Short Fiction quotes

“You knew I worked for the F.B.A.,” he said. “You knew I’d have charge of a district pound. You knew it before we got married.”

“I didn’t know you killed them,” she said venomously.

“I won’t have to kill many. Besides, they’re only animals.”

Still he felt the night’s guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer was obvious.

Society manufactured them because killing them was permissible.

Human babies could not be disposed of when the market became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted birth rate?

Eventually he would have to adjust to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in conflict with the grim necessities of his job.

Somehow he would have to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel.

It was only a matter of adjustment.

A thief, he was about to die like a thief.

He hung from the post by his wrists.

Asir glowered at himself for blundering with words he did not understand, but could not admit ignorance to Mara who clung tightly to his arm.

“I think,” he said, “that a technologist is a thief who tells the gods what to do.”

“Kiss me, Technologist,” she told him in a small voice.

The President looked at the robot and a great, weariness swept over him. Suddenly it all seemed futile—a senseless game, played by madmen, dancing over countless graves—playing tag among the tombstones.

Check and checkmate. But always there was a way out. Never a final move.

Life eternal and with life, the eternal plotting and scheming. And never a final victor.

His eyes twinkled maliciously. “Listen, Martha, I want to be buried face-down. I want to be buried with my back to space, understand? Don’t let them lay me out like a lily.”

“They oughta face a man the way he’s headed,” Donegal grunted. “I been up⁠—way up. Now I’m going straight down.”

Martha had fled from the room in tears. He had never done it again, except to the interns and nurses, who, while they insisted that he was going to get well, didn’t mind joking with him about it.

That had been carrying things too far. She knew he was hoaxing, and dabbed at her eyes again.

The dead must humor the mourners, he thought, and the sick must comfort the visitors.

It was always so.

She shook her head. “Don’t talk, Donny, please.”

“A man makes his own soul, Martha.”

“That’s not true. You shouldn’t say things like that.”

It was funny, he thought; five years ago men would have been outraged at the notion of an American absolutism, with one man ruling by decree. But now that it had happened, it was not too hard to accept. He wondered at it.

And he soon decided that almost any fact could be accepted calmly after it had already happened.

Men would be just as calm after their cities had been reduced to rubble.

He moistened his lips nervously and stared at the microphone. He was scared. Scared to run away. He had never been afraid of a fight, frightened maybe, but not afraid. Why now?

It takes a lot of courage to be a coward, he thought, but the word coward made him wince.

He groped blindly for a reasonable explanation of his desire to desert. He wanted to talk to somebody about it, because he was the kind of man who could think best in an argument. But there was no one to talk to except the radio.

Changing tribes was easy, for all tribes belonged to Man, but renouncing machinery for jungle tools would be more difficult.

A man could change his politics, his friends, his religion, his country, but Man’s tools were a part of his body.

Having used a high-powered rifle, the man subsumed the weapon, made it a part of himself. Trading it for a stone axe would be like cutting off his arm. Man was a user of tools, a shaper of environments.

“It came from there,” he hissed.

“She’s your womb, gentlemen. Are you going back?”

“Are you an analyst or a dramatist, Meikl?” the baron asked sharply, hoping to relieve the sudden chill in the room. “This becomes silly.”

The analyst paused.

“I can think of nothing worse that could happen to us,” he said slowly, “than just being what we already are.”

He snapped his heels formally, bowed to the baron, and stalked out of the cabin.

“Two Geoarks? What a strange idea.”

“Is it strange that you and I should have two brains? Or were you aware that I have one too?”

“Evon! What a strange idea.”

Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up, without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the casual statement:

“In our gardens, there are no weeds,”

and it applied to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna and flora of the planet.

… gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient species.

Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war.

Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of their Eden.

Evon lowered his hands, stood dazed and blinking for a moment. He glanced at Meikl, then at the girl. He knelt beside her, staring, not touching, and his knee encountered the blade of the sword.

“You have brought us death, you have brought us hate,” he said slowly, his eyes clinging to the sword.

“Pick it up,” hissed the baron.

“Now do you know?” the baron gasped.

“My⁠—my hand⁠—it knows,” the native whispered.

Ven Klaeden glanced sourly at Meikl, losing his balance slightly, eyes glazed with pain. “He’ll need it now, won’t he, Analyst?” he breathed, then fell to the moss.