Starlings

by Jo Walton

She was plain and lonely in her solitary life, but she couldn’t see how to change it, for she didn’t have the trick of making friends. She always saw too much, and said what she saw.

His words were ever truths shot through with sparkling lies, but his joy in their effect was as real as hot crusty bread on a cold morning.

“No, it is wood,” she said, very definitely. “But it’s a pretty enough lie to make true.”

“But I have loved you since I first saw you,” the king insisted, although her words and the vision had shaken him. He took a deep draft of the ale to drive them away. “Love? Well now. You feel what you feel, and I feel what I feel, but that doesn’t mean you have to fit us into a story and wreck both our lives.”

I’d like to make a new story that was about you and me, the people we really are, getting to know each other.” He put out his hand to her. “Oh, that’s hard,” she said, ignoring his hand. “That’s very hard. Would I have to give up being a silver salmon leaping in the stream at twilight?” “Not if that’s who you are,” he said,

The problem of pain is mostly a semantic problem, people confusing “good” with “nice.”

Which brings me back to the problem of pain. Of course God could have made the universe without pain, but a universe without pain is a universe without change, without movement, without stories. God could have contemplated nothing but their own glory for all eternity. They chose to have a universe with stories, and there are no stories in utopia.

They remind me of my family, not the most refined, perhaps, but getting along. The crow flew up off the ground and away over the rooftops, calling out his hoarse squawk, not a proper song the way birds are supposed to. “We’re okay here,” is what it seemed to say,

What consciousness is, I think, (and I’ve thought a lot about this, having reason to) is not thinking “I think” but having an agenda.

But the things she’s trained to do don’t include JCB driving, or jellyfish rescue, or world rescue either, and if she starts to define typing on the Internet as “helping the jellyfish,” then the words “helping” and “jellyfish” have drifted beyond all semantic hope.

Even if she found some new way to put it, even if she had wisdom and answers rather than just questions and uncertainty, it probably wouldn’t make a difference to very many of them.