Arm of the Sphinx (The Books of Babel, #2)

by Josiah Bancroft

Like it or not, we are pirates. Saying please and thank you doesn’t change that. There are no devils by degree, no gentlemen thieves. There’s just strong and weak, the willing and the dead.

Who are these pious men writing the story of time anyway? To whom are they devoted? Every historian I’ve ever heard of has a benefactor or a master or a duty to his country. History is a love letter to tyrants written in the blood of the overrun, the forgotten, the expunged!”

“Look at them, Squit. They’re going with him. It’s like no one ever told them about following strangers into the grass. And they call me reckless.”

“It’s easy to judge a life not led.”

“If the point is to keep us from leaving, why not just lock the cage. That’s what it’s for! What’s the point of leaving us with a choice?” “Because we are uncertain, and he knows it. If we chose to walk out that door, they might stop us, put us in shackles, and post guards outside. And then we’d be well and truly imprisoned,” Senlin said. “But with the door open, they permit us at least the illusion of freedom. And it’s quite difficult to escape an illusion. They think we will prefer imaginary freedom to certain imprisonment.”

If one machine could do the work of so many men, what would be left for those men to do? In a thousand years, when the last human work was taken over by an automatic engine, would it conclude the liberation or the enslavement of the race?

‘Books are traps.’ But how are they so, and whom do they trap: the author or the reader? Perhaps they are just the boasts of vainglorious minds, and what we hold up as literature is in fact a cult of unlikable characters. I hate to think they are like a fishing weir to the swimming mind, a trap easily swum into but rarely escaped: a neurosis, a dogma, a dream. No, no, I must not be so cynical! If books are traps, then let them be like terrariums: sealed up and still living miniatures of the world.