Alastair Reynolds

It was easy to sound that confident; less easy to believe it in his heart. They had got this far did not give them an automatic guarantee of success. The world did not work like that. It took pleasure in punishing the cocksure.

“Do you think it means anything?”

“Probably not," Ricasso said, wiping his dust-smeared hands on his knees. “I’m all for looking for meaning in ancient texts. But now and then you have to just accept the fact that you’re dealing with so much religious gibberish.”

“We don’t have enough evidence to decide either way,” Ricasso said, “so for now we may as well keep open minds.”

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.

She looked at him, marvelling. “Sometimes it’s as if you’re living a century behind the rest of us.”

“Elephants don’t care what century it is. They care what season it is.”

They might have their airships and machine guns, but superstition wasn’t something that went away just because you had engines and bullets.

“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?”

The existence theorem says that it is always much easier to find a solution when you can be confident that one exists.

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

Auger could not help marvelling at the experience of being inside the ALS sphere and seeing her world as it should have been. This was an earth that had never known nuclear war, or runaway climatic catastrophe, or smart weather, or a Nanocaust. The sight of it made her want to weep. No image had ever come close to the heartbreaking beauty of this small blue world, a beauty all the more acute now that she knew how exquisitely fragile it was. It was the beauty of a butterfly’s wing.

I wish there was something we could do. But organised structure is the most precious thing in the universe. When it is lost, it is truly lost.

“Is he going to be okay?” Svetlana asked.

“He was dead, Svieta,” Axford said patiently. “Anything else has to count as an improvement.”