in them as an escape, as a comfort. It imagines the two of them, spies in the world-palace, working together. The burden of its mission shared at last, with someone who could know it completely. It imagines finding some secret path to the heart of the Carryx, of detonating a bomb at the root of the world. Of holding hands while they watch the towers fall. Of making love on the corpse of a civilization. And why not? Even if they fail, why shouldn’t they try?

Far out, beyond the atmosphere, something bloomed in a geometry of radiation and magnetic force. Circles define hexagons, hexagons define intersecting planes, all of it opening and then falling away, like the ideal of an orchid playing out on five-dimensional space.

The longing that pulls at it, the despair and the hope. It was not designed for them. It feels them all the same. Dafyd, my love, it is not just your war. You and I. We will burn this world down together.