The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

She calls herself a poet, but she has never let me read a word she’s written, if she’s ever written a word

No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their truer nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a construct of the mind of man

I might as well have promised to raise the dead or make Mars safe for the XY chromo crowd. And now, sitting there on the Barsoom XI, facing this woman for whom my life and Sailor’s life and the Fenrir contagion were together no more than a chance for early promotion and a fat bonus from the network snigs, I realized that I cherished my ability to hate. I cherished it as surely as I’d cherished Sailor. As surely as I’d once stood in the shadows of docking zeppelins, joyful and dizzy with the bottomless wonder of childhood

Yeah,” she called back. “I’ve got a little sister. She’s out there somewhere. Sheba’d up with a guild mason down in Arsia Mons, last I heard. But we don’t talk much these days. She got sick on Allah and doesn’t approve of whoring anymore

Not really. I told her she was fucking gowed, looking for salvation with that bunch of devils, but we’re all free out here, Councilor. We choose our own fates

is not the task of the writer to “tell all,” or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out

The divine is always abominable,” she whispered and rolled over, turning her back to me

She has become my ghost, my private haunting, and haunted things are forever waiting

Two moves from checkmate, barring an act of divine intervention. But that’s another of his games, Delaying the Inevitable.

All of these events, all of these men and their actions. Lies and blood and betrayals, links in the chain leading, finally, to this moment, to that ninth wave, mightier than the last, all in flame. Meredith swallowed a mouthful of sea water and struggled to keep her head above the surface