Damon > Recent Status Updates

Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out our suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

I was acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. Someone-- was it van Gogh?-- said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty. Terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu, but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of that particular shade.

But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? Is it a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own? Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us?

There is to me about this place the smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death-- those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call 'miasma", defilement-- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death."

"What is this?" Roarke asked. "It's not snow, it's not rain, not even really sleet. It must be--"
"Crap," she said. "It's cold, wet, crap."
"Ah." He nodded, rubbed the back of his knuckles absently up and down her spine. "Of course. Maybe it'll keep people indoors and you'll have a quiet day."
"People kill each other inside, too," Eve reminded him. "Especially when they get fed up looking out the window at crap."

"Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. Many still believe that this is the greatest truth in the universe, far more important than mere survival. If every species in the cosmos believed this, perhaps there would be no dark forest."

The trouble with illusions, he thought, is that you aren't aware you have any until they are taken from you.

"I believe in God the way I believe in quarks," she said coolly. "People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks or God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did. I do what I do, without hope of reward or punishment. I do not require a bribe."

"I can't remember when I sat at a piano last." But she could remember. The time of day and the way the sunlight slanted through the window in the music room and the cat jumping onto the keyboard only to be dumped unceremoniously onto the carpet, the practice session punctuated by occasional gunfire and the thud of a mortar shell landing somewhere nearby. She could remember everything, if she let herself.

Not that the chow aboard the Terra was bad, because it wasn't. It was famous, in fact, for being the very best to be had-- aboard warships. He accepted this oft-repeated accolade without examination, though the image of gourmets making a culinary pilgrimage between the stars did not come easily to him. On the other hand, he conceded, it was no sillier a use for faster-than-light than rending alien exoskeleton.

"Were I to order my men to release you, how many would you kill before they got away?"
I grinned. "Three."

"Have you ever loved someone so bad you thought you would die?"
I winced. "Yes."
"That's what I thought," she said, and died.

What a curious thing: to think the man she had married, a man she had loved and been devoted to, had gone on to commit murders. Had killed and meant to kill again. Eighteen months ago, they had spent their nights cuddled on the couch watching television. Now he commit daily atrocities.

Jakob had told her that all acts of altruism were secretly acts of selfishness, that you were really only doing for others to please yourself. And he was right, without ever really understanding what he was right about. He thought altruism was worthless if it brought you happiness-- that it wasn't really altruism at all-- without seeing that it was all right to feel good about making other people feel good.

Was it not a design flaw, that people were entranced by death, yet repelled by suffering?

She rose and stood alone in the dark, both in that moment and ever after.

Not knowing what to say, he said nothing. As the days and weeks and seasons wore on he found himself repeating this nothing, not wanting to. He chanted it to himself in cell blocks and dingy apartments, recited it like a litany, ripped himself to rags against the sharp and ugly poetry of it. It echoed down the grimy hallways and squandered moments of his life, the answer to every question, the lyric to every song.

"We are all kings and queens of our own dementia. The only question is how we choose to rule. I was in fractures before. I am in fractures now. But the pieces still form the same broken picture."

"There is no such thing as safety. Just degrees of risk."

"Someday," he said, "when I'm old and rich, I'll have my own spaceship. Just you wait."
"What would you do with your own spaceship?"
He looked at her, serious as could be. "I'd make a long jump. As long as I could. Out toward the far rim of the galaxy."
"Why?" she'd whispered.
"To see what's out there. To fly into the deep depths and carve my name on an empty planet. To know. To understand. Why else?"

"Someday," he said, "when I'm old and rich, I'll have my own spaceship. Just you wait."
"What would you do with your own spaceship?"
He looked at her, serious as could be. "I'd make a long jump. As long as I could. Out toward the far rim of the galaxy."
"Why?" she'd whispered.
"To see what's out there. To fly into the deep depths and carve my name on an empty planet. To [i]know.[/i] To [i]understand.[/i] Why else?"

The perfection of the mirrored surface fascinated her. It was more than atomically smooth; it was Planck-length smooth. Nothing smoother could exist, as the bubble was made out of the warped surface of spacetime itself. And on the other side of the bubble, on the other side of that infinitesimally thin membrane, was the strangeness of the superluminal universe, so close and yet so far away. That, she would never see.

When she'd had her implants installed as a kid, her parents hadn't paid for a system that allowed for full sensory recording-- no touch, taste, or smell-- as they'd considered it an unnecessary extravagance. For the first time, Kira wished they hadn't been so practically minded. She wanted to feel what she'd felt that night; she wanted to feel it for the rest of her life.

"I don't have a lot in common with a spider, but I could probably agree with a spider on which web is more attractive, or which of the other spiders is largest and most brightly colored, assuming we see the same part of the spectrum. There are a lot of places for shared ground, no matter how different we are."

Talia snorted. "Beauty is expression of the divine. It doesn't come from inside us."

Pleasure-- intellectual or otherwise-- wasn't enough. It couldn't balance out the weight of his grief. In that regard, faith was appealing, but there too, he felt a painful lack. Tempting as it was to lay his problems on an uncaring (or even caring) god, doing so merely transposed the question instead of truly answering it-- handing off to another what he was unable to answer for himself.

Unlike so many couples, she had willed him the contents of her implants. All of her saved material, all of her documents. But most important, all of the audiovisual data the implants had recorded throughout her life. Every private moment. Every joy and sorrow and frustration. That Layla had been okay with him seeing the records was a depth of trust that had staggered him.

She stood at the far end of the table, waiting for him. There, bathed in the light of a dying sun, she seemed perfect. Happy. She smiled, and his heart broke as he looked at her. He stepped forward, but they grew no closer. He tried to speak, but his mouth formed no words. A sense of wrongness grew within him. Something was off, something within the fabric of the world. Reality was displaced.

"A church?! So you think they have souls? Hmmm? And if they do, were they all damned from the moment of creation, since the Lord's word never reached this corner of space? Or do you imagine the savior was reincarnated here, there, and everywhere to rescue the souls of sentient species throughout the universe?"

I slid the bathroom door open and was blown back by this invisible, putrid cloud. The woman was in her tub. She had slit her wrists, long, vertical slices along the arteries to make sure the job was done right. Her name was Reiko. She was the only neighbor I'd made any effort to know. She was a high-priced hostess at a club for foreign businessmen. I'd always fantasized about what she'd look like naked. Now I knew.