By the time Jeremy’s comrades made their way into the chamber, it was all over. Stillness and silence. Slowly, Victor Cachat lowered the flechette gun. More slowly yet, as if in a daze, he began to examine his own body. Astonished, it seemed, to find himself alive.
Surprise is your best weapon.
“Chance is the nature of our universe. […] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.”
The words were spoken in Berry’s normal tone of voice. Easily, almost gently—but with all the solidity and sureness of a continent moving across an ocean floor.
Oh, my, thought Anton. If she lives long enough . . . these fine gentlemen are in for some surprises, I think.
“Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it’s coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.”
Have you ever heard this song?” Harriman hummed. “The Moon belongs to everyone; the best things in life are free,”—then sang it, badly off key. “Can’t say as I ever have.” “It was before your time. I want it dug out again. I want it revived, plugged until Hell wouldn’t have it, and on everybody’s lips."
A customer at one of the small tables began to go mad.
I’d noticed him coming in. A lean scholarly type wearing sideburns and steel-rimmed glasses, he had been continually twisting around to look out at the moon. Like others at other tables, he seemed high on a rare and lovely natural phenomenon.
Then he got it. I saw his face changing, showing suspicion, then disbelief, then horror, horror and helplessness.
Several families had obnoxious kids bouncing off the walls. In this case, “bouncing off the walls” is not just a figure of speech. The overstimulated kids were literally bouncing off the walls. Lunar gravity is the worst thing to ever happen to parents.
Pregnancy, childbirth, healing and old age all required gee force. No amount of gengineering by the Biomistresses of the great stations could circumvent that inescapable evolutionary fact.
We bred for strength, we Jinxians. At what cost to other factors? Our lives are short, even with the aid of boosterspice. Longer if we can live outside Jinx’s gravity.
Muhammad snorted. “Save it for the tourists. I’ve seen you in tournaments, sensei. Even playing by the rules, you were scary enough.”
He pointed a finger at Zilwicki. “And this one? I can’t recall ever seeing him in a lotus, contemplating the whichness of what. But I use the same gym he does, and I have seen him bench-press more pounds than I want to think about.”
My people sing, we dance, we love. That is our strength. But we also dig. And then we die. Seldom do we get to choose why. That choice is power. That choice has been our only weapon. But it is not enough.
POWER is power.
“Bigbooty… more power to him.”
No one who’d ever met Oravil Barregos could have doubted for a moment that he was intensely ambitious. He knew it himself, and he’d accepted that he was the sort of man who was never truly happy unless he was the one wielding authority. Making decisions. Proving he was smarter, better, more qualified for the power he possessed than anyone else. Nor, he admitted, was he averse to wealth and all that came with it.
I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.
“What choice have I?” “Can’t you try? However useless the effort may seem to you to be, have you anything better to do with your life? Have you some worthier goal? Have you a purpose that will justify you in your own eyes to some greater extent?”
nm
Sitting in orbit around a backwater planet like Mobius Beta with nothing to do had to be the most mind-numbingly boring duty in the entire galaxy even at the best of times, far less times like these, and he hated the way it turned his mind inward, left him no choice but to contemplate things he’d far rather not think about at all.
Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?