Seven Surrenders (Terra Ignota, #2)

by Ada Palmer

Slave Mycroft has only one expression: apology. As for True Mycroft, their expressions are unreadable, or rather you’re wrong if you try to read them, like when the shape of a dog’s face makes it seem to smile or frown where really you’re just projecting human expressions onto an inhuman thing.

This was the supreme act of violence of this century, done not by a government, not a Church, not a tribe, not an army, but by an individual. Ever since villagers first wielded sharpened sticks in their chief’s name, the State had held a monopoly on supreme violence, but the Hive system ended that. Mycroft called their killings a demonstration of a liberty our era had not realized we possessed, proof of history’s progress if seventeen deaths were enough to shock the world; historically, seventeen deaths is a good day.

Man, whether the conscience is innate or implanted by society, and whether the human mind is actually capable of willing evil for the sake of evil—even the most heinous killers still tend to imagine some goal (revenge, profit, personal pleasure, some mad command). It’s an important question, fundamental really—can we choose actions that purely make the world worse without any perverse perceived benefit?—but we couldn’t discover whether the true Human Beast could exist back when the Beast was like a craftsman in an age of mass production, negligible beside the infinitely greater evils: Democide and War.

in these days of peace when we choose our Hive and values for ourselves, human individuals finally have the chance to be the worst thing in the world, and the ri...

Bondage doesn’t solve this, makes it worse, actually, since the bonds are just reminders of the power they’re restraining. Here, though, with my power not constrained but gone, my Owner was as comfortable as when you sit naked in an empty house, or sing in the bathroom, so I tasted at last that easy affection which only dolls and dildos had enjoyed before. I could feel how much it was changing me even as it happened, the granting of such a visceral wish rewiring things inside my mind, not just the conscious iceburg tip but down into those black depths

sniff out the forbidden appetites that people don’t admit they have, and make them so real that afterward the normal world feels dull as black and white.

their affection washing over me like a good movie, which takes you to all the peaks of passion without you having to lift a finger.

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.

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,

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

It is enough to make these brave men shake. But you are braver still, reader. Yes, you, who trust your life to distant leaders whom you cannot watch firsthand, and whose Creator decides your fate invisibly, without warning, explanation, or apology—and yet you rise to face each morning, head held high.

When Hope left she took Doubt with her, leaving only resolution, and a quiet curiosity about the larger nature of the universe.

Conviction’s end had left me a newborn, vulnerable again to fear, hope, curiosity, hunger for knowledge, and, above all, to life’s fierce desire to see tomorrow.

we rushed to each other, the world around melting away as we embraced, the bars between us no more impediment than the core of the Earth is to its two hemispheres.

The Mardis thought that three things make wars more or less terrible: the length of the peace before them, the amount of technological change, and how little the commanders know about war’s up-to-date realities.

the sky is falling. yes, we should catch it before it buries everyone alive.

In my experience the Furies are a fairer portrait of Fate than any smiling angel. They are not good, not merciful. The sufferings they sow are not steps toward some incomprehensible Good; rather, in this kingdom where the virtuous must suffer, at least the Furies make the wicked suffer more. This I can believe in, Fates who spin and mark and cut our threads of life and hide no benevolence behind their shears; some other goal, perhaps, but not benevolence. I know enough of what we mortals mean by “Good” to know that I have never seen it. I do not deny the Plan—a world without a Plan would not have spared Apollo’s killer only to grant me Apollo’s legacy—I simply refuse to be party to the optimistic hubris which labels the Goal behind that Plan as “Good.”

Dominic’s a perverted sadist living in a psycho whorehouse, but at least there we could talk about the truth.

“Cato would say it’s like a retrovirus. The virus pumps its RNA into a cell and the cell keeps pumping out more virus every chance it has, until it dies. It doesn’t even know it’s doing it.”

She did not try to rise, but flopped onto her back as trembling gave way again to tears. Just tears. It doesn’t matter how long she lay there, ten minutes, an hour, two; feelings that deep dissolve the illusion that time can be measured.

It’s the truth to me now, the way I think, and I can’t stop thinking that way. It’s like how you can’t stop thinking that up is up, even though you know there’s no real up in Space, or how the army men can’t stop thinking that Stander-Y is the enemy even though there never was an enemy, and how I can’t stop being sure that what you’re going to do with your powers is the most important thing that’s ever happened to the human race, even though I don’t know what that thing will be.

“The Greek Stoics said a human being is like a dog tied behind a moving cart. The dog can struggle, tug at the rope, dig its heels in, choke and suffer as it’s dragged, or it can trot along content and trust the Driver, though it still can’t understand the purpose of the journey, or its end.”

Imagine, reader, the view that lucky stars enjoy as young worlds orbit, rich with life. The star catches brief glimpses as its children spin, of living oceans, lichen jungles spreading new dirt across still-cooling rock, and the first sentiences raising curious eyes to their bright parent.

She did not comfort Jehovah—in her world it is not woman’s part to console man—rather she had Him tell her of His grief, and, hearing of the deaths of innocents, she wept, she sobbed, she shivered fragile in her habit’s rough embrace, so her God had no choice but to comfort her, and make Himself again the strong One.

the Old City below, historic Ingolstadt, lurking like an archenemy with its one-horse-wide organic streets, its fort and cathedral towers alive with pigeons. Matter and antimatter must not meet, so, to separate the Institute from the Old Town, Brill conceived this Spectacle Strip between, where Faust and Sniper stand. Here the great sculptors and architects of each generation are invited to build ‘abstract self-portraits,’ anything they can dream, a rainbow tree, a singing obelisk, a warren of mirrored tunnels, a sausage stand in the shape of a chambered nautilus, anything so long as it is a reflection of themselves. Old Town, Spectacle Strip, and Institute; if only the most successful revolutionaries cease to fear their teachers, how better could Brill boast his conquest of Master Freud than to let his capital flaunt its Id, Ego, and Superego so conspicuously?

intricate patisserie, ribbon candy delicate as jewelry, chocolate truffles, bite-sized cakes, and bouquets of fruit sliced so thin that the light shone through their juicy petals like stained glass.

History’s largest war is coming. In the middle of it, Bridger was born human with the powers of a God, and Jehovah was born a God with no more powers than a human.

Treason! A thousand times treason!” Treason was a strange choice. Technically assault on a Romanovan Tribune was High Treason, but I suspect Dominic had in mind the more basic treason of a creation attacking the God Who had adopted it and its world, abandoned, as it seemed, by its own Maker.

The Hive system made monarchy popular again by eliminating the risk of tyranny, since if a bad Emperor came along, all the Masons would just switch Hives, but free choice requires options to choose from.

Rage is an asset in the kind of rough, animal combat Saladin and I perfected, but fencing is an art, and Dominic’s rage contaminated his stance as roughness muddies paint.

He had the vial already in his hand, potion bubbling like the part of flame that is more liquid than destruction.

It was not fast, Jehovah’s resurrection. God can create a cosmos in an instant, but to let us understand, Caesar, Censor, Papa, Kosala, Tully, to etch His miracle into all our memories beyond the possibility of doubt, that took time.

“As if it were not cruelty enough that change in time cannot create without destroying, once again He makes the agent He sends to bring about His better world love this one.”

It hurts not knowing, but you feel this all the time, do you not, reader? Frustration’s itch as you boil with questions which I and my peers, distant or dead, cannot be made to answer.

All power here was hers. She might chill him to silence with the cold glare of the Cousin Chair for the Anonymous who undermined her CFB. She might comfort him with the tearful smile of a lover ready to soothe her lifemate’s pain. She might stab him with the disinterested stare of a spouse betrayed by the awkward public partnership they had forced on themselves

“If I had a time machine I could go back in time and find a king, any ancient king who ever lived, and bring them here and they would weep with envy for what the most modest of us has: a bash’house, warm in winter, cool in summer, comfortable clothes, appliances that do the work of a thousand servants, a bash’ we choose, a spouse we choose, laws we choose, a job we choose, and enjoy, and only have to work at twenty hours a week, while the rest of the time we can listen to music at the touch of a button, read any book we want, travel the world in safety, dine as well as kings could, better!”

this is the utopia past generations worked to make for their descendants, not a perfect world, but the best one humanity has ever had, by far. This is the better world that history’s future-builders dedicated their lives to making.

What is this Trunk?” “Of the Evolution Tree. A Tree has many Branches but one Trunk. When it’s still young you can’t tell which of the top Branches will become the Trunk, and which will branch off and lose Momentum. The Dinosaur Branch got as far as Birds, but only Mammals achieved Sentience. Humanity’s Tree had many Branches too: Tribes, archés que, nationesque, religionesque. Some persist in Reservations, but yappari Hives turned out to be the Trunk.”

“Either the Trunk is on Earth, or in Space, or Inside with Brain Words. If Either of you is right, the Majority is wrong.”

Kosala let herself glance at Vivien again, her expression neither forgiving nor reproachful, but seeming to agree with him that, if the pair had had the power once in their lifetimes to stop time and take some private hours before the world churned on, they would have spent it here.

“The old concepts of masculine and feminine were huge,” she continued, “complicated, centuries in the making, and deeply rooted in people, consciously and unconsciously. They facilitated bigotry and oppression, yes, but they had a lot of other social functions too. People who identified as feminine were caretakers, peacemakers, hostesses, consciences to balance the aggressive masculine. In the last centuries of the Exponential Age gender began to be liberated from biology, but that process wasn’t nearly finished when the Church War came. The worst cults in the war were also associated with gender oppression, so after the war the nascent Hives tried to purge all gender differences so abruptly that there was no time to come up with substitutes for all the other social functions gender used to have.

That’s what happened when we suddenly silenced gender. The broad, vague, cultural concepts of masculine and feminine had served a lot of social functions beyond oppression. Back when half the race identified as feminine it meant that half the race was devoted in some way to nurturing, peace, and charity, and we never developed a substitute for that. Since masculine was the empowered gender, the rushed transition encouraged everyone to act masculine, and all at once humanity went from a race of half peacemakers to a race where those with instincts toward the feminine felt ashamed of the label, or ended up sheltering in its only acceptable modern form.”

Oh, miraculous chameleon, Science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith! What cult ever battered by this world of doubt can help but envy you?

The Hive, the nation, multitudes united into one Leviathan with the Sovereign as its head, is, as Freud might put it, another of mankind’s prosthetic gods: deputies substitute for omnipresence, laws for Justice, welfare for Divine Love, the long reach of the military for the angel with the flaming sword.

Wars get worse when people know less about them.

Diogenes the Cynic was our childhood mentor, Saladin’s and mine, the first of our wretched race to realize that honor, glory, ambition, wealth, success, all are artificial things, and that pursuing them only makes us miserable. True happiness is to live as Diogenes and Saladin dared, like a dog by the side of the road, eating when the urge comes, pissing when the urge comes, saving all one’s energy for the happy exercises of the mind, which no tyrant can deprive you of.

the most successful man in history. The great breakthrough of our age is supposed to be that we measure success by happiness, admiring a man for how much he enjoyed his life, rather than how much wealth or fame he hoarded, that old race with no finish line. Diogenes with his barrel and his sunlight lived every hour of his life content, while Alexander fought and bled, mourned friends, faced enemies, and died unsatisfied. Diogenes is greater.

I never intended to finish Apollo’s Iliad. There was a storybook in there among the war plans, Apollo’s giant robots, and Utopia expected me to finish what my victim started. It is ingrained in us, in them above all, this conviction that writing is the best immortality. They feared you would forget Apollo, as Alexander feared that he would fade away with no Homer to immortalize him. But Diogenes needed no Homer, so I do not think Apollo needed his Iliad. If his name survives three thousand years, that storybook will not be why. So I lied. This is the book I finished for Apollo, not his own. Still, it no longer matters. What do a few paper chapters matter when Bridger has already made so much so real?

If there are still colors in grief’s palette that I—orphan, parricide, traitor, wanderer, fool—have not yet had wrung out of my flesh, then let me suffer them, not all the world.

I would rather be the lowest man alive, breaking my back to plow another’s land for a starvation wage, rather than be what I was, the most honored of the dead. I meant it. Ten years I’ve been a tiny plastic toy babysitting a child in a gutter, and I’ve thanked the gods for every day. I think that’s why they picked me as guardian. I understood Bridger’s gift better than anyone. The dead want to live. Even those of us who never really existed in the first place, we want to live, not all of us, maybe, but most of us. We want it more than anything. Even if it means being a toy, or a slave, or suffering like you and I have, Mycroft, we want to live.