What a pair they make: discussing free democratic republics while neither of them even knows how to sit in a chair properly.
"But there isn't any continuity in it, is there?" How old is the oldest man on the Walrus? On Nascere? What has any crew passed down to another? Secret pieces of seamanship, how to raid and survive, how to make a name that will be forgotten when you are gone. What difference is there in the lives of the women and men who did this work twenty years ago and the ones that do it today? Nothing. Yet.
Flint fetches the cup up from where she's set it, wrapping both his hands about it. Holds it just there, letting the warmth leech into his fingers. "The trouble isn't the system, it's that it exists in isolation even from others like it. A ship is an island, surrounded at all times by the world in opposition to it. That world means to break you; it has dashed a hundred other crews and swallowed everything they've done and it will do it to you and it will do it to your men given the barest chance.
"And if it doesn't, what then? One day you will be old and gray and you will be tired of the sea, but there will be no alternative. There is no place waiting for you because a ship's freedom, even in places like Llomerryn, is a story told to contradict something else. It is defined by what it chooses not to be, by people who believe they are right to be different. That may be just, that may be true, it may even be the nearest thing to independence certain men can find in this world as it is presently. But it is a state under perpetual siege. Until freedom is a life lived and not a weapon you have to use against something else, our option - yours and mine and the people in that courtyard tonight - is to take the best version we can get and figure out a way to use it to show the rest of the world that it can be done."
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-11-16 03:30 am (UTC)"But there isn't any continuity in it, is there?" How old is the oldest man on the Walrus? On Nascere? What has any crew passed down to another? Secret pieces of seamanship, how to raid and survive, how to make a name that will be forgotten when you are gone. What difference is there in the lives of the women and men who did this work twenty years ago and the ones that do it today? Nothing. Yet.
Flint fetches the cup up from where she's set it, wrapping both his hands about it. Holds it just there, letting the warmth leech into his fingers. "The trouble isn't the system, it's that it exists in isolation even from others like it. A ship is an island, surrounded at all times by the world in opposition to it. That world means to break you; it has dashed a hundred other crews and swallowed everything they've done and it will do it to you and it will do it to your men given the barest chance.
"And if it doesn't, what then? One day you will be old and gray and you will be tired of the sea, but there will be no alternative. There is no place waiting for you because a ship's freedom, even in places like Llomerryn, is a story told to contradict something else. It is defined by what it chooses not to be, by people who believe they are right to be different. That may be just, that may be true, it may even be the nearest thing to independence certain men can find in this world as it is presently. But it is a state under perpetual siege. Until freedom is a life lived and not a weapon you have to use against something else, our option - yours and mine and the people in that courtyard tonight - is to take the best version we can get and figure out a way to use it to show the rest of the world that it can be done."