City of Sorcery
If anyone is rude and unpleasant when you are trying to help
them, it is out of fear, because they are afraid of what you
will try and make them see or understand. No matter how
deeply their reason is hidden, something in them knows and
understands, and fears leaving the protection of shock.
Strange, is it not? We renounce our fathers when we swear
the Oath, yet we cannot wholly renounce them; they reappear
in the faces of our children.
I think I was here with Mama and Shaya before I was born.
When Auntie Ellemir told me about how babies came, before
Shaya was born, I was surprised, because I thought they came
from the gray world. Because I used to talk to Shaya before
she was a baby. She was all grown up here, and then suddenly
she was a baby and couldn't talk to me anymore except when we
were here."
But of course there is some reality where Shaya is not a
child at all. I must always remember that--remember that she
is more than just the baby I held in my arms and nursed and
cherished. Mothers who forget this do dreadful things to
their children.
It is the fiber of the featherpod tree; they grow everywhere
in the hills. Woven podwool like this is costly; it is
commoner to treat it like felting or papermaking, because the
fibers are short.
Magda wondered when she had learned it, and saw in Camilla's
mind there was a flash of memory, a year spent as an abused
and beaten child, enslaved in a bandit encampment...
Magda, did you ever think? Maybe the world isn't supposed to
be a better place? Maybe it goes on the way it does so that
people can choose what's really important.
Sure she died. So did yours. So will you and I some day.
Since we're all going to die anyhow, no matter what we do or
don't do, what sense does it make to go around scared all the
time, crawling, and putting up with a lot of rotten stuff
just to hang on a little longer?
And if you save her from the effects of her own folly, what
then? Will you safeguard her all her life lest she fall into
error?
Your motives are good. So with the child who wanted to help
the tigercat move her kits to a warm and cozy den in his own
bed. You do not know what you were doing, and you will not be
spared because your motives were admirable.
But what possible justification could there be for anyone
who did these things because the alternative was personal
death?
"One who does good, having an infinite power to do evil,
should have credit not only for the good she does but for the
evil from which she refrains."
Better to die turning away from evil, than die with it.
The Fall of Atlantis
My little one, there are those who forsake the paths of
light to aid those who walk in darkness.
Never had Riveda been so kind to her. It was as if his whole
life had been spent in some tense struggle between warring
forces, which had made him stern and rigid and remote in the
effort to cleave to a line of rectitude. Now that he had
fully abandoned himself to sorcery, this evil and horror
absorbed all his inborn cruelty, leaving the man himself free
to be kind, to be tender, to show the basic simplicity and
goodness that was in him.
Riveda made love to her softly, with a sensitive sincerity
she had not dreamed possible, at first half fearful lest he
bring her pain; then, when he was certain of her, drawing on
some deep reserve of gentleness, giving himself up to her
with the curious, rare warmth of a man long past youth: not
passionate, but very tender and full of love. In all her
times with Riveda she had never known him like this; and for
hours afterward she lay nestled in his arms, happier than she
had ever been in her life, or would ever be again, while in a
muted, hoarse, hesitant voice he told her all the things
every woman dreams of hearing from her lover, and his shaking
scarred hands moved softly on her silky hair.
The darkness can teach you things that the light has never
seen, and will never be able to see . . .
Misc.
I regard Dyan Ardais, not as evil, but as unhappy, a man
desperately at the mercy of his own misery and his own
obsessions; and Dyan's tragedy, I have always felt, was that
he did not come to know Regis well until he had destroyed
himself irrevocably in the younger man's eyes.
-A Darkover Retrospective
But...at one time, Darkover had had a highly developed
technology of the matrix stones, and that its misuse had
reduced the Seven Domains to a chaotic anarchy, after which
the Hasturs had formed the system of Towers under the
Keepers, pledged to chastity to avoid dynastic squabbles, and
bound by vows and severe ethical principles.
-The Bloody Sun
One had pale red, braided hair, coiled low on her neck and
tucked into her hood; the other, close-cropped dark curls.
They both had the somewhat hard, boyish look which women wear
when they choose, against all the sanctions of a patriarchal
society, to do a man's work and take a man's freedom.
-The Planet Savers
Rediscovery
Bring together two Vegans, and they start a religion. Bring
together two Deltans, and they form a political party. Bring
together two Terrans, and they build a town.
mass of the combined moons must be less than that of the
planet for a habitable. Usually less then a fifth of the
combined weight. Also there is a limit to size; too small and
they escape the primary and become asteroids.
The Shattered Chain
She had not been born into the Guild of Free Amazons; she
had come to it through a choice so painful that the memory
still had power to make her lips tighten and her eyes grow
grim and faraway.
Gwennis did not raise her eyes. Rohana had heard the
argument about that, too. ("I won't seduce him to his death.
If he minds his own business, he is safe. I won't use a
feminine trick.")
A moment later Lori herself bent over him, delivering a
swift, fatal death-stroke to the great vein below his ear.
Should any woman alive be allowed to live so ignorant
that she is no better than a dairy-animal? The Free
Amazons openly despised her, and with the pride seen in the
invincibly stupid, the wet-nurse treated them with contempt.
And so, when I could walk again, I left my children
sleeping, one night, and cut my hair, and made my way alone
to the Guild of Free Amazons, and there my life began.
"You're a fool, Peter," she said in disgust. "Do you really
believe no woman could be loyal to another woman out of
common humanity and integrity?"
Damn it, before I complicate my life with another man, I
want to know more about myself! I want to know what I am to
myself, not always have to see myself through a man's eyes!
Rohana said that any man and woman, with health and
goodwill, can live together in kindness and make a good life
for one another.
Like any young woman in the grip of her first serious love
affair, it seemed to her that he filled her whole sky.
The Gods hate a greedy man.
But she had carried the child, that year, in anger and
desperate rebellion, feeling that perhaps she had paid too
high a price for Gabriel's goodwill and peace in her home.
Thendara House
I thought we were friends too, Magda thought, sipping
at the coffee. But I know now that I have never had any
woman friends at all; I didn't know what friendship was. I
was always trying so hard to be one of the boys that I never
paid any attention to what other woman did, or didn't do.
Until I met Jaelle, and knew what it was to have a friend I'd
fight for and die for if I must.
Nothing you will learn is of the slightest importance, save
for this: you will learn to change the way you think about
yourselves, and about other women.
"Ah, sister," Camilla said, "That is the true horror of all
our stories, that some men, hearing them, would think them
almost funny."
Give the Goddess her due, child, even when that due is
grief.
I should have known better; always Camilla must be stronger
than anyone, man or woman!
"I am sure you know that we have knowledge of contraceptive
techniques," Cholayna said. "So that a woman can put her
strength into bearing only one or two children and not spend
all her life in bearing them and watching them die."
Marisela nodded. "If the two she does bear are the strongest
and best, and we could be sure of that," she said, "but
suppose the two who survive are the weakest, and so their
children will be weaker yet? Ten, twenty generations down the
road, we will be a people of weaklings, kept alive only be
sophisticated medical techniques and thus dependent on your
technology. If a woman is saved alive when her pelvis is too
small, then perhaps her daughters will live to bear more
children with this defect, and once again, we are dependent
upon more and more medical help to keep them alive in
childbirth. ... Better that one should die now than that a
hundred weaklings should sap the strength of our people. And
it is like a lottery--the first two children are not always
the brightest, the strongest, the best...
Dance--they say--is one of the very few wholly human
activities; most things are also done by animals, but there's
a saying: only men laugh, only men dance, only men weep.
Kindra had said it so often; it was better to wear chains in
truth than to weight yourself with invisible chains and
pretend that you are free.
To Peter a woman was a necessary convenience, a background to
his ego. Suddenly she felt sorry for him. He needed women,
but he needed them to be all wrapped up in him in a way
neither of them could be. She was sorry for the thing in
Peter which attracted strong women to take care of him. She
supposed it had been happening all his life, but when he had
them he must weaken and destroy them because he feared their
strength.
Rohana had said, honor is abiding by those oaths even when
it is no longer convenient.
"When can I be simply myself, and do what is good for myself
and not for a hundred other people?"
"When you are in your grave," Cholayna said gently. "No one
alive lives only for herself. We are all part of one another,
one way or another, and anyone who does any action which is
not for the common good is little more than a murderer."
"I am not interested in your religion!" Magda almost shouted.
"That is not religion. Philosophy perhaps. It is a simple
fact; no one can do anything without either helping or
harming everyone with whom she has contact of any kind. Only
an animal does not take that into account.
