Inhibitor Phase (Revelation Space, #4)

by Alastair Reynolds

‘Perhaps they don’t trust you enough to take the game seriously.’ ‘But you did?’ ‘No, but a poor chance in a weighted game is better than no chance at all. Shall we get this over with?’

And you know the slower, more agonising sort of terror that lies in the act of hiding – hiding for years or decades, never daring to make a single mistake. That terror that seeps into every thought, every dream. The terror that underlines every pleasure, the terror that negates hope, the terror that stains every joy with the knowledge that it may all soon end, and horribly. But this is the counterpoint: the truth that we must also carry within us. The understanding that for all they have done to us, for all they have brought us to the whimpering edge of annihilation, they’re not invulnerable. That we can kill them, and we shall.’

She looked at me patiently. ‘Let me explain something about survival. You do not worry about the third or fourth stepping stone until you have successfully traversed the first and second.

The exact details of our flight’s end stages were therefore impossible to predict in advance, giving us no way to be sure when to set the revival clocks.

Let the ship decide?

Mars already had a long and bewildering history of ambition, conquest and abject, harrowing failure. The Muskies, with their cultish, over-reaching aspirations, were just one small chapter in that narrative.

but the main thing is this: we’re not a bunch of identical black cubes with only one idea in the universe. We’re messy and broken and we make stupid mistakes but we aren’t stupid, mindless machines that are too dumb to realise their programming no longer makes any sense. We’re people. Fish people, pig people, people-people, creepy-zombie-spider-people . . .

‘Does it help our chances, to constantly mention how terrible it is out there?’ Pinky asked. ‘Or could we, you know, take that as read?’