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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Architects had returned.

Because unspace wasn’t real. And when you entered unspace, you weren’t real either. You existed only in the bubble of your own consciousness and, even if you gripped the hand of your neighbour painfully tight, as many of them did, those fingers would become empty the moment the ship dropped from the real.

Solace grimaced, waiting for Olli to take exception, but the specialist just said, “Fuck, right back at you.”

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 he’d signed up because you had to do that thing, sometimes, that was bigger than what you wanted.

No, we never want to go, but we do it anyway.

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.

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.

“Well, I mean, it’s interesting in itself. Because unspace doesn’t work like the real, so finding something that can deform it is a clue to how the Throughways might have been made—most people think the Originators made the Throughways, right? Though I guess there’s never been any solid evidence of that. But more than that,” Idris added hurriedly, seeing her roll her eyes, “it gives us a new hypothesis to link Originators with Architects.”

They were clustered around larger plants, which looked like distressingly phallic mushrooms ten metres tall and up.

Reading this made me laugh out loud.

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

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.

These five went on to comfortably describe this ark future, which would be absolutely delineated by their own choices and commands. By the end of their meeting, they had seamlessly transitioned from trying to prepare for the worst to looking forward to it. And from there to actively trying to bring it about.

Something vast and dreadful was going to happen, and it knotted his innards, setting his augmented heart racing so hard he wondered if Trine was getting feedback.

Go unto the Temple.

It had six limbs, and the foremost were huge scythe-ended hooks. Of course they were. Where were all the nice, harmless species the Architects had obliterated?

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

Live by the bloody sword indeed.

“What is it you bitches say? Prêt à combattre?” “Prêt, Mother.”

The shells began to part. Kris heard things snap and tear. Then with immaculate slowness, The Radiant Sorteel, the Provident and the Prescient, was torn in half.

“You got me here! Here I am! Not going anywhere, not escaping, really need to crap!”

“It hurts,” she said. “If you even survive the process. And if the Tothir does too. You feel its pain as well as yours, all the time. You get used to bearing it but you never stop feeling it. All the time, Menheer Int.

I killed a Mordant House man who’d been sent to kill me, just so I could kill myself with the poisons they’d given him to kill me with. Fucking stupid, right?

“They simply cannot exist at the same point. You can’t, as it were, hide your face behind your hands, if you want to look into the abyss at the same time.”

Captain Ahab

She shook her head, perhaps impressed at finding something in the universe as vitriolic as she was.

As above, so below.

Unspace was as it was because it was being held in a shape.

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

The third Voyenni had taken a whole panel off the wall and was going at it with a toolkit and extreme prejudice.

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.

“Idris! You have lived within the engine’s heart. 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!”