The Doors of Eden

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Life sometimes seems destined, to we fortunate ones who live at the far end of time’s telescope.

Lee was newly terrified that Mal would suddenly remember she was white and posh—

Its body was built from a different alphabet, another language entirely.

weird loner who didn’t get into town much, and enjoyed bitter boundary disputes with anyone luckless enough to be his neighbour.

The country was beautiful, but you had to like bleak to really appreciate it.

this is what you get when you butcher bones, not when you gnaw on them.

A bespoke fate for Elsinore Mallory, to which no other human being had ever been consigned.

one species discovered that harvesting material from its defenceless neighbours was vastly more efficient than filtering detritus for a living.

Whatever life has clawed its way out from their tentacled shadow simply dies off.

They have gone beyond us to a realm of contemplation that we, the ape-children with our bloodied stone axes, are not fit for.

They were doing all the gloriously mundane things people did when they didn’t know the world had magical stone circles or monstrous Birdmen in it.

She didn’t want to go after the man, now she’d seen his face, seen him move as though the buildings around him were a ghostly mist he was kindly consenting not to disrupt by just barging through.

As the world recovers, they are the one species to have thrived through the great dying. Appropriately, for they are the greatest killers.

Every technological development is achieved over a mound of corpses,

Alison herself bounced between the poles of greasy takeouts and salads so plain they’d make a diet plan wince.

Was it still paranoia when it wasn’t you that they were out to get, but the whole country?

a long, low bellow like the indigestion of a whole world. Like monsters.

Nothing matched, and the lime-green wallpaper and turd-brown carpet weren’t on speaking terms either.

“The company has been across my desk so often that I can’t scrub off the footprints.

This place smelled like that. Like despair.

She had been gazing into the abyss, fishing for secrets, and now the abyss gazed right back at her, this insignificant speck that had dared to dangle her tiny hook into its depths.

Someone was approaching, from no direction.

“Well, you have a choice of cold places, Lee.

He smiled again; it transformed his face from horror movie to broad comedy,

“Lose yourself in this place, this city, if you can. If they find you, you cannot say where we are if you do not know.”

She’d seen them. She knew she’d seen them. And she also knew they hadn’t been there.

None of them had come to see squirming hordes of weasel soldiers with razorblade guns or dinosaurs in ice-age forests.

There weren’t any handy interdimensional portals this time, so they took a minicab,

Over time the poorest families die, but the richest only multiply. The poorest of the rich then become the new poor, and the cycle continues. Their rat scientists scrabble desperately for some way out of the maze.

The rats were more human, in that moment, than the man whose glass he refilled.

Only one needs to find the answer, but difference is strength. To save everything, we need as much difference as possible.

“It’s a million-to-one long shot, and only these two desperate lesbians can save the world. Perfect action movie material.”

but what did it matter? Dead alone or dead all in a heap was still dead.

“Don’t shoot!” Lee tried to speak, but breathing still felt like a privilege. She waited for the bullets.

Julian wanted very badly to believe in God, right then.

Instead, he was forced to believe in a spined, segmented thing, kilometres long, hanging in the air as though physics had no more hold on it than reason.

Well worded - he wanted to believe in God right then but...

“We’re just…We don’t know what’s going on.” If a lion could talk we could not understand him,

Half a million years ago, a handful of our world’s denizens transformed from somethings into someones.

He called the shots, or he dismantled the hierarchy until he was the highest part of what remained.

Rove loved Rove first, things useful to Rove second. And nothing else.

Despite all the recent lessons he’d had about his infinitesimal place in the cosmos, Julian fancied he could hear the universe holding its breath.

She thinks she’s found God, poor deluded soul.”

“Bugs and monkeys and vermin and queers,” he said softly. “What sort of a way is that to run a universe? I’ll be glad when we’re rid of them.”

Great quote from the mind of a horrific human, encapsulating their worldview through them, their own words

Someone says a thing to you strongly enough, you believe them. You take confidence for truth.

But you let people with strong words tell you what the truth is. Kings, emperors, tyrants.

It wasn’t his finest hour, and he could have said no. But he was self-aware enough to know that once warm and safe he would justify it to himself as necessary.

All of reality, which had seemed so robust and enduring, was merely the fevered dream of a dying god.

I have spent millions of years travelling the stars, experiencing everything that there is. I’ve heard a thousand voices…and all of them are mine. But now there are others.

‘Had we but world enough, and time…’