Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Portiids’ own ancestral faith turned out to be in the divine nature of Avrana Kern, and meeting their goddess cured them of that in short order.

Kern was God to Portia’s people. But that was a very long time ago. Portia closes the breech of her gun with a snap, as though about to go off and commit deicide that very moment.

Paul is away in Landfall with his constant attendants, working on a civic mural the prosperous citizens have commissioned.

There is something writhing out there in the bean patch. There are clawing hands reaching from the potato graves. Shapes are forming out of the protean earth, humping and dissolving as the rain beats them down.

“Nice?” the Witch demands, because witches are many things, but nice isn’t one of them.

there is only misery there, the sadness of lost fragments trying to find a way home.

A woman trying, despite all the sharp-edged flaws in her character, t...

Maybe that was unfair, but Kern will be Kern. She wouldn’t want to go and see how well the small-h humans had done, but conceivably she might want to go and see how badly. Except, if one were to parse the origin story of Kern very closely, looking into all the gaps between the few words of it she had preserved, one might tease out an odd little story of a conflicted woman who wanted to be God.

But only because God gets to create new life, and newness and life were things that she valued. Doctor Avrana Kern was a difficult entity to understand, but Miranda had a hundred perspectives on her, and between them all she thought she had a handle on the irascible old intellect.

From a practical point of view, the real difficulty with everyone being descended from those original few is that every little question of property devolves into a multi-handed inheritance dispute, blooming from increasingly impenetrable family trees.

Spiders and octopuses and crows, oh my!

Naming something gives you power over it, after all.

Because sometimes non-neurotypicality is what you need.

One thing about making deals with inexplicable things in the stories is that, if you’re not careful, you can receive something that is simultaneously exactly what you asked for, and not remotely what you wanted.

Somewhere in the distance, and retreating, she hears a lonely howl that echoes from horizon to horizon, but is only in her head. Betrayed, abandoned, cut out of the future, forced back into the landscape.

They stretch their wings. They don’t answer. They’re birds, after all. What could they have to say? Heavily, with the weariness of the ages, they lurch their bodies into the air and ascend, wings pummelling at the sky until they’re just dots. Until ...

alien clothes for an alien being which only thinks it’s human. And yet human feelings tear her up from inside. Portiid feelings too. The wild bright riot of an Octopus heart. Because empathy is the cornerstone of what her composite people have made together,

Even for a species careless about personal borders, she’d gone beyond a new frontier. She’d done what Kern did long before her, in fact, however unwittingly. She’d left her flesh behind,

been a person to them. She’d just been data.

Even Kern, who might be expected to have been more sympathetic towards the plight of a simulated intellect, hadn’t been much moved.

Sometimes the friends we meet along the way were inside us all along…

“It’s not really the existential problem you think it is,” Kern tells her. This is the splinter-Kern, the instance that was hived off the ship’s main mind and sent down to run the rescue effort. She was recovered with considerably less fuss, given that her nature is more compatible with the medium.

starving urchin in the ruins of her civilization, last living human

“I don’t have feelings,” Kern says. “I mean, I could, if I wanted. I’ve dabbled. It didn’t go well.

You’re an alien symbiote incorporating an encoded memory of a human woman, whom you’re currently simulating with sufficient fidelity that you can believe you’re her.

They are about to introduce it to the wider universe.