They’re your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they’re going to flare off in… — Alastair Reynolds

She was usually caught with her back to us, a distant figure standing on some cliff or high building with one hand on her hip and another shielding her eyes from the sun, lost in the rapture of scale and scenery, drunk on the very idea of being human, a monkey who had hit the big time.

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.

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