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As with all priests, you learned early to call the truth heresy.
He sighed, remembered water lifted from a river in the hollow of his hands—trembling, draining. Memory drenched his face in it.
To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.
He’d slain the past.
Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.
The cleansed mind makes decisions in the presence of unknowns and without cause and effect.
No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.
“Hunting for sand in the desert,” she’d called this venture.
“I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.”
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.”
“There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers,” Paul said. “Nothing. Nothing can be done.”
