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He opened the fist, revealing blood pouring out of a small hole somewhere near the middle of his palm. “Here’s the deal. It’s a stigma; like a mark of Christ.”
Sky Haussmann was three when he saw the light. Years later, in adulthood, that day would be his first clear memory: the earliest that he could clearly anchor to a time and a place and know to be something from the real world, rather than some phantasm which had transgressed the hazy border between a child’s reality and its dreams. He had been banished to the nursery by his parents. He had disobeyed them by visiting the dolphinarium: the dark, dank, forbidden place in the belly of the great ship Santiago. But it was Constanza who had really led him astray; she who had taken him through the
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I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.
By the time we landed, other worlds had developed near-light space travel, making our entire journey look like some pathetic, puritanical gesture of self-inflicted punishment.
There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail.
The first rule of collisions between two orbital bodies was that they were very rare indeed . . . until one happened. Then the shards of the destroyed bodies would splinter off in different directions, significantly increasing the likelihood of another impact. It would not be such a long wait until the next collision. And when it happened again, the number of shards increased once more . . . such that the next collision was a practical certainty . . .
a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?”
It’s only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they’re what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings.
“What would they have to gain by not betraying us?”
One of the most pragmatic truths about war, and the way it affected us, was that many of the clichés were not very far removed from reality. War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory.
“Not remotely. I haven’t always been female, for what it’s worth, and I doubt that I’ll stay this way for the rest of my life. I certainly won’t always be known as Zebra. Who’d choose to be pinned down by one body, one identity?”
“My past is a foreign country.”
and it was just koi that gave us immortality. Or the first steps towards it, anyway. They live a long time, koi. Even in the wild, they don’t really die of old age. They just get larger and larger until their hearts can’t cope. But it’s not the same as dying of old age.”
The climate was against me now. It was not a time for heroes—they preferred to redefine them as war criminals.
How long would you have to live; how much good would you need to do, to compensate for one act of pure evil you’d committed as a younger man?
She was a recent arrival to Yellowstone; like me a soldier, but one who had been sent here not on some errand but because of a clerical error.
Khouri!
