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January 6 - January 8, 2023
His brain is the product of millions of years of primate evolution, and it isn’t prepared for this. It decides that he’s being attacked, and then that he’s falling, and then that he’s had some kind of terrible dream. The yacht isn’t the product of evolution.
Solomon didn’t believe in love at first sight, but as soon as he sat down at the table, he was profoundly aware that he hadn’t brushed his hair very effectively that morning and he was wearing the shirt with the sleeves a little too long.
“Even if there are a few things we still need from Earth, we can trade for them. Shit, give us a few years and we’ll be mining them out of the Belt,” Tori said, backing away from his last point and making a new, equally unlikely assertion at the same time.
They lost because even though one of their tanks was worth five of the other guy’s, America could build ten.
“You are adorable, and you are my husband, and I love you and trust you like I never have anyone in my life. I wouldn’t trade this for anything but more of this.
“That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.”
From when Moses saw the promised land that he could never enter, people have been on their deathbeds just wanting to see what happens next. He wonders if that’s what makes the promised land holy: that you can see it but you can’t quite reach it. The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction.
Solomon relaxes, and the expanse folds itself around him like a lover.
They said the thing
Another man had joined them. Thin, young, with a case of acne that deserved medical attention.
“Colonel Frederick Lucius Johnson. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. My name is Anderson Dawes. I work for the OPA.”
Fred’s vacuum-rated armor protected him from the smell of viscera, but it reported it to him as a slight increase in atmospheric methane levels. The stench of death reduced to a data point.
They made me a butcher.”
If you want to make it up to her and all the people like her, I could use your expertise. You’re a rare resource. You’ve got knowledge and training, and as the man who is famous throughout the whole system for killing Belters, you’re in a position to be our strongest advocate. All it means is walking away from everything you know and love. The life you built for yourself. The admiration of everyone who looks up to you. All the things you’d have lost anyway.”
A small, old, dark-skinned woman in an orange sari appeared on the screen, leaning forward and listening to an interviewer’s question with an expression of polite contempt. Aunt Bobbie coughed out a single sour laugh and turned off the screen.
“Then why do they act like they hate us?” David’s father said with something like triumph. “Because that’s what fear looks like when it needs someplace to go.”
The lights had dimmed all through Breach Candy, simulating a twilight he’d never actually seen. Somewhere, the sun would slip below a horizon, a blue sky darken. He’d seen it in pictures, on video. In his life, though, it was just that the LEDs changed color and intensity.
“You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse. And David is my beloved nephew. If you fuck with him after this, I will end every piece of you,” Bobbie said, her own smile sad. “No disrespect.”
“What’s the matter?” Erich said. “Are you all right?” I stopped being all right before you were born, she thought.
Then, to hear her tell it, God had come to her in her sleep and told her to have a baby. She woke up, marched to the training center, and applied for any program that would earn her enough money to legally go off contraception. It took her three years of fourteen-hour days, but she managed it. Enough money for both a licensed child and the donation of germ plasm that would help begin my
I divided myself into three different young men: one a nurse to his failing mother, one a fierce student on a quest to understand the disease that was defining his life, and the last a victim of depression so profound it made bathing or eating food a challenge.
Heartbreak and relief were my soul’s twin bodyguards.
Time had eaten some of my memory and likely falsified some as well.
There was something. Not a bruise really, but where a bruise would have been if Xan’s blood hadn’t stopped where it was. A discoloration on his head. Cara couldn’t get the idea out of her mind that this was where Death had touched him.
“Ready?” she asked. Are you ready to take control of a planet? Are you ready to command the lives of millions of people and forge the most valuable planet in the greater human sphere into a tool that will, in time, feed trillions of people under a thousand different suns? He told himself that the flutter he felt in his stomach was excitement.
But there was a kind of bloodlust. They’d made the thing that had frightened them before now bend to their will, and it was intoxicating.
“Wake up.” “Can’t wake up,” Filip said. “I died. Dead men don’t wake up.” “You didn’t die.” “Then why do I hurt so much?” “Because you didn’t die,” Mose said with a long, wheezing laugh. “Dead men don’t hurt. That’s being alive.”
Her last name was a mouthful of Russian that sounded like a puppy falling down stairs, so everyone called her Nami Veh.
Grief made people weird.
Once, he’d tried reading about the experience of child soldiers and the paths they’d taken through the trauma of their adult lives. Before he’d even finished the first half of the book, he’d descended into panic so deep that the ship medic had put him on antiseizure medications. He’d never tried again.
The only right you have with anyone in this life is the right to walk away. He
“You should eat. It’s not good, but none of this gets better by starving.”
“You say that now,” Nami said with a laugh, “but having anyone care that much and try that hard to save you from yourself can be fucking exhausting.” “Do I get to pick? Because—” “Look,” Nami said. “I don’t need to hear all the ways your father made life harder for you, and I’m not going to explain how living with Saint Anna broke a few things for me. We have no reason to compete, you and I.
The only point is that our parents can lay burdens on us, all without meaning to, that we’ll have to carry around for the rest of our lives and there’s nothing we can do about that. But you and I still get to decide how we carry those burdens.”
“What if we just go on like people always have? The same bullshit. Give the same bullies and liars power like we did before. Cut all the same corners. Put up with all the same hypocrites. Make everything here into more of the shit that got us here. That seems worse. For me? That’s worse.”
Filip picked up the emergency blanket. It was very light, and small enough to put in a pocket. “Thank you, but I don’t deserve any mercy.” “Of course you don’t. That’s why they call it mercy. If you deserve it, they call it justice.”
Doing the right thing has to be enough in itself. It’s not about getting the pat on the head.
We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.
