Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

They lost and they lost and they lost, and Holt and his Key Crew stayed awake and did battle against maths and the universe for thirty-seven hours. Rowing against the wind, he thought. Pulling against the tide. Recasting the jagged claws of hostile physics as dark rocks, and the stuttering instruments as sporadic lightning that simultaneously threatened them and lit their way.

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. Do not let the cost consume you.

Most of the rest of the crew were also still alive, ready to be woken and take up the slack. Most of Heorest Holt was still a functional human being, and the parts that wanted to scream and beat at the walls were locked away for now.

Other than that, it was a world deader even than dying Earth had been when they’d fled it. Seas without fish, land without grass, skies with no birds. Not even the paucity of species Earth had been left with, the opportunists and the scavengers, when humanity had finally given up on their old homeworld.

And it’s not a priority. Surviving is our priority. Frankly, let our children look into it, when we’ve built enough of a future to have children in.”

Because he believed in wishes and magic, elder gods and deus ex machina salvation. What if, buried down there, was the machina from which that deus might arise?

As though he’s one of her storybook goblins that can spin straw into gold but at too high a price.

The horror of the dream isn’t that everyone’s dead, it’s that she’s still alive.

Because the beetles are there to eat dead things and stop them piling up everywhere. But the beetles don’t know that, and to a beetle your grain store is just a lot of dead things that need eating.

She takes “the way things are” and “the way things should be,” which for all of Liff’s life have been two mostly overlapping circles, and pulls them apart a bit.

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

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.

Why else venture into the universe, after all? The new was the one great currency of a civilization that had developed beyond a need to scrabble and endure hardship.

The entity from Nod had been driven by such a lust for novelty ever since it looked out through human eyes and understood that the world it had always known was no more than a drop of water.

The militia are here for the establishment, the older Landfall families with a storied history, who stayed put and grumbled when everyone else was taking risks to grow the colony here on Imir. The punching around here only goes one way, and that’s down.

Liff is aware she’s maybe not making the best life choices, but that sort of thing falls by the wayside once you’ve decided to let yourself be guided by two magical talking ravens.

“You don’t think what they have here, their culture, their traditions, is worth preserving?” Miranda asks, because to her it absolutely is. It’s different, and difference is the only resource the universe is short of. So much of it is just empty sameness. Life is rare, and needs to be studied and admired and encouraged to be itself.

“It’s not right. We don’t have the right to destroy what they are.” “And yet the moment we do anything, that’s what we’re doing,”

They jostle and joke amongst themselves, and whoop and say in over-loud voices how this’ll show them. She knows they don’t even know who they are. But that’s not important once you’ve decided there’s an us and a them. Only the fact of the division matters.

Miranda wants to say that Portia just made everything worse, but there are four nooses dangling from the branches of the First Tree, so probably there isn’t much worse to make.

There’s nobody she can turn to in the crowd. It’s just the Crowd, a thing to itself.

It’s not our fault at all. These people can get on and die out entirely without our help.

I’ll soon scare up some data for you and then you can get back to those conclusions you’re so fond of. My premier conclusion is that it’s not going to be any better. I’m not qualified to look for “better.” I’m just after “new.”

They were birds, from a human point of view, trying very hard to be human. At the point of the Phoenix’s departure, Earth had been so much of a human world that even actual humans were finding it hard to be human enough to survive it.

So yes, the raccoons weren’t having a good time of it over on Rourke, but they lasted long enough to breed more raccoons who would continue not to enjoy themselves very much. Which was evolution’s endgame after all.

She liked to think that, despite his overweening arrogance—a trait she and Kern surely shared with the fictional doctor—even Victor Frankenstein might have softened towards his creation if he had been the last human left in a world where only monsters could survive.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,”

Alien or Earth-born or artificial, there would come a moment when your perspective flipped and you recognized the I across from you.

Their whole diasporic culture has no use for supreme beings. Still, in that moment, she calls out to the cosmos, seeking the impossible, pleading with the immutable laws of energy and time. Just like any sentient being, powerless against entropy.

“I created worlds and I was a god, and I am legion. I have responsibilities. And I need to gather my crew.”

And past the Witch’s imperious demeanour, there is loss and need and a gnawing duty. A woman trying, despite all the sharp-edged flaws in her character, to do the right thing.

And, were we philosophers, do you know what our primary emotion to such a godlike vista would be? I am agog to learn. That it’s really frustrating, because all that omniscience just means we can appreciate far more every time things go wrong.

The universe was full of things that seemed laden with intent until they turned out to be nothing more than the voice of mindless celestial mechanics. Anything too regular was likely to be natural, like the constant time-keeping of a pulsar. Anything too random was likely to be natural, no more than contours in the peachfuzz of background radiation.

They were, after all, from a culture that had struggled out of the gravity well, out of need and want, and into a realm where they could go anywhere, with all the time the universe had to offer. Curiosity was one of the few drives still unsatisfied.

With enough of us, enough pairs of memorizer and thinker, we can solve anything. Or at least botch along just about.

The history of life on Rourke is one of great congregations of noise, thousands of us shrieking at one another. In the space between each pair, a mind; in the space between all of the pairs, a plan.

“Will it be all right?” she repeats. 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.

Centuries in the simulation, but then hers is a society that doesn’t count time any more. Time is just what happens to other people on the way between planets, or while you sleep, or between tissue regeneration and re-embodying.

“The essential fallacy,” Gothi picks up, “is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.”

I have developed mental habits reliant on actually existing. Even though, by objective standards, I didn’t exist, it being only a simulation. It felt real.”

Once you’ve lived in a simulation, it becomes hard to trust the real.

Her own culture, distributed and varied, has done its level best to future-proof itself. But there will come a time, even if it’s the heat death of the universe, when they will be gone. The living and the struggle is all. The moments of joy and sorrow, not just as stepping stones to the future, but taken on their own merits.