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August 14 - October 10, 2020
Giving without hope of getting, in the hope of getting without needing to ask.
That’s how it works, Baru, that’s how it’s always worked, cracking open a new province. Stoke their problems with each other, find the cracks and widen them: like tapping an egg on the edge of the dish. And then sell them the solution. They’ll buy it from you and thank you for it.”
“We should sell this as a novel, shouldn’t we?” “But it’s all true.” “Exactly why it should be a novel! The frame of fiction allows the reader to … adjust their comfort. If they want to trim away a few of the more extreme points, write them off as artistic exaggeration, well, we give them permission. And if they want to imagine things went further, that we are hiding the juicy bits … well, we equip them to imagine.”
There is only one way to escape the masters of manipulation.” “What’s that?” “Chaos.”
“They tell me the messiah shouldn’t do chores, but I think it sets a bad example.”
“Oh, any little lord can make her people do scut work. That’s dominance, and it’s brittle.” The Brain knelt, grunting, to get the pig by its two trotters. “But if you do your own work, and do it very well, they come to you with questions. As it is with Akhena. And if you answer well enough, not just about what they should do but why they should do it … then they learn to think as you think, and to make the choices you would choose. And you lead them without a word, from a thousand miles away, because you are with them in the shape of their thoughts.”
To us a soul is not a great ineffable mystery. People are, after all, not very mysterious. A soul is simply the text of a person’s inner law, and a mind is the act of reading that law into the world.
I found Faham’s idea of reality as a malleable thing, subject to the influence of our minds, very silly. If it were true, surely the fantasies of all the poor and sickly would have worked some improvement by now.
“Power can’t be separated from its history. A choice can’t be taken in isolation from its context. Power is the ability to set the terms of the riddle. To arrange the rewards and punishments by which the choice is judged.”
True power was not the ability to conduct a killing or a business deal or an assignation but to alter the context by which those acts were judged and evaluated.
They can put a hole in your skull, and cut off your fingers, and rip your cheek, and slice your back open, and your damn itch will still drive you mad.
To absolve them of guilt would be to deny their humanity, to deny that they had some intrinsic dignity and moral independence which only they could choose to surrender. To say that these people were doing monstrous things entirely of their own monstrous nature was to deny Falcrest’s immense historical crimes. But to say that these people were doing monstrous things solely because Falcrest had made them into monsters was to grant Falcrest the power to destroy the soul: to permanently remove the capacity for choice.
“You know how to cook that?” Ake asked her, skeptically. “I put it on the fire,” Shir said, “until it stops tasting raw.”
“Trade is like a waterfall,” she offered. “The further it has to fall, the more power you can get from it. It doesn’t fall across physical space, though. It falls across … across the difference in what two places can offer.
if there was any purpose to the world at all, it must be to make it kinder for those who waited across the Door for their time to be born.
A treaty was a spell to force the human world to obey a truth that existed only in paper.
Everything an empire does is terribly expensive; otherwise they wouldn’t be things only an empire could do.
“But life needs to do more than just live, doesn’t it? Sometimes we have to risk ourselves … risk death. For our families. For our people. For an ideal. That’s what a brain is, isn’t it? An organ that guides the body against its own instincts. Why do we need a brain, Baru, if the skin and the stomach are enough? A worm has no brain. A worm can still touch what it loves, eat what it tastes, flee from its fears. We need a brain to deny ourselves what we want. Sometimes we must choose hate over love. Sometimes we must choose death over life.”
“I’ve lived long enough to hear all sorts of ideas called ‘reality.’”
If you can see how it works, it’s science. If a wizard were to show you a book of rules by which he combines various gestures and words and gems and metals to make his spells, it would be science, not magic.”
