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Which of us are people and which of us are meat?
Honestly, the only real question contemplated by either side was whether to eat, enslave, shun, keep them as pets, or cleanly and quietly exterminate them all. After all, they had no real intelligence. No transcendence. No soul. Only the ability to consume, respirate, excrete, cause ruckuses, reproduce, and inspire an instinctual, gamete-deep revulsion in the great civilizations that turned the galaxy around themselves like a particularly hairy thread around a particularly wobbly spindle.
Neither Decibel nor Oort nor poor dead Mira ever imagined the power of the ordinary to gum up the works of the epic.
The story of the galaxy is the story of a single person in it. A cover version, overproduced, remastered, with the volume cranked up way past eleven and into the infinite.
“Jee haan, but they are the same! One hunts, one runs; one chews the carrot, one chews the Sir John Hurt. One makes eggs that go BANG! One makes Acme traps that go BANG! See? Sameful. Only Mr. Looney of the Tunes is more actual, on account of how aliens live in your big Danesh-head and bunny rabbits live in Coventry. Also, mine is bright and happy and makes a colorful noise, so I put it on top of yours that is droopy and leaky and makes a noise like the dishwasher. Double also, if aliens were real like bunny rabbits and talkbacking grandsons, they would never be so ugly, because God would not
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He’d always had the kind of face that made people squint and try to think of a polite way to say, Just what exactly are you, kid? As though he might legitimately answer rhinoceros or sea-cow or Aldebaran.
‘Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does’?
The giant panda eats bamboo. The wormhole eats regret.
The waste product of the constantly dividing multiverse is a fine, drifting mist of regret, and no wormhole has ever starved.
It’s not your fault. No one expects more from a species that still uses electric kettles.”
Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art.
No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy-store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension. Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species. And
the First General Fact: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?
People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they’re all monsters.
The nap was the really important thing. The nap was all.
Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down.
‘Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all.
Somehow, when you attacked first, you were left with the distinct and uncomfortable sense that you might be a bad person.
Justice takes so long that by the time you get it, it’s gone off and smells like an old corpse. Forget about justice. Just knock back a big, stiff drink and move to a new town with fewer pronks living in it.
My diagnosis? You’re an asshole. Sadly, the only known cure is being set on fire and dropped off a balcony.”
