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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Everyone reported the same experience: human, Hanni, Castigar, even the cyborg intelligences of the Hivers. The illusion was that you shared the vastness with something. That it became aware of you and came closer, from outside the ship to inside, from inside to lurking in the next room. From the next room to standing at your very shoulder. And the one key characteristic of this presence that everyone imagined was that it was intolerable. It represented the worst, absolutely unabideable thing for any given observer. When it finally caught up and was there, breathing on your neck, darkening the corner of your vision… When the choice was to turn and gaze upon it or…

Havaer had his gun out, just to establish what sort of team meeting this was going to be. Kenyon didn’t, because he hadn’t realized he was going to that kind of meeting, but he was very obviously within a hair of going for it.

“You didn’t get court-martialled, then,” Kris observed. “I’m not technically in the army, so it would have been court-civilianned,” Mundy noted. “May still happen. Know any good lawyers?”

“I am sorry, and it’s no disrespect to the spacer traditions. But he’s dead, you see,” they explained in a small voice. “And I wasn’t finished with him. I was going to debate him at conferences. I was going to outdo him in the academiotypes. I was going to refute his theories. Because he owned me. I was his thing. He taught me a great deal and if not for him I’d not be me and not have achieved what I have. But I was his property, first and foremost. When I finally rejoin the Assembly and then instantiate out again it won’t matter, but for as long as I’m this me, I carry him with me. I thought this would help me put him down, but I don’t think it has.”

He had an idea how all of this would look on his permanent record, and his career prospects might actually be better if he died at some point in the process.

She gave them two hours of her time, in fact, sitting up on a chill little rooftop terrace looking out over the wine-dark waves—literally, given the deep red of the local plankton-level life. Pink-marbled icebergs drifted in the light of the declining sun, and they were able to watch teams of little boats tack and skim.

Despite the alleged rough and tumble of a spacer’s life, it wasn’t often she got to express to the universe just how pissed off she was at how shit most of it was.

The printer finished up, and a little silvered tray extended. On it was a knife, Scintilla duelling standard, made out of hard plastic. Kris picked it up and slipped it into her sleeve, feeling disproportionate comfort from its slight weight. She then heard running feet and shouting voices, not too many doors away from hers. Bring it, she thought. Things were about to get litigious.