WednesdayJan 22, 2025
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
When he drank his coffee, that was all he did. If his com chimed or there was a caller at the door, he ignored it. He didn't read the newsfax, nor even listen to any of his favourite music. His one cup deserved, and got, his full attention. He'd once heard a story about a monastery on the top of some mountain in Japan or somewhere. After a long trek in the cold to get there, the monks would offer to sell you a cup of coffee. You had a choice: There was a two-dollar cup or a two-hundred- dollar cup. When pressed to explain the difference, the monks were reported to say, 'A hundred and ninety-eight dollars.
Did that myth at the heart of all the fairy tales her mother had told her, that part about happily ever after, ever really work out that way? How many children around the galaxy had been given that pretty picture, had swallowed it entire, only to grow up and find that reality was not so simple, not so beautiful, not so easy? The story didn't end when the brave princess killed the wicked queen and rescued the prince. That, she was learning, was the easy part. The hard part came when the guns were cleaned and reholstered, the bodies of the villains cremated, and the day-to-day business of life reared its ugly cobra's head and grinned down at you. When your prince had doubts you couldn't answer for him, when you had doubts he could only shrug at, that, that was the hard part. That was the part the stories hadn't addressed.
If you are going to deal in death, you should be willing to see the truth of it, not some glorious lie. If I have a battle with another sword player, it is between the two of us, our business, our truth. But if you run a planet and you get pissed off at somebody the next orbit over, you each might send a million soldiers to recycling plants. A smart rocket can come from a thousand klicks away to kill you; it doesn't care and it won't be in the least upset that it has blasted you to atomic debris. That's the real horror of modern war, that it is impersonal. Being cut with a sword hurts, and if you are close enough to do it, you can't miss the other's pain.
Well. There was noting to be done for it. Things had happened as they did, time's arrow had yet to be reversed by humans, done was done. If a man spent his life looking over his shoulder at every possible branching of his path he could have taken, he would never accomplish anything. One must learn from history so as not to repeat it, but one must not waste one's energy or time worrying about what might have been. Sorry ... but people die every day and the galaxy continues on quite well without them. Consider yourself lucky you are one of those as yet unselected by the Fates.
Soon another test would come. He must be ready for it. So he sat, but it was not mindless meditation but mindful scheming that filled him. In a contest like this, there could be no second-place winner. To be second was to be last and to be last here was to be dead.
He had regrets, of course, but not so many that he would lose any sleep over them. Life surprised him now and then and he didn't much care for surprises, unless he was passing them out. But what was to be done? You had to deal with the reality, he had learned that over the years, no matter how much you didn't like it
'Humans suffer from self-centred notions as to the nature of life. Humans assume that alien life forms should conform to standards that match our own, including logic and morality. Even among humans, morality is ignored when expedient. Why should we expect more from an alien life form than we demand from ourselves?'
If you shoot a man across a field or even a room, you don't get the full impact of what you've done. Facing an opponent one-on- one, hand-to-hand or with a sword, you have to accept your personal responsibility. Killing somebody ought to be messy. You should be sprayed with his blood, you should be able to hear him scream, catch the death rattle, smell the faeces and urine as the bowels and bladder let go. You should have to dispose of the body. So you know exactly what it was you did.
No, now he didn't want to let himself get too close because he knew it wasn't going to last. Good stuff never lasted. Change would come and wipe it away, and what was the point? It hurt too much every time it was ripped away and he was getting tired of losing pieces of himself. Pretty soon there wouldn't be much left, just scraps of gristle and bone without feeling. He didn't need that
The injury that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance
There may or may not be a God or gods; the Siblings do not concern themselves with proving or disproving such a thing. By definition, gods are more powerful than men, and thus quite able to fend for themselves without help
There's always a price for what you want
This would be a tricky operation, no doubt of that, and a mistake would probably be fatal. So many things he had done over the years would have been fatal, had his luck not been strongly good. He had cheated death dozens of times, but that did not mean he could take it as a given. A man needed only one fatal mistake to end the game
When they'd been on the run, with death maybe lying in wait around any corner, they had never been more alive. When each day might be your last, it made a big difference. You couldn't maintain that state forever, of course; the stress would eat you alive, but putting yourself at risk did bring out your bestor your worst
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