Disquiet Gods (The Sun Eater, #6)

by Christopher Ruocchio

Certain ancient sophists would hold that we are each the masters and owners of ourselves, that we might thereby do anything—might even destroy ourselves—so long as that destruction came as an exercise of our own will. But like all sophistry, this sentiment is pyrite, and no true gold. Our lives are not in our bodies, but are distributed things, partly contained in us, partly in those persons and institutions which make up the landscape of our lives.

All change increases entropy, even change for the good.”

Then I saw only the pale sky, and watched as it seemed burned away by the friction fires of our passing until the stars—hidden by the white veil of day—emerged from the revealed black of space like pearls fetched up from the deep of some unfathomed sea.

Have I not said that freedom is like the sea? That a man may swim in any direction he chooses, but all he will do in that sea is drown.

“Much of the truth has ever been believed myth by most people, and much myth truth.”

“We cannot decide the world we live in ourselves, but we can change the world for those who follow after.”

It is not power that builds empires, that asserts order on the stars. It is vision. Vision and the heroic will to act. Where there is that vision, all else follows. Where it is not, there is decadence, desperation, and decay.

“None of us is good, lord,” Edouard said, “It for us to do good despite ourselves.”

I felt . . . I felt as a child feels when, taken out beneath the night sky, he is first told that each of those little lights is its own sun, with its own worlds, its own life and history. Vast as our cosmos may be and infinite in depth, next to him it is as nothing, as the meanest puddle is nothing when measured against all the seas of Earth. In all that vastness I was less than nothing, less than a mote of dust, and yet like a mote of dust I was drawn upward, not crushed by the enormity of what I saw so that I—who might have pressed my face to the very stone in awe and reverence—felt that I should leap into the air and sing.

We are beasts of burden, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled.

Men accepted the truth or did not, and would use their reason to justify that acceptance or the lack of it. For most men, reason follows belief, and does not lead it.

“History only repeats itself because human nature never changes,” Edouard said. “We think we’ve come so far, but all the miles we’ve walked since we left the Garden are as inches measured against the light-years we have to go.”

“Your beliefs matter only so long as you can assert them on others. What point is there in your beliefs if they cannot change what is?

People conceive of war and battle as mere events, happening for discrete periods of time in a specific place. But war is a place unto itself. A new universe, one with its own laws of time and space. Seconds which might have passed one after another in ordinary time pass all at once in war—so that hours vanish in instants—or not at all. In war, often a single second contains lifetimes.

The woman spoke again in that false, inhuman voice, “Stranger still that on both occasions, you should be at the heart of things.” The black eyes of the doll on the throne shifted to look at me, narrowed only a fraction. “Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footsteps of doom?” She said this last in Classical English, and I recognized the phrase. “Tolkien,” I said. Was that a smile on the corpse’s lips?

“Pain teaches mercy,” I said. “You suffer so that you understand suffering, so that you do not inflict it without need. Pain makes us human, teaches us to be . . . human.”

Our fear of pain is the foundation of all morality. It is that fear that shapes our world, orders civilization. We pass laws, build walls and fortresses, fight wars and forge empires all to minimize our people’s pain. That is why it is the lowest form of obedience, not because it is basest—as I once answered when asked by Tor Gibson—but because it is foundational. Our experiences of pain teach us the nature of suffering, and so we are moved to minimize that suffering in others. Pain grounds our reality, is the cornerstone of our interactions with the objective world.

To fly in space is to be exposed. There is nothing between you and any observer but distance, but space itself. There is nowhere to hide, and nothing to guard you from the enemy. To fly in space is to be naked before the whole, uncaring universe.

If what I have done disturbs you, Reader, I do not blame you. If you would read no further, I understand. You have the luxury of foresight. You know where this ends. I shall go on alone.