Arm of the Sphinx (The Books of Babel, #2)

by Josiah Bancroft

There are no devils by degree, no gentlemen thieves. There’s just strong and weak, the willing and the dead.

Every historian I’ve ever heard of has a benefactor or a master or a duty to his country. History is a love letter to tyrants written in the blood of the overrun, the forgotten, the expunged!”

It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added and removed. Wars have been aggrandized and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are re-dressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and vision and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice!

The only thing holding us together at this point is hope.” “Apparently we ran out of that.” “Impossible. We have you.” Senlin had the aggrieved expression of one unaccustomed to compliments. “I think you’re confusing hope with stubbornness, Adam.” “I’m pretty sure that’s what hope is. Stubbornness.

An hour later, Voleta found the captain beating an open book upon his table. He was so earnest in his punishment of the dead volume that he did not notice Voleta had entered his cabin until she began to cheer him on.

Civilization first came into being when two of our ancestors knocked together at the mouth of a cave, and one brute or the other uttered the immortal phrase: “No, no, I insist, after you.”

None of them knew, not really, what the Tower was about, and who ran it, and what he was willing to do to get his way. In this knowledge, she was alone, and it weighed upon her; it made her envious of their ignorance.

This was not a thing Senlin had ever expected to do. It felt unnatural—like riding a horse into a house. Yet, here he was: flying an airship into the Tower of Babel.

The monuments were too large to be observed by passing ships, and from the knees down, all those dukes and marquesses were indistinguishable and only as noble as their toes.

Weddings were so common in those early days that one could traverse the beach by leaping from bridal train to bridal train without ever touching the sand.

“Asking for directions is one thing. But asking for a handout is just m—” Edith bit down on the word madness before it escaped. “It seems a little optimistic, Captain.” “Optimistic is the word for it, Mister Winters. Optimistically, Marat will make me tea, fill our pantry, and throw open the doors to Pelphia. I hope that is the case. But I have a pessimistic solution as well. If it comes to it, I’m going to facilitate his generosity in our favor.”

“You’re not suggesting that you go on your own?” Edith said, shaking her head. “No, I’m coming with you. Permission to come with you.”

They passed smashed bowers, empty signposts, and booths that had once been filled with edibles and mementos that now bowed under mats of shining lichen.

“It’s an emu.” “How can you tell?” Senlin scuffed aside a clump of moss so she could see the machine’s planted feet. “See, it has three toes. An ostrich only has two.” “How in the world would you know that?”

“You lived with students; I lived with pirates. If beer comes out of it, I’ve heard of it.”

“Young backs have short memories,”

“Don’t be absurd. Testing for poison is a first mate’s job,” Senlin said. Edith gave him a strained look. “I was only joking!

This is the trouble with running for your life—it’s easy to lose perspective of what accounts for a life.”

Down on one knee, Iren pried nails from broken boards with a crowbar. The spikes emerged slowly and with a piercing squeal. She dropped the nails into a zinc bucket, so each scream concluded with the rat-a-tat of a snare drum.

Senlin woke feeling like the tea bag at the bottom of an empty pot: wet, heavy, and used up.

“If the point is to keep us from leaving, why not just lock the cage? That’s what it’s for! What’s the point of leaving us with a choice?” “Because we are uncertain, and he knows it. If we chose to walk out that door, they might stop us, put us in shackles, and post guards outside. And then we’d be well and truly imprisoned,” Senlin said. “But with the door open, they permit us at least the illusion of freedom. And it’s quite difficult to escape an illusion. They think we will prefer imaginary freedom to certain imprisonment.”

“You’re not going to faint again?” “I have never fainted in my life,” he said, stretching his legs over the blankets on his bed. “Well, you’ve taken some abrupt naps,”

There is no stranger privacy than the one supplied by a cloud. It is as containing as a room and as open as the sky. A cloud is intimate and exposed at once. A cloud puts a soul in a confiding mood, which is why old aeronauts stand apart when their ship hits a cloud: to keep from spilling their secrets.

“Granted. If there isn’t peril, then it isn’t an adventure.”

That’s the trouble with prisons; they’re full of prisoners, people who have forgotten or surrendered their character.

The trouble with intelligent people is that they always think they could do a better job if they were in charge. But intelligence is not the same thing as vision or shrewdness.

The tradition among libraries of boasting about the number of volumes in their collection is well established, but surely, it is not aggregation that makes a library; it is dissemination. Perhaps libraries should bang on about how many volumes are on loan, are presently off crowding nightstands, and circulating through piles on the mantel, and weighing down purses.

The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand: They show us where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.

Dignity is entirely ephemeral; it is like the dust of a butterfly’s wing. Once shed, it is impossible to recover.

Ah, this is the devil of writing in ink! A pencil allows one to speculate and retract, to play a card and then renege. But ink immortalizes gestures and moods and muttered truths. If pencils were all we had, I suspect there would be far fewer books.

When humanity ceases to aspire, it begins to decline. Do you know why the status quo is so tyrannical and nauseating? Because it does not exist! There is no stasis in the world, and certainly not where humans are involved. The status quo is just a pleasing synonym for decay.