Seven Surrenders (Terra Ignota, #2)

by Ada Palmer

Enjoy my Owner did, every inch of me, but I’ll skip the details. It was not all sex. A lot of it was being held, that warm, trusting embrace. A lot of it was talk. My Owner talked about what it’s like being able to see people’s hidden obsessions, like having X-ray vision and spotting all the ailments doctors haven’t discovered yet. They talked about the nature of secrets, speculating about why one feels the need to share secrets with someone, whether one imagines something might happen if one says them aloud, like knocking on wood, or whether it just feels more real when there’s a witness. They talked about the state of the world, about ideas of God which I won’t repeat, and a lot about gender. Gender they called a universal language which we’re all supposed to pretend we can’t read. Most just play blind or try (as we know we ought) to eliminate the traces of it, and the ancient inequalities those traces threaten to revive.

There’s a word to chew on, ‘avocation’: a second great occupation that takes you away from your vocation, like a musician sidetracked by acting, a teacher by politics, Thisbe by making movies, or my ba’pa designing dolls, all important tasks but secondary still.

I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world. If you aren’t a Humanist it’s because you think something different. That difference matters.

Wilfred Owen left behind a tiny collection of poems, not enough to even make a book, but still the most upsetting things I’ve ever read; if Owen had lived they might have revolutionized literature, spurred presses and politics away from the guilt-laden bravado which would light war’s fire again, or driven countless readers to suicide.

Karl Schwarzschild corresponded with Einstein from the trenches and deduced the existence of black holes while rotting knee-deep in muck; if Schwarzschild had lived they might have accelerated physics by fifty years, enabled Mukta two generations earlier, or given the Nazis nukes. Owen and Schwarzschild; calculate carefully which firebrands to snuff and one death can redirect history better than any battle. That was the foundation of O.S.

But I am not cut out for objectivity. I fill in: an expression I did not see, words I heard only in paraphrase, a gesture I know was there, though no witness can prove it. Why do I do this? Because, imaginative reader, you are human. You will fill in for me, invent faces and personality as you invent your own Alexander, your own Jack the Ripper, and your own Thomas Carlyle.

Our modern moths have bounced so many times off lightbulbs, they aren’t prepared for torches, and forget that wings can burn.

Curiosity is a dangerous thing for a dead man; it tempts one to want to live.

Kat Typer I know is fascinated by the pseudoscientific spiritualism of the Nineteenth Century: meters to quantify ghostly presences, meticulously catalogued séances, ESP research, but it is not in the supernatural where Kat finds wonder. It is the late Nineteenth-Century mind that fascinates, these scientists who were simultaneously so rigorous and so poetic, so critical and so credulous, so expert and so wrong. It was a unique mind-state, Kat thinks, fleeting, a psychological mayfly possible only in the moment when science was rising quickly in respect and use, but lagging behind in power.