The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

Hence the honest and necessary plea: terra ignota. I did the deed, but I do not myself know whether it was a crime.

“Hobbes says that neither passion nor action may be called a sin until they know some law that forbids them, and that, where there are no man-made laws, the immutable and eternal Laws of Nature and Reason state that all men must and may, by whatever means we can, defend ourselves.”

Humor, mankind’s survival strategy, brought absurd images before my mind here, mobs in blasted wastelands, raising impossibly honest banners: “Financial stability! Self-determination! Xenophobia!” We do need pretexts for our wars. A man may leap into the fray in the name of Liberty, Homeland, Human Rights, Justice, but never Economics.

If my Saladin is childhood’s fear, the unknowable evil in the closet’s depths, I have become adulthood’s fear, fear of power, law, illustrious contacts, police resources, covert agencies, and sweet judicial murder.

Collected Laws of the Universal Free Alliance,’” he read aloud.

The Code of Universal Laws, commonly known as Black Laws:

Replicas cannot touch. That is what we all want, to touch what someone touched, a special someone, different for each of us, whose story reached forward through history and touched us. We want to reciprocate that touch as friends do. Who touches you, reader? Whose touch do you want to reciprocate, thwarting the walls of time?

If we were bending the law, we served the higher law that kids deserve to learn.

Neverland rushed to Atlantis to save Utopia.