Redemption Ark Quotes

“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.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Matter is lazy. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it's doing, whether that's sitting still or moving. We call that laziness inertia, but that doesn't mean we understand it. For a thousand years we've labelled it, quantified it, caged it in equations, but we've still only scratched the surface of what it really is.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Well," she said, "I see it hasn't got a fuck of a lot better since I was away.”
― Alastair Reynolds , Redemption Ark

“The ship had always been vast and intricate, its topology as unfathomable as the abandoned subway system of a deserted metropolis. It had been a ship haunted by many ghosts, not all of which were necessarily cybernetic or imaginary. Winds had sighed up and down its kilometres of empty corridors. It was infested with rats, stalked by machines and madmen. It had moods and fevers, like an old house.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“I am not cruel,” he said. “Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“[Lack of ambition is for baseline humans.]”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“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 patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“We’ve managed to do without intelligent machines until now, Skade. Not because we fear them but because we know that any intelligent entity must choose its own destiny. Yet that servitor doesn’t have any free will, does it? Just intelligence. The one without the other is a travesty. We’ve gone to war over less.]”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Madness, yes . . . but heartfelt madness.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Behold, Mr. Clavain: Chasm City. A place I have to come to know and, while not actually love, perhaps not to detest with quite the same missionary zeal as when I first arrived.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“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.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Partnerka Clavaina została chirurgicznie zmodyfikowana w ten sposób, że mogła przyjąć w macicy żywy mózg po operacji będącej prostym odwróceniem cesarskiego cięcia - zabieg wykonywał Clavain. Ciało mężczyzny zostawili na miejscu, by znaleźli je strażnicy. Następnie Hybrydowcy sklonowali dla tego człowieka nowe ciało i wpakowali do środka ciężko doświadczony mózg.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“He had done what he could, and the emotional burden had cost him terribly, and he did not think he had the energy to do it one more time. It was enough that he had not totally failed this time.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“This entire drama concerned only the local group of galaxies. Out there—not just tens, but hundreds of millions of light years away—there were other such groups, clumps of one or two dozen galaxies bound together in darkness by their mutual self-gravity. Too far to imagine reaching, but they were there all the same. They were ominously silent—but that didn’t mean they were necessarily devoid of sentience. Perhaps they had learned the value of silence. The grand story of life in the Milky Way—across the entire local group—might just be one thread in something humblingly vast. Perhaps, after all, it didn’t actually matter what happened here. Blindly executing whatever instructions they had been given in the remote galactic past, the wolves might strangle sentience out of existence now, or they might guard a thread of it through its gravest crisis. And perhaps neither outcome really mattered, any more than a local cluster of extinctions on a single island would make any significant difference when set against the rich, swarming ebb and flow of life on an entire world. Or perhaps it mattered more than anything.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Perhaps that was the first failure, so long ago that no one remembers it. The wolves kept following the rules they had been instructed to enforce, but with less and less wisdom; less and less mercy. What started as gentle containment became xenocide. What started as authority became tyranny, self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. Consider it, Felka. There might be a higher cause to what they’re doing, but it doesn’t have to be right.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Think about it, Felka told him. The existence of the wolves solved one cosmic riddle: the killing machines explained why it was that humanity found itself largely alone in the universe; why the Galaxy appeared barren of other intelligent cultures. It might have been that humanity was just a statistical quirk in an otherwise lifeless cosmos; that the emergence of intelligent, tool-using life was astonishingly rare and that the universe had to be a certain number of billion years old before there was a chance of such a culture arising. This possibility had lingered on until the dawn of the starfaring era, when human explorers began to pick through the ruins of other cultures around nearby stars. Far from being rare, it looked as if tool-using technological life was actually rather common. But for some reason, these cultures had all become extinct. The evidence suggested that the extinction events happened on a short timescale compared with the evolutionary development cycles of species: perhaps no more than a few centuries. The extinctions also seemed to happen at around the time each culture attempted to make a serious expansion into interstellar space. In other words, at around the development point that humanity—fractured, squabbling, but still essentially one species—now found itself. Given that premise, she said, it was not too surprising to find that something like the wolves—or the Inhibitors, as some of their victims called them—existed; they were almost inevitable given the pattern of extinctions: remorseless droves of killer machines lurking between the stars, waiting patiently across the aeons for the signs of emergent intelligence…”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“It was not simply about the war against intelligence, she told Clavain. That was only part of it; only one detail in their vast, faltering program of cosmic stewardship. Despite all evidence to the contrary the wolves were not trying to rid the galaxy of intelligence altogether. What they were striving to do was akin to pruning a forest back to a few saplings rather than incinerating or defoliating completely; or reducing a fire to a few carefully managed flickering flames rather than extinguishing it utterly.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Yes, we did make love, back in my first days amongst the Conjoined. But there came a time when it was no longer necessary, except as a nostalgic act. It felt like something that children do: not wrong, not primitive, not even dull, just no longer of any interest. It wasn’t that we had stopped loving each other, or had lost our thirst for sensory experience. It was simply that there were so many more rewarding ways of achieving that same kind of intimacy. Once you’ve touched someone else’s mind, walked through their dreams, seen the world through their eyes, felt the world through their skin… well… there never seemed to be any real need to go back to the old way. And I was never much one for nostalgia. It was as if we had stepped into a more adult world, crammed with its own pleasures and enticements. We had no reason to look back at what we were missing.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“He could see into the surface layers of her personality, feel the surface traffic of her thoughts. The data was calm. There was nothing that he could not examine; no sensory experience or memory that he could not unravel and open as if it were one of his own. But beneath that calm surface layer, glimpsed like something rushing behind smoked glass, there lay a howling storm of consciousness. It was frantic and ceaseless, like a machine always on the point of ripping itself apart, but one that would never find respite in its own destruction. He pulled back, terrified that he might fall in. [You see what I mean?] I always knew you lived with something like that. I just didn’t… [It isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault, not even Galiana’s. It’s just the way I am.] He understood then, perhaps more thoroughly than at any point since he had known her, just what Felka’s craving was like. Games, complex games, sated that howling machine, gave it something to work on, slowed it to something less furious.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“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.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Am I supposed to be flattered, he thought, that my essence is so easily captured by an assemblage of mindless algorithms?”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“They had been in love, desperately in love, but the universe cared nothing for the vicissitudes of the human heart. Now they both had to follow their own paths.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“But he supposed grief, the kind of howling, remorse-filled grief Clavain was experiencing, could smash rationality to shards. The impact of so familiar an emotion as sadness on the flow of history had never been properly accounted for, Scorpio thought. Grief and remorse, loss and pain, sadness and sorrow were at least as powerful shapers of events as anger, greed and retribution.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“It isn’t about ending intelligent life,” the Wolf said. “No?” “It is about the exact opposite, Felka. It is about life’s preservation. We are life’s keepers, steering life through its greatest crisis.” “But you murder. You kill entire cultures.” The Wolf shifted in and out of vision. Its voice, when it answered, was tauntingly similar to Galiana’s. “Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, Felka.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“It was said that he looked like a man who had given up on the living, and was now only going through the burdensome motions of completing some final duty.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“She understood that 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 patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries. That was the answer. But it did not explain why they did it.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Using beta-levels makes perfect sense, Ilia. Our two ships are out of effective communication range now, but they’re getting closer. The beta-levels can speed up the whole negotiation process, establishing the ground rules, if you like. When the ships are closer the betas can download their experiences. Our flesh progenitors can review what has been discussed and take appropriate decisions much more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.” “You sound plausible, but all I’m talking to is a set of algorithmic responses; a predictive model for how the real Clavain would respond in a similar situation.” The servitor made itself shrug. “And your point is?” “I’ve no guarantee that this is exactly how Clavain really would respond, were he standing here.” “Ah, that old fallacy. You sound like Galiana. The fact is, the real Clavain might respond differently in any number of instances where he was presented with the same stimuli. So you lose nothing by dealing with a beta-level.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“It was the attitude of a true Conjoiner, convinced that her essence would live on in the wider consciousness of the Mother Nest, and that physical death amounted only to the removal of an inessential peripheral element from a much more significant whole.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“It was said that the taking of hard decisions was something that became easier with repetition, like any difficult activity. There was, perhaps, some truth in that assertion. But if so, Clavain found that it most certainly did not apply in his own case. He had taken several extraordinarily difficult decisions lately, and each had been, in its own unique way, harder than the last.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark