House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

Provided it stayed within the Zone, a ship could circumnavigate the galaxy in two hundred kilo-years and still have time to stop off at a hundred systems en route. That was a circuit, the two-hundred-kilo-year interval between Gentian reunions.

“To see something marvellous with your own eyes—that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment… that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it.

At that moment it was as if half the sky had been clawed back to reveal a blinding whiteness beyond it, as if the black of night was just an eggshell-thin layer masking an unimaginably cruel brightness.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” “Wonderful and a little spooky.” “Like all the best things in the universe.”

The impasse deflected some of that energy, flickering like an electric-blue bubble as the photons downshifted into the optical, curdling with thick, squirming lightning as field asymmetries washed over its volume, but the attack was sustained and at devastatingly close range, and Adonis Blue had already been wounded by the hull shards.