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Quite frankly, no one of the bons cared in the least how it was done elsewhere. Elsewhere, so far as the bons were concerned, had stopped existing when their ancestors had left it.
The Brothers are penitents, it is said, though no one else on Grass knows or cares what they are penitent about.
The local province was populated largely by the Sanctified, which meant there were provincial laws against both contraception and abortion.
“O’Neil will explain. Ass. Not you. O’Neil. Ass. Don’t write that down,” this to the acolyte.
“What’s your name?” Rigo had asked. The acolyte’s voice was hollow, inattentive. “We don’t have—” “I don’t care about that. What’s your name?” “Rillibee Chime.” The words fell softly into quiet, like rainwater into a pool.
“Well, Hallers, suppose we get the cure tomorrow. Why should we save everyone? Our own best people, of course, but why bother with everyone else?
“No Sabbath.” “No planetary religious holidays of any kind. Which is not to say there is no religion, simply that matters of faith have been irrevocably removed from any civil support or recognition.
she moved as a whip cracks, always seeming to arrive wherever she was going with considerable noise but without having bothered to travel the intervening distance.
I am going to change into some nice old robe and become sedentary. I need food, a lot of food, and then some familiar book and sleep.
“Well there’s widows, right enough, and occasional an orphan, I suppose, though why they should need charity is beyond me. We commoners take care of our own, but that’s not charity, it’s just good sense.
Stella rode brilliantly, but she had made it clear that she would not enjoy riding on Grass, that she would not enjoy anything on Grass.
He sounded enthusiastic, and Marjorie knew that he was scheming. Rigo was always happiest when he had some kind of covert activity going on.
visitors routinely stepped over bodies without worrying much about it. Not many of the bodies were dead;
At one time the Port Hotel had offered tours into the edges of the swamp forest, but after a boatload of influential persons had failed to return, the tours had been discontinued.
If she stood apart from him, he accused her of being remote. If she came close, he swallowed her up.
Showing love to Stella was like showing meat to a half-wild dog. Stella would seize it and swallow it and gnaw its bones.
Men had told her many sweet things about herself, but never before that she was important. It was the nicest compliment she had ever received.
a little aircar as it scuttled bouncily northward.
the earthfreaks who ate food they grew themselves
There was quiet then, quiet for several hours. Rillibee remembered the quiet as a prelude to what happened later. Much later that quiet came to stand for tragedy, so that he would be uncomfortable with too much tranquility, too much silence.
After a while, he wouldn’t let them be in the room with her at all. They could still hear her voice. For a while she sounded just like Mom.
Janetta, now standing at the middle of a small circle, dancing by herself, humming, lovely as a porcelain figure and as unpersonal. Nothing in her face or glance spoke of a person being there.
Long ago she had chosen not to notice how matters went between Rigo and Eugenie, so she did not seem to notice now.
All the questions had been reduced to doctrine; all the doctrine had been simplified to catechism; all the catechism had been learned long ago.
They wanted family, but they wanted it on command, like water from a spout, ready when they turned it on, absent otherwise. “Help me now, give me now, comfort me now. Then, when you’ve done it, get out of my way!”
perhaps God has already done his intervening by creating us. Perhaps He intends us to do what we keep praying He will do.
“I’m an Old Catholic. I don’t have to decide where Sanctity went wrong, so long as I know it did!”
It wasn’t even a reader. It was an old-style book, with pages.
“Yes, yes,” said God patiently. “Come in.”
The trouble is that very small beings write books that contradict the rocks, then say I wrote the books and the rocks are lies.”
His heart lay in his eyes, but she did not see it there.
“It’s your faith. I didn’t want to….” “It’s what I was born to,” he admitted. “What I was given to. That’s not the same thing.
If the Hierarch chooses to deploy a thousand troopers, we couldn’t enforce the coming of summer!”
I think we need to talk about our future.” She felt sorrow mixed with a faint annoyance. It was so like him to pick a time when there might not be any future to discuss their future together.
