The Mercy of Gods

He had a brief but vivid memory of being seven years old at his grandmother’s vineyard in Nortcoor, looking into the night sky and seeing it for the first time as infinity towering above him like God, only worse because it was real.

The end-of-year celebration was different. It was a nested series of lies. A minefield scattered with gold nuggets, opportunity and disaster in visibly mingled.

“You know what this is. This is a sign.”

“A sign,” he said.

“The tools we needed to take on our new project, given to us exactly when we needed them. It’s the universe telling us that Ostencour’s plan is the right thing to do.”

“Or the natural playing out of consequences,” Campar said, trying for lightness. “Hard to tell those apart sometimes.”

Stress, power, love. They didn’t change people, but they revealed people as who they were.

Everything about this is gross. Everything. It’s a status fuck. Finding the man with the most pull in the group and diving into his lap. It’s disgusting.

“We never had a chance,” he said. “Look at all this. We never stood a chance against this.”

“We did not,” Else agreed. “Too bad we didn’t know.”

“Knowing wouldn’t have mattered.”…

“We’d have fought anyway,” he said, thinking of Ostencour and his improvised knife. Synnia wrestling down the guard. “It’s what we do.”

“I don’t know if that idea is stupid or noble,” Else said.

“Human,” Dafyd said. “It’s just human. We don’t stop just because there’s no hope.”

Else nodded, stopped with her brow furrowed. A tear dropped from her eye unnoticed, and she shrugged. “There's always hope for something. Just not always…not always what we want.”

What is lost is lost, and why regret a dream I had when I was young just because the universe woke me from it?

Small moments, unnoticed at the time, change the fate of empires.

Jessyn knew the medicine was starting to work when her fantasies changed from suicide to murder.

He hadn’t thought about it. It was a crisis, and in a crisis you did what needed doing. Stopping to think was a short path to panic. He didn’t have time for that.

In practice, “casual” included intricate and opaque rules of behavior and a rigidly enforced though ill-defined hierarchy of status. And one of many ironclad rules of etiquette was that people were to pretend there were no rules of etiquette. Who spoke to whom, who could make a joke and who was required to laugh, who could flirt and who must remain unreachable distant, all were unspoken and any mistake was noted by the community.

She remembered one of her therapists saying Anger is pain in a party mask. It had seemed wise at the time. She wasn’t sure if she agreed with it anymore. Maybe anger was a scab over a wound, or maybe it was what happened when the universe spun you so hard that you lost everything. Or maybe it was just a thing that welled up in you when you found yourself lying sleepless in the dark of a prison work camp with no idea what your future might be or if your past mattered.

In a world without privacy, etiquette had to suffice.

“The only test is whether a subject species is useful. Usefulness is survival.”

They were all silent for a moment. The implications of the simple statement were like ice water in Rickar’s blood.

Campar chuckled. “Come on, that’s pretty much what every funding committee says.”

No one laughed.

I’m drunk. Hypocrisy is the natural companion of beer.

Why me? is not something the universe ever answers.

He was curious because he chose to be. It didn’t make him stupid.

Humans are structureless. They live in conflict with themselves and each other. Their great genius is rationalization: lying into mirrors until they bully and seduce themselves into things they would never otherwise do. They are creatures of self-delusion, regret, and desire.

Looked at in a wide enough frame, maybe her problems weren’t so large. They just seemed that way when she held them up against her eyes where they’d block out all the light.

Of all the unthinkable events in his life, the fact that the universe had put him beside this woman felt the most unlikely.

She warned me that raising children would require patience. It’s why I never had any of my own.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

I’m not, though, Jessyn thought. I’m just feeling a different kind of bad.

If you are strong, you will serve in your life. If not, you will serve in your death. All serve.

Most people were cowards. Being angry about that was like being angry at time for passing.

Good and evil are constructs lesser beings build to create divisions in places where rigor and intelligence are insufficient. It is a sloppy shorthand, and prone to error.

I think some important scientific questions have finally been answered. Alien life exists, and they are assholes.

A leader must be utterly decisive, especially when giving orders that conflict with the ones from the day before.