Children Of Ruin Quotes
"For him, though, there was no time, nothing but the oblivion of the cold-sleep chamber."
"Instead, paradoxically, he woke himself with a dream."
"Life whirled about the coral metropolis in a riot of motion, swimming, jetting, drifting, crawling."
"By then he’d been in and out of the mission systems quite a lot without anyone noticing."
"What better indication of a warm and loving human nature was there?"
"They meant human friends, and that had never been his strong suit."
"What, after all, was the worst that could happen?"
"Disra Senkovi opened his eyes, aware that his beatific smile had crossed over from his dream and was still on his face."
"They wouldn’t just send a manned mission off on a whim, now, would they?"
"I’m broadly supportive of your decision."
"We can’t just go to work on this planet."
"That’s a very pessimistic appraisal of the human spirit."
"He had been out of storage for six months, this time round."
"He wanted them to ask, so that he could be aloof and not answer."
"And now he was learning just precisely why he had been considered a good second."
"There were precisely five human beings this side of Earth’s solar system, to Baltiel’s certain knowledge."
"Alone meant too much time to think about what had happened."
"They were all bright minds, more than capable of having asked the same questions of the ship."
"The cold-sleep pods yawned for them like the grave."
"In the absence of knowledge he could avoid thinking about it and just go back to pick up where he’d left off."
"There was no magic cure for depression."
"They would go where he led, he knew, and Senkovi wouldn’t much miss them."
"How she would have hated that. He could almost imagine her refusing to accept it, demanding a bespoke fate appropriate for her genius."
"What you don’t know you’ll miss until it’s gone, number 153: the Human Race."
"He stood by the tanks sometimes, watching his pets, his creations at work, at play. They watched him back: they knew him and he felt they liked him."
"He was depressingly aware that he was trying to wring something from his pets that would be available for free from his fellow humans."
"His fear is written across his skin for her to read – and she does – but not as a signal he consciously intends to send."
"Their jaunts in and out of cold sleep had given time a rough edge that had finally sawed through their last connections to their home planet."
"The universe was no longer watching them. The data they were collecting was for no eyes but their own."
"Because we need to feel ourselves important to our environs, and Nod has no way of knowing us."
"I’ve pushed you too far, haven’t I? This is goddamn unnatural, is what it is."
"She can give us a virtual tour of floating cities on Damascus, of airborne dome-complexes on Nod that have a zero footprint, where the alien life just goes on unmolested beneath your feet. And it’s mad, it’s all mad."
"Some of the original Gilgamesh survivors had simply never adjusted, living on a Human reservation where Portiid presence was minimal and covert."
"We have discovered such strange vast things we never dreamt of."
"Don’t you want to learn it all, at last?"
"Like a drunk fumbling with a front door key."
"Belatedly he realized it was his own, shouting at the insensate machines that wouldn’t do his bidding."
"We had such plans. But it wasn’t true, not in the end, not after that savage disconnection from all their pasts."
"I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams."
"We are greater and greater. You expand our world. We cure your singularity."
"Everything he had worked so hard to bring about, the entire future he had been constructing, it was all going to perish."
"He reserved his dread for losing touch once again with his kin, his species."
"The creator referred to these records as the Senkoviad."
"They are on the very brink of seizing their own destiny."
"He felt a lurch, as though the fake gravity of the ship’s rotation had suddenly shifted to the wall."
"His own mental health concerns him far more."
"We are obviously going to go in and retrieve such information as remains accessible."
"Why else did you cross from your own native vessel to inhabit these far spaces?"
"We need to download this station’s archives entirely and then get them, and ourselves, out of this solar system as fast as possible."
"You cannot reduce all Human experience to numbers."
"For many long spans of time, we were Lante."
"Even in defeat, even in nothing, there is treasure."
"We Remember And We know that they are coming."
"I am dreadfully worried and concerned for the safety of my fellows."
"Home glass wonder fright alert Senkovi home voyage light Senkovi attendance home."
"Lot only knows that there is a great future waiting, just on the far side of . . . something."
"All he knows is that something must change to save the world and this is the biggest change he can conceive of."
"Lot knows awe and a sense of his grasp about the levers of history."
"We Wake from cryptic slumber. Surrounded by a new medium."
"The infection rides the currents of the sea, but it also rides the sea’s denizens, replicating into new colonies."
"Solomon weighs his desires, and his judgement is this: I want to live."
"Another octopus, a male. Perhaps his designation, set down in the old human-style databanks, is Noah."
"Paul is fiercely unhappy. Confinement is seldom a positive thing."
"Helena has now spent her rage and grief, and it bought her nothing, as far as she can see."
"Fabian has been in a fugue state. It happens to both genders."
"She watches a colossal mud flat writhe and quiver and reach up towards her vantage point with tentacles and limbs that dissolve back into slime even as they form."
"Then the drone is lifting away – only belatedly does he recognize his own handiwork, his palps on the controls."
"She had fallen into the trap of thinking that she was dealing with a united civilization, hierarchically organized and capable of being treated as a single entity."
"Whether that could ever be a possibility is a point for the historians and sociologists."
"They are devouring all their fuel, exhausting reserves, soon to be on a one-way trip to nowhere at all in a piece of utter rocket science lunacy."
"And yet we know that another force is reaching for him through the ancient spider memory of the huntresses."
"Each memory he flees through is dismantled and devoured by something that grows only more determined to catch him."
"The rooms darken, the decay inherent in the old man-made building accelerating, the windows fogging with mould."
"He feels the crest of its wave putting him in its shadow and cannot brace for the impact because there is nothing of him left to brace."
"The great louring tide of oblivion is abruptly flowing out in all directions, no longer constrained by the shape or fears of Meshner Osten Oslam."
"It is functioning well beyond its intended capacity."
"It is consuming the space and processing power here, which I require to continue to function at my current level."
"We remember back to the time when there was no We to remember."
"We sat and listened in humility and awe as the complex interactions that together made up Lortisse spoke to one another."
"That was Lortisse’s adventure and We wanted that."
"But it was not as we were promised. The Adventure never came, and We tried for many generations to create it for Ourselves."
"We were Lante for many, many generations, waiting for the Adventure to begin."
"We make it part of ourselves and We model Lante’s cognitive processes and become a more thoughtful thing in order to process it."
"They have read our story in Lante’s words and know Us."
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
"Consider it penance, luxuriating in the possibility of sacrifice and heroic gestures."
"Old is for humans and other mortal things. Kern has gone past old and out the other side."
"You’re tiny, but Lante knew she was tiny, and compared to the universe one of your cells and Lante’s whole body aren’t so different."
"The organism reaches further, adapts and gains more mastery over its environment, as it always has."
"It’s like religion, really. And if we’re right, it’s not a threat, any more. And just maybe it’s an opportunity."
"Every so often one of the octopuses comes to speak with her, pressing Helena into awkward translations of neurological and biochemical concepts she does not truly follow herself."
"Space is not an ocean, despite the temptation to think in terms of battlecruisers and naval ranks and war-fleets exchanging broadsides."
"Taking things apart out of idle curiosity has always been part of their mental toolkit and why should the universe itself be an exception?"