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After much questioning, I had ascertained that they had killed Tuk to make him die and that he had died because he had been killed.
We stared at each other for some time after that; each convinced, I am sure, that the other was a total idiot.
the Three Score and Ten have offered their usual enlightenment. The person questioned smiles beatifically and responds in some non sequitur that would make the babble of the Web’s worst village idiot seem like sage aphorisms in comparison.
he’d been hanging there . . . oh, dear God . . . seven years. Living. Dying. The cruciform . . . forcing him to live again. Electricity . . . surging through him every second of those . . . those seven years. Flames. Hunger. Pain. Death. But somehow the goddamned . . . cruciform . . . leeching substance from the tree maybe, the air, what was left . . . rebuilding what it could . . . forcing him to live, to feel the pain, over and over and over . . .
Once a parent to a child now dead, the Consul walked on, knowing once again the sensation of bearing a sleeping son to bed.
FORCE doctrine held that, while a world could be reduced from orbit, actual military invasion of an industrialized planet was an impossibility; the problems with landing logistics, the immense area to be occupied, and the unwieldy size of the invading army were considered to be the ultimate arguments against invasion. The Ousters obviously had not read the FORCE doctrine books.
The third Ouster would have escaped if he had not rediscovered honor and turned to fight. Kassad felt an inexplicable sense of déjà vu as he put an energy bolt through the man’s left eye from five meters away.
In the holodramas of Fedmahn Kassad’s childhood, heroes always seemed to know how to operate skimmers, spacecraft, exotic EMVs, and other strange machinery whenever the need arose. Kassad had been trained to handle military transports, simple tanks and APCs, even an assault boat or dropship if he was desperate. If stranded on a runaway FORCE spacecraft, a remote possibility, he could find his way around the command core sufficiently to communicate with the primary computer or put out a distress call on a radio or fatline transmitter. Sitting in the command chair of an Ouster squid, Kassad did
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Shimmering, miragelike, a tree of steel thorns appeared out of the haze and a sudden dust storm of ochre sand. The thing seemed to fill the valley, rising at least two hundred meters to the height of the cliffs. Branches shifted, dissolved, and reformed like elements of a poorly tuned hologram.
I was born on Earth . . . Old Earth . . . and fuck you, Lamia, if you don’t believe it.
my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo.
my vocabulary served me well. ‘Shit-fuck,’ I would grunt, gesticulating. ‘Asshole cunt peepee fuck.’ ‘Ah,’ grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, ‘going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?’ ‘Goddamn poopoo,’ I would grin back at him.
I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven’s Gate. ‘Piss, shit,’ I said. ‘Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Peepee cunt. Goddamn!’
They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Tyrena as she read through the first copy. Her eyes were blank, bronze disks in that week’s fashion, but this did not hide the fact that there were tears there. She brushed one away. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘I tried to discover the voice of some of the Ancients,’ I said, suddenly shy. ‘You succeeded brilliantly.’ ‘The Heaven’s Gate Interlude is still rough,’ I said. ‘It’s perfect.’ ‘It’s about loneliness,’ I said. ‘It is loneliness.’ ‘Do you think it’s ready?’ I asked.
‘It’s perfect . . . a masterpiece.’ ‘Do you think it’ll sell?’ I asked. ‘No fucking way.’
‘You said seventy million were planned,’ I said. ‘Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline’s resident AI read it.’ I slumped lower in the flowfoam. ‘Even the AI hated it?’ ‘The AI loved it,’ said Tyrena. ‘That’s when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it.’
