Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… “This establishment is an importer of fine teas,” she says, “and none better on the High Street, I can assure you as much. We have tradition to uphold. We are perceived by the community in just such a way that deviation,” it is as if she plucks the word from the air with her fingers, drawing it down into her argument “is unacceptable.” “Certainly, certainly.” The man says, sniffing loudly from the side of his nose. He is wringing his hands. “I’ll take my goods elsewhere then, shall I?” Her eyebrow quirks with near imperceptible subtlety. “Yes. You certainly shall.”
Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… “Eighty-four thousand people live in this little city, yet fewer than five hundred have been found worthy – be that worth of economic success or hereditary right – to own land. Are we so backwards that we have bestowed so much on so few? Are we so backwards that a mere fraction of our population is able to live beyond the indignity of stacked hovels spacious enough for no more than a small cot and a few chairs? We must look at those relative palaces, built clutching the banks of the river, and ask: by what right?” – Harold Gaben, Ersatz Dystopia
Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… I’d like to steal a boat and float down that river someday. I’d like to drift on out to the coast, passing direct from the city, nodding by the rolling grasslands, skirting under the boughs of trees grown too close along water, and wending a leisurely pace to somewhere new. Likely, if I was not stopped by the guards at the wall, or lugged alongside a trawler further downstream, I would not make it beyond the Morokin Ports a half-day’s travel away. I’d be stopped and put to work in a mine and this river would be lost to me.
Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… The apprentice puzzles. “What do you see when you look into the night sky?” “I see nothing. I see perpetual darkness. I see a black void.” Thoughtful pause. “If there is nothing to see, why look?” “The first to arrive wrote of the absence of lights in our night sky. They yearned for something more than the nothingness we now know. Thus, they built the great lens.” “Yet we observe nothing?” “The question is not of seeing the void. The question you should ask,” he replies, “is if there should be something more than nothingness. And why there is not.”
Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… A squat block of quarried stone (one of thirty-eight) serves today as a table for a seller of (precisely) eight knobs of polished tin, four empty essence primers, eleven neatly tied bundles of steel blades, three cartons of powdered cinnamon, the dented left arm of a tinkerbot, sixteen hastily transplanted evergreen saplings in earthenware pots, a variety of used drinking vessels, a single brass fork, eleven draw-string bags filled with assorted gears and springs, and one single high quality lens (wider than a man’s hand) securely in the care of a portable safe box anchored to the stone.
Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… An airship should only touch ground when it is there she intends to stay. We built the city’s main passenger terminal with out hearts bent to the rigor of just that philosophy, a spiral structure of modern simplicity wending up nearly eight hundred spans into the sky. A mountain of a landmark to be seen from everywhere, even the largest of our dirigibles would find easy clearance to dock, touching gracefully with the iron clamps that secured them to each respective loading platform. We brought the ground to our machines rather than risk offending the traditions of generations before us.
