Why Should Things Be Easy

Who Claims Truth, Truth Abandons. History Is Hir'd, Or Coerc'd, Only In Interests That Must Ever Prove Base. She Is Too Innocent, To Be Left Within The Reach Of Anyone In Power,- Who Need But Touch Her, And All Her Credit Is In The Instant Vanish'd, As If It Had Never Been. She Needs Rather To Be Tended Lovingly And Honorably By Fabulists And Counterfeiters, Ballad-mongers And Cranks Of Ev'ry Radius, Masters Of Disguise To Provide Her The Costume, Toilette, And Bearing, And Speech Nimble Enough To Keep Her Beyond The Desires, Or Even The Curiosity, Of Government.

He Gazes Through Sunlight's Buttresses, Back Down The Refectory At The Others, Wallowing In Their Plenitude Of Bananas, Thick Palatals Of Their Hunger Lost Somewhere In The Stretch Of Morning Between Them And Himself. A Hundred Miles Of It, So Suddenly. Solitude, Even Among The Meshes Of This War, Can When It Wishes So Take Him By The Blind Gut And Touch, As Now, Possessively. Pirate's Again Some Other Side Of A Window, Watching Strangers Eat Breakfast.

A Weapon Based On Time . . ." Mused Viktor Mulciber. "well, Why Not? The One Force No One Knows How To Defeat, Resist, Or Reverse. It Kills All Forms Of Life Sooner Or Later. With A Time-weapon You Could Become The Most Feared Person In History." "i'd Rather Be Loved," Said Root. Mulciber Shrugged. "you're Young.

Someday She Might Replace Whatever Of Her Had Gone Away By Some Prosthetic Device, A Dress Of A Certain Color, A Phrase In A Letter, Another Lover.

All Investigations Of Time, However Sophisticated Or Abstract, Have At Their True Base The Human Fear Of Mortality.