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Valkyrie protocol final version snippet #5 | |
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by GraysonLady » Thu Aug 13, 2020 11:18 am | |
GraysonLady
Posts: 19
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"I fear I have lost the scent, Doctor." He looked at her apologetically. "I believe I understand every word you said. It is the sum of their meaning that eludes me."
"Well, you're in good company. A lot of people seem to struggle with this one. Here, you hold the rope." He nodded and took the rope from her, holding it extended between them as she had. "This is what happens when we go back to study the past but make as few changes as possible," Teodorà said and strummed the rope gently. "And when less care is taken?" "This —" she held up the knife "— is a more accurate analogy of what happens then." She placed the edge of the blade against the rope and stroked downward, and strands spiraled off the main court. "I am no savant," Pepys said, watching the strands unravel, "no fellow of Lord Brouncker's Society. Yet to mine own untutored eye, that would seem to be no good thing." "No, it isn't," she agreed. "And the more you do of it, and the more closely together you do it, the worse it gets. Our blundering through the past almost destroyed all of reality. And we didn't care how many people we killed – slaughtered — in our raids, because it wasn't 'real.' None of them stayed dead. We thought what we were doing was safe and right and harmless. We thought —" Her lips quivered, and the words choked in her throat as she remembered the bodies, the blood, the stink of riven organs sprawled across the mosaic floors of the Great Library. The thunder of the chronoports' Gatling guns, slaughtering the city guard. The terror that had spread across the city as the "demons" descended upon them with death and destruction and horror. The clouds of buzzing flies drawn to drying blood as she walked back and forth through the puddles to plunder the endless racks of scrolls. Somehow that was the most haunting memory of all. The flies . . . . "You discovered you were . . . in error," he said softly. "Yeah." She inhaled deeply, then nodded and laid the knife on the table. "Yeah, we were 'in error,' all right. We were wrong. So very, very wrong." "In what way?" Pepys asked almost gently, and she looked at him. "There's a reason I mentioned the Great Library," she said, her voice soft enough he had to strain to hear it. "That's because I was the one who headed that expedition. It was a huge feather in my cap, professionally. But now we know what really happened, because one of our time machines went back to that moment to search for any child universe it might have spawned . . . and found it. Found the universe I created — the universe in which flying 'demons' ransacked the Library, destroyed the heart of the city with their 'fireballs' and 'lightning,' and then just vanished again. The one that remembers me as the most horrible monster in their entire history." She broke off, closing her eyes and shaking her head. "I suppose you could call that having been 'in error,'" she said after a moment, her voice bitter with self-loathing. |
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Re: Valkyrie protocol final version snippet #5 | |
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by Dilandu » Thu Aug 13, 2020 12:48 pm | |
Dilandu
Posts: 2536
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(grumbling) Those Americans... they could not even rob the ancient library without breaking in, gun-blazing!
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Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave, Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave. (Red Army lyrics from 1945) |
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Re: Valkyrie protocol final version snippet #5 | |
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by Robert_A_Woodward » Fri Aug 14, 2020 1:18 am | |
Robert_A_Woodward
Posts: 546
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What makes you think that they were Americans? (other than the nationality of the authors). ----------------------------
Beowulf was bad. (first sentence of Chapter VI of _Space Viking_ by H. Beam Piper) |
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Re: Valkyrie protocol final version snippet #5 | |
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by Dilandu » Fri Aug 14, 2020 9:44 am | |
Dilandu
Posts: 2536
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Actually I was joking. ------------------------------
Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave, Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave. (Red Army lyrics from 1945) |
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