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he knows me. He knows that every place I’ve ever ended up was because the science, the finding out, mattered the most to me.
‘The Mandate is simultaneously deeply interested in science and utterly hates it,’ I tell him. ‘Science is what gives them their legitimacy. Their . . . mandate, actually. Their justification for doing everything they do is that they have a logical, rational piece of thinking, which means it’s the best way to do things for the greatest number of people. So they love science, because it gives them permission to do all the shit they do. Right up to the point someone puts together an inconvenient but cogent argument that gets in the way of how they want the universe to be. They want very specific
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Jenny Haniver
From Wikipedia, "A Jenny Haniver is the carcass of a ray or a skate that has been modified by hand then dried, resulting in a mummified specimen intended to resemble a fanciful fictional creature, such as a demon or dragon." There's even a picture!
The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Ah, Kiln. You hear ‘survival of the fittest’ and imagine evolution like a boxing match, where the last champ left in the ring takes the belt. What makes you ‘fittest’ isn’t being bigger and stronger than everything else. It isn’t even necessarily being better at any given thing than everything else. Because you need everything else.
It wasn’t some super-resilient microbe, by then. What we brought back was our understanding of Kiln and how it worked. Our memories of how it had bound us together on the march. It was easy enough, the next time they sent us out on Excursion, to reconnect with our acquaintances and bring them back into camp. Spread the love, share the load, get to know our neighbours.
‘Whatever happens we have got / the Maxim gun, and they have not,’ as the bard writes.
