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Zeyk growled. “Please don’t ask stupid questions,” he said. “Sunnis are fighting Shiites—Lebanon is devastated—the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor states—the North African countries are a metanat—Syria and Iraq hate each other—Iraq and Egypt hate each other—we all hate the Iranians, except for the Shiites—and we all hate Israel of course, and the Palestinians too—and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouin from Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So
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And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.
About five percent of it by weight was made of living things, and this critical five percent consisted of dense populations of nematodes, worms, mollusks, arthropods, insects, arachnids, small mammals, fungi, protozoa, algae, and bacteria. The bacteria alone included several thousand different species, and could number as high as a hundred million individuals per gram of soil. And the other members of the microcommunity were almost as plentiful, in both number and variety.
It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally.
It was strange how much beauty hurt, sometimes, and even happiness.
“Then I wonder if that’s not the problem with Terran immigration. Not the numbers themselves, but the fact that so many people arriving from Earth are coming from older cultures. It’s like they’re arriving out of a time machine from the Middle Ages, and
And so the newcomers can’t cope. They cluster in immigrant ghettos, or new towns entire, and keep their traditions and their ties to home, and hate everything here, and all the xenophobia and misogyny in those old cultures breaks out again, against both their own women and the native girls.”
how immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present.
