VIII. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you!

[epigrammatical]

[AUDIO, public. The morning after the event ends and Tu Vishan starts moving again.]

I am not alone, I gather, in detecting a change in the air here. It is rather like waking on the very first day of the Season, with all the possibility that lies ahead—or waking the morning after the last day, with the happy knowledge that one need not be at home to anyone that day. We have, I suppose, escaped the fate of Des Esseintes's tortoise.

---

[AUDIO, private to Dorian Gray.]

I have finished Mr Findley's novel, Dorian. A most marvellous book; quite gorgeous and affecting.

But I must ask you, dear boy—is what he writes about Oscar true?

[He's already guessed that it is. This is less a real question than the confirmation of a sense of creeping dread.]

Comments

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[aloadeddie]

Still, I guess my original point is that a madman with a gun is very dangerous, but a madman with super strength, the ability to fly or to set things on fire with their mind? Far as I'm concerned, that's a lot worse. Kedan customs notwithstanding.

And what do we really know about the kedan, anyway? We're not even sure what they usually look like.

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[epigrammatical]

Your point is sound. I suppose I have always imagined, or perhaps merely hoped, that were such a one to become dangerous, there would be a means by which he might be suppressed.

As to the kedan, I have often wondered what their true faces might be, though of course one doesn't dare inquire. Perhaps their true form is something like an artist's mannequin, featureless and plain.

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[aloadeddie]

You have a surprisingly creepy imagination sometimes, you know that?

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[epigrammatical]

[Henry laughs out loud at that.]

Is it really such a shock, my dear fellow? One doesn't spent time amongst the most morbid of artists and writers without absorbing a little of their sensibilities.

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[aloadeddie]

I suppose so. [Arthur sounds - well, a little pleased with himself, if anything.] I think I remember hearing somewhere that the Victorians were pretty morbid and obsessed with death.

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[epigrammatical]

Are we? Yes, I suppose so—it cannot be helped, perhaps, when the Queen has herself made an art of wearing mourning for over twenty years. Life is all too easily cut off in our day as well, and death cannot be kept at a far distance in such circumstances.

In truth, death is the only thing that terrifies me—for can survive anything else. [He says it quite lightly, a drawing-room quip, although it's also absolutely true.]

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[aloadeddie]

Count yourself lucky. Learning to throw yourself into a rain of bullets might sound appealing, but it's not. It's really not.

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[epigrammatical]

[A small chuckle.] The only firearms I encounter are aimed at fowl, and I am quite content to keep it that way.