Zoe's Tale (Old Man's War, #4)

by John Scalzi

mostly, you’re born on a planet, you live on a planet, you die on a planet, and your ghost hangs around and annoys your descendants on that planet.

Who am I? Who are my people? Who do I belong to? Questions with easy answers and no answers. I belong to my family and to the Obin and sometimes to no one at all. I am a daughter and goddess and girl who sometimes just doesn’t know who she is or what she wants.

I knelt at the grave, thought some more, and tried to find a way to say a last good-bye to my mother and father and to keep them with me, to stay and to go, to be the daughter and goddess and girl who doesn’t know what she wants, all at once, and to belong to everyone and keep myself. It took a while.

“Always a good idea to confront change with your eyes open.”

don’t play at it,” I said. “They have it.” “And it is a terrible thing that they do,” the Consu said. “Consciousness is a tragedy. It leads the whole race away from perfection, causes it to fritter its efforts on individual and wasteful effort.