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Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.
And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it’s still possible to get things done.
Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.
Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time . . .
“Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave,” said Vorbis. “So I understand,” said the Tyrant. “I imagine that fish have no word for water.” He smiled the fleeting smile again. “And there are the baths and the Library, of course. Many fine sights. You are our guests.”
‘Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed.’”
“Life in this world,” he said, “is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say, humbly, ‘Go on, do Deformed Rabbit . . . it’s my favorite.’”
Simony snorted. “Well, well,” he said, “we live and learn, just like you said.” “Some of us even do it the other way around,” said Didactylos.
You gave a god its shape, like a jelly fills a mold. Gods often became your father, said Abraxas the Agnostic. Gods became a big beard in the sky, because when you were three years old that was your father.
“Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.”
“I thought you said there were hundreds of thunder gods,” said Brutha. “Yeah. And he’s all of ’em. Rationalization. A couple of tribes join up, they’ve both got thunder gods, right? And the gods kind of run together—you know how amoebas split?” “No.” “Well, it’s like that, only the other way.”
“Sir, surely only things that exist are worth believing in?” said the enquirer, who was wearing a uniform of a sergeant of the Holy Guard. “If they exist, you don’t have to believe in them,” said Didactylos. “They just are.”
You can’t inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol.”
You can die for your country or your people or your family, but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of a long life.”
And no one, as they hauled on timbers in the teeth of the gale, as Urn applied everything he knew about levers, as they used their helmets as shovels to dig under the wreckage, asked who it was they were digging for, or what kind of uniform they’d been wearing.
