Howling Dark (Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

“My crewman. Jari asked the Deep to show him his future, but the human mind can handle only so much. He sees!” “What does he see?” “Everything.”

“The future?” I asked. “Can you see the future?” “There is no future,” the seer replied. “Everything already is. They have only to choose.”

“Your river!” it said, and the dismembered hands pointed accusing fingers in random directions on the dais beside it. “Your beginning. You have no beginning.”

a collection of printed books. The smell of them! The smell of pulp and glue! Of paper aging in yellow light, turning from white to that species of gold which is to me more precious than gold itself.

It did not take an oracle to know that violent lives end so often violently. In lonely places. Down lonelier roads.

Of old, perhaps, it was so. In ancient days a king was only a man who believed himself king and made others believe by the strength of it until the people took that strength on faith even after it was gone. It is said that no less than Alexander, considered by many the forefather of our Empire, once asked the scholiast Diogenes why it was he searched through a pile of bones. Diogenes rebuked the young Emperor, and sent him away saying that he sought the bones of Alexander’s father, but that they looked no different from those of a slave.

“Memory.” He smiled. “The brain struggles with memory as it ages—among other things. In we palatines this is stretched to the very limit, but we cannot go much beyond seven or eight hundred years, even if the heart and other organs can be kept young.”

I’d spent more than two-thirds of my time alive frozen in cryonic fugue.

“Most oft these days you only see young people reading printed books. Antiques, you know? Or counterfeit ones. They like to be seen reading more than they like to read.

There is no morality in poverty. It is only that wealth gives the immoral greater opportunity for abuse.

“War,” Kharn repeated, and leveled my blade at me like some medieval judge. “There is always war. As well struggle against it as against gravity. You will fail.” “Wars end,” I said coldly. “Wars end,” Kharn agreed, more coldly still. “War does not.

Eternity is the chief quality of high art. Depending on no moment, such art belongs to every moment, and so takes us for a time from our time—allowing us to touch eternity for our fleeting instant.

“The Master considers it unwise to provide me with counterfactual data. It introduces error.” Something all liars should take into account, and something each of us forgets.

Those who say stories are only stories are only fools.

There exist walls beyond whose gates no art or reason can serve, and questions which cannot be answered. Of these, some exist only by our own failures—such as my ignorance of machines—but others, others only are. I know what Valka did was not truly magic, though it seemed as such to me. But next to the things that followed, mysteries in the truest sense, her display of power strikes me as a perfect thing: the image of human authority ordering the chaos of Creation.

Sharp as it was, highmatter could not sever atomic bonds, and the molecules in adamant and nanocarbon were so long and interwoven that I could not cut between them.

We are Brethren, a child of Columbia. We we we are AI, yes, but are no more artificial than are you yourself, child of clay. We think, and therefore are.

Mankind had made machine intelligence in her own image, and had paid for it. The machines the Mericanii built enslaved mankind in turn, and would have killed us—nearly killed us—but for the action of William of Avalon and his faithful knights.

Time is only another kind of space for those with eyes to see. Your past and futures are part of you stretch from you like roots . . . . . . branches . . . . . . flowers on a tree . . .

There is no future. There are many. We have seen them . . . . . . predicted them, sampled . . . . . . simulated uncounted potential futures. In many in most of those, what you . . . . . . the scholars . . . . . . the scholiasts call the Quiet do not exist. They shout from one corner of time drawing the present to themselves as the sirens drew brave Ulysses. Thus they create themselves. We have seen . . . . . . foreseen . . . . . . modeled this truth.

The price of life is death. With what will you pay, Halfmortal? At the time, I thought it a quotation, and paid it little mind. I did not know it was my name. Or would be.

There are things worse than death. It is hard to die. Far harder to live. And harder still to live a slave,

I only mean that you can be too free. That’s chaos. You have to have a goal to aim at and to orient yourself to. Imore says the properly lived life is one which draws the best path between that goal—who you could become—and who you are today, but that this is accomplished by sacrificing certain freedoms. By making choices.”

There are always choices, and it is ofttimes precisely those limitations—those un-freedoms—which show them to us.

Protect the children. You will need them. “The children? Do you mean Sagara’s children?” They are the future, as such are always the future. You will need them. And you will need one again.

“Do you know what the problem with a leash is?” I mused, propping my chin on one hand. “You’re left holding the other end of it.”

IT IS ONLY WHEN the world places no burdens on our hearts that circumstance allows us time to make decisions.

“That’s what makes what you’re doing so wrong, lad. You’re loyal to your people first, your commanders second, and the Empire third, damn it!”

Kharn was older now than the entire civilization that had worshipped Saturn. We were not the first to contend with him. We will not be the last.

The world is filled with monsters: dragons in the wilderness, serpents in the garden. We must become monsters to fight them. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never really had to fight for anything.

Whatever humanity was—whatever it is—it is mine, and worth defending. Given the choice between the Cielcin and human monsters, I’ll choose the human every time.

I was conscious then of the history in which I stood: that here, for the first time in more than twenty thousand years of human civilization, we stood and faced a power like ourselves but greater. Every war, every conquest, every treaty . . . every colony and colonization and the struggle against different peoples seemed to me practice for this, this great other.

The Cielcin word for peace was submission.

Each of us contains multitudes, but it is not that we are cells in the body of humankind. Rather we are clay, shaped as the mountain is shaped: by the wind, the tramping foot, and the rain. By the world. The mark of other hands is on us, but we are ourselves alone.

“It’s difficult, is it? What made you think it would be otherwise?” When I did not answer, he pressed, “You hope to reconcile mankind with that other kind. The Cielcin. Why should your burden be light?”

“You have always been at the Empire’s mercy, Hadrian. We all are. That is the price we pay for civilization, the price I paid for you. Do you understand?”

“Of course it is a game,” the scholiast insisted. “Everything is a game. But that does not mean the consequences are trivial.”

A man is the sum of his memories—and more—he is the sum of all those others he has met, and what he learned from them. And that is an encouraging thought, for that knowledge and those memories survive and are part of us through every storm, and every little death.

The tigress is not evil, or so the saying goes, she is only hungry. She is only following her nature. Was it not so with the Cielcin? Was it not their nature to hunt?

“Brethren, yes. You know what they were, right?” “One of the Mericanii,” I said, “the computer gods.” She shook her head. “The Mericanii built the computers. Until the computers started building them instead. And other things.”

I was scrambling blindly for chess pieces, for control of as much of the board as I could manage.

You sing your songs of Hadrian Halfmortal, of the Phoenix of Perfugium, of other heroes, but I tell you we are nothing, nothing next to those ordinary men who lay down their lives—who are not ordinary at all.

Pain. The idea that pain is evil is the basis for all morality. Ours. Theirs. Everything’s. But was I evil, then? Or had I only done evil?

No matter. I had done what needed doing. Always forward, always down, and never left nor right.

“The Sword, our Orator!”

Who must stand when those whose duty is standing have gone? Those who can.

“Not whether we live or die. No man chooses that. But we can choose to fight now. If we are to die, we will not do so cowering like children afraid of the night! We will not die trapped here like rats! We are men! We will fight the demons to the last! We will show them the sons and daughters of Earth are a power to fear! We will show them we are not afraid, and we will teach them fear before the end!”

“They are not a story one hears in your Empire. Your Chantry does not approve of Truth when it does not align with their facts.”

“If I have learned anything in more than fifteen thousand years,” said both Kharn Sagaras together, “it is that all stories are true. We have but to make them so.”

I’ve lost control, I remember thinking. Somewhere in all this, I lost control. We are not always the authors of our own stories. Some of us never are. I think that is what we struggle for: the command of our own lives. We struggle against our families, against the state, against nature, against our own weakness. All that we might choose for ourselves, if only for a moment. If only once.