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“The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.”
IF LIFE TRANSCENDS DEATH, THEN I WILL SEEK FOR YOU THERE. IF NOT, THEN THERE TOO.
Everything they were trying to interact with here had been waiting since humanity had been a kinky idea that two amoebas came up with.
“This far, and no farther,” she whispered. Her litany to the tyrants and bullies and despots.
There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness. Good enough.
Patterns were the enemy, even patterns that were meant to cover her tracks.
The ones you trust are always the most dangerous.
“You are about to run an n-equals-one experiment where one is the number of universes we can break trying to satisfy Duarte’s curiosity.”
But all the stories about the devil making a deal and then cheating missed the point. The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly all that had been promised. And the price was your soul.
“Are you trying to make me feel better?” “No,” Chava said. “We’re too old for that.
It wasn’t chaos, or if it was, it was no more than usual. It was the blossoming of hope where there had been no hope before. It was everything Bobbie had intended it to be, except for one detail.
Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.
The effort of being okay around the crew of the Storm had, it turned out, been exhausting. He hadn’t even known he was making the effort until he didn’t have to anymore.
They were simple words. Commonplace. They carried a heavy weight.
It felt very strange to be in such a quiet, peaceful, empty place and also the middle of a war.
That frightened her worse than the suddenness and strangeness of the transition. The sense of absence without an object, of loss without knowing what had been lost.
Elvi wasn’t sure if she liked them or if they scared the shit out of her. If they were passing their Turing test, or if she was failing it.
That was the thing about hubris. It only became clear in retrospect.
Elvi felt something like anger, something like dread, something like the mordant pleasure that comes from being proven right about something shitty. “What an asshole,” she said.
Lesson one: You can’t rely on reinforcements.
Lesson two: We have thirteen hundred systems to resupply us. You have one.
That was the third lesson: Playing defense means being endlessly ground down. Someday something will get through.
Because that was the final lesson she taught her enemy: It’s safe to chase after us. It’s how you’ll win. And it was a lie.
They made a show of congratulating her, as if not dying for fifteen years in a row was an achievement to be proud of.
The chime rang, calling them all to the dining room like the most privileged cattle in the universe.
No one asked after Dr. Cortázar. That, Teresa had come to understand, was one of the unwritten rules. When someone disappears, don’t ask why.
The captain’s chair of the Rocinante was his. Though, since she was still nominally the admiral of the resistance fleet, his captaincy felt a bit like an emeritus title.
