Sometimes your prompts are utterly inscrutable: I can't guess what would have inspired this one at all!
The passage Elizabeth frowned as she read, sometimes taking notes and marking pages in books; other times she sighed and located her bookmarks, comparing what was written in one book with another. As she worked away her smile eroded and her overall demeanour became grimmer. When she stood up at last and stretched, she picked up a couple of heavy volumes and set them back in their places on the shelves, and then turned to a bookcase she'd not yet had reason to visit. The books -- leather-bound in burgundy, royal blue were fine, but the ones in bilious yellow were disturbing -- had titles that made much more sense now. She hesitated, but then decided that being timid now was no longer an option, and she pulled a -- yellow-bound -- book from the shelf. Black lettering on the spine entitled it Economic implications of Carcosan exports. Obviously, she thought, there were no Carcosan exports so the book should be a single page mocking the reader, not a 700-page treatise. But when you understood that this was an analytical study of what would happen if access to Carcosa were suddenly available, and what would like be exported from there... well, the book seemed heavier in her hands that it's weight would allow. "I can feel your unhappiness from the doorway," said Lord Vileburn. He looked pale and had dark bags under his eyes, as though he'd not slept the previous night. He came in, and a sooty smell followed him, as though he'd been cleaning chimneys. "This was... no, unexpected is the wrong word. I didn't even know something like this could be expected. This has been like... like learning about pyromancy. I had no idea that you could that at first, and it all seems so strange and curious. And then you start to realise what it means, and you start to understand all the rules and precautions that seemed so stupid when you're first told. And eventually you feel like backing away altogether and asking people to ban the use of this. But this is... politics." "You can't refuse to play the game," said Lord Vileburn. "There are no sidelines to watch from." "It's... I don't like it." "Not many people do. The ones who do, well, I think my advice would be not to trust them." She sighed and set the book down on the table. "So," she said. "The War in Occitania. That was a consequence of a Pope deciding, about one hundred and fifty years ago, to attempt to wipe out the Gnostics. Not the first attempt, and also not a successful one, but he tried. And so some of them ended up in Occitania and as a result they changed the political outlook there, and that resulted in a war with Andorra, who probably shouldn't have had an army at all, so that was a surprise to everyone. And somehow that all traces through to Labdaris conducting research that was prohibited, but when it was discovered, we decided that it was better to have the knowledge and contain it than to risk someone else repeating the research without us knowing about it. So we ignored our own treaties and our declared ethical standards in order to avoid something worse. Which we didn't know would definitely happen, but we preferred being wrong now to being wrong later." "I did tell you that it doesn't rationalise well," said Lord Vileburn. He sounded tired, she realised. "There are a lot of decisions that seem good at the time that can be called into question later on." "How many of them lead to war?" "Too many."
Greg - the passage of time. I am old now, you know.
Quite enjoyed this scene. So how much of the book is complete now, do you figure?
And you do realize you're writing a book here, right? Piece by piece, scene by scene. As much as I'm enjoying reading it as it goes, I am very much looking forward to seeing it all compiled into one place :)
2 comments:
Sometimes your prompts are utterly inscrutable: I can't guess what would have inspired this one at all!
The passage
Elizabeth frowned as she read, sometimes taking notes and marking pages in books; other times she sighed and located her bookmarks, comparing what was written in one book with another. As she worked away her smile eroded and her overall demeanour became grimmer. When she stood up at last and stretched, she picked up a couple of heavy volumes and set them back in their places on the shelves, and then turned to a bookcase she'd not yet had reason to visit. The books -- leather-bound in burgundy, royal blue were fine, but the ones in bilious yellow were disturbing -- had titles that made much more sense now. She hesitated, but then decided that being timid now was no longer an option, and she pulled a -- yellow-bound -- book from the shelf. Black lettering on the spine entitled it Economic implications of Carcosan exports. Obviously, she thought, there were no Carcosan exports so the book should be a single page mocking the reader, not a 700-page treatise. But when you understood that this was an analytical study of what would happen if access to Carcosa were suddenly available, and what would like be exported from there... well, the book seemed heavier in her hands that it's weight would allow.
"I can feel your unhappiness from the doorway," said Lord Vileburn. He looked pale and had dark bags under his eyes, as though he'd not slept the previous night. He came in, and a sooty smell followed him, as though he'd been cleaning chimneys.
"This was... no, unexpected is the wrong word. I didn't even know something like this could be expected. This has been like... like learning about pyromancy. I had no idea that you could that at first, and it all seems so strange and curious. And then you start to realise what it means, and you start to understand all the rules and precautions that seemed so stupid when you're first told. And eventually you feel like backing away altogether and asking people to ban the use of this. But this is... politics."
"You can't refuse to play the game," said Lord Vileburn. "There are no sidelines to watch from."
"It's... I don't like it."
"Not many people do. The ones who do, well, I think my advice would be not to trust them."
She sighed and set the book down on the table.
"So," she said. "The War in Occitania. That was a consequence of a Pope deciding, about one hundred and fifty years ago, to attempt to wipe out the Gnostics. Not the first attempt, and also not a successful one, but he tried. And so some of them ended up in Occitania and as a result they changed the political outlook there, and that resulted in a war with Andorra, who probably shouldn't have had an army at all, so that was a surprise to everyone. And somehow that all traces through to Labdaris conducting research that was prohibited, but when it was discovered, we decided that it was better to have the knowledge and contain it than to risk someone else repeating the research without us knowing about it. So we ignored our own treaties and our declared ethical standards in order to avoid something worse. Which we didn't know would definitely happen, but we preferred being wrong now to being wrong later."
"I did tell you that it doesn't rationalise well," said Lord Vileburn. He sounded tired, she realised. "There are a lot of decisions that seem good at the time that can be called into question later on."
"How many of them lead to war?"
"Too many."
Greg - the passage of time. I am old now, you know.
Quite enjoyed this scene. So how much of the book is complete now, do you figure?
And you do realize you're writing a book here, right? Piece by piece, scene by scene. As much as I'm enjoying reading it as it goes, I am very much looking forward to seeing it all compiled into one place :)
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