The Lazarus Effect

 

The Histories assert that a binary system cannot support life. But we found life here on Pandora. Except for the kelp, it was antagonistic and deadly, but still it was life. Ship's judgment is upon us now because we wiped out the kelp and unbalanced this world. We few survivors are subject to the endless sea and the terrible vagaries of the two suns. That we survive at all on our fragile Clone-rafts is as much a curse as a victory. This is the time of madness.
--Hali Ekel, the Journals

There were giants in the earth in those days.
--Genesis, The Christian Book of the Dead

We bear our original sin in our bodies and on our faces.
--Simone Rocksack, Chaplain/Psychiatrist

The fearful can be the most dangerous when they gain power. They become demoniac when they see the unpredictable workings of all that life around them. Seeing the strengths as well as the weaknesses, they fasten only on the weaknesses.
--Shipquotes, the Histories

The touch of the infant teaches birth, and our hands are witness to the lesson.
--Kerro Panille, the Histories

First, we had to develop a landless life-style; second, we preserved what technology and hardware we could salvage. Lewis left us with a team of bioengineers--both our curse and our most powerful legacy. We do not dare plunge our few precious children into a Stone Age.
--Hail Ekel, the Journals

How cruel of Ship to leave everything we need circling out of reach above us while this terrible planet kills us off one by one. Six births last nightside, all mutant. Two survive.
--Hali Ekel, the Journals

Justice does not happen by chance; indeed, something that subjective may never have happened at all.
--Ward Keel, Journal

Space is mankind's natural habitat. A planet, after all, is an object in space. I believe humans have a natural drive to be mobile in space, their true habitat.
--Raja Thomas, the Histories

A planet-wide consciousness died with the kelp and with it went the beginnings of a collective human conscience. Was that why we kill the kelp?
--Kerro Panille's Collected Works

Consciousness is the Species-God's gift to the individual. Conscience is the Individual-God's gift to the species. In conscience you find the structure, the form of consciousness, the beauty.
--Kerro Panille, "Translations from the Avata," the Histories

They that go down to the sea in ships,
That do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord,
And his wonders in the deep.
--The Christian Book of the Dead

The child Vata slipped into catatonia as the kelp and hylighters sickened. She has been comatose for more than three years now and, since she carries both kelp and human genes, it is hoped that she can be instrumental in restoring the kelp to sentience. Only the kelp can tame this terrible sea.
--Hali Ekel, the Journals

How do Mermen make love?
Same way every time
--Islander joke

This may be the better age for the Faith, but this is certainly not an age of Faith.
--Flannery O'Connor, from her letters, Shiprecords

Forceful rejection of the past is the coward's way of removing inconvenient knowledge.
--the Histories

What's so tough about making love to a Mute?
Finding the right orifice.
--Merman joke

Humans spend their lives in mazes. If they escape and cannot find another maze, they create one. What is this passion for testing?
--"Questions from the Avata," the Histories

All Pandorans will be free when the first hylighter breaks the sea's surface.
--Sign over a Merman kelp project

We seldom get rid of an evil merely by understanding its causes.
--C.G. Jung, Shiprecords

Never trust a great man's love.
--Islander proverb

Perseverance furthers
--I Ching, Shiprecords

At any given moment of history it is the function of associations of devoted individuals to undertake tasks which clear-sighted people perceive to be necessary, but which nobody else is willing to perform.
--A. Huxley, The Doors of Perception, Shiprecords

One measure of humanity lies in the lengths taken to right the wrongs perpetrated against others. Recognition of wrongdoing is the first crucial step.
--Raja Thomas, the Journals

Pattern is his who can see beyond shape:
Life is his who can tell beyond words.
--Lao Tzu, Shiprecords

...self has somewhat the character of a result, of a goal attained, something that has come to pass very gradually and is experienced with much travail.
--C.G. Jung, Shiprecords

The distresses of choice are our chance to be blessed.
--W.H. Auden, Shiprecords

Without the conscious acknowledgement and acceptance of our kinship with those around us there can be no synthesis of personality.
--C.G. Jung, Shiprecords

Down the course of history, people have been the principal cause of human deaths. It is possible to alter that course here on Pandora.
--Kerro Panille, the Histories

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinity. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
--William Blake, Shiprecords

Hasn't the water of sleep dissolved our being?
--Gaston Bachelard, "The Poetics of Reverie," from The Handbook of the Chaplain/Psychiatrist

To survive Pandora's time of madness, we were forced to go mad.
--Iz Bushka, The Physics of Political Expression

Don't call me her father. I was nothing more than an instrument of Vata's conception. "Father" and "daughter" don't apply. Vata was born more than the sum of our parts. I caution the sons and the daughters after us: Remember that Vata is more mother to us than sister to you.
--Kerro Panille, Family Papers

The repressed share the psychoses and neuroses of the caged. As the caged run when released, the repressed explode when confronted with their condition,.
--Raja Thomas, the Journals

If you don't know about numbers you can't appreciate coincidence.
--Scudi Wang

Control the religion and the food and we own the world.
--GetLaar Gallow

Life is not an option, it is a gift. Death is the option.
--Wark Keel, Journal

...it comes to pass that the same evils and inconveniences take place in all ages of history.
--Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses Shiprecords

Symbols are worth a damn.
--Duque Kurz

When power shifts, men shift with it.
--George Orwell, Shiprecords

Do that which is good and no evil shall touch you.
--Raphael, Apocrypha, The Christian Book of the Dead

And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off.
--Genesis 8:11, The Christian Book of the Dead

Physically, we are created by our reverie--created and limited by our reverie--for it is the reverie which delineates, the furthest limits of our minds.
--Gaston Bachelard, "The Poetics of Reverie," from The Handbook of the Chaplain/Psychiatrist

Hybernation is to hibernation as death is to sleep. Closer to death than it is to life, hybernation can be lifted only by the grace of Ship.
--the Histories

Fools! who slaughtered the cattle sacred to the sun-king; behold, the god deprived them of their day of homecoming.
--Homer, Shiprecords

If war does come, the best thing to do will be to just stay alive and thus add to numbers of sane people.
--George Orwell, Shiprecords

In the world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.
--The Christian Book of the Dead