Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

They were their own little state with thirteen citizens, cut off from human progress, marooned on a desert island in a sea the size of the universe.

He had expected the alien air to be pungent, ghastly. Instead it was heady with odours his body could do nothing with. They smelled like something, like nothing. They were cocktails of molecules his nose had never needed to identify before.

The headaches are starting now, the ones the medication never seems to touch. He suspects it’s all psychosomatic, his mind deciding that he damn well should be in pain given the stunt he just pulled. That doesn’t make it better, it only means he can’t actually use anything to get the pain to stop.

“Your brain is a complicated toy. When you play carelessly with it, you might lose some pieces,”

She wonders if they are at war, whatever they are, but it seems impossible that there could be a whole angry planet with such a level of technology that wouldn’t just destroy itself. Like Earth did. As though there is some millennia-old curse that follows all the children of that lost planet and goads them into annihilation.

less a matriarchal god figure, in the end, than a conjured demon that has grown used to the captivity of its magic circle.

“Their first attack came when we said we were human—their second, when they caught us responding to this signal. Whatever they’re so touchy about, this is the heart of it.”

They have limits, and sometimes the poetry of destruction is the only art form left to them.

They are devouring all their fuel, exhausting reserves, soon to be on a one-way trip to nowhere at all in a piece of utter rocket science lunacy.

I’m old, she thinks, although she’s not, not really. Old is for humans and other mortal things. Kern has gone past old and out the other side.

Only by accepting the other can it truly find diversion and inspiration; only by allowing the universe to be separate from it can it have the infinite variety it craves.