Eyes of the Void (The Final Architecture, #2)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Sentience imposed itself on the skin of unspace. It resounded through all those non-existent spaces.

lifetime in the shadow of lost homes and twisted worlds. The whole Naeromathi species was living in trauma, staggering from system to system, devouring and building more shell-shocked cyborgs to carry on the hopeless fight.

A castle from the worst sort of fairytales, spearing up into the sky, its twisted spires erupting from the glassy black rock.

The sky was full of those monstrous hell-flowers, great glass-plate petals and leaves overlapping and poisoning the light so that it rained on her like visible corruption. Beyond them, smudged and blurred until its fires were filthy, was the great angry ember of the system’s sun.

The worst planet in the universe. Yet she and her companions weren’t dead. The fires of that sun and the radiation it sparked from th...

And yet it was all leading somewhere. The arrangement drew the eye. It had a centre, and once she’d realized that, it was hard not to think of the whole static assembly as orbiting it.

Bring it, she thought. Things were about to get litigious.

But I’d rather death than to live forever as a gangster’s pet monster.”

The planet is trying to take this place apart, and there’s no corridor into space,”

This is a mad place. It will make us all crazy.

It was a terrible thing to look into the heart of your culture and know that you were intended for monstrosity and only an active devotion to the good of others would keep you from it, even when those others hated you.

We had to interpret it, squint through the numbers until we worked out what we were looking at. And we did, in the end. It just wasn’t what we thought.”

You have seen what is here on this world. You understand the universe’s sole truth! Nothing matters!” Ahab’s voice vibrated the floor and walls. “That is the secret. Nothing matters!”

“Nothing matters,” Shinandri echoed, but in a different tone, a speculative one. He understood. Unspace, the Originator walls, the Throughways, the universe, from the void between the stars to the whirling emptiness of atoms, it was all about the nothing and how you arranged it. Which meant that there were no walls at all, if you could just bend the pieces of nothing the right way.

The Machine was an eye into unspace, but it was such by virtue of being a gravitic engine, focusing its might upon the very boundary between real and unreal.

that the Machine used to focus its immaterial eye.

Finally there was the universe itself, in its precisely strung-out scatter of tiny distortions, to the nothing that were stars and planets ad infinitum, all set out to some plan or

Some plan, he thought, helplessly losing traction against the funnel of nothing, with the Presence rising beneath him. Ahab is right: nothing matters. Shinandri is right: it’s the precise arrangeme...

He wanted to tell them to brace themselves, to warn everyone this wouldn’t work, and that he was just about to accelerate the end of all of them. Or he might possibly murder half the planet, themselves included, through some spectacular release of energy. Or he’d accomplish nothing at all.

Gravity was no longer their tame dog, and every open space became a battleground for changing weather, winds that scoured past them and tore people from their feet or tried to suck them away into the abyss.

“I am speaking to you as the human element in a new alliance that has come together to deal with the threat the Architects pose to all life.

He didn’t want to take the war to the Architects. He didn’t want to be any part of what might be genocide. But neither the universe nor the war was done with him yet.