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Utopia spawns few warriors.
It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems.
The muck and dirt, the king with fleas.
(He looked away, shivering again, then threw a piece of wood onto the fire, and did not notice then or afterward that it was a piece of the bloodwood chair he had added to the flames, and not a log at all.)
:chef_kiss.gif:
“Thirty days with a crew of viral masochists and a ship that thinks it’s a cuddly toy.”
But I think the controlling Minds were so impressed with Zakalwe’s trick they thought he deserved to get away.
LOL … like for aesthetic reasons?
Happily, the fad for having colds passed quickly.
At least, she thought, they’re fairly Standard. She had never liked being altered to impersonate the natives.
!!! 4th wall-breaking reflexive recursion?
“They also,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, “refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value — carbon fascists.”
He looked unworried, full of life. Pep and vim were the words that came to mind. She felt vaguely disgusted.
Sex was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her.
You’re saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.) No, he heard her say. I’m saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.
“I’m from out of town,” he said breezily. This was true. He’d never been within a hundred light-years of the place.
“Humanoids are the galaxy’s way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.”
Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered.
Memories are interpretations, not truth, she insisted, and rational thought was just another instinctive power.
“So many scars, Zakalwe,” she said, shaking her head, tracing lines across his chest. “I keep getting into scraps,” he admitted. “I could have all these heal completely, but . . . they’re good for . . . remembering.”
Scars as memory - metaphor for emotional trauma? Potent thought
But that remorseless concentricity didn’t matter anymore; here was here and now was now.)
“Maybe we cancel out each other’s obsessions, then.”
“Perhaps I like to dwell on what might happen so as never to be surprised.”
“That I . . . can’t believe enough not to have doubts.”
She said she would write a poem specifically about him one day, maybe when he had told her more about his life.
This reads like a threat; foreboding
“Trillion fucking tons and it hasn’t got any goddamn garbage; apart from its brain, I suppose.”
So sooner or later I’ll die — violently, probably. Maybe even foolishly, because that’s often the way of it; you avoid nukes and determined assassins . . . and then choke on a fish bone . . . but who cares?
“Myself,” said the drone sniffily, “I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty percent water.”
Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars.
“Only the very young or the very stupid think wars are waged just by the military.
“You’ll run out of expletives soon; I’d advise saving some for later.
Sometimes — like now, when things fell against him and every turn he took brought him up against another vicious twist of the knife, another hammering on the bruises he’d already collected — it would be comforting to think that it was all designed, all preordained, all already written, and you just turned the pages of some great and inviolable book . . . Maybe you never did get a chance to write your own story (and so his own name, even that attempt at terms, mocked him).
And it had two shadows, it was two things: it was the need and it was the method. The need was obvious: to defeat what opposed its life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.
He could laugh at it, at the sharing of time and place between the grand and the petty, the magnificently vast and the shoddily absurd, like horrified nobility having to share a carriage with drunk and dirty peasants being sick over them and copulating under them; the finery and fleas.
“Dizzy, luck this good never lasts long; it’ll average out.”
Everywhere they found themselves, the galaxy bubbled with life and its basic foods kept on speaking back to it, just like he’d told Shias Engin (and, thinking of her, felt again the texture of her skin and the sound of her voice). Still, he suspected if the Culture had really wanted to, it could have found far more spectacularly different and exotic places for him to visit. Their excuse was that he was a limited creature, adapted to certain sorts of planets and societies and types of warfare. A martial niche, Sma had called it.
It had always seemed to him that the ideal man was either a soldier or a poet, and so, having spent most of his years being one of those — to him — polar opposites, he determined to attempt to turn his life around and become the other.
This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
many strong sons and cunning daughters.
All you had to do, Sma said, was think in seven dimensions and see the whole universe as a line on the surface of a torus, starting at a point, becoming a circle as it was born, then expanding, moving up the inside of the torus, over the top, to the outside, then relapsing, falling back in, shrinking.
have no idea whether they’re the good guys or not, Tsoldrin. They certainly seem to be, but then who knows that seeming is being?”
Perhaps that’s only right; perhaps that’s what evolution requires, to leave the field free for younger, unencumbered minds, and those not afraid to act.”
What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
Every year a complete ring, signature of bad year and good by the spacing, and every ring complete, sealed, hermetic. Every year like part of a sentence, every ring a shackle, chained and chaining to the past; every ring a wall, a prison. A sentence locked in the wood, now locked in stone, frozen twice, sentenced twice, once for an imaginable time, then for an un-imaginable time. His finger ran over the ring walls, dry paper over ridged rock.
but” — he slapped the table — “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”
What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
He knew (somewhere at the back of his mind) even as it happened that none of it was real, but that seemed like the least important property of the adventure.
that’s happened is that reality has caught up with the way people always did behave anyway.
you will in time come to feel like a tooth on the biggest saw in the galaxy,
“Ah, but the more the legs, the bigger the tangle.”
“To the Culture,” he said, raising his glass to the alien. It matched his gesture. “To its total lack of respect for all things majestic.”
the moral equivalent of black holes,
