Page 76 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

to his lips when I began to ask him what he was doing. He read it twice, and then

I read it, to see what he was looking for.

Last night was moonless, and we took a boat out onto Scapa Flow. There
was broken light all across the sky, and columns of cloud twisting and
turning through the pieces. Dust and dragon fire. Professor Semyonova
said: “That’s the Milky Way. As much of it as we can see, anyway.”

It was so beautiful I kept my eyes on it in case it suddenly disappeared,
or turned out to be some gigantic illusion. Maybe it was the rocking of the
deck, or maybe I stared for too long, but after a while I felt it all moving
against me, the light and the clouds and the darkness, countless stars and
planets flying like arrows from a bow hidden farther back. Not that we
three on the boat were the target; that was an accident of scale. We crush
ants all the time just walking through a park. I thought the best plan was

to leave before the sky arrived, just jump into the sea and drown directly.
The second best plan was to close my eyes, but Myrna made me keep
looking up. She said her own fear had been that those pinpricks of light
were growing and that as they did, she shrank. She made me keep looking
up until the panic was singed away. All I knew how to do with puppets, all
I used to want to do, was play unsettling tricks. That’s not enough

anymore. I want to put on stubborn little shows, find places here and there
where we get to see what we’d be like if we were actually in control of
anything. Cruel fantasies, maybe, but they can’t hurt any more than
glimpsing a galaxy does.

Tyche Shaw

“Good grief, the puppeteers of today,” I said, at the same time as Rowan
asked me how much I thought Tyche disliked Myrna on a scale of one to ten.
“Eight,” I said. “Maybe eight and a half. Though judging from the essay,
she’s come round.”
“Judging from the essay, Gepetta, the dislike currently exceeds ten. Myrna
knows how to make people do what she wants, but she doesn’t know how to
alter their actual thoughts. Yet here’s Tyche suddenly claiming Myrna’s aims as

her own. Can’t you just smell burning in the distance? In a way it would be
entertaining to just sit back and watch Myrna get out-manipulated for once. But I
can’t do that.”