Eon (The Way, #1)

by Greg Bear

So confronted, with none of the comfortable separation of a video monitor frame, space seemed to extend into a mating of infinite, star-cluttered halls. She felt as if she could walk down any one of the halls and become lost in altered perspective.

Gods and extraterrestrials. Still, she managed to nap.

Naps >

"You've wondered why I'm so tired looking," Lanier said. "Yes." "Do you understand, now?" "Because of this. . . library." "Partly," he said. "It's from the future. The Stone is from our future.

The asteroid was longer on the inside than it was on the outside. The seventh chamber went on forever.

In the history of the Thistledown and the Way, no one had ever entered the asteroid from the outside. Olmy and the Frant had surveyed the Thistledown's new occupants for two weeks and had learned a great deal. They were indeed human, and not even Korzenowski himself could have expected what Olmy now knew.

In retrospect, it seems completely logical that once a weapon is invented, it will be used. But we forget the blindness and obfuscation of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when the most destructive weapons were regarded as walls of protection, and when the horror of Armageddon was seen as a deterrent no sane society would risk. But the nations were not sane—rational, composed, aware, but not sane. In each nation, the arsenal included potent distrust and even hatred. . . .

a willingness to isolate themselves morally as well as physically—they embodied the worst aspects of what Orson Hamill has called "the conservative sickness of the twentieth century." There is no room here to analyze the causes of this sickness, where individual power and survival counted above all other moral considerations and where the ability to destroy was emphasized over any nobility of spirit, but the ironies of the outcome are rich.