Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

You will fail, and when you do, you must do everything you can to fail as little as possible. Don’t let the failure get its teeth into you. You will make decisions that come with a cost. That is Command.

Even though the scale of their losses was so great—almost thirteen thousand hopeful colonists who had survived two thousand six hundred years of space travel, only to be murdered by the simple act of trying to slow down.

Things fall apart, though, and entropy is the landlord whose rent always gets paid.

Each of the humans was like a universe, and so the culture set out on a great voyage of exploration, until it found the human brain and discovered what thought was, and memory, and the wider reaches of creation. And some unpleasantness ensued after that.

We travel because we wish to find out. We call our discoveries across the stars, each to each. We come running at the promise of something new. We seek for every possibility of life and sentience, because the universe is vast and cold and mostly empty, and variance from that void is to be treasured.

And Kern was always Kern’s harshest critic.

Portiid Understandings were like domesticated herds of dumb beasts to her sentience.

she could not be defined as a discrete entity at all; she was an experience that was aware it was being experienced.

She wonders how many beetles fell in and drowned before some freak mutation provided the right organization of hairs to permit this, and here it is, just one more plague for the tired people of Landfall.

The beetles are starving, and yet having a bumper year, because their grubs do well in rotten wood while the adults need other sustenance. A perfect biological storm caused by the ecological cascade that is sweeping down on the colony.

Expand the planet’s impoverished biodiversity.

Beetles parasitizing beetles parasitizing beetles, all the way down.

don’t remember you hating enough last time.

Although there’s half the town assembled and she’s just one woman, she makes a game try of it.

Paul is fighting, constantly on the verge of squirming out of the grip of his captors. His high voice gibbers over the sound of the crowd, calling out desperately. They can barely hold him. It’s as though every joint is doubled and tripled or he has nothing but gristle instead of bones.

More screaming follows, from a more unified emotional compass. Because something dreadful is happening to the body.

Don’t deny my lived experience.

You shouldn’t call her the Witch. That’s impolitic.

We are the eye with which the universe beholds itself. What? Poetry. Another human thing you don’t understand.

a crust of a thing built up over the things humans left us with.

Identity could be a hard thing to pin down, and for a protracted period of time they weren’t quite sure who they were supposed to be.

They sorted through all the different dreams as they organized themselves, an ontogeny that recapitulated their personal phylogeny.

Their seething plurality must be tamed until all of its roiling shapes could be hidden behind a single mask.

they were a substrate that only found meaning and expression when it was being used.

She was replicating Human pathways of thought, but she wasn’t Human, yet. Decanting into a body shouldn’t have been strictly necessary, but the container gave a shape to the contained.

This new crop of corvids seemed to have higher standards than the generation which had been driven out into the wilderness. They’d fixed the power and turned the heaters back on.

the adaptable species that had found ways to fit in amidst the cracks; to use what people left behind, to eat the waste that people didn’t want. They jostled for wing-space with the gulls and pigeons, fought the rats for leavings.

The corvids, though. After knowing the comparative luxury of human leavings, they had been thrust into this hellscape, two by two, and most of them had died. Which is also the story of evolution. The survivors had been those who didn’t die, which in most cases meant they were able to live slightly longer with the products of an alien geochemistry infiltrating their bodies, whilst still hunting out food in a wasteland and staying together long enough to raise a new generation.

As her learning developed, she began to see herself as a latter-day Frankenstein, whose creation has shambled home from the icy wastes for a final confrontation. Save that, instead of horror, it brought a kind of hope.

But sometimes a little monstrosity is what you need.

A perfect balance of opposed and equal neuro-divergence.

Humans were an ecosystem. In the case of the Nodan microbial entity, this turned out to be literal, but even back on Earth humans created challenges and opportunities for other species.

Their places and modes of life were rough bricks, in between which were gaps and niches that other creatures could adapt to

obsessively catalogued and analysed by one half of the communal Corvid brain. It was then passed over for the other half to consider. What use can we put this to? What patterns can we find? They investigated the last little redoubt of living humans and saw similar patterns, but ones that were complete where their former discoveries had been abandoned in disrepair.

precisely where any actual thought lay, between the Corvids’ two disparate mindsets.

What had seemed to be a perfect civilization, complete with a recognizable technology and language, just dissolved into mechanistic repetition and instinct.

The avian lords of Rourke could hold a human-sounding conversation for an age and then just break apart into a ...

Kern was always up for sharing bad news.

Kern, the bitch that you are :)

Especially as everything on Earth seemed to be about bad things happening to people.

The spectrum of Paul’s skin told everyone in no uncertain terms that he disagreed. His arms were already doodling plans for planetfall, contact, return signals. Paul’s self-appointed role in most discussions was to disagree. He spent most of his life in enthusiastic disagreement with himself even, higher mind against tentacles and all of it written out on his skin.

Paul!

Anyone else only had to advance a suggestion and he’d find logical and emotional counterpoints—frequently mutually antagonistic as well. Small wonder it had taken Miranda’s base stock so long—and so many tragedies—before they had been able to assimilate an Octopus mind.

By the time it leaked out of the atmosphere to their instruments, it meant almost nothing. Small talk, logistics, arrangements, uninformative without the social context which birthed them. No broadcast media, no great datasphere to raid for perspective.

Miranda was terrified and she was trapped in the persona of Miranda and—

Down there was something that could only be characterized, even to the microbial substrate that was pretending to be Miranda, as alien

It’s as though she was dreaming twice.

Filling her mind with impossible things. She has a story in her head that’s not in the book, one of an icy world and a dying town and a great wheeling congregation of birds. Not an unkindness, say the voices from her other dream, but a kindness of ravens.

A gathering of birds, two by two. A host which became a recording medium, carrying a kind of humanity down the generations. Even when the actual humans were all gone.

there is a Wolf (there isn’t a Wolf) then it is in here with her, in everything. The very air is its breath, the dreams of Landfall its thoughts. Somehow.

Then the ground beneath her rolls, the horizon rising like a crashing wave above her, driving down on her with broken branches and stones and a suffocating tide of mud. And darkness. Back to the darkness, in the end.

Or possibly running away from the impossible elemental manifestation of Avrana Kern,