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But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting—
“So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything,
the word “special” having to get in there somehow, as always.
as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible.
The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.
was not ready for the trip up those clanging stairs to the empty roof where he had no animal.
Isidore stood holding the two handles, experiencing himself as encompassing every other living thing, and then, reluctantly, he let go.
Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.
the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
His tone was interestingly merciless, and Rick Deckard noted it.
The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another.
“We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture.
arms folded self-consciously before her small high breasts,
Why did we mention those
But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over.
I can’t marry and I can’t emigrate and the dust will eventually kill me. I have nothing to offer.
He and the thousands of other specials throughout Terra, all of them moving toward the ash heap. Turning into living kipple.
conically breasted
he and Wilbur Mercer are in competition. But for what? Our minds, Isidore decided.
It was as if he had given up; he had accepted the radioactive dirt and it had begun its job, long ago, of burying him.
In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy.
“It’s a chance anyway, breaking free and coming here to Earth, where we’re not even considered animals. Where every worm and wood louse is considered more desirable than all of us put together.”
“I think you’re right; it would seem we lack a specific talent you humans possess. I believe it’s called empathy.”
You got me out of this place and here’s your reward; you’re everything we jointly abominate. The essence of what we’re committed to destroy.
I love the squirrel, Deckard;
The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by—or despite—its outcry.
she lay crouched against the wall of the elevator, screaming. Like the picture,
Talk all the way to the tomb,
my feelings were the reverse of those intended. Of those I’m accustomed to feel—am required to feel.
most variations in sex are illegal. But people do it anyhow.”
“Go to bed with her first—” “—and then kill her,” Phil Resch said succinctly. His grainy, hardened smile remained.
Oh I do not like him ☹️
“All life is one; ‘no man is an island,’ as Shakespeare said in olden times.”
“The androids,” she said, “are lonely, too.”
Conscious of his own aloneness.
“Unlawful,” Rick repeated. To save their lives.
Mercer doesn’t have to do anything alien to him. He suffers but at least he isn’t required to violate his own identity.
There is no salvation.”
“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete.
Someday the Boneli test will fade into yesterday’s hoary shroud of spiritual oblivion.”
the brick-hard, irregular, slithery surface of truth.
Chitinous reflex-machines who aren’t really alive.”
“I love you,” Rachael said. “If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I’d score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.”
You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all.
before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it’s changed. You can’t go back, he thought. You can’t go from people to nonpeople.
Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none.
He carried it to the sink and there he drowned it. In him, his mind, his hopes, drowned, too. As swiftly as the spider.
For them, winter had come.
“There is no Pris,” he said. “Only Rachael Rosen, over and over again.”
the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.
