It’s always that last damned ten percent. I also need to give myself permission to let people tell me what’s wrong with the first draft before I go and fix it. That’s surprisingly hard to do.
“Sometimes that doesn’t matter,” I muttered. “Sild tried his damnedest to kill me, after all.”
“Did he?” Oft shook his head. “One thing Sild kept up from his previous life was an interest in unarmed combat. Going space-happy shouldn’t have wiped that away. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
I thought about that fight. I’ve had emergency combat training, naturally; you don’t get to go out here unless you know what to do when your colleague starts frothing at the mouth and shouting about blood and blood gods. I’m no martial artist, though. If Sild was, he should have done a lot more damage. Hell, he had barely done any damage to anybody.
Then I shook my head. “No. There was a manifesto, weird arrangements of broken items, and deathtraps. All of those were normal. You always get those from the space-happy.”
“True, Pam. I wasn’t able to access the manifesto, though. Do you know what it said?”
“Dammit, I don’t. We had The Process read and scan everything. That’s the safe thing to do, because it couldn’t go crazy like we did.” [redacted for spoilers] , I thought to myself — and then I suddenly started, because the Anticipant had touched my arm.
She gave me a smile that was no less genuine for being obviously laboriously constructed, brick by brick. “That which is not dead might eternal lie; and with strange eons, even death might die,” she promised me, and I weirdly felt a little better.