“Holsten stared at him for a long while, thinking through the implications of that: thinking about Earth’s long history before the fall, before the ice came. His society has possessed such a fragmented, imperfect understanding of the predecessors that they were constantly trying to ape, and did even that poor record now boil down to just himself, the contents of the one old man’s head? All that history, and if … when I die …? He did not see anyone having time to attend history classes in Karst’s new survivalist Eden.
He shivered – not from the usual human sense of mortality, but from a feeling of vast, invisible things falling away into oblivion, irretrievable and irreplaceable. Grimy he turned to the message that Alpash was now showing him.”