Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9)

by James S.A. Corey

Seen in that light, maybe he wasn’t the broken part of the equation. Maybe the larger situation was bad enough that feeling as whole and sane as the man he’d been before his Laconian imprisonment would have been a sign of madness.

Fuck-it-if-it’s-not-happening-right-now was crisis thinking, and if he couldn’t break out of it, it would only lead to more crises later on.

Breaking things was always easier than building them up.

“I can’t control any of that,” Kit said. “All I can do is keep acting like the universe is going to keep existing and planning for a future in it.

Part of why I am what I am is all the bad choices my mom and dad made, and if they’d done differently, they’d still have made some mistakes somewhere along the line, and those would be part of me instead. They weren’t perfect, and we aren’t perfect.”

She remembered something she’d heard once: I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. She didn’t know where the line came from. It didn’t matter. She had a hunt to complete.

Line is from Moby Dick, said by Captain Ahab. Her hunt is a clear parallel. Similar doom foreshadowed?

She could almost imagine being a survey crew trying to keep its head down and finish its contract in the shadow of war crimes about to be committed. It was always like this. People trying to get their work done even while atrocities were blooming around them. Avoid eye contact and hope that the fire doesn’t spread to you and yours.

When he’d been a prisoner on Laconia, he’d been able to hold himself together. To rise to the occasion, plan, scheme, and even suffer with a resolve that he couldn’t find now. After he’d escaped, he’d felt euphoric. Calm and whole and returned to the life he’d given up hoping for. But the honeymoon faded, and the version of him it left behind was scarred and broken. He didn’t feel weak. He felt annihilated. Years were gone. Years of prison and torture, which had been bad, and of pretending to be an honored guest while the threat of death invisibly followed one step behind. The dancing bear years. They’d been the worst because they’d broken down his sense of himself. Of who he was. Of what was true.

“That’s it,” Naomi said. “I couldn’t put my finger on it, but that’s why I can’t do this. He’s holding a gun to their heads and then pretending that I’m the only one who can decide whether he pulls the trigger. That’s not a trust exercise. It’s just another threat.”

“You’re overthinking this, Cap’n. You got now and you got the second your lights go out. Meantime is the only time there is. All that matters is what we do during it.”

The horrors of a systemful of dead people, replayed again and again, with commentary in ten languages and a hundred political orthodoxies. The science feeds about the manner of death. The religious feeds about its spiritual meaning and what it said about the will of God. The political feeds about why it was some other ideology’s fault. She watched all of them like she was looking for something in the images of the corpses. Meaning, maybe. Or hope.

“How do we do this?” she murmured. “They all just died, and everyone just keeps doing what they were doing anyway.” “No options. We go on because we go on.”

We’re trying to do all of this with humans.

This was the life he’d dreamed of during his imprisonment. This was what he thought he’d lost forever: suffering a little insomnia while his lover of decades rested at his side. That the universe had given it back to him after he’d given up hope flooded him with a profound gratitude when it didn’t frighten him. This was so small, so precious, and so fragile.

Behind the dark-rimmed pale eyes, under the graying hair, the same reckless, holy fool she’d noticed when Captain McDowell brought him on board. Time and use had changed them, but it hadn’t changed what they were. There was joy in that. A promise.

“I always thought about how strange it would be to have that loss. I never thought about how odd we must have been to him. These weird people with twice as much world that he couldn’t conceive of. And he couldn’t. The thoughts you have depend on the brain you have. Change the brain and you change the kinds of thoughts that are possible to think.”

“How much can you change and still be you?” she asked, and it took Alex a few seconds to realize it wasn’t a rhetorical.

“Well,” he said, “people change all the time. Not changing would be weirder.

“I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.”

She was beautiful, yes, but she’d always been beautiful. When they’d been young together, they’d been beautiful just because youth had a beauty all its own. It took age to see whether the beauty could last.

Miller’s smile was enigmatic, and it looked a little like sorrow by the time it reached his eyes. “Until death all is life.”

From Don Quixote

She imagined whole stations filled with silent bodies working in perfect coordination, the need for verbal communication replaced by the direct influence of brain on brain. A single hand with billions of fingers. If that was what humanity was now, there would never be another conversation, another misunderstanding or joke or shitty pop song. She tried to imagine what it would be like for a baby born into a world like that, not as an individual but an appendage that had never known itself as anything else.

“Maybe you came through all this to understand why he did what he did. To get your head around it,” Miller said, taking his hat off and scratching the back of one ear. “You do what you have to do to fight back, or you get slaughtered. Either way, you lose what being human used to be.”

There was so much that they’d never seen or understood. They’d all just bumbled through, using the gates as shortcuts and hoping for the best. A species of beautiful idiots.

“I absolutely believe that people are more good on balance than bad,” he said. “All the wars and all of the cruelty and all of the violence. I’m not looking away from any of that, and I still think there’s something beautiful about being what we are. History is soaked in blood. The future probably will be too. But for every atrocity, there’s a thousand small kindnesses that no one noticed. A hundred people who spent their lives loving and caring for each other. A few moments of real grace. Maybe it’s only a little more good than bad in us, but…”

“I think we got lucky. I think we were one little system in a vast, unreachable universe that was always on the edge of destroying itself, and now we have thirteen hundred chances to figure out how to live with each other. How to be gentle with each other. How to get it right. It’s better odds than we had.”

“The stars are still there,” she said. “We’ll find our own way back to them.”