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“Trade means change. Bodies change. Ways of living must change. Did you think your children would only look different?”
“They blame me for not looking like them. They can’t help doing it, and I can’t help resenting it. I don’t know which is worse—the ones who cringe if I touch them or the ones who pretend it’s all right while they cringe inside.”
“I don’t know what I’d call what you’re doing to us, but it isn’t trade. Trade is when two people agree to an exchange.” “Yes.” “It doesn’t involve coercion.” “We have something you need. You have something we need.” “We didn’t need anything before you got here!” “You were dying.”
How could sane people like the ones he had left behind in Phoenix do such a thing—or, how could they let insane people gain control of devices that could do so much harm? If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn’t give him power.
Most animals did die, and most plants, and some of us. We’re hard to kill, but your people had made their world utterly hostile to life.
“So now and then when we get ex-resisters traveling through Lo and they hear my name, they assume I have horns. Some of the younger ones have been taught to blame me for everything—as though I were a second Satan or Satan’s wife or some such idiocy. Now and then one of them will try to kill me.
