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Sometimes it only took a quiet word to put them right. “You’re not me,” she would explain to them. “Be grateful for that, and enjoy your dependence on sleep. It’s your brain’s chance to break out of linear thought patterns. Even asleep, you’re doing useful work for Panoply.”
“I’m the way I am because of what happened in this room,” she would tell them. “Not because I’m strong, or better than you, or more dedicated to Panoply. Not because I care about the Glitter Band more than you. It’s because I’m damaged. Because the thing that happened to me in this room broke my mind, and all the king’s horses couldn’t put me back together again.”
What went on here—you can’t call them crimes, exactly. But they were against something, and things like that leave a stain on a place. A sort of spiritual blemish—like a bad atmosphere.
draught
If you lose language, Dreyfus wondered, do you also lose any comprehension of the point of it?
Their father closed his fist, then opened it again, a grey tetrahedron floating in the cup of his palm. He offered the tetrahedron to Caleb. “You understand a symbolic exchange,” Father continued. “This will feel no different—to begin with.” “What’s going to happen?” Caleb asked, reaching out to accept the tetrahedron, but stilling his hand at the last moment. “It will seem like waking,” Father said. “Like knowing the world for the first time, with clear eyes. Like finally being alive.”
“They’ve had loving childhoods,” he said, speaking the words as if she were the one who needed persuading. “No two boys have ever been better looked after. No two boys have ever been better equipped to take their places in society. Caleb is willing. Julius must make the same commitment to the life of a Voi.”
Aumonier grimaced, thinking how curious it was that the universe could make any prior situation seem only mildly troublesome, when at the time it had seemed to encompass all conceivable woes. She longed to be sitting back in the tactical room, listening to Sparver, thinking only of exploding heads.
“There are other things we can’t sense,” Dreyfus said. “Distributed intelligences, spread across the networks.” “We’ve heard nothing from Aurora or the Clockmaker in two years. That’s because they’re so preoccupied with their slow war against each other that they can’t spare even a fraction of their energies to bother with our little affairs. So why would either of them start now?”
“Beyond that, you’ll show no more interest in Dreyfus. You’ve made an enemy of him and frankly he has my complete sympathy. Dreyfus doesn’t like demagogues. I’ll confess I take a harder line. I despise you. I’d like to smear you out of existence before you damage something very precious to me.”
He wanted to stop himself, to treat her with the same ruthless indifference he reserved for the others, but whenever he came close to acting on that intention he would only end up sitting or walking with her again, deepening the groove of their relationship, making things worse.
“That’s what happens when you’ve had great success in life—when you’ve achieved the one goal you always desired. You lose a sense of purpose. Your smallest anxieties fester and magnify. Your fears turn inward, and attach themselves to irrational concerns.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary about that,” Sparver said, but not without a certain skin-crawling prickle of anticipation, the way one felt sticking one’s hand into a dark sealed box.
environment was shaped to enforce one narrative: that they were the natural sons and heirs of Marlon and Aliya Voi. But for as long as I worked with them, the boys were troubled by fleeting recollections of an alternate past. They rarely allowed themselves to speak of it, because it was so disturbing to both of them. At best, they tried to pretend it was just a particularly upsetting recurring dream. But it seemed to me that something that powerful, that vivid, must be rooted in an objective reality.”
“You said there was no situation so bad that we were ever justified in giving up, sir.”
