Home > Work > Ancestral Night (White Space #1)
61 " There are people, even now, who manage to elude rightminding to the point where they enjoy their pleasures more if somebody else suffers to provide them. "
― Elizabeth Bear , Ancestral Night (White Space #1)
62 " I had the skills, and making myself hate them would have been a real waste of time and energy. "
63 " Even given my limited knowledge of the vast span of Terran history, terrible crimes seemed terribly commonplace and didn’t usually lead to enlightenment. "
64 " Two decians later, we didn’t have any answers, but we’d kind of gotten used to having the not-a-parasite around. And we were still calling it the not-a-parasite, even though it had proven pretty useful. "
65 " I knew what outsiders thought of the clades, and they weren’t entirely wrong. Join, sign the contract, be assured of being surrounded by like-minded individuals working tirelessly for your mutual benefit forever. Raise children who would never break your heart, never rebel. And you wouldn’t even have to sacrifice your free will, because you’d want just that, just what everyone else wanted. Because you’d be tuned regularly to assure that it was what you wanted and that you were happy with your life choices and all the hard decisions were made in such a way as to not challenge anyone in the group, because everyone in the group held the same beliefs in common. "
66 " The mantid was one of those creatures you could just hand around with, not saying anything and not notice the quiet because it felt natural. "
67 " A faint shudder ran through the ship when we dropped out of white space into reality. "
68 " Once you signed the contract, you would never be alone again. "
69 " When you can sound like anything you like, why not sound like something pleasant? "
70 " It whetted its killing manipulators one over the other, which looked like a threat but might have been a shrug. "
71 " I wondered if it had eaten a suspect. If I had, I hoped the suspect deserved it. It seemed like a good cop, as such things went, and I’d hate to think less of it. "
72 " The idea made me sad. But it also felt like closure. And I badly needed some of that. "
73 " The clades like to point out that their choices were just a more extreme version of being and remaining a productive member of the Synarche-or good. "
74 " It was incredibly glorious, and the ship I was on was the most amazing archaeological and engineering discovery of my lifetime, and all I could feel was melancholy. "
75 " In the answer to one of these ancient philosophical questions, it turns out that nobody’s idea of green is the same as anybody else’s idea of green, at least on a species-level-but at least the physics for comparing them all is pretty straightforward. "
76 " Just because I don’t care for the prowl myself doesn’t mean I can’t be a pretty good wingperson. "
77 " Suddenly, I wanted to strip my suit off and hold my hand up to the sky, to compare the patterns the Koregai senso had left on my body to the swirling, lensed, impossibly distorted glory of the Core. "
78 " We were moving fast, but at least we were within lightspeed communication range that wasn’t longer than a human lifetime. "
79 " Sometimes it helps to remind them you’re not a drone. "
80 " Funny story, but the coincidence of our last names ending in the same letter is what led two such disparate types as Connla and myself to meet and team up in the first place. It’s a long story involving being sorted onto the same team for a pub quiz. "