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There just isn’t such a life form any more. But we still extol its virtues … after having exterminated it as a race.
No, Nicholas had said. It won’t work. Because they’ll send another. And—Dale Nunes is a man. Not a force. And would you prefer to deal with Estes Park as a force, on your TV screen, which you could see and hear … but not talk back to?
Louis Runcible who builds housing for tankers who come up to the surface expecting to find the war in progress, only to discover that the war ended years ago and the world’s surface is one great park of villas and demesnes for the elite few … why, Adams asked himself, must this man be slaughtered, when he is so patently performing a vital service?
If merely saying that a man had been executed was enough to satisfy everyone, why not merely say it instead of doing it?
What a great burden, Adams thought, the luxury of this way we live. Since no one makes us suffer we have elected to volunteer.
We are, Adams realized, a cursed race. Genesis is right; there is a stigma on us, a mark. Because only a cursed, marked, flawed species would use its discoveries as we are using them.
It was not the smile of a young man; it had in it ancient, wild craft. An elliptic untamed wisdom which could afford to be gentle, could be tolerant because it had seen so much.
