House of Suns

There had been a human soul in that skull only a few hours earlier, and now no authority in the universe could bring her back. We were like monkeys sitting around a fire that had just extinguished, wondering why the warmth and light had gone away.

They’re your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they’re going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they’re going to surprise and disappoint you.

I felt a terrible sadness open inside me, a void through which the winds from the end of the universe were blowing.

Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion—that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.

Do you see us slavering for revenge, that most pointlessly biological of imperatives?

We were sowing so much misinformation that some of it came back and bit us.

Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time.

“I have only your word for that.”

“Yes,” the glass man said, “that’s rather the point. There’s going to have to be a lot more trust from this time forward. Why don’t we start as we mean to go on?”

Civilisations beyond number had risen from obscurity, considering themselves masters of all creation, before fading back into the footnotes of history.

“I’m hearing a lot of reasons why someone wouldn’t hold a grudge against us,” Campion said.

Betony looked sympathetic. “Then you misunderstand human nature, my dear fellow. People will hate us simply for being what we are: a force for good, for benign non-interference. The mere fact that we haven’t dirtied our hands, that we’ve maintained an unblemished reputation—that’s enough to make someone detest us.”

If my years as a shatterling had taught me anything, it was that not all questions had answers. Societies had reduced themselves to radioactive dust because they could not accept that single unpalatable truth.

People lived and died and did strange, pointless things to themselves. So did societies, be they city-sized states or galactic empires encompassing thousands of solar systems. Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.