No idea. [Some idea, is the guilty thought, a half-conscious whisper like the fumes off the surface of a very old, very sick bog. William came from a world that was terminal, and she has a flash of an image in her head: poverty and squalor, corruption, infrastructure rotted from the inside out in so many places. Yet a minority that persisted, still, in perverse opulence.
Maybe I was weak. But it's not a damning notion, exactly; it carries with it the tired, almost indifferent knowledge, that everybody was weak. Earth was dying.] He can't get at anybody else direct, [he reassures her.] Asks me to do shit sometimes, but it ain't ever been to hurt anybody else. [The opposite.
There's a trembling memory of watching a girl in an unfamiliar uniform with her hand gashed open, cut to the bone, the terror on her face; the feel of her shoulder under his hand, and then the wound closing up like the surface of syrup after a dipped spoon. It took him half an hour, but the memory is a split-second.] Are you gonna--
[And this image is not memory of experience, but the impressionistic scrabble of remembered imagination, cut together with a vid clip or five somewhere. The terror hadn't stayed long, but there had been there. Burnings, lynchings. Hunts in the street, government experimentation that was so imperatively secret that everybody knew it, between the United States of America and the Royal Parliament of Cambodia. Not all of the demons had fought back, but it was their carriers, really, who had paid the price. Some part of William has already guessed that there are far stranger creatures aboard the Tranquility, and perhaps none so frightening as the Tranquility herself, but.
Some worlds teach their denizens to be careful.] --raise some sort 'f alarm?
no subject
Maybe I was weak. But it's not a damning notion, exactly; it carries with it the tired, almost indifferent knowledge, that everybody was weak. Earth was dying.] He can't get at anybody else direct, [he reassures her.] Asks me to do shit sometimes, but it ain't ever been to hurt anybody else. [The opposite.
There's a trembling memory of watching a girl in an unfamiliar uniform with her hand gashed open, cut to the bone, the terror on her face; the feel of her shoulder under his hand, and then the wound closing up like the surface of syrup after a dipped spoon. It took him half an hour, but the memory is a split-second.] Are you gonna--
[And this image is not memory of experience, but the impressionistic scrabble of remembered imagination, cut together with a vid clip or five somewhere. The terror hadn't stayed long, but there had been there. Burnings, lynchings. Hunts in the street, government experimentation that was so imperatively secret that everybody knew it, between the United States of America and the Royal Parliament of Cambodia. Not all of the demons had fought back, but it was their carriers, really, who had paid the price. Some part of William has already guessed that there are far stranger creatures aboard the Tranquility, and perhaps none so frightening as the Tranquility herself, but.
Some worlds teach their denizens to be careful.] --raise some sort 'f alarm?