Home > Work > Ancestral Night (White Space #1)
21 " I’m not concerned about any terrible things you might have done,” he said quietly. “I’m concerned about the terrible things that happened to you. "
― Elizabeth Bear , Ancestral Night (White Space #1)
22 " If you have to constantly alter your natural mental state to survive a situation, doesn’t it follow that the situation is toxic? "
23 " We cannot choose where we come from, but we can choose where we are going, and we can choose the routes we're willing to take to try to get there. "
24 " Scared of Farweather. Scared of whether or not my gravity trick was going to work if there was another living body in the way of it, or whether Farweather would have better control—or whether the ship itself would intervene with some kind of failsafe to protect her. And I was scared as well of what I might do if my plan worked and I actually did get the upper hand "
25 " Shall I compare thee to a docking ring? Thou art more beautiful and more temperate, though that’s not really hard when you’re talking about an airlock whose external temperature is measured on the low end of kelvins. On the other hand, I’m not sure I could have been happier with anything or felt more raw, unfettered love than I did for that docking ring, right then. Free and with my afthands on metal, I stretched against the rotational acceleration and sighed "
26 " Was this what having an identity felt like? Was this being someone? Feeling like there was a core of who you were beyond which you could not be altered? Feeling . . . continuity. Feeling like you existed as a real, solid thing, apart from your trauma. "
27 " Sure, but there’s… exploitation with consent and without it, I guess? Not all relationships are parasitic.”“Yes,” he said. “Some are commensal. But I also consider this: as long as there have been exploited classes, the world has been looking for ways to keep those exploited classes from striving. Better to keep them from even feeling striving. Bleed them, starve them, terrorize them into learned helplessness, seduce them into Stockholm syndrome so they police themselves. Provide them with drugs—legal or illegal— and then use the sequelae of those addictions to control them further. Give them a minimum comfortable living so they’re not motivated to overthrow the government. There are ways, and some ways are more ethical than others. "
28 " What would it do to your psyche if this were your sky? What would it do to the racial awareness of your species if this were their memory of their dirt-bound cradle, before they stepped out into the great emptiness beyond? "
29 " We went to our separate corners to muse, and mope, and stare thoughtfully out the viewports. "
30 " Space is big, and even at ludicrous rates of speed, crossing chunks of it takes a long time. "
31 " All things end, but this had been a healthy and happy part of my life, much better than the bit before. "
32 " There’s always somebody who feels like they have a right to judge. "
33 " Of the things that bind the universe together, gravity is not particularly strong a force, as it happens. It just…never stops reaching. That always sort of made me feel good about gravity. It’s always looking for the next rock, always something down a breaker in space-time, whipping something in a long, arcing curve around something else. Gravity doesn’t give up. It keeps on trucking. "
34 " Politeness counts the effort, or so one of my clademothers used to say. "
35 " Just the sort of stuff that doesn’t seem important to deal with right now when you’re busy, until you can’t get to your skin because you’re seal inside an isolation film and it’s the only thing you can think about. "
36 " You generally need at least a modicrum of stability for people to have the time and resources to innovate and the will to make risky choices. "
37 " A huge, lonely melancholy welled up inside me as the sheer enormousness of what I was contemplating. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, exactly, so I let it inside. "
38 " Perhaps what I was feeling was the thing called awe. "
39 " It writhed brightly, a spectrum of raveling colors, and then vanished and jumped position as the star resolved into view. Some distance away. "
40 " Anyway, dissociation is a great coping skill. It can keep you going and functional basically forever. The problems hit when it starts to break down, which is essentially as soon as you start to question your own detachment. "