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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A Hegemonic dealing with another cultist seemed like a combined politeness and Bible-study contest. Except instead of a Bible, it was whatever cult wrong-headedness these loons had cooked up together to explain why they’d signed themselves over to a bunch of high-tech shellfish.

His eyes were fifty per cent naively earnest and the rest pure bobbins. She wanted to tell him, Look, they’re clams. You’re kneeling before an altar that’s mostly all-you-can-worship seafood buffet.

Be diplomatic. Be firm. I’d rather you didn’t have to kill anyone but sometimes you can’t mine without explosives.

His hands gave the orders, shut down the ship’s higher systems and spun the great ring of the gravitic drive so that it reached out in the impossible direction, touching the point where real things shouldn’t go.

Halfway down, a voice issued from speakers set into the wall. “Far enough. Let me scan you,” in tones as blandly pleasant as Kit’s translator. “Scan what you like, we’re armed to fuck,” Olli said cheerfully.

Her people had no idea, honestly, just how much invention necessity could be mother of.

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 she seemed so weirdly clueless half the time. The other half, of course, she was punching or shooting someone.

How much of a hothouse flower are we? There was no way of knowing until the blooms started to wither.

His stare intensified. “You’re giving me the choice?” “Let us say we are at least allowing your preference to influence our decision.”

Maybe she would live. Maybe she would learn to see the universe like he did, and God help her if so.

In his head a grid of fiery lines had appeared, like red-hot cheesewire, and he felt his brain was being forced through it.

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.

The third death had come quite soon after. One of the Colonial Ints had simply stepped in front of the same crystalform and, even as her fellows were shouting at her, let it tear her apart. Her arms had been wide open as though greeting a lover.

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

“The answer can only be situational,” Colvari reflected. “Does any entity really know what it would risk oblivion for, until the moment has arrived?”

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.

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.

It’s happening. He didn’t know what but it most definitely was.

Medical readouts showed his heart was still beating and he hadn’t exploded any blood vessels in his brain, so she’d count that as a win.

She wanted to just march up to the stupid bastards and shout in their faces about common enemies and there being a time and place to enact this kind of nonsense, but it was abundantly clear they didn’t care.

The silence that followed was filled with terrible possibilities.

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

They had been so worried about covering every potential base, to ensure the survival of the species, that they’d ended up with the action plan of: First we have to set everything else on fire.

“Hope you brought a friend,” she hissed. Solace weighed Mr. Punch in her hands. “We’re basically going down in flames, is that the plan?” “What is it you bitches say? Prêt à combattre?” “Prêt, Mother.”

“Such protestations from a kindred soul,” the Hiver chimed, “remind us why we love you, who will not accept the trammels of the universe but instead take arms against the very stars. For this rebellion, know you are forgiven.”

While I appreciate that leaping to assume autocratic authority at the first whiff of opportunity is in general bad for the future of civilization, I’ll make the exception this one time.

No matter how hard the law, no matter how iron the statute, honour came first. She reckoned that was how places like this could be so fussy and formal all the rest of the time. There was this outlet for all their violence and blood, just beneath the surface.

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

and she wanted to be the one who did, not just the one who ordered and watched.

The glow ran through greens and yellows and then into eye-wrenching hues she couldn’t name and would see in her nightmares.

“Then she showed me where I could just walk out into the light and die. I stood there for a long time, believe me. And I’ll go back there, probably, to take that last step. But for now… I thought I could do something to help.” “Help Ahab?” “Help the universe. Because nothing I ever did for Hugh or the Broken Harvest ever did. And that was what I wanted to get away from. Government wetwork or just murdering people for some crazy gangster.

“The Razor is not a criminal. It’s an angel. A fallen angel cast down from Heaven to do the things that the Essiel are forbidden to do.”

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.

He’d looked into her sere, gaunt face and wondered just how many scores Chief Laery was about to settle with the universe at large.