Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey (2021) (read in 2022)

“The awareness of molecular vibration was analogous to the physical sensation of heat—it measured the same material reality—but the merely human sense was like a child playing a whistle compared with Duarte’s vast, symphonic new awareness.”

“There was pain—a great deal of pain—and there was fear. But there wasn’t anyone left to feel it, so it faded quickly. There was no consciousness, no pattern, no one to think the thoughts that swelled and dimmed. Something more delicate—more graceful, more sophisticated—would have died. The narrative chain that thought of itself as Winston Duarte was ripped to pieces, but the flesh that housed him wasn’t.”

“With infinite effort and care, he pulled the unbearable vastness and complexity of his awareness in and in and in, compressing himself into what he had been. The blue faded into the color he had known as a man. The sense of the storm raging just on the other side, of the violence and threat, faded. He felt the warm, iron-smelling meat of his hand, holding nothing. He opened his eyes, turned to the comm controls, and opened a connection.”

“His awareness of the ring space was clear now. He could hear the echoes of it in the fabric of reality like he was pressing his ear to a ship’s deck to know the status of its drive. The rage of the enemy was as apparent to him now as if he could hear its voices. The shrieks that tore something that wasn’t air in something that wasn’t time.”

“The colony worlds were acting like their safety could exist separate from the well-being of all the other systems and ships. It couldn’t be so hard to see how accepting a little restriction and regulation benefited everyone. But inner-worlds culture didn’t measure it that way. For them, being better meant being better than the person next to you, not both of you sharing the same increase.”

“There was only so much explaining to people how cooperation would keep them all from dying she could manage in a single sitting.”

“He looked at the tactical. She was right, of course. Just in the time they’d been at a relative stop so that she could read through the data, ten more ships had passed through gates, burning on one errand or another that someone decided was worth the risk. Or didn’t understand that there was a risk. Or didn’t care.”

““I’ve been running a guerrilla government with shitty communications, thirteen hundred different isolated systems, and literally billions of people who think whatever they’re looking at is the most important thing there is,” Naomi said. “I know how you feel.””

“She hadn’t been born yet when Laconia became its own nation. She’d never known a universe without the gates. She was like looking at a different species.”

“You think you know something, right? Then it turns out you were only used to it. It does something, and it does something, and then after a while, you think that’s what it does. Then it turns out there was this whole other thing, maybe.”

““Using a microwave as a lamp, because it has a light in it,” Jim said.”

““This is all too big for people,” Alex said. “The things that built it? Maybe they could handle it, but we’re not designed for this scale. We’re trying to get big enough we can make it work, but we’re breaking our legs just standing up.””

“The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her and hers flowing backward into a time before minds. Like grandmothers telling the stories their grandmothers told about their grandmothers before them, she falls gently and forever into black oceans the size of everything. The other two are and aren’t and are again, with her and within her like humming to the memory of songs she never quite forgot.”

“The next time comes, and the dreamer fits his bleeding hands in the spaces between the spaces, breathes through the holes in number, and builds from abstraction a tool to crack wide the abstract. He sees the mechanism through its own strange eyes, and its depth astonishes and terrifies him. The voice of the machine grows deep and grand and horrifying: God whispering the obscenity that ends worlds. The darkness is the darkness of old, but terror has no face for him, and there needs to be a way, so there will be. A thousand bites, a million needle sticks, a ripping away of all that doesn’t fit.”

““The kind of guy, he’d feed you into a wood chipper, but he wouldn’t stiff you for his half of the bar tab,” Amos said. “I’ve known folks like that.””

“Amos chuckled. “You can tell yourself that, Sunshine. Don’t make it true.””

““I can’t see how this all plays out.”

““Sure you do. Everyone dies. That’s always been how it is. Only question now is whether we can find some way to not all go at once.”

““If we do, then civilization dies. Everything humanity has ever done goes away.”

““Well, at least there won’t be anyone who misses it,” Amos said, and sighed. “You’re overthinking this, Cap’n. You got now and you got the second your lights go out. Meantime is the only time there is. All that matters is what we do during it.””

“Amos raised a hand, palm out, like he was gentling an animal. “Doc. I get it. You’re a good person, and I like you. I trust you. I see that you’re not getting off on this. That’s why we’re not having the other version of this conversation. But it’s done. I’ve known a lot of people who had reasons that this time was different. That this once, it was okay. Maybe the kid’s bad and you’re really helping them. Or they’re into it, and so there’s no harm. And Sparkles is into this. We both know that, right?”

““We do.”

““So there’s all kinds of stories about making this okay. I’m not here to tell stories. I’m just letting you know.””

““And if we all die because we didn’t push a little harder?”

““That’ll suck,” Amos agreed. “I’m not a philosophy guy. I’m not trying to bust your balls or figure out, you know, everything. But this is pretty simple. I came to see what you and Sparkles were doing. I’ve seen it. It needs to stop, so we’re gonna stop. That’s it. We’re good.””

“[…] he could turn the display to a probabilistic three-dimensional map that showed all the possible flight paths the Roci could take, the complex decision points where an equation with values like time, vector, delta-v, the elasticity of a human blood vessel, and the ship’s position in space defined the moment when a possible future slipped away. Jim moved between the two views—the curve of the Roci’s intended path and the swooping, lily-shaped cone that was the Derecho’s possible paths. Then over to the intricate web of things that could happen but hadn’t yet, as it narrowed second by second and left a thin thread called history behind it.”

“The war would go on. The builders of the ring gates moving from form to form—primitive bioluminescent sea slugs, to angels of light, then to a hive of mostly hairless primates with billions of bodies and only one mind. The dark things inside the gates and outside the universe scratching and ripping and unmaking the sickness that had intruded on its reality. Maybe someday that battle would be won. Maybe it would go on forever. Either way, nothing that Jim knew as human would persist. No more first kisses. No more prayers. No more moments of jealousy or insight or selfishness or love. They would be taken apart and fit back together like the bodies on Eros. Something would be there, but it wouldn’t be them.”

“She tried to imagine what it would be like for a baby born into a world like that, not as an individual but an appendage that had never known itself as anything else.”

“For an instant, there was a release of energy second only to the beginning of the universe. There was no one there to see it.”

“The awareness of molecular vibration was analogous to the physical sensation of heat—it measured the same material reality—but the merely human sense was like a child playing a whistle compared with Duarte’s vast, symphonic new awareness.”

“There was pain—a great deal of pain—and there was fear. But there wasn’t anyone left to feel it, so it faded quickly. There was no consciousness, no pattern, no one to think the thoughts that swelled and dimmed. Something more delicate—more graceful, more sophisticated—would have died. The narrative chain that thought of itself as Winston Duarte was ripped to pieces, but the flesh that housed him wasn’t.”

“The sword that slew a billion angels had only inconvenienced the primates in their bubbles of metal and air.”

“With infinite effort and care, he pulled the unbearable vastness and complexity of his awareness in and in and in, compressing himself into what he had been. The blue faded into the color he had known as a man. The sense of the storm raging just on the other side, of the violence and threat, faded. He felt the warm, iron-smelling meat of his hand, holding nothing. He opened his eyes, turned to the comm controls, and opened a connection.”

“His awareness of the ring space was clear now. He could hear the echoes of it in the fabric of reality like he was pressing his ear to a ship’s deck to know the status of its drive. The rage of the enemy was as apparent to him now as if he could hear its voices. The shrieks that tore something that wasn’t air in something that wasn’t time.”

“There were two levels that she had to figure out. First was the civilization that had built the protomolecule and the gates, then the forces that destroyed them. On her best days, she’d thought of herself like a medieval monk struggling to understand the saints to better see the face of God. More often, she felt like a termite trying to explain dogs to her fellow Isoptera so that they could all speculate about fusion jazz.”

“It sure as hell seemed like better odds than tracking the missing ship.”

“I’m not sure what liberty is if you’re not permitted to decide what chances you’re willing to take.””

“The colony worlds were acting like their safety could exist separate from the well-being of all the other systems and ships. It couldn’t be so hard to see how accepting a little restriction and regulation benefited everyone. But inner-worlds culture didn’t measure it that way. For them, being better meant being better than the person next to you, not both of you sharing the same increase.”

“There was only so much explaining to people how cooperation would keep them all from dying she could manage in a single sitting.”

“He looked at the tactical. She was right, of course. Just in the time they’d been at a relative stop so that she could read through the data, ten more ships had passed through gates, burning on one errand or another that someone decided was worth the risk. Or didn’t understand that there was a risk. Or didn’t care.”

“The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her and hers flowing backward into a time before minds. Like grandmothers telling the stories their grandmothers told about their grandmothers before them, she falls gently and forever into black oceans the size of everything. The other two are and aren’t and are again, with her and within her like humming to the memory of songs she never quite forgot.”

“Once and gone so far away no one was there to think it, the it was like this: Down was the hardness of heat, and up was the hardness of cold, and between those two implacabilities was the universe.”

“The idea of a flaw as tiny as a missed base pair translating itself into a slightly different curve on a protein and then into a leaking heart valve or a nonfunctional eye was compelling and creepy in more or less equal degrees.”

“The things that are doing this are rattling all the windows looking for the way to make us die, and I don’t know how we guard our physical fucking constants against attack. It’s just a matter of time before they figure out how to trigger vacuum decay or something.”

““You’re going to be fighting for the fate of humanity. I’m going to be worrying about algebra assignments.”

““Well, maybe you’ll get lucky and we’ll win and the algebra will matter. Then twenty, thirty years down the road, something else will show up to slaughter everyone, and you can take care of that one.””

““Basically, it makes a tiny, transitory ring gate, which releases just a lot of energy for free. And apparently, it’s violating entropy. Which means time.”

““Entropy only runs one direction. Primary school physics requires three hours of barking?”

““He’s saying wherever it’s getting that energy from doesn’t play by our rules.”

““We knew that, though.”

““We suspected it.”

““Do we know it now?”

““We suspect it harder,” Elvi said. “We’re scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.””

“An hour had sixty minutes because mathematicians in ancient Babylon had worked in a sexagesimal system. A year was the time it took Earth to make a full transit around Sol, and that mattered even though Teresa had never been to Earth and almost certainly never would. Like the number of minutes in an hour, the width of a centimeter, the volume of a liter, the length of a year was the marker by which humanity told the story of itself.”

“She liked the way he deflected. He didn’t want to go to Laconia, his chief mechanic did. His ship wasn’t broken unless Tanaka was willing to permit it to be. There had always been that thread in the tapestry of Laconian culture: the willingness to assert whatever reality your commanding officer proposed. She wondered what Mugabo’s internal life was like. Did he have a reserve of freedom and perversity hidden inside, the way she did, or was he the same blankness all the way down?”

“Naomi shook her head once. “Everything in me says the offer’s a trap, but if it isn’t, and I turn away? If this isn’t the opening I was looking for, I’m not sure what our goal is with them.””

““I don’t have to,” Amos said with a deceptive mildness. Jim heard the expectation of violence behind it, even if Teresa didn’t.”

“But Naomi’s gaze had turned inward. Something in Teresa’s words had done the trick. Jim saw her understand even before he knew what she’d understood. Naomi lifted her eyebrows and shook her head, just a millimeter back and forth.

““You know what this is?” she said. “This is him making me responsible for what he does. Teresa’s right. She’s got exactly the frame I’m supposed to use. One person for a multitude. But I’m not looking to kill a multitude. That’s him. If I do what he says, I’ll be saving all the people he would kill to punish me if I didn’t.”

“Amos’ laugh was almost the same timbre and cadence as Muskrat’s little bark. When he spoke, he was mimicking the soft, threatening whine of an abusive lover. “Look what you made me do, baby. Why do you have to make me so mad?””

““Carrots don’t matter when he still gets to hold the stick,” Naomi said. “I’m done with sticks. Sticks are disqualifying. If he’d led by pulling the Derecho back from Freehold, it would be a different thing. He didn’t. He chose this, and I don’t trust him.”

“Jim smiled at her. “Also, he’s asking us to hand over to him a young girl who doesn’t want to go, so fuck him. We don’t do that.”

““Fuck him,” Amos agreed.”

“Amos chuckled. “You can tell yourself that, Sunshine. Don’t make it true.””

““Once this is over, and your emotions are calm enough that you can see that this decision was correct, we can discuss whether you want to fracture the underground’s leadership or back my authority.””

“[…] the builders or the Romans or the space jellyfish—the beings of light—hadn’t known what it was to be alone since they’d learned to glow in that ancient, freezing ocean. They were individuals and they were a unity. A superorganism, connected as intimately as she was with her own limbs and organs.”

“I think we may be as hard for them to see and make sense of as they are for us. So part of what we can do is dirty up their data. All our random, uncoordinated transits are what they’re feeling. It’s like hearing rats in your walls and putting out different poisons until the noise stops. The noise stopping is how you know what worked. And since we’re still making transits in and out of that gate? As far as they know, their poison didn’t work.””

““I think there’s a dysfunctional love triangle in the physics group. They may need a talking-to from the boss.”

““Are you fucking kidding me?” Fayez spread his hands. “Every miracle we’ve pulled off, we’ve done it using primates. Just because we’re capable of mind-blowing wonders doesn’t mean we aren’t still sex-and-murder machines. The organism doesn’t change.””

“co-opting fast life to bring what makes it rich, sending out what will or may one day return with presents for the grandmothers who cast them free, and the vast patience of the ones who are too cold and too slow and too wide to ever die, too sudden for time to touch. A bubble blown into the holes in the spectrum and a thousand thousand thousand seeds sent like kisses to the singing poet stars.”

“Jillian’s smile felt like a knife. If she had to die, she was glad she was taking this smarmy fuck down with her. “We have a few minutes still. You can send a message. I would let your superiors know that when Colonel Tanaka opened fire without provocation on Draper Station, she didn’t just kill us. She killed you too. I hope it was worth it.””

““I’ve never known Trejo to lie. I’ve never known Duarte to lie either, and he was the personality that set the tone for all of this. He was grandiose. He was ruthless. He was a genius at a couple of things and under the misapprehension that it meant he was smart about everything. But in his mind, he was doing the right thing.”

““The kind of guy, he’d feed you into a wood chipper, but he wouldn’t stiff you for his half of the bar tab,” Amos said. “I’ve known folks like that.””

““I can’t see how this all plays out.”

““Sure you do. Everyone dies. That’s always been how it is. Only question now is whether we can find some way to not all go at once.”

““If we do, then civilization dies. Everything humanity has ever done goes away.”

““Well, at least there won’t be anyone who misses it,” Amos said, and sighed. “You’re overthinking this, Cap’n. You got now and you got the second your lights go out. Meantime is the only time there is. All that matters is what we do during it.”

““I just want to go out knowing that things will be okay without me. That it all keeps going.”

““That you’re not the one who dropped the ball.”

““Yeah.”

““Or maybe,” Amos said, “you’re not that important and it ain’t up to you to fix the universe?”

““You always know how to cheer me up.””

“[…] he could turn the display to a probabilistic three-dimensional map that showed all the possible flight paths the Roci could take, the complex decision points where an equation with values like time, vector, delta-v, the elasticity of a human blood vessel, and the ship’s position in space defined the moment when a possible future slipped away. Jim moved between the two views—the curve of the Roci’s intended path and the swooping, lily-shaped cone that was the Derecho’s possible paths. Then over to the intricate web of things that could happen but hadn’t yet, as it narrowed second by second and left a thin thread called history behind it.”

“Something more solid and real than they were slid through the jumble of atoms that was the wall. A thread of conscious darkness that had never known light, was the antithesis of it. Kit tried to move the clouds that were his arms around the cloud that had been his son, knowing distantly that it couldn’t matter. He was no more solid than the wall had been.”

“She saw through a thousand sets of eyes, felt a thousand different bodies, knew herself by a thousand different names. Aliana Tanaka screamed.”

“You think you know something, right? Then it turns out you were only used to it. It does something, and it does something, and then after a while, you think that’s what it does. Then it turns out there was this whole other thing, maybe.”

““Using a microwave as a lamp, because it has a light in it,” Jim said.”

“Jim thought about that. Between working for the Transport Union back in the day and fleeing with the underground, he’d been to more systems than most people ever would, and it was still probably under three dozen. He knew how many more there were, how many he’d never see, how many Naomi was trying to coordinate. Alex was right. It was daunting. Maybe more than daunting.

““And that’s not the worst of it,” Alex said. “By the time you’re done, there’s been a century of change at the place you started from. It won’t be the same. All the places you visit start changing into new ones the second you leave.””

““This is all too big for people,” Alex said. “The things that built it? Maybe they could handle it, but we’re not designed for this scale. We’re trying to get big enough we can make it work, but we’re breaking our legs just standing up.””

““I’ve been running a guerrilla government with shitty communications, thirteen hundred different isolated systems, and literally billions of people who think whatever they’re looking at is the most important thing there is,” Naomi said. “I know how you feel.””

“She hadn’t been born yet when Laconia became its own nation. She’d never known a universe without the gates. She was like looking at a different species.”

“They are threefold, and the dream shudders like an image projected onto cloth when a wind blows. The grandmothers are dead, their voices are all songs sung by ghosts, and the truths they tell, they would tell to anyone. They cannot listen back, and the dreamer sees the hollow behind the mask. She tries to turn her head, to look behind her, to see the single living man in the land of the dead, and the gesture goes on forever, the essence of turning and turning and turning without the release of having turned […]”

“We aren’t stronger than they were. But we’re base materials. We are made from clay, and that’s our power. They were fragile, and we are robust. They had a sword but lacked the strength to wield it. I will find the sword and the map they left behind. I’m getting lost here. A sword? They built but were unable to effectively use certain tools that prevent the enemy from intruding into what we mean when we say the universe. But those tools exist, and I believe we can make effective use of them. I think I understood that. In broad strokes, anyway. In order to fully access these tools, we have to become more like them. We have to be one thing instead of billions of different ones. I am learning how to do that as well. Are you . . . saying we need to become a hive mind? Yes. Interconnected, with our thoughts and memories flowing freely between nodes. All our illusions of division washed away. Empire was the closest I could imagine to it. But—the third man gestures at himself almost in apology—I can imagine more now.”

“Intestinal microflora have a vast effect on cognition, emotion, metabolism. Most of the cells in your body right now aren’t human. Change out a few species of bacteria in your gut, and you’ll be a fundamentally different person. The builders, as far as we can tell, were free-floating individual organisms that networked themselves into a functional consciousness, kind of the way an octopus can be viciously intelligent without a centralized brain. With the nonlocal effects we’ve seen? Sure, why not rebuild that architecture with advanced primates?””

““So you’re saying,” Naomi broke in, “that Duarte, or whatever he’s turned himself into, is at least plausibly preparing to make everyone, everywhere part of a collective consciousness with him at the center so that he can go to war against the things beyond the gates.””

“Amos raised a hand, palm out, like he was gentling an animal. “Doc. I get it. You’re a good person, and I like you. I trust you. I see that you’re not getting off on this. That’s why we’re not having the other version of this conversation. But it’s done. I’ve known a lot of people who had reasons that this time was different. That this once, it was okay. Maybe the kid’s bad and you’re really helping them. Or they’re into it, and so there’s no harm. And Sparkles is into this. We both know that, right?”

““We do.”

““So there’s all kinds of stories about making this okay. I’m not here to tell stories. I’m just letting you know.””

““And if we all die because we didn’t push a little harder?”

““That’ll suck,” Amos agreed. “I’m not a philosophy guy. I’m not trying to bust your balls or figure out, you know, everything. But this is pretty simple. I came to see what you and Sparkles were doing. I’ve seen it. It needs to stop, so we’re gonna stop. That’s it. We’re good.””

“The thing where he lost the idea of Kit in a stream of consciousness that wasn’t his? This was new. It had only come a few times, but afterward he felt thinner and less connected to reality. Like the essential self he’d always known—the thing he meant when he said “I”—turned out to be less an object and more a kind of habit. Not even a persistent habit like taking drugs or gambling. The kind of thing you could take or leave. Coffee with breakfast instead of tea. Buying the same kinds of socks. Existing as an individual. All things he could do or not do without much changing.”

““Just what was in the toolbox before,” she said. “I feel like I came to cook a meal and it turns out it’s a poetry competition. Everything I built was to fight against Laconia back when Laconia was simple things, like invulnerable ships and neofascist authoritarians. Now that it’s become a really invasive bad dream, how do you build a resistance to fight that?””

“Left was a thought he just couldn’t have. Like he was colorblind, but for half his perceptual field.”

“Tanaka leaned back in her chair. “Are you all right?”

““I always thought about how strange it would be to have that loss. I never thought about how odd we must have been to him. These weird people with twice as much world that he couldn’t conceive of. And he couldn’t. The thoughts you have depend on the brain you have. Change the brain and you change the kinds of thoughts that are possible to think.””

““It would have worked,” she said. “If we’d cooperated, it would have worked.”

““It would have been better.”

““I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.””

““Not to protect the empire,” Nagata said. “To protect the human race.”

“Tanaka shrugged. “From my perspective, that’s a distinction without a difference.”

““You’re right,” Holden said. “Let’s solve the extinction-level threat first. Then we can all go back to killing each other at a more civilized pace.”

“He was staring at her, the bugs around his head motionless, as if each of them was staring too. He’s thinking about how he’s going to have to kill me again when this is all over with, Tanaka realized.”

“The next time comes, and the dreamer fits his bleeding hands in the spaces between the spaces, breathes through the holes in number, and builds from abstraction a tool to crack wide the abstract. He sees the mechanism through its own strange eyes, and its depth astonishes and terrifies him. The voice of the machine grows deep and grand and horrifying: God whispering the obscenity that ends worlds. The darkness is the darkness of old, but terror has no face for him, and there needs to be a way, so there will be. A thousand bites, a million needle sticks, a ripping away of all that doesn’t fit.”

“The horned god forgets. The little man forgets. The sparkling ghost cannot bring herself to forgetfulness, and that is and will always be her hunger. The machine glimmers its idiot glimmers, it shapes its insoluble puzzles, it sings a buzzsaw shriek. And in a dream beneath the dream, a man stands alone in a lighthouse and faces an angry sea. His exhaustion and pain rhyme with something real, and Amos opens his eyes.”

“Tanaka either didn’t notice or chose to ignore her. “I’ve taken the liberty of reaching out to Admiral Trejo. I’m hoping we can get some backup here in time.”

““In time for what?” Jim asked.

““The battle,” Tanaka said as if it had been a stupid question.

““Are we sure that these are enemies?” Elvi asked.

““Yes,” Tanaka said. “We tried to get into the station. We were pushed back. Now an ad hoc flotilla of hive-mind-controlled ships are running toward us. If they’re just rushing here to bring us cake and party decorations, we’d know because we’d be in the station chewing the fat with the high consul.””

“The war would go on. The builders of the ring gates moving from form to form—primitive bioluminescent sea slugs, to angels of light, then to a hive of mostly hairless primates with billions of bodies and only one mind. The dark things inside the gates and outside the universe scratching and ripping and unmaking the sickness that had intruded on its reality. Maybe someday that battle would be won. Maybe it would go on forever. Either way, nothing that Jim knew as human would persist. No more first kisses. No more prayers. No more moments of jealousy or insight or selfishness or love. They would be taken apart and fit back together like the bodies on Eros. Something would be there, but it wouldn’t be them.”

“When they’d been young together, they’d been beautiful just because youth had a beauty all its own. It took age to see whether the beauty could last.”

“She turned off her screen, then squeezed his hand. “You are remarkable. You have always been remarkable. Not always wise, not always thoughtful. But always, always remarkable. Yes, I have paid a price for letting someone as headstrong and impulsive as you matter so very much to me. But I’d do it again.””

“Better to play the cards she had. She wasn’t going to win, but she could take a long time losing.”

““Okay,” Jim said. “We’ve got an entrance. We have a way in.”

““We’ll give you as much time as we can.”

““It’s going to be okay.” The oceanic optimism would have been a lie in anyone else. Or maybe a prayer.

““Good hunting, love,” she said, and the three dots passed into the blue and vanished.”

““I feel fine,” Jim said, then paused, considered.

““A little feverish, maybe? But not bad.”

““I want an update every five minutes. Set a timer.”

““If I start feeling worse, I’ll let you know.”

““Yes, you will. Because you’ll be on a timer.”

“Miller, floating between them and a half pace back, tried to conceal a grin. Jim weighed the pros and cons of pushing back against Tanaka and set a timer. He set it for seven minutes, though.”

““You make it sound like there’s a later in the game.” Miller’s smile was enigmatic, and it looked a little like sorrow by the time it reached his eyes. “Until death all is life.””

“It’s all right to let go, a voice said with the complexity and depth of a choir. If angels had voices, they’d have sounded like this. It’s all right to let go. Holding on is only pain and weariness. Let us carry you, and you can rest. You can let go now. It was almost persuasive. It was almost enough.”

““Easier to take something out when you don’t give a shit about what comes after,” Amos agreed.

““Those ships are finished, but I don’t think anyone on ’em cares.” It’s all right to let go. Put down your weapons now, and you will be saving humanity, not destroying it. Don’t be afraid of the changes that are coming, they are the only thing that can save us all. Alex gritted his teeth until his jaw ached.”

“Miller hoisted a weary eyebrow. “You need to ask yourself whether you think Duarte’s the perp, or first among victims. You know that this stuff can hook itself into your dopamine receptors. Train you up to like whatever it wants you to like. Maybe it grabbed on to how he feels about the kid over there and used that as a leash. The things that built all this shit could be using him from beyond their graves the same as they used Julie. And there are some things you can only access by being in the substrate. You remember that.””

“Miller gestured at the walls, the fireflies, the incomprehensible complexity and strangeness of the station. “It’s where the power comes from. They cracked the universe open, pushed their way in here, and it pushed back. A whole other universe trying to smash this place flat, and it powers the gates, the artifacts. That magnetic ray gun Duarte was playing with. They built stars with it. Broke rules that you can’t break without a different set of physics to strain it through. You can Eve-and-apple it all you want, but this shit right here? This is all made out of original sin.””

““Teresa, put your helmet back on.” Or else what? Teresa thought. She was so tired of being bullied by the people who said they were there to help her. She was so tired of being Laconian. She pretended she couldn’t make out Tanaka’s words, even though they all knew that wasn’t true. Tanaka’s anger was less than her own. When Tanaka opened up her own visor, Teresa felt a little thrill of victory.”

““This is why it will work. The meat, the matter, the rude clay of us. It’s hard to kill. The ones who came before were brilliant, but they were fragile. Genius made of tissue paper, and the chaos blew them apart. We can be the best of both now.”

“The closer the Rocinante and the Falcon kept to the station, the more cover the alien structure provided and the less of the field of battle was in her scopes. The Roci was able to build real-time reports by syncing with other ships in her little fleet by tightbeam and making a patchwork map with data from half a dozen different ships. She didn’t like it, though. It left her feeling half blinded.”

“When she had a moment to gather herself, she wondered how many people there were still left out there. Had Duarte invaded and co-opted the minds of everyone in all the systems, or was he targeting the ones on their way toward the rings? She imagined whole stations filled with silent bodies working in perfect coordination, the need for verbal communication replaced by the direct influence of brain on brain. A single hand with billions of fingers. If that was what humanity was now, there would never be another conversation, another misunderstanding or joke or shitty pop song. She tried to imagine what it would be like for a baby born into a world like that, not as an individual but an appendage that had never known itself as anything else.”

“She pulled up the scopes in time to see the dropship scattering into bright dust. There had been people on that ship. She wondered if they were dead now, or if their memories and opinions and senses of their own selves were stuck flickering through a billion different brains that weren’t theirs to begin with. Or if they’d been dead before their bodies were destroyed. Maybe those were different ways of saying the same thing.”

“The crushing pressure outside the ring space was a furnace, an engine, a source of unimaginable energy. Like a judo master, the ring station took the near-infinite power of an entire universe trying to crush it and pivoted, turning its strength against it. The other, older universe just outside the sphere of rings moved past him, and he could feel the pain he caused it. He could feel its hatred. The wound in its flesh that he was.”

“It would be beautiful. Miller nodded like he was agreeing with something. Which maybe he was. “Nerving yourself up to kiss your big crush for the first time? Or getting pissed off because the apartment one over has a nicer view than yours? Playing with your grandbabies, or drinking beer with the assholes from work because going back to an empty house is too depressing? All the grimy, grubby bullshit that comes with being locked in your own head for a lifetime. That’s the sacrifice. That’s what you give up to get a place among the stars.””

“Jim moved his attention back to the station, complex and active as his cells. It all made sense to him now—the passages, the sentinels, the vast machines that broke rich light and opened the holes in the spectrum. That generated the subtle lines. There was so much that they’d never seen or understood. They’d all just bumbled through, using the gates as shortcuts and hoping for the best. A species of beautiful idiots.”

“[…] evacuate immediately. Assume whatever system you are entering is where you will be from now on. Expect and assume no further contact after your transit, and do not reenter the ring space once you’ve left. This is not a joke. This is not a drill. Message repeats.””

““We’re ready,” Elvi said.

““That’s an exaggeration,” Fayez said. “We’ve reached an arbitrary level of fuck-it-good-enough. We’re calling that ready.””

““I mean, don’t get me wrong. My analysis of the situation is a lot like yours. But you got to see there’s an irony in it. All the shit you gave me about giving people all the information and trusting them to do the right thing? Most of these fuckers aren’t gonna know what happened. This decision you’re making for the whole human race.””

““I absolutely believe that people are more good on balance than bad,” he said. “All the wars and all of the cruelty and all of the violence. I’m not looking away from any of that, and I still think there’s something beautiful about being what we are. History is soaked in blood. The future probably will be too. But for every atrocity, there’s a thousand small kindnesses that no one noticed. A hundred people who spent their lives loving and caring for each other. A few moments of real grace. Maybe it’s only a little more good than bad in us, but . . .””

“For an instant, there was a release of energy second only to the beginning of the universe. There was no one there to see it.”

“The ring gate faded. Its recent brightness went first, and then the distortion at its center . . . faded. Where there had been a mystery and a miracle, a gateway to the galaxy, now there were just distant stars framed by a dull loop of metal a thousand kilometers across.”

““Even if someone does, though. We’ll never know. The alien roads are gone. Now it’s just us.” The ring tumbled on her screen, and she looked past it to the stars. The billions upon billions upon billions of stars, and the tiny fraction that had other people looking back toward her.

““The stars are still there,” she said. “We’ll find our own way back to them.””