The Wine of Violence

“Zolmec,” said Nazra, “has always taught that the greatest words are ‘I could very well be wrong.’”

Children, being close to the ground, have a special rapport with insects.

“Everyone here does think as I do,” replied Nefertiti Jones’s double, “and consequently I have no enemies.”

The new homeland bulged with the sort of free-for-the-grabbing bounty that invites greed, envy, exploitation, profiteering, and politics.

Often Burne found himself saying, “I don’t think you would make a very good soldier,” and with grating predictability he heard that he wouldn’t make a very good pacifist.

Someday that man will be astonished to discover there’s a whole world marching along outside his buzzing head.

A second slash ended the monster’s misery. So, he thought, this is how my Earthling ancestors ran their affairs. This is how lands were won, empires expanded, insurrections resisted, prisoners taken, slaves kept, heretics converted, captives made loquacious. For the first time in his life, Minnix felt himself a part of history.

History, he decided, was a terrible idea.

“What do you want out of life, Francis Lostwax?”

Francis smiled. “To never hurt anybody again.” His lack of hesitation surprised him. “To feel clean.”

Like most visionaries, The Teller saw the distant future with optical-glass clarity, the intermediate future with beeswax clarity, and the immediate future with the clarity of dark glasses dipped in tar.

Father says don’t kill your principles just because the government is paying for the funeral.

“On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?”

“It’s very complicated. You say, ‘I love you,’ and then you stand back and see what happens.”

Nature may not be benign, but she is reliable.

Smugness kills all utopias.

In Francis’s view there was ultimate gold in this commitment to impractical knowledge, to theories that had no responsibilities other than to be true. On good days the new ideas inched human intellect toward the grand understandings that were science’s pride and joy.

Like all good friends, they hated seeing their relationship lose its emotional innocence, its chastity of good will, and now that the thing was lost, now that searing statements had changed hands and left scars, neither looked forward to the future.

People found ever more ingenious ways to hate each other.