"We were working secretly/For the military
Our experiment in sound/Was nearly ready to begin
We only know in theory/What we are doing"
* * *
"One by one, the cities blossomed. The atmosphere ripped over each explosion, as if a giant steel ball had been dropped in a pond.
Over the western limb, beyond the Atlantic, a brighter-than-dawn glow was creeping, now yellow, nor purple, now green.
The whole world was being swept by a crown fire, with the flames leaping not from tree to tree, but from city to city […]
People were no more substantial than pine needles."
* * *
"A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond its crest the bleached, half-melted skeletons of city towers. The rubble wave was textured like a net, rusting steel rods twisted gracefully as fine string, vast slabs of concrete still clinging there. The foreground might once have been a city square; there was a sort of stump, something that suggested a fountain."
"What stillness in this pre-dawn hour. The air is cold. In all our life of preparation we are unprepared for this new hour filled with emptiness. How thick the darkness behind which hides the animal cry. I know what is there, hidden from my stare. Grief's weeping. Deeper emptiness."
"Now that the greatest part of the world has been turned into a charnel house and the lesser part has been damaged -- perhaps beyond repair -- I would very much like to see someone argue, with a straight face, that our world is not an interdependent entity. These people urgently need to be slapped into some kind of sanity."
"Our nation has been put to the sword, and why? We were bystanders in a war in which we were completely uninvolved, but we are not Anglophone, and only a few of us are white, and so the lives of our people did not matter. […] I am concerned with the sufferings of my West African nation and of my African continent; I am beyond caring what happens to the United States. Let their nation burn for all I care -- we have more important things to do, more worthy things to accomplish, than to save Americans from the monsters of their own creation."
"Over the past year [of 1985, following the passage of the Trade and Migration Pacts], our world that has moved closer than ever before to some kind of global confederation. The Third World War has adequately demonstrated that no one state -- not Congo, not Egypt, nor Japan, not even the European Confederation or Australia or Brazil -- can hope to survive global cataclysms unaided. There has been a degree of selection, here -- those countries least likely to share this viewpoint were the most likely to war with each other, and so they have not survived to delay the process of global unification."
"I wish to express my sincere gratitude that
O, our brave new world has such people in it!
How have you lasted so long at our hands?"
* * *
"Of all of the improbable things to happen in the year 1998, certainly the most improbable was our world's unexpected contacts with interdimensional society."
"Am I alone in wondering how we would have reacted, two years ago, to the news that Europe would be invaded by a Tsarist Russia from another Earth and that the Anglo-Americans would flee en masse to a other, supposedly vacant, Earth where they would happen upon civilizations of sentient rats? And that the rats would come to our world and apply for citizenship here? […] I have recently been beset, as the Czechoslovak Kundera or the Argentine Borges would put it, by the sense of the mutability of the human world."
""