Terminal World

This was a watering hole, and watering holes drew the hungry as well as the parched.

“I take it you’re not a believer, Meroka?”

“Are you?”

“I don’t believe.” He paused theatrically. “In anything. I question. I doubt. I doubt and I doubt consistently and systematically. It’s called thinking scientifically.”

“I hope you understand what the fuck that means,” Meroka said, because I sure don’t.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to, my dear. The world isn’t exactly conducive to scientific thinking. Not in its present condition. But it’s changing, and so must we. Those of us who can, anyway.”

I’m not asking you to open your mind to all manner of nonsense, Doctor, merely to allow for the possibility of things you might previously have dismissed, or failed to give any consideration to whatsoever. Such as the fact that the world was not always this way, and by implication doesn’t have to be this way in the future.

Welcome to politics, Doctor. We don’t get to pick our allies. The best we can hope for is that we don’t despise them quite as much as our enemies.

“I had you down as a xenophobic zealot,” Quillen said. “I didn’t realize you were also a sadist.”

“We all have our hidden depths.”

She was pointing into the empty, angel-less heavens beyond.

Everything else. The universe.

“And you do not think that this is possible?”

“I’ll believe in anything when I see evidence for it.”

“I know what you’re feeling," Meroka said. “You’re thinking, this was my little adventure, it was all revolving around me. And now it’s not. You’re just a detail, swept up in the stuff she’s making happen. Welcome to the way most of us spend our lives feeling, Cutter. We’re just turds swirling our way down the pipe.”

Hopefully they’ll accept me for what I am, not what I was. That’s all we can ever hope for, isn’t it?

It was easy to sound that confident; less easy to believe it in his heart. They had got this far did not give them an automatic guarantee of success. The world did not work like that. It took pleasure in punishing the cocksure.

“Do you think it means anything?”

“Probably not," Ricasso said, wiping his dust-smeared hands on his knees. “I’m all for looking for meaning in ancient texts. But now and then you have to just accept the fact that you’re dealing with so much religious gibberish.”

“We don’t have enough evidence to decide either way,” Ricasso said, “so for now we may as well keep open minds.”

They might have their airships and machine guns, but superstition wasn’t something that went away just because you had engines and bullets.