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Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.
“Since when, Viv, has the universe or any god you know given one fuck about what’s fair?”
Practical experience, on the other hand, suggested that weapons in the hands of jumpy, untrained folk rarely made anyone safer.
She’d read once, maybe in Graeber, that rather than barter, precapital economies held certain sorts of goods more or less in common; you’d borrow a neighbor’s hammer, perhaps even without asking, and one day they’d come for something worth about a hammer; they wouldn’t, though, take your goat, since goats were a different sort of thing. Barter happened between groups without mutual trust—my village might barter with those dangerous foreigners, say. By offering trade she’d marked herself as a threat, closed herself to hospitality. But if she tried to take back her offer and throw herself on the
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She smelled a small god not so far away, some ancient fucked-up elephant brand whispering about the joys of free enterprise to a handful of near-sentient fishes on a backwater moon.
Gods have a lot to answer for. And this one sure has it coming.
Zanj, fresh-fallen from space, burning with reentry, claws dripping plasma, her head oblong, her teeth jagged, her eyes white, her face a mask of fire, did not look like a person with whom one should fuck.
scars, Viv felt she understood
“I am sorry I kidnapped your people and ate their dreams.”
IN THE CLOUD the dead tumble aimlessly, and the living travel fast.
CRASHING TURNED OUT to be easy. Staying alive was the hard part.
A number of lights Viv hoped weren’t important turned red.
She could deadlift a good deal more than her body weight, and rig a sail alone, but the Star was another class of thing altogether—built from exotic matter for killing stranger, stronger things than gods.
Being was an inbound spiral, spinning always back on itself, an orbit enforced by the gravity of attachment.
That’s why he was in chains the last time we saw him. Because he’s such an excellent judge of political reality.”
If she needed to hide in shadows, she’d just snuff out the sun.
She’d dreamed of the Empress before, and thought those dreams only trauma and aftermath, the usual dance of psychological recovery that often hurt as much as the initial wound, because the human mind had assembled itself haphazard from spare parts meant for something else.
In prosperity, small resentments had ways of growing large.
“War makes strength.” “War,” the Ornchief said, “makes scars.”
An army might march on its stomach, but a starfleet flew on its songs.
Couldn’t they have landed, for once, on a non-shitty planet?
“Now,” Zanj said, “we fight our way to whoever’s done this.” “And then?” She shrugged, as if there were no simpler question in the world. “Then we hit them until they stop.”
“Don’t do that again,” Xiara called back over her shoulder. “What?” “Protect me,” she said. “How am I supposed to save you, if you keep saving me first?”
Nevers and onlys and forevers grew as you did. The sky went on forever, but if you had no context save the height of the nearest trees, you could fool yourself into thinking the blue hung just beyond your reach, when in fact it was never there at all, and what was, was deeper than you could dream.
“I mean, I came all this way for the view,” Zanj said. “But as long as we’re in the neighborhood, sure, let’s save the galaxy.”
Find allies. Take care of yourselves. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.
