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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

He’d never realized before how much his assessment of people was based on their wealth.

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

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.

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.

‘We need to get off-planet. Let me call my ship,’ he begged, but the Tothiat only smiled. ‘Menheer,’ she said. ‘Have you no faith?’ And a smile that could only have been nine parts insane.

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

‘Based on our brief acquaintance so far we suggest you won’t want to know, once you know, but until you know, you’ll want to know. If you know what we mean.’

Because it’s hard, when you’re not finished with someone. Like a book with the final chapters deleted. You want to believe there’s an intact copy out there, somehow.

She asked precisely none of these things, however, because they were human questions, and this was not human business.

Not the Architects. Not the Originators. The universe itself. Because they were both part of it, and you couldn’t know them unless you understood the whole.

Solace was one of those agonizers who used hand-wringing as a substitute for actual conscience,

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

Solace was standing helpless in the middle of it. She was the Executor, the officer in charge, and that was her place. Except in her heart she was still just a Myrmidon, Heaven’s Sword Sorority, Basilisk Division, and she wanted to be the one who did, not just the one who ordered and watched.

He needed to know. He had to discover the truth behind the Architects and their masters. Though he’d tell himself it was to save the universe from them, in reality he just wanted to know.

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.

‘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.