I und’standed why Meronym’d not said the hole true ’bout Prescience Isle an’ her tribe too. People b’lief the world is built so an’ tellin ’em it ain’t so caves the roofs on their heads’n’maybe yours.

Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world’s.

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function.

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function.

My strategy had been wrong from square one. I had tried to shout my way out of this absurdity, but the institutionalized cannot do this. Slavers welcome the odd rebel to dress down before the others. In all the prison literature I’ve read, from The Gulag Archipelago to An Evil Cradling to Knuckle Sandwich, rights must be horse-traded and accrued

If we obeyed, our Papa would love us forever. If we failed to obey, Papa would zerostar us year after year and we would never get to Xultation.

I wondered where’d my tribesmen’s souls be reborned now Valleyswomen’d not be bearin’ babbits here. I wished Abbess was there to teach me, ’cos I cudn’t say an’ nor could Meronym. We Prescients, she answered, after a beat, b’lief when you die you die an’ there ain’t no comin’ back. But what ’bout your soul? I asked. Prescients don’t b’lief souls

The forest left as abruptly as it had arrived, and the topography grew hillier.

Elliot pointed out that my performance-linked credit stream still had a twelve-month flow horizon before resizing could be feasibly optioned. Oh, I miss the days when they’d laugh like a hyena, tell you to go to hell, and hang up.