Redemption Ark (Revelation Space, #2)

by Alastair Reynolds

If she had not been the Inquisitor she would have been terrified of herself.

Khouri had tasted the minds of those machines briefly, feeling the furious predatory chill of ancient recordings. They were like the minds of pack animals, ancient and patient and drawn to the dark. Their minds were mazes of instinct and hungry intelligence, utterly unencumbered by sympathy or emotion. They howled across the silent steppes of the galaxy to each other, summoning themselves in great numbers when the bloody stench of life again troubled their wintry sleep.

From where Clavain stood, it was like watching fireworks above a remote town. From the colours of Agincourt to the flames of Guernica, to the pure shining light of Nagasaki like a cleansing sword blade catching the sun, to the contrails etched above the skies of the Tharsis Bulge, to the distant flash of heavy relativistic weapons against a starscape of sable-black in the early years of the twenty-seventh century: Clavain did not need to be reminded that war was horrific, but from a distance it could also have a terrible searing beauty.

secrets so shattering that they merited layers of hierarchy within an otherwise omniscient hive mind.

Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.

We feel it every moment of our lives, from the moment we’re born. Push against a pebble and it moves. Push against a boulder and it doesn’t, or at least not very much. By the same token, if a boulder’s rushing towards you, you aren’t going to be able to stop it very easily. Matter is lazy, Remontoire. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it’s doing, whether that’s sitting still or moving.

Inertia isn’t a property of matter as such, but a property of the quantum vacuum in which matter is embedded.

For the galaxy, as much as it was a machine for making metals, and thereby complex chemistry, and thereby life, could also be seen as a machine for making wars.

“I think they’d be better off in the control of orthodox humanity.”

“My name is H, Mr. Clavain. At least, that is the name under which I currently choose to do business. Shall we do business?”

Clavain observed that H walked with the tiniest of limps, caused by a slight imbalance in length between one leg and the other that he managed to overcome most of the time.

... but Tanner was the one who lost the leg

In Clavain’s experience, it was the less comforting possibility that generally turned out to be the case. It was the way the universe worked.

Intelligence, even machine intelligence, was something that could not be allowed to infect the galaxy until the coming crisis had been averted. Intelligence was, quite literally, its own worst enemy.

In operation, the machinery would move with respect to itself, executing a hypnotic thresherlike motion, whisking and slicing the vacuum. In the midst of that scything motion, a quark-sized pocket of state-four quantum vacuum would be conjured into existence. It would be a pocket of vacuum in which inertial mass was, in the strict mathematical sense, imaginary.

He had killed the thing he most loved in the universe.

I actually have a slight lisp. Even play it up sometimes. I suppose you could say it’s part of my character.”

the presence of the wolves explained one of the great cosmic mysteries, a paradox that had haunted human minds since the dawn of spaceflight. The galaxy teemed with stars, and around many of those stars were worlds. It was true that not all of those worlds were the right distance from their suns to kindle life, and not all had the right fractions of metals to allow complex carbon chemistry. Sometimes the stars were not stable enough for life to gain a toehold. But none of that mattered, since there were hundreds of billions of stars. Only a tiny fraction had to be habitable for there to be a shocking abundance of life in the galaxy. But there was no evidence that intelligent life had ever spread from star to star, despite the fact that it was relatively easy to do. Looking out into the night sky, human philosophers had concluded that intelligent life must be vanishingly rare; that perhaps the human species was the only sentient culture in the galaxy. They were wrong, but they did not discover this until the dawn of interstellar society. Then, expeditions started finding evidence of fallen cultures, ruined worlds, extinct species. There were an uncomfortably large number of them. It was not that intelligent life was rare, it seemed, but that intelligent life was very, very prone to becoming extinct. Almost as if something was deliberately wiping it out. The wolves were the missing element in the puzzle, the agency responsible for the extinctions. Implacable, infinitely pati...

Grief and remorse, loss and pain, sadness and sorrow were at least as powerful shapers of events as anger, greed and retribution.

All stars already sang to themselves. The outer layers of every star rang constantly at a multitude of frequencies, like an eternally chiming bell. The great seismic modes tracked oscillations that plunged deep into the star, down to the caustic surface just above its fusing core. Those oscillations were modest in a star of dwarf type, like Delta Pavonis. But the singer tuned itself to them, swinging around the star in its equatorial rotation frame, pumping gravitational energy into the star at precisely the right resonant frequencies to enhance the oscillations. The singer was what the mammals would have called a graver, a gravitational laser. In the heart of the singer a microscopic closed cosmic string, a tiny relic of the rapidly cooling early universe, had been tugged out of the seething foam of the quantum vacuum. The string was barely a scratch compared with the largest cosmic flaws, but it would suffice for the singer’s purposes. It was tugged and elongated like a loop of toffee, inflated with the same vacuum phase energy that the singer tapped for all its needs, until it had macroscopic size and macroscopic mass-energy density. Then the string was deftly knotted into a figure-of-eight configuration and plucked, generating a narrow cone of throbbing gravitational waves. The oscillations increased in amplitude, slowly but surely. At the same time, chirping gravitational pulses with precision and elegance, the singer sculpted the patterns themselves, causing new vibr...

The twenty-first century’s global wars were less relevant; with sub-orbital waverider drones, no point on the planet had been more than forty minutes away from annihilation. But the solar system wars of the latter half of that century offered more useful parallels. Clavain thought of the Earth-Moon secession crisis, or the battle for Mercury, noting victories and failures and the reasons for each. He thought of Mars, too, of the battle against the Conjoiners at the end of the twenty-second century. The sphere of combat had reached far above the orbits of Phobos and Deimos, so that the effective crossing time for the fastest single-person fighters had been three or four hours. There had been timelag problems, too, with line-of-sight communications blocked by huge clouds of silvered chaff.

It’s the people who don’t worry—those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right—they’re the ones that cause the problems.

Sentience that bowed down and accepted its own extinction—no matter what the long-term arguments, no matter how good the greater cause—was not the kind of sentience he was interested in preserving.

It might be pointless. It might just be postponing the inevitable. But if that was the case, what was the harm in trying?