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by
Ada Palmer
Read between
September 8, 2019 - February 5, 2020
from our perspective, but may really be light-centuries apart, one a nearby dwarf, a second a giant a thousand times as distant, a third not a star at all but a galaxy, which to our distance-blinded eyes seems just another speck.
A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shapes of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars.
Danaë nodded her consent, then prepared her smile for the crowd, as a hunter prepares his bow. Like the Empresses and Queens of old, Danaë cannot abide being useless, but will accept exclusion when another duty waits.
Legend says that Emperor Constantine, converted on his deathbed, willed the Roman Empire to the Christian Church, and in one act both ensured that Church’s immortality and doomed Europe to nineteen centuries of wars for God; just so, Carlyle’s deathbed embrace of Adolf Richter Brill strengthened and crippled Gordian.
We lie. We lie again when we say we split the atom. ‘Atom’ was supposed to be the smallest piece of matter—all we did is give that name to something we can split, knowing that there
are quarks and tensors, other pieces smaller that we cannot touch, and only these deserve the title ‘atom.’
If all humanity were so unwilling to lie to ourselves, we might not have given up on our great dreams. Complacent reader, we no longer aim for Earth nor atom, but...
Reader, we no longer aim for Earth nor atom, but, so long as the Utopians still live and breathe, they will not give up on our last great dream: the stars.
Griffincloth was developed for camouflage, a flexible, fabric-like surface which could display in real time the video feed of objects on the other side, making an object properly equipped with Griffincloth invisible.
Utopia means ‘nowhere,’ so all Utopians drape themselves in their most precious nowheres.
I told you, reader, that Utopia does not give up on dreams. When a Utopian dies, of anything, the cause is marked and not forgotten until solved.
Even for suicide they track the cause, and so, patiently, blade by blade, disarm Death. Death, of course, has many weapons, and, if they have deprived him of a hundred million, he still has enough at hand to keep them mortal. For now.
Even if a constellation takes a viper’s shape to brave the pit, the starlight holds no venom.
“The Directorate has no right to silence words; only the author does.
HERE ENDS THE SECOND DAY OF THIS HISTORY.
The Prince of Murderers, said Papadelias, the Moriarty he waited for, would do both, accepting fully and philosophically his inevitable
end, yet still fighting with all his strength and cunning to extend his freedom to the last breath. He needed, I think, to meet a soldier.
Books, even made-up stories, can’t all have happy endings because they reflect the real world, and the real world isn’t always happy.”
“If history is written by winners, fiction like that is written by bystanders trying to guess what the victims would have said if they’d survived.”
“Determinists, did the Determinists also get mad at God for choosing to make the world a sad book?”
I shall loop back now, and give my best account of the encounter of that morning, which, like an eclipse, was always coming, yet still makes us quake inside when we see the cosmic clockwork plunge day into night.
J.E.D.D. Mason’s gaze fell now upon Thisbe Saneer. “No one comes to stone the servant when they could watch the execution of the king.”
wish J.E.D.D. Mason could have expression in His voice, emotion in His face, for moments like
this when I’m sure the deadness of His request kept them from understanding how passionate a plea it was, how literal, how vast His Fear when Dominic was threatened.
“So, adopting a child makes them ineligible. Interesting choice. Now I want to know even more about this boy an Emperor would choose to hold so close, but block from the succession.”
You may not have thought about it, reader, but ‘free’ is not a word one hears much anymore, not in its pure denotation. Almost everyone is so free these days, just as everyone is so healthy, happy, sentient, and alive, that one only mentions the quality if it is threatened: unhealthy, unfree.
No, reader. A protagonist must struggle, succeed, fail. His fate must determine whether this is comedy or tragedy.
The Directors speak English in the conference room, the compromise language which makes no claim about which nation-strat is strongest.
“Then you are alone.” The dead softness of His voice felt cautious now, as when you comfort a wounded animal, and you know your syllables are meaningless, but, seeing it in pain, you must do something. “Faced with that question, a Cousin might answer the heart, a European the past, a Humanist themself, a Brillist the psyche, a Utopian imagination. All are pieces of the Masonic answer: humanity. Only the Mitsubishi place the Source outside humanity, in Nature.”
Directors. “In this thought, you are the most alone. This is what Sugiyama thought, which Masami Mitsubishi would not have said, but all Earth will read now.”
Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once? We all know the powers of Utopia. We see their living wonders fill the streets, cheer as they conquer syndromes, hire them to make the impossible possible for us job after job. We even trust them with this hunt for the dread Gyges Device. Yet we still think and plan for the world. One world. We never doubt that every individual shipment they send to Mars must be successful, that their science is sound, their effort proceeding, but somehow we do not believe the distant end will ever come. These Nine
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It was the kind of anger we create to mask our guilt.
But only our Creator truly understands the ends to which He turns His instruments: why He had me kill those seventeen people, not sixteen, not eighteen; why He sent Bridger this bloodstained guardian; or why He chose that night of March the twenty-fifth to reveal to His devoted priest Carlyle Foster that, in His strange Mercy, He had spared, of all men, Mycroft Canner.
Latin slip past incomprehensible? It is worst with Latin, too, for it was by chance you were not raised to speak French or Japanese, but no one is raised on Latin. Latin is a choice.
Bridger sniffed. “I know it was the worst thing anybody’s ever done. But that was then Mycroft. Now Mycroft is different.”
I think the hardest kind of mourning is when you have to lie.
He wore no coat, no vizor, just a loose blue shirt and gray pants, neither sloppy nor formal, and a Graylaw Hiveless sash, calculated to make him seem as generic as possible. Everyone can listen to an everyman.
Their answer was sweet as rescue to a drowning man. “We neither help nor hinder, only ward.”
He earned France’s fear for what he did to lovers, and he earned history’s for articulating
why one should.
I asked myself, reading this over, why I describe the King of Spain less vividly than all the others. In truth he is less vivid, always restrained and stately, trained from infancy to do nothing he could not be seen doing on a coin.
“If you had something, something so wonderful that it seemed that it might... that, given the chance, it would make a better world, for everyone, forever, so much better, but first there was a danger, a terrible, terrible danger that it could rip everything we have apart... would you destroy that better world to save this one?”
I freely confess, reader, that this chapter is half imagination, for I was still a prisoner at Madame’s.
Animals may hunt by speed, by trap, by disguise, by ambush, but name for me another besides mankind that hunts by trust.
This last, hands-off image of Providence appeals to many, especially to those afraid to face a universe without a Father but unwilling to call themselves unfree; contemplate it longer, though, and you will find it no more liberating than the others, for such a universal Parent would make every one of us a set-set.
this was the first time in Saladin’s life that he had let a person draw so close and only then sensed danger. I told you, reader, man is a beast that hunts by trust.
“If I just keep running away, all that’ll do is make more places I can’t come back to. I have to make the bad guy stop, but I can’t figure out how to make them stop until I know why they’re doing it.
“That’s the thing about gore, Bridger, if you don’t let yourself look at it then your imagination twists it in your mind and makes it into a kind of nightmare instead of letting you learn from it. You have to look at it, see what they did exactly, blood for blood, or you’ll never understand it.”
“Mycroft says it’s important for me to be a kid, because only a kid can grow up to be a human being. I of all people need to not be a monster.”
“If you want to pray for them, try Hermes. Gotta figure Hermes likes imaginary friends.”
