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“Are you desperate to get to your husband’s soul so you can … win an argument?”
In that very moment of defiance she had recapitulated the law that had been taught to her.
There is no difference between pretending to obey Farrier and committing yourself utterly to his control.”
letting people ‘choose’ to do what we want is our job!”
It felt weird to watch her friend kiss a woman. Not good weird. But weird like eating cantaloupe, which Aminata hated. You could see, theoretically, why someone else liked it.
“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.”
I just let myself think, somehow, that I’d done it all myself, that I was…”
But she had to know how to end Falcrest without simply murdering it. How to butcher an empire. How to do it cleanly, and to end up with useful and nutritious parts.
She had chosen not to rape but she had still kidnapped him and taken him into her power where rape could be inflicted without any hope of justice. The entire situation was therefore evil.
“So why do you think that you’d use war in your great work? When you’ve realized so proudly that power comes not from brute strength but from the control of the context in which strength is deployed?”
“To be disfigured,” Hu warned her, “is not to be reduced. Or to be made evil. That’s an Incrastic idea.”
“The burden of repairing the damage would fall upon the damaged. And that’s not justice.”
Baru, intellectually calibrated and mentally awakened to the highest planes of aesthetic and philosophical appreciation, stared at her tits.
e (i * π) + 1 = 0
I can’t help but be amused and not impressed by this, since I learned this in high school in a pretty short span of time. I do understand that it’s a lot easier to learn than discover, though!
People were hashes. You could only see their output, the passwords they showed to the world. You could not know the truth of them.
that brief rapport with him was so precious to her that she had not wanted to wear it out by remembering it too often.
Svir had delivered Barhu a new letter from her agent in Aurdwynn, and even explained how the Throne’s mail service was able to send enciphered text without knowing where the recipient might be. (The answer involved something called a gossip protocol.)
Of course her own house is going to try to kill her, Barhu thought. Women are mostly murdered by the men closest to them.
HOMEOPATHY IS A FRAUD: DO NOT ATTEMPT.
They will be at once aroused by the seductress and satisfied by her downfall.”
She is unmastered. They are masterless. The difference is everything.
It is not justice. But there is no such thing as justice. Only the measureless and asymbolic truth. Who prospers. Who suffers. Who lives in glory. Who dies in chains.
“But it is still Falcrest’s strength. It is still that monstrous pillaging force which treats people like coin and coin like people. And if you try to wield it you are seduced by it.
“I promise not to judge.” “Do not promise that. Only judge mercifully.”
“That’s the difference between obeying him and pretending to obey him, even if they look the same from the outside. Even if no one else can see it. This is what I do, mother. I let them think they’ve won, so that we can win.”
Am I just finding roundabout ways to say that these people are too backward to do science?” “That’s a Falcrest conceit,” Xe countered. “We’re saying they’re clever in a way that’s not valued by Incrasticism.”
“Because your ancestors are smarter than you. Not any one of them, but all together.
The mob, all the rhetorics agreed, should have expressed its anger more civilly.
But all of those things were just limbs and muscles on the beast. They explained how Falcrest was conquering the world but not why. A strong man might have the ability to strangle or force a weak man. But nowhere was it written that the strong man was fated to kill or enslave that weak man.
But Falcrest was not an innocent victim of a historical inevitability. Empire required a will, a brain to move the beast, to reach out with appetite, to see other people as the answer to that appetite, to justify the devouring of other peoples as right and necessary and good, to frame slavery and conquest as acts of grace and charity.
Not all those who lived in Falcrest participated in its devourings. But all those who lived in Falcrest had benefited from them, and by encouragement or by passive acceptance they had allowed those devourings to continue.
“And will you be happy?” She stroked the line of Baru’s shoulder. “Will you do that part of the work, too? I wanted that. That is the reason your stupid self-sacrificing plans to infest your body with cancer and plague cannot be allowed. You must be happy. I died to give you that chance. You must be happy.”
