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A dead girl that’s my most close and faithful friend has got a good way of explaining that. She says the things that work the deepest changes in us kind of live on inside us, so they always feel like they’re happening right now. I believe she’s right. Or at least that’s the way it is with me.
“It’s all right. Trust me, we gave much better than we got. Nemo me impune lacessit, as the saying goes. ‘Touch me, and see how I touch you back.’ And now we have improved ventilation, don’t we? Almost there. Come along.”
Lorraine had already started talking to someone named Jesus. She asked Jesus to shine his light on us all, and she thanked him for the good things we was about to eat. I knowed enough to see this was a prayer to a god I hadn’t never heard of before. I was curious about that, but I didn’t ask. People either don’t like to talk about their gods at all or else they talk too much and you wish they would stop.
And the tears I saw in his eyes gave me hope in a way. Tears are not the mark of a coward, as some would have it. They’re only a mark of something having touched you deep. The worst cowards are them that are touched by nothing.
“It’s not weapons that win a war,” I said, still pretending to be bored. Behind Morrez’s back, I could see the horror on Jon’s face, and Jarter’s and Shirew’s, but I didn’t let any show on mine. “A weapon’s only as good as the hands it’s held in, and Half-Ax fighters is known to be weak. It’s said they’re hard to fight, but only because they run away as soon as you come at them. You got to race them before you can drub them.”
The people of the before-times had been so rich they could use their tech not just for weighty things but to give them pleasure in an idle moment. I wondered: did they know they lived in Edenguard, or did they dream of a higher Heaven still?
But I was learning what most people learn when they go about to lead others. You begin by wearing a mask and pretending to be a different person – a person that’s like you with all the doubts and fears and yieldings taken out. But the more you put that mask on, the harder it is to take it off again. You draw back from them you love, not because you don’t need or want them any more but because you’re not the right shape to fit with them.
“It’s okay, Monono,” I said. “I wasn’t even scared that much. That nonsense Paul was talking was just too silly to fright anyone.” “It’s called fascism, Koli-bou. It’s like ra-ra skirts and flared trousers. People get all hot for it and make themselves look ridiculous, then when the fad blows over they pretend they were never that into it.”
had made so many mistakes since then, I couldn’t even count them no more. If I could unpick my whole life like a pattern in wove cloth, I would do it in a heartbeat. But life’s not forgiving either, and we only get one chance to weave what pattern we can.
This was why humans had finally given up on the idea of true machine intelligence as a goal to aim for. They knew the things that had shaped their own minds – the ruthless imperatives of pack hunters, the terror of the hunted, the love of kin and tribe, the pain of loss and necessity. A machine mind wouldn’t experience any of those things. Its shape would be terrifyingly alien. You couldn’t hope to reason with it or understand it.
Grief’s not a debt we owe. It wells up or it doesn’t.
I was thinking the while about how love works and how it shows itself, and how it can’t find a way sometimes to say what it means. But it’s most real when it’s most tongue-tied, the same way a wide and deep river will move quiet between its banks, while a little freshet will sing its heart out all the live-long day.
Smiling in the face of horrors is a thing you can get better at. It was probably one of the first tricks our mothers’ mothers ever learned.
