Lords of Uncreation (The Final Architecture Book 3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

There wasn’t much Andecka wouldn’t believe, if Idris Telemmier said it. It was a hero worship he was profoundly uncomfortable with, but she’d seen him at work close-up in all his wretched glory. He was the human candle that somehow burned twice as brightly, but never burned out. And burning hurt, she knew that. She’d felt the heat of it, but she reckoned Idris was on fire all the time.

Andecka and Grave were not warriors, in that moment. They were petitioners. All they had was begging. Their only weapon was empathy. While extreme military resistance had, on two known occasions, resulted in an Architect’s physical destruction, empathy had saved more worlds by far.

They had laid out all they had at its feet, and it was very, very sorry for their loss. Thoughts and prayers from the godlike destroyer for the worlds it crushed beneath its crystal feet.

Keristina Soolin Almier, lawyer. It might be the end of planetside human civilization but people still needed lawyers.

It was the great truth of law that the more savage things got, the more you needed a lawyer to dig you out.

contracts were the connective tissue that held the universe together as far as a lawyer was concerned.

And yes, that small slice of humanity left would be governed by men like Ravin Uskaro, but then that was his role. He was born into a governing class, blessed by a superior heredity. It was just the way things were.

Here she was in the heart of the Hegemony, the most technologically advanced polity humans had ever met, and apparently they’d developed past the need for efficiency. In fact, taking your own sweet time about everything was absolutely the Hegemony’s thing, as far as she could work out, and sometimes that time seemed to be “never.”

with it. “Fuck me, they said you’d been frying your brain but I didn’t realize you’d turned the heat up so high.”

If she decided to make a run for it and sell her ill-gotten gains to Hugh or the Hanni or something, then she would probably become very rich and then very dead in that order. Life goals…

“Wars were done by Hanni,” Kit told her. “They are not known to you. We got better. Why do you think we like games so much?”

The Nativist faction was bucking under his hand right now—they said he’d knuckled under, that he wasn’t the champion of the human race they’d thought. Another few months and he’d have lost them entirely to some opportunistic demagogue. And when you lost a hold on that particular serpent, you could expect to feel its fangs soon enough. They were always after someone to blame for their misfortunes.

Ravin knew how a minority could look like a majority if it acted decisively enough.

They were Colonial patriots, Nativists. Men who remembered military service as glorious because they’d not personally been there when the Architects had arrived.

You couldn’t save everybody. And that presupposed that everybody was worth saving.

throwing out, beating or just shooting those who tried to insist that, no, they had a ticket. They had a seat. They should be saved. It was hard, Ravin knew. It was nothing to be proud of, that he was having to resort to tactics such as this. A period of history that, once it was safely in the past, could be shrouded in obscurity.

In an ideal universe, yes, perhaps more could have been saved, but these were times of crisis and Ravin was a man fit for difficult decisions. A leader. A hero, as far as the history books would relate. He’d stand at the shoulders of the historians to make sure they got it right.

You had to take a lot of civilized things for granted before wheels were the answer.

Frye smiled. Idris, who’d faced Architects on several occasions, trembled before that smile. It was a bland, keen thing. It could make all his achievements and accomplishments delusions. It could see Ravin’s mad ark fleet as the future, and cast anyone who wouldn’t skin their own grandmother for it as a species traitor. It was a smile that could beam down on lesser people as they were tortured and carved into compliant, useful navigators for a fleet that would go from nowhere to nowhere forever. Or at least until something broke down that couldn’t be fixed.

“Because it’s wrong to strive against the way the universe is made. The Essiel do not prey upon the lesser, nor rebel against the great. They know their place, as masters of those things they hold to, and that act on their behalf. When comes the fire, the tide, the storm, they have their shells. That is the way. Except there’s no perfection in this world, hence there must be exception made. Hence those who cannot live within their bounds are yet made use of. If railing against fate is wrong, let us do wrong. Let us do all the acts unspeakable. Break all the laws. Fight that which must be borne. Be wicked, know no grace. Refuse all walls. And so, though we be cursed, reviled, denied, so we yet serve the way that we have left behind. When comes the threat the shell cannot resist, there shall it find us, waiting.”

“When Doctor Parsefer coined the phrase for baseline humanity, she meant it as more than a dismissal. The refugia are where variation survives. Variation that the future might need. Without them, what are we? A hollow shell. We only ever had meaning in relation to the rest of humanity, whether we were for them or against them. They balanced us, and shaped us. And without them, on our own in the void, we will collapse inwards. We’ll have no heart. We need them, even if it’s just because we need someone to distinguish ourselves from. Your plan will destroy the Parthenon more surely than losing a war to the Colonies would.”

It was something he’d seen plenty of times in his job, the way that kind of mindset worked, spiralling inwards into itself. Until at some point, the necessity of doing bad things for a good cause became, by the inexorable ratchet of cognitive dissonance, the insistence that doing things the bad way was a virtue in itself. Because otherwise how could one justify all the bad things already done?

They were all with him and none of them was having a fit or a psychotic break. With Intermediaries, that probably counted as combat ready.

The tentacles, Aklu’s magic legs, twined and their tips screeched against the drone bay walls like fingernails. Her breathing abruptly became too hard, too fast, and the medical telltales in the Scorpion pod started to shout at her, trying to give her a calming shot, except she hadn’t kept the drug reservoirs filled since forever. “Oh,” she said. The Architect tearing into the real right on top of them, the ship coming apart—nobody should have to witness something like that. But she was Olian Timo. She wasn’t Idris, flying into pieces so fast he should have some sort of warning sticker slapped on his forehead. She’d gone through life without most of the standard complement of limbs and she’d adjusted, which meant she was a tough son of a bitch and didn’t get… like this.

More closely, a handful of the other Ints were making observations, trying to understand what was snarling unspace in front of them. Hesitant, broken sentences strung together by a cartilage of ellipses and question marks.

Step off a Throughway, and you needed a mind just to keep yourself this side of not existing at all.

it was the Int in him that people actually wanted. The Idris of him was generally considered inconvenient baggage that had to come along.

“Mundy, you’re back in. You’ve got a desk and a job and a rung on the ladder again,” she pointed out. “Listen to yourself,” he said. Diljat blinked, scowled, looked bitter, then went through about a dozen expressions in the space of a second or so, all of which Havaer had seen in the mirror.

He was damn sure what had really been going on with the Vulture God crew at the time hadn’t been anywhere near this altruistic, but it was all about narrative.

Kris started grinning. Because you knew it was the last act of any dispute when people starting offering to settle.

She needed to adjust the scale on her worst-meter because the situation kept running off the wrong end of it.