Fifth chapter is Ignace Karkasy the poet's chapter. He doesn't impress me and nothing much else does here either, but I might be being mean.
It opens with this disaster of a public event where some architect with a bad mike and projections that can't handle sun is talking toward a crowd of overheating penned in nobles.
"and what little of his speech came through served only to demonstrate the man had no gift whatsoever for public speaking.
‘…always a heliolithic city, a tribute to the sun above, and we may see this afternoon, indeed, I’m sure you will have noticed, the glory of the light here. A city of light. Light out of darkness is a noble theme, by which, of course, I mean the light of truth shining upon the darkness of ignorance. I am much taken with the local phototropic technologies I have found here, and intend to incorporate them into the design…’
Karkasy sighed. He never thought he would find himself wishing for an iterator, but at least those bastards knew how to speak in public. Peeter Egon Momus should have left the talking to one of the iterators while he aimed the wretched picter wand for them."
but like yeah why didn't the iterators? or at least vet his speech? or tell him that's a speech to give to the people back home on Terra about the cool things their army is doing or at least a speech for a small indoor room crowd and not a big open crowd people whose last city of light you just exploded?
also he keeps complaining about the iterators and are they or aren't they good speakers?
"Karkasy stared at the Titan for a little while. He’d never seen anything like it before in his life, except in picts. The awesome sight of it almost made the tedious outing worthwhile.
The more he stared at it, the more uncomfortable it made him feel. It was so huge, so threatening, and so very still. He knew it could move. He began to wish it would. He found himself yearning for it to suddenly turn its head or take a step, or otherwise rumble into animation. Its immobility was agonising.
Then he began to fear that if it did suddenly move, he would be quite unmanned, and might be forced to cry out in involuntary terror, and fall to his knees."
Is this the psyker effect of someone inside it? Or is he just really emotional and doesn't have a lot of experience so he's easily overawed despite thinking he's worldly?
"Karkasy guessed the VII had been chosen over the Luna Wolves because of their noted genius in the arts of fortification and defence. The Imperial Fists were fortress builders, warrior masons who raised such impenetrable redoubts that they could be held for eternity against any enemy. Karkasy smelled the artful handiwork of iterator propaganda: the architects of war watching over the architect of peace."
I mean that's pretty good but like, if they're so good why did they flub the other parts?
Is this one of those things where the Imperium does have super competent people but they also have no actual power to get anything done so it doesn't much matter?
"Karkasy had waited to see if either would speak, or come forward to remark upon Momus’s plans, but they did not. They stood there, bolters across their broad chests, as static and unwavering as the Titan."
I wonder if they're already aware they're not allowed to?
"Troopers of the Imperial army had been stationed around the hem of the crowd as a precaution. They had been required to wear full dress uniform, and they were so overheated that their sweaty cheeks were blanched a sickly green-white.
One of them noticed Karkasy moving out through the thinnest part of the audience, and came over to him.
‘Where are you going, sir?’ he asked.
‘I’m dying of thirst,’ Karkasy replied.
‘There will be refreshments, I’m told, after the presentation,’ the soldier said. His voice caught on the word ‘refreshments’ and Karkasy knew there would be none for the common soldiery.
‘Well, I’ve had enough,’ Karkasy said.
The soldier frowned. Perspiration beaded at the bridge of his nose, just beneath the rim of his heavy fur shako. His throat and jowls were flushed pink and sheened with sweat."
the Imperium really has always totally sucked I guess
emps come on these are solved problems
It's bad to make people stand in the sun without water, and it looks bad to do it to your own troops and then they collapse and make you look weak and they're getting crippled by it so they're less useful to you.
And soon somebody does faint and Karkasy uses the disruption to leave to wander the city. Emps. EMPS. This is like going okay you're gonna live under fascism, but at least I can promise that the trains will also never run on time under my rule either.
"The soldier looked up from the papers into Karkasy’s face, as if searching for some essential characteristic of poet-hood that might be discerned there, comparable to a Navigator’s third eye or a slave-drone’s serial tattoo."
Are slave-drones servitors? Or a type of servitor that starts with clones?
"War had ravaged many parts of the city he passed through. Buildings had toppled into white and dusty heaps of slag, or been reduced to their very basements. Others were roofless, or burned out, or wounded in their structures, or simply rendered into facades, their innards blown out, standing like the wooden flats of stage scenery.
Craters and shell holes pock-marked certain pavements, or the surfaces of metalled roads, sometimes forming strange rows and patterns, as if their arrangement was deliberate, or concealed, by some secret code, great truths of life and death. There was a smell in the dry, hot air, like burning or blood or ordure, yet none of those things. A mingled scent, an afterscent. It wasn’t burning he could smell, it was things burnt. It wasn’t blood, it was dry residue. It wasn’t ordure, it was the seeping consequence of sewer systems broken and cracked by the bombardment."
Then he sees wall graffiti, which he can read because other!Emps also enforced the same language for thousands of years.
"Many were bold, angry graffiti, splenetically cursing the invaders or defiantly announcing a surviving spark of resistance. They called for death, for uprising, for revenge.
Others were lists, carefully recording the names of the citizens who had died in that place, or plaintive requests for news about the missing loved ones listed below. Others were agonised statements of lament, or minutely and delicately transcribed texts of some sacred significance.
Karkasy found himself increasingly captivated by them, by the variation and contrast of them, and the emotions they conveyed."
not super innovative here, but there's a reason people keep coming back to ancient graffiti, and mixing that with the people whose destruction your own people did to them, yeah, there's a lot there.
dunno how good his stuff would be though, since the power of it is the rawness of it. Prettying it up into poetry misses the point imo. And he's definitely gonna do that "He felt the muse return, and it made him smile, despite the heat and the mummification of his throat. It seemed apt, after all, that it should be words that brought words back into his mind."
they needed historians of a poetical bent not poets
also he's a traditionalist into moleskin journals and fountain pens why does scifi always miss out on the opportunity to have the traditionalist diehard be the guy into oldschool smartphone dictation.
Every fountain pen filling system known (to me) is catergorized and explained with pictures, fountain pen filling system patents, videos and
"The heat had almost congealed the ink in his nib, but he wrote anyway, copying out such pieces of wall writing as affected him"
This is Malcador this is absolutely Malcador Emps is weird but Malcador's the guy carting around the Mona Lisa.
"He had filled almost twenty pages, almost half his chapbook. He felt a sudden pang. What if he had only nine volumes of genius left in him? What if that box of Bondsman Number 7’s, delivered so long ago, represented the creative limits of his career?"
eeeeeemmmmmmmmmmmmmmppppppppppppppppppssssssssssssssssssssss
this is a Terran are there zero science atheists in all of the galaxy? how did you fuck up this much!!!
Because all the remembrancers were born yesterday, he goes super deep into the place and then decides to walk into a bar to get a drink.
"They looked so human, he thought, and realised it was a ridiculous thing to think, because they were without a doubt human. But at the same time, they weren’t. Their drab clothes, their drab manner, the set of their features, their way of sitting and looking and eating. They seemed a little like animals, man-shaped creatures trained to ape human behaviour, yet not quite accomplished in that art.
‘Is that what five thousand years of separation does to a species?’ he asked aloud. No one answered, and some of his watchers turned away.
Was that what five thousand years did to the divided branches of mankind? He took another sip. Biologically identical, but for a few strands of genetic inheritance, and yet culturally grown so far apart. These were men who lived and walked and drank and shat, just as he did. They lived in houses and raised cities, and wrote upon walls and even spoke the same language, old women not withstanding. Yet time and division had grown them along alternate paths. Karkasy saw that clearly now. They were a graft from the rootstock, grown under another sun, similar yet alien. Even the way they sat at tables and sipped at drinks. "
I don't think he ever even barcrawled on Terra. Babby's first encounter with a foreign country.
They don't even bother poisoning his drink and he goes out again to wander.
Then he finds a really pretty building and doesn't know what it is and goes inside and there's a book with writing which means it's a church.
"The sheets were old, and faded, covered with ornate black script and hand-coloured images.
This was an altar, he realised. This place, a temple, a fane!"
like maybe it's a textbook? maybe they read from the books of Physics and Reason
"History had taught him about fanes and religious belief, but he had never before set foot inside such a place. A place of sprits and divinity. He sensed that the spirits were looking down on his intrusion with disapproval, and then laughed at his own idiocy. There were no spirits."
he could stand to read more physics for example because he really sounds like a guy who was a christian until five minutes ago. EMPS. EMPS why do you suck so much.
Lorgar may have actually been reducing the overall superstition in a given planet.
there's a lot of rambling by Karkasy about how how these guys are heathens and how stupid people are for being superstitious and how people who aren't him sometimes even believe good old normal human Emps is a god, and what if humanity has an inherent create-god brainflaw, which is a pretty cool question but I'd rather it was asked by someone who wasn't scared the gods he didn't believe in were cranky he'd walked into their temple.
"The Emperor had always refused such adoration in the most stringent terms, denying his apotheosis. Some said it would only happen after his death, and as he was functionally immortal, that tended to cap the argument. Whatever his powers, whatever his capacity, whatever his magnificence as the finest and most gloriously total leader of the species, he was still just a man. The Emperor liked to remind mankind of this whenever he could. It was an edict that rattled around the bureaucracies of the expanding Imperium. The Emperor is the Emperor, and he is great and everlasting."
lmao yeah he's just a man, who is immortal. and also unquestionable. and total leader by virtue of his magnificence and glory.
then he finds soldiers burning (I guess when you have are flamethrowers everything looks like a problem to burn off) the graffiti, and tells them to stop, because he's dumb. Then he wanders a bunch, decides his poetry sucks actually probably because it does and otherwise has a whole crisis. Then he goes back to the bar, and drinks, and then the soldiers show up at the bar eventually too, because they also need food and drink. He yells drunkenly at them about how the Imperium is doomed.
"This city was supposed to last forever, but we broke it and laid it in tatters. Let Momus rebuild it, it will happen again, and again. The work of man is destined to perish. Momus said he plans a city that will celebrate mankind forever. You know what? I bet that’s what the architects who built this place thought too.’
‘What man does comes apart, eventually. You mark my words. This city, Momus’s city. The Imperium–’"
eventually the soldiers get so riled they beat him to death.
hopefully now we'll only spend time with the good remembrancers and not introduce another him.
Final thought for the day
"‘Perhaps we are cursed,’ Karkasy told the empty fane, ‘to crave something which does not exist. There are no gods, no spirits, no daemons. So we make them up, to comfort ourselves.’"
how wonderful, then. to live in a universe full of daemons want to comfort us!
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