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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

It’s amazing how someone can support your culture and ways absolutely up until the point you ask her to actually live by them. But that’s not you. You’re your own people.

Back in the first war, when the Architects had been twisting human worlds one at a time, with a lazy indifference to how many millions were still on them. Back when nobody had any hope and every mad plan was worth a try. Idris had already heard that they were wrecking people’s brains in an attempt to replicate whatever it was that made Saint Xavienne special. He hadn’t wanted to have his own mind destroyed, of course he hadn’t. But he’d signed up because you had to do that thing, sometimes, that was bigger than what you wanted.

He didn’t want to be the centre of the universe’s attention. He wanted it to all be over. And maybe Arc Pallator held the key to that. This was enough to tip the scales and get him on board.

Yes, yes, he told himself irritably, and then, quoting an old spacer song half the Colonial Sphere knew the words to, We’re all acquainted with the tragedy of being you.

The ruins had been dead but something had still been alive about them. Something had been plucking at his mind, telling him things he couldn’t understand.

He was the canary in the mine, and you always brought the canary. Nobody cared that the canary didn’t much enjoy its job and would maybe like to be doing something else.

There were people everywhere. Ruins were, Idris felt, meant to be creepy and silent and solemn, but humans had obviously been living here for a while, a couple of generations at least, adding layer after layer of convenience to the ancient stubs of walls and structures. There were pipes and conduits, solar collectors and generators, water tanks, all of it as ramshackle and random as a spacer could have felt at home with. And there was a whole community here—not just a bunch of old monks venerating the ages, but families, children.

In the back of his mind he’d always seen the cult as shysters trying to sell something—specifically, a way of life under the alleged protection of the Essiel. He’d never spared much thought for those who’d bought into that way of life. But here they were, skulking about in the ruins of a long-dead race, praising the star-gods who could no longer save them.

Olli felt she’d seen enough shit for one day, but then the abiding lesson of the universe was there was always more shit.

“We really are learning a lot. I’m learning. I sometimes feel… it’s so close, as though I just need to look under the right rock to find the universe’s user manual. But it’s a ruin, it’s dead. Even as informative as it is, it’s just echoes we’re hearing. We can’t shock whatever it is back to life. And if we could…” He balled his fists impotently. “We can’t. It’s not speaking to us like I need it to. It won’t help me understand.” “Like you say, it’s a ruin. There is no it,” Solace pointed out. “But it’s… there is. Because the shape of what was here remains. Between the walls. In the cracks. And I think if, if somehow we could, if one of us could do something big enough, in just the right way, we could understand it all… and… Damn words… There aren’t the words, Solace. I can’t tell you.”

Yes, the universe was built on a certain common logic that could be expressed by numbers, but those numbers themselves were an arbitrary construct that was culturally specific.

His heart sank to see it, to hear the sound of a city-full of people lamenting, echoing back and forth across the broken walls of the dead place. Go unto the Temple. What would that accomplish, precisely, if the Architect did smite the world beneath it?

The Greater Good morphed into self-interest so easily; human history was full of it.

Idris saw cultists all around him dropping, eyes rolling, some kind of ecstasy or passion overcoming them, frothing, fitting, oblivious. Only he and Emmaneth were left untouched, heretics at a second coming. And then they had left the tortured world behind and it was just him, alone in an empty temple. Him and unspace, and the thing they always said couldn’t really live there, but did.

What was the use of a mad scientist if they suddenly decided to start making sane decisions?

she’d been taught to think that the Parthenon were the right and the good. And rather than that meaning they got to do what they liked, and their actions would be whitewashed as right and good because of who they were, it meant they had to actually do right and good things. Active virtue, defending humanity and never, ever giving in to the temptation that Doctor Parsefer had strewn in their path when she’d cooked up her perfect vat-born warrior angels. If these angels were ever to fall, we would be such a force for evil in the universe. 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.

The Originators were working from the other side of the boundary. All their ruins, all their works were just the tiniest intrusion into the real. Their civilization was never a real thing, and perhaps that’s where they went, in the end. They ceased, and left only the Throughways and whatever litter they hadn’t been able to reclaim.