Locklands (The Founders Trilogy, #3)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

They say politics is the art of distributing pain. And scriving, of course, is the art of distributing intelligence.

Sancia?> she said. <Yes!> snapped her wife.

HER WIFE

How many realities have I killed now? How many stories have I suffocated and replaced in panicked moments like this, all to win this miserable war?

“When I was young,” said Polina as she crossed the room, “I thought of war in terms of swords and spears and shields. But now I know it’s maps, and more maps, and calendars and timetables, and shipping lines and item counts—and then maps, and more maps again.” She stood next to where Berenice sat. “It’s deadly dull stuff, to be sure.”

Because power and cruelty are easy, Sancia had said. What we’re making takes a shitload of work. So we must be doing the right thing.

I’m alive,> Sancia said. <That’s good enough.> Another smile, but there was a sadness in it now. <I see. There are moments when that’s enough, yes. But I find those moments are rare.> <Are they?> <Yes. Often the people here need more.>

Men came to the lands, men built in the lands, and then they built things to empty the lands of men.

namers see names written in reality all around them—and when people die around them, namers see names they shouldn’t. Names strange enough to drive them mad.

He can literately read the language of the universe omg

You’re saying your people—like, a couple thousand years ago—figured out some way to meditate their way into seeing sigils everywhere. You…You must have been the first scrivers!>

We are abandoned, he thinks, by all men and whatever god set the heart of this world ticking.

I wish I could tell the difference,> said Berenice, <between revelation and madness.

“That’s how we all think of ourselves, as people in a tale. Living our stories. But if you live long enough, you see it’s not a story at all. It just keeps going. People come and go, like butterflies in the wind. Cruelties don’t always meet justice. And maybe you’ll never meet the end you wanted, or expected, or deserve. Maybe you’ll never meet an end at all. Eventually you’re just left with scraps. Pieces of unfinished stories. Threads of tales no one ever got to live.”

We thought we could scrive our way into liberation, she thought. Into salvation. As if the city were a rig we could tamper with, and all that pain and oppression were simple sigils we could wipe out and write over.

How much we have given, she thought, trying to follow in the footsteps of clever men with clever fixes.

A people are more than just the tools they use.

“We are a dream,” whispered Tevanne. “A half thing. An unfinished work. We lie in the wastes, unwatched, uncared-for. An iteration. There must be other versions. Better ones. And those improvements—they can be written over this one. And then none of this will have ever been real.”

That is a very depressing way to look at the multiverse theory

“There are people in this world who learned the lessons I never did, the lessons that our son has learned all too late—that you are right. There is no magic fix. That a better world can only be brought by what we give to one another, and nothing more.”

A burst of atonal chiming, like the bells of a broken clock…and yet as she walked through, they stopped being atonal, and all the chimes shifted, turning into the most beautiful music that she could hear only in this place, on the other side, on the underside of everything.

Stop I’m crying 😭

But what I remember most is the feeling of aloneness. Aloneness is different from loneliness: loneliness is an emotional state, but aloneness is the intense awareness that you do not have support.

This is the curious tension of a pandemic: nothing about your experience is unique or exceptional, for it is shared by so many; and yet, you feel utterly alone.

For if the Founders Trilogy is about anything, I suppose, it is that the innovations of our species do not yield dividends on their own. They only bring prosperity when they are paired with a society, a culture, or a people who can use them to their utmost.