The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance.
The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one’s thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family.
Chims needed to touch and be touched, perhaps quite a bit more than their human patrons, who sometimes held hands in public but seldom more.
My family tree spreads wide as well. I am a great ape, and you are a great ape, and so are chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos, all of us distant and distrustful cousins.
I know this is troubling.
“And you take orders from foreign powers now?”
“No, but I do have standing orders to start exactly zero wars with the psycho-bear of destruction at the galactic core.”
“If he were worthless,” Fitz said tightly, “the militaries of three empires wouldn’t be poised to fight right now.”
It was as much a battle of wits and words as it was of mitts and swords.
“That’s because, despite any surface slickness, he comes from the shallow—very shallow, in his case—end of the gene pool…intellectually speaking, that is,” Emily replied.
The practical effect of this compound is that it effectively eliminates all friction from any thing placed in water. Boats will be able to move across the sea with no resistance at all. The fuel savings will be astronomical.
In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
The moment lasted, and lasted. Two people, strangers until that day, grinning at each other. And as it lasted, began to undergo what Anton, from his reading of the classics, understood as a sea change.
A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow.
Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark years. I can’t help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist.
“Hi, Kevyn. I’m you…okay, that’s not quite true. I’m you as you’ll be seven weeks from now.”
“I’m going to be captain?”
“Yes. Err…no. Maybe. Let me try again. I used to be you, and now I’m seven weeks older and I’m me, but that doesn’t mean you have to end up like me. In fact, I’m here so that you can work with me to make sure that the conditions that resulted in me don’t happen to you.”
“It sounds like I lean to babble like an idiot in the future.”
Howdy, stranger! This is Hauser. If things have gone wrong, I’m talking to myself and you don’t have a wet towel around your head. Now, whatever your name is, get ready for the big surprise. You are not you, you’re me.
Just because we had our roots on a different world doesn’t make us of different flesh. There are no strangers in God’s universe.
One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.
Why did they come billions of miles just to stare at us? It’s rude.