The Humans

The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.

was the eyes, on Earth, that mattered. You saw the person, and the life inside them, if you saw the eyes.

She had stuff to give, but it was ungiven; it was locked away.

There was comfort in that. The knowledge that wherever you were in the universe, the small things were always exactly the same. Attracting and repelling. It was only by not looking closely enough that you saw difference.

Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite amount of solar systems.

The most human of words, the implication being that healthy normal life is covering something – the violence that is there underneath, the violence I had seen in Gulliver the night before. To be healthy meant to be covered. Clothed. Literally and metaphorically.

That was part of being human, I discovered. It was about knowing which lies to tell, and when to tell them. To love someone is to lie to them.

So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode. Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.

anarchy.