MAXIM 49: Every client is one missed payment away from becoming a target, and every target is one bribe away from becoming a client.
Didn’t think I could prove it was a bribe.
“If you’ll sign this.”
“What is it?”
“A receipt.”
“For a bribe??”
“Surely you’re aware of the new regulation making all bribes tax-deductible.”
He’s spending a year dead for tax reasons.
“Time…to die.”
There was nothing humorous or whimsical about that smile. No amusement. It was a thing of chilled steel—the smile of a wolf in the door to her den, between her young and the world as the hunting hounds closed in upon it. It was grim, hard, and yet, in spite of everything she’d just said, there wasn’t a gram of surrender in it. For better or for worse, it was the wolf-smile of a woman who would die on her feet in the defense of her people and her home before she surrendered or yielded.
“We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment…”
It was a sound track of the conversation he had had with O’Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child’s face.
“It’s not in a very nice neighborhood.”
“That’s okay. I’m not a very nice neighbor…and I’ve got my own hoods.”
Habermans are the scum of Mankind. Habermans are the weak, the cruel, the credulous, and the unfit. Habermans are the sentenced-to-more-than-death. Habermans live in the mind alone.
I like living in my head because in there, everyone is kind and innocent. Once you start integrating yourself into the world, you realize that people are nasty, mean creatures. They’re worse than zombies. People try to crush your soul and destroy your happiness, but zombies just want to have a little nibble of your brain.
Thin filaments extend upward into the brain. I will attempt to remove them.
She’d never guessed what she was creating, never imagined the monster she’d spawned. She’d seen the power of Alicia DeVries’s mind without recognizing the controls which kept that power in check, and only now had she begun to understand fully what she had done.
‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemlance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.’
“Yes,” Nimbus told me, "by keeping your people childlike, the Shaddill eliminated you as a threat and made you all the more endearing: a society filled with happy, healthy kids, rather than the usual messiness of a civilization run by adults. When your brains get to the critical point of Grow up or shut down… you’re designed just to go to sleep.
“I wouldn’t risk it,” said Addy positively. “They’ll sleep now and it will be quiet, and for the sake of a little quiet I can stand an empty stomach.”
If we fail, the planet will grow sterile and your people will die in hunger, thirst and waves of plagues. Our people and the thrm’s will die more slowly because the poisons here will render us unable to conceive. The skies will cease to be blue, the land will lose its verdure and the seas, well, the seas will be the first to go. Anything that does survive will be broken, mutant, discontinuous from us and mutually exclusive. It will be the new life of a shattered world, a world for chitinous, crawly things, not one for soft and tender emotion.
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me.
“Quit complaining, lieutenant. My suppressing fire worked. They’re suppressed now.”
“Suppressed, yes, and on fire. We want prisoners, not a barbecue.”
What’s your melting point, Cyborg?