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If only he could be like that – intellectually honourable. Another baffling item on the cryptic report card his mother toted around in some mental pocket, the report card on which he was always just barely passing.
He didn’t seem surprised or shocked. All he said was that some people needed to change, and to change they needed to be elsewhere. He said a person could be in your life and then not in it any more.
EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?
They seem close, the stars, but they’re far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender.
Oryx was so delicate. Filigree, he would think, picturing her bones inside her small body. She had a triangular face – big eyes, a small jaw – a Hymenoptera face, a mantid face, the face of a Siamese cat.
He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo.
At least he didn’t fall out of the tree. “Tomorrow is another day,” he declaims to the pink and purple clouds. But if tomorrow is another day, what’s today?
The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses,
Ill winds blow far and find a ready welcome.
The alternative for Jimmy was turkey with the parental-unit turkeys, joke, haha,
his boring old australopithecine not-really-an-uncle Uncle Pete?
For the same reason he’d taken to spending hours in the more obscure regions of the library stacks, ferreting out arcane lore. Better libraries, at institutions with more money, had long ago burned their actual books and kept everything on CD-ROM, but Martha Graham was behind the times in that, as in everything. Wearing a nose-cone filter to protect against the mildew, Jimmy grazed among the shelves of mouldering paper, dipping in at random.
He compiled lists of old words too – words of a precision and suggestiveness that no longer had a meaningful application in today’s world, or toady’s world, as Jimmy sometimes deliberately misspelled it on his term papers. (Typo, the profs would note, which showed how alert they were.) He memorized these hoary locutions, tossed them left-handed into conversation: wheelwright, lodestone, saturnine, adamant. He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
One of his term papers – for his Applied Rhetoric course – was titled “Self-Help Books of the Twentieth Century: Exploiting Hope and Fear,” and it supplied him with a great stand-up routine for use in the student pubs.
troglodyte.
Take Your Time, Leave Mine Alone.
phantasmagoria.
old neurological pathways die hard
Trampled to death by lustful pigoons. What a moronic finish.
The lights go out. Now he’s alone in the dark. “So what?” he tells himself. “You were alone in the light. No big difference.” But there is.
Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.
Every week there was a Compound social barbecue, a comprehensive ratfuck that all employees were expected to attend.
Damn and shit. He’s forgotten to bring the windup radio. Well, no going back.
“Immortality,” said Crake, “is a concept. If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be …”
