I'll Show You When We Get There.

Today we ... no, a royal "we" sounds too pretentious even for me ... so today I replace the fine blog you usually read with my favorite words from the latest book I've finished reading, Lawrence M. Schoen's novel Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard. ISBN 9780765377029


All the characters within it are descended from "raised mammals" or RMs, representatives of native Earth species given human intelligence by the middle of the next century to us. And in the intervening millennia they've built a vast Alliance of Worlds.


Elephants, otters, yaks, bears, sloths, oh my. By the time we get to the main story, though, there's not even a mention or a smidgen of a mention of humans. But it won't bother you and it didn't bother our main character Jorl ben Tral (a Fant, short for "Elephant") until ...


I'll let you read the story -- you may even figure it out from these quotes I use.






I bid you welcome,


David

Your time in life has ended; you are now as you were in life, but not alive. In this, a world of my own making, I bid you welcome.

(This appears several times, a Speaker who takes the Barsk-made drug kopf can summon the essence -- the nefshons -- of someone dead and converse with them. It's not near as impressive as it sounds.)


Flukes can come in pairs. Unlikely, statistically improbable even, but not impossible. (27)


It's against the rules for a Speaker to summon anyone who was ever a Speaker. (64)


Gilgamesh. The Pendragon. Kal-El. I am these and more. I am the Archetype of Man and from slumber such as you have never known have I awoken. Speak, friend, and I shall hear you. I am the hero. I am the young warrior, the dreamer, the quest taker. I am the sum of mankind's symbol of this aspect of himself. I am the past sent forward. (74)


That mark means you can go where you please and no one can hinder you. It doesn't mean anyone has to help you though. And I won't. (81)







And it's not paranoia when every other living being off your homeworld who knows your name would be happier if you'd never existed. (95)


He had his own stereotypes to beat back. People assumed a Yak would be headstrong, and every time he presented a reasoned and reflective argument he cut through half his opposition. (112)



I'm just saying. Don't take it out on us when we do the work you give us and you don't like the outcome. It's like blaming the desert for being dry. (113)


Once a single timeline is inevitable, events will play out and the thing will be out in the open for anyone to see. (116)


As a historian, he understood that what in hindsight were taken to be grand events really consisted of a myriad of tiny, seemingly inconsequential choices. (119)


Once they reached adulthood, male Fant just tended to get surly around large numbers of their fellows. Each wanted to be off living his own way, master of his own destiny, and free of any reminders that someone else might have another way of going about things. (125)


I know those are the rules. But prophecies trump rules. They have to. Rules look backward, they're blind to the situations that might come up after someone makes them. But prophecies only look forward. So they're more important. Ok? (141)


Not dead, and more than alive enough to know when an officer is obeying illegal orders. (149)


It seems to me, that the most unlikely events almost have to happen, or life would just be dull and no one would write anything down. (171)




Ah, self-interest at last. Despite all our differences, of race and time and commonality, we achieve commonality. I understand self-interest. (176)


You little fool! You can reach into people's minds, see them as they are and not as the flesh they wear, and you still let bigotry rule you. (180)


Let's just say I have an old soul and leave it at that. (189)


The senator considered himself enlightened, and recognized his reaction as simple bigotry, but that calm knowledge in no way eliminated the emotional reaction of being near this Jorl ben Tral. (239)


It's a special kind of monster that would torture a child to achieve his ends. (268)


And yet, of the three limits [the Matriarch who first discovered how to Speak] Margda's Edict imposed on all Speakers, she had only broken two of them. Not summoning another Speaker had made a certain amount of sense and propriety. Not Speaking to the living also seemed obvious. But the third, a restriction against summoning oneself, had never made sense to him. Why should any Speaker wish to Speak with himself? And besides, wouldn't doing so be covered under the first two restrictions? But the Matriarch had thought it important enough to her vision of the future to proscribe it on its own. Perhaps like the other two, she had done so to keep it sacrosanct until she herself needed it. Or ... what if she had meant for Jorl to break this last rule himself? (303-304)


Sometimes we tell ourselves metaphors, to help us comprehend parts of the world that don't make sense to us. (313)




There's really only one choice you ever have to make in any act of creation. Will you be the instrument or the artist? If you're only now coming to realize that you've been a tool all your life, there's no one to blame for it but yourself. If you don't like that state of affairs, then act! Impose your will upon the world and walk your own path. If you don't, you'll just end up being a token in someone else's game; you'll continue to be used as they see fit. That's how the universe works. You don't have to like it, but you'd do well to get used to it. (362)