Revenger (Revenger, #1)

by Alastair Reynolds

I liked the fact that the Hall of History was pretty, with that long black wall running the height and length of the room, and the coloured bars that were lit up along its length, like irregularly spaced fence posts. It was easy to be impressed by the glowing colours and the writing in them. I was fixated on what was known. It was years later before I stopped to think about the black intervals between the bars, and what they meant.

“I’m sorry, Father,” I said. “I love you. You know that. But I’ve got to go with Adrana.”

Ness sisters

It was often difficult to tell if things were a hundred years old, or a hundred thousand.

I’d been in bigger and grander libraries than Rackamore’s, but I could safely say I’d never been in a library on a ship, or one laid out in such curvy, swoopy lines, or one that was full of such strange and old books.

With me being the bookworm I am, it might seem queer that I didn’t go to the library sooner than I did. But books were a nice thing in my life, a luxury and a reminder of better times, and I didn’t want to start letting nice things back into my world until I thought there was at least a chance of making it through the next couple of days.

i get this

“I’ve earned the right, Prozor. Just as you did. I know I don’t look or speak the way the rest of you do, and I know I haven’t seen a hundredth of the things you have. But I’ve survived Bosa Sennen, and that’s more than most can say. And now I’m going to make her regret the day she ever crossed orbits with Fura Ness.”

I kept thinking about the Crawlies, and what they were really good for. But not just them—all the aliens. And not just the aliens that were here now, doing business with the worlds, but all the aliens that had come and gone through the Congregation in the Occupations before us, and what they’d been up to as well.

I thought about the quoins and how rum it was that some people or aliens living before us had been kind enough to leave all this money littered around the worlds and baubles, just waiting to be dug up and used again. And I had a thought that wouldn’t ever have crossed my mind on Mazarile, and that seemed strange and dangerous even now, in Trevenza Reach. What if it’s not even money? Prozor came back with the

This Fura was different. This Fura was harder and scowlier and knew what needed to be done. This one could turn her back on her own dying father, or watch a blinded man whimper in pain and not give one cold cuss. This one could cut her own hand off if it helped. This one didn’t care what people thought of Fura. And even as I cursed those tin fingers, which wouldn’t yet do a tenth of what I wanted from them, I knew which Fura I liked the best.

sundered. Maybe that’s how every Occupation got started—some old, old ship limping its way back from the stars. If it takes a ship like the Monetta months to sail from one side of

“Another kind of wind, raging out of the Old Sun all the while, but it slips through the hull and the photon sails like they aren’t there at all. Dark-wind, some call it. Or ghost-wind or shadow-wind.

neutrino sail

“She didn’t invent cruelty,” I said, something tingling in my tin fingers. “And no one made her the queen of it.”

The weakest, most frayed lengths were just above the bucket, where we could dwell on ’em and consider the drop under us were they to snap. I’ll spare you the worry of that. They didn’t snap, and we didn’t drop.

We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don’t often get a glimpse of what we could have been. Most of us are better off for the not knowing.

“It was never about making myself rich. It’s about keeping the quoins under my eye, where they can’t come to harm. Where they can’t get their claws or feelers on ’em.”

’em. It was Bosa that worked out the quoins, and if the truth of that doesn’t cool your blood, nothing will. They’re souls, Fura. The souls of the dead. Only they’re not dead, exactly.”