Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have soul?
“I think I’d like a little music, Joyce.” Metzinger blinked at her, and Honor smiled. “Punch up Hammerwell’s Seventh on the intercom, please.”
“Hammerwell’s Seventh?” Metzinger shook herself. “Yes, Ma’am.”
Honor had always loved Hammerwell. He, too, had come from Sphinx, and the cold, majestic beauty of her home world was at the heart of everything he’d ever written. Now she leaned back in her chair as the swirling strains of Manticore’s greatest composer’s masterwork spilled from the com, and people looked at one another, first in surprise and then in pleasure, as the voices of strings and woodwinds flowed over them. HMS Fearless sped towards her foe, and the haunting loveliness of Hammerwell’s Salute to Spring went with her.
To Helva, the problem that she couldn’t open her mouth to sing, among other restrictions, did not bother her. She would work out a method, bypassing her limitations, by which she could sing.
Barbra Streisand’s town house in Manhattan suddenly vanished into a bottomless pit that yawned in the middle of the fashionable East Fifties. Her C above high C was heard for hours. Diminishing.
A good friend helped me find these lyrics again, and I told her if she ever fell, I’d be there to catch her. She told me if I ever sang this song like I just did, it’d be a success. Well, I’m keeping up my end of the deal.
“Yes, that. With the cover that the lands are really your bride’s, not yours, so you can evade the necessity of swearing allegiance to me.” He gave Noelle a smile that had a sly edge to it. “Of course, she will have to do so.”
If he’d thought to catch her off guard, the attempt failed. Noelle had figured that part out already. She’d have to hold her nose, figuratively speaking. But the Roths had already sworn allegiance to Wallenstein, and so far as she could tell neither one of them had started growing horns or hooves so she could probably get away with it too.
“Of course, Your Majesty,” she said. Her own smile was very sweet. Dripping with honey. Well, saccharine.
Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn’t it?
“Will I dream?”
“Of course you will. All intelligent beings dream. Nobody knows why.”
Yes, Theisman had always done his duty. Would always do his duty, without flinching or hesitating, whatever its demands. But she supposed the same thing could be said of her, and what was she doing here on this planet, of all planets in the universe, if she didn’t “dream of peace?” And the more she thought about it, about what it must have been like to spend all those years trying to defend his star nation against an external enemy even while he saw State Security making “examples” out of men and women he’d known for years—out of friends—the more clearly she realized just how longingly a man like Thomas Theisman might dream of peace.
“When someone has been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?’
'You wouldn’t want to. That’s what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.”
A boy of your intelligence should never swear… Oh shit. Indeed.
Blood: You know, Albert, sometimes you can be such a putz…
Vic: A putz? What’s a putz? It’s somethin’ bad, isn’t it? You better take that back or I’m gonna kick your fuzzy butt!
Blood: [sighs] Yep, definitely a putz.
Do ye know why we’re still alive, with hundreds, maybe thousands of men that’d be glad ta kill us?
They wouldn’t dare. I’ve only got to drown, or jump under a truck, and the sky will fall down and all the men will die. Have you ever thought of that, Rowf? That puts us one up on them!
‘He is a person of considerable importance,’ said Bidworthy, unable to decide whether the other was trying to be funny at this expense or alternatively was what is known as a character. A lot of these long-isolated pioneering types liked to think of themselves as characters.
‘Of considerable importance,’ echoed the farmer, narrowing his eyes at the horizon. He appeared to be trying to grasp a completely alien concept. After a while, he inquired, ‘What will happen to your home world when this person dies?’
‘Nothing,’ Bidworthy admitted.
‘It will roll on as before?’
‘Yes.’
‘Round and round the sun?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then,’ declared the farmer flatly, ‘if his existence or nonexistence makes no difference he cannot be important.’ with that, his little engine went chuff-chuff and the cultivator rolled forward.
“We have every piece of data on 200 million people,” he said, ticking off his fingers. “We have their bank accounts. We know how much they make and how much they spend and where. We have their social media. We know what they talk about, who they influence and how much. We know exactly how important each and everyone one of them is.”
“I may be slimy, but I ain’t crazy. There’s no way I could absorb three billion dollars — or even three million — without being discovered. But I played it like Robin over there: the money got spread around three million ordinary accounts here and in Europe, one of which just happens to be mine.”
Money equals happiness. More money, more happy.
Maxim 19. The world is richer when you turn enemies into friends, but that’s not the same as you being richer.
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
"It was a cool alien life form. I was going to kill it, except Ashelle tamed it with her natural empathy and joy for life.
I learned a hard but valuable lesson. It was filled with daring and whimsy. It was cool! But now it’s all erased by your weird, autocratic Department of History and their memory adjustment technology."
“Gosh. I can’t say I recall any of that.”