Swan Song

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Brian Stableford. Swan Song

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For Ceri

Chasing freedom can be a very tiring game. It’s the sort of game that dominates your thought and endeavor for months or years—endurance isn’t a problem as long as you have some kind of effort to make and some kind of direction to go—and then, when you win it, you’re left utterly and absolutely flat. Empty and exhausted. Drained of all purpose, impetus, and ambition. The first taste of hard-won freedom is inevitably as foul as stagnant water. It can be the first time in your life that you can’t find an answer to the question why, and when you’ve been fighting that hard for that long, the lack of such an answer can be frightening.

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I shook my head. “Don’t like the big men and the sign-on,” I said.

He looked away again. He knew the score. He probably valued his own soul too much to put it in hock.

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