What do you think?
Rate this book
734 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 4, 2011
"So, Barad, visionary that you are--how do I defeat this enemy?"
"I'm not a warrior. You know better than I what your family has done in the past. You crush them. Don't you? You kill enough of them so that they have no heart to fight on. You destroy their wealth, their happiness, their capacity to threaten you. You control where they live, how they live, and you take their resources so that they have to come to you for the very things necessary for their survival. You make a myth that explains the rightness of your victory and the wrongness that made the defeated into the defeated. All these things your Acacia has done, and yet none of it made you safe. The Meins came out of defeat a stronger enemy than before you conquered them. The Santoth roar back upon us all now, when we were not even thinking of them. The Auldek come against us because of what? Are they an old or new enemy? They have been devouring our children for generations. Now they want more."
"I know the way things have been," Aliver said. "I ask you to speak of a way things could be."
"Tell me this: Is the world too small for the people that live in it?"
"No," Aliver said.
"Is there too little water and air, wood and food and animals, stones to build with and ore to make tools with? Is there not enough?
"Of course there is enough."
"Will any of us live forever?"
"No."
"Need any of us fear death?"
"No," he said, "none of us need fear death."
"If all that is as you say, war makes no sense."
"I never said it did."
"Then don't make war."
"I must."
"No, make something different from war. Don't allow your enemies to be enemies. Make them something else, because otherwise they have a power over you that they should not have. If you think in the same ways as the past, you will only get new versions of the past. Think differently. That's what I'm saying."