The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

She’d done it. She’d succeeded catastrophically.

the ratio of the circle’s circumference to its diameter, three point one four. A number representing the portions of the body, the philosopher Iri anEnna had said. One part of water, one of air, one of flesh, and a little fraction of mystery.

Baru ignored him. That detail was inconvenient to the story she was telling.

where memory was like a house you arranged for the benefit of those who lived in it, not a museum to leave untouched.

A soul is simply the text of a person’s inner law, and a mind is the act of reading that law into the world.

But what he proposed was an act of cosmic hubris. It was like rewriting the end of a story to change its beginning. Like reaching up with your finger and blotting out the moon.

Szeti shrieked in bad harmony with the man whose face was burning off.

“How? How is it clever to do whatever your ancestors teach you?” “Because your ancestors are smarter than you. Not any one of them, but all together.

Yes, happiness was rarer than suffering—that was simply a fact of mathematics; happiness required a narrow range of conditions, and suffering flourished in all the rest.