The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers, #4)

by Becky Chambers

You had to pause in the face of reflex, ask yourself if the narrative you attached to the knee-jerk was accurate. Once she’d grasped this, she could never again see life as a static thing, something with one immutable definition. The universe was not an object. It was a beam of light, and the colours that it split into changed depending on whose eyes were doing the looking. Nothing could be taken at face value. Everything had hidden facets, hidden depths that could be interpreted a thousand ways – or misinterpreted in the same manner. Reflexes kept a person safe, but they could also make you stupid.

War was ugly, exhausting, and above all else, tedious – an odd thing to say about a situation in which there were more explosions and adrenaline than you knew what to do with. But for all the strategising, for all the narrow escapes and near misses, when you boiled it down, war was nothing more than an argument in which no one had landed on a better solution than killing each other. The suffering, at some point, became commonplace.

‘Thank you very much,’ Roveg said, bowing gracefully. ‘I humbly accept the repatriation of this fine artefact. I’ll give it a place of honour in my gallery at home.’ He was being intentionally flowery, but it was also the truth. The cheap knick-knack in his hands now carried with it a sentiment of the present he would cherish, and a reminder of the past he would always loathe. Only the finest art could accomplish both those things at once.