Antique Rugs in Space: Part 2
05-05-2011 / By:
Hoshi Inazuma has experienced luxury, yes he has. He has experienced the entire range of experiences in his life, from abject, dirt poverty to living the life of an emperor god and back to the streets. There is nothing on this world, on any world, he hasn't tried.
Relativistic time dilation has been his friend. He's been alive for more than three thousand years and he can tell you the origin of the human race.
He once read a story about a little boy named Ender who grew into a thousand-year-old young man. He liked Ender. Thought he was kind of a pushover, though. Always trying to do the right thing, the moral thing, instead of the best thing.
What's life if you don't live it? What's even the point, though? People don't ask themselves that enough.
He doesn't tell people these things, though. He hasn't told anyone the life he led as a weaver of antique rugs on a work-colony planet out in the outskirts. He hasn't told people about his stint in the royal court of the Amari clan, where every surface of his bedroom was covered in thick Oushak rugs.
But it's there. Those experiences linger there, ready and waiting for him to call on them to build an accurate portrait. To play a character.
Acting, to some extent, is pretending. But who more accurately pretends to be on a boat when they're really on dry land: a sailor, or a hick from inland who's never seen the ocean?
Hoshi has muscle memory for a thousand different tasks. He can be a sheepherder's son and he can be a corporate lobbyist and he can weld and he can dance. And what he hasn't done himself, he's read about, during inter-system flights when decades passed and he spent a few months researching the next job.
Relativistic time dilation has been his friend. He's been alive for more than three thousand years and he can tell you the origin of the human race.
He once read a story about a little boy named Ender who grew into a thousand-year-old young man. He liked Ender. Thought he was kind of a pushover, though. Always trying to do the right thing, the moral thing, instead of the best thing.
What's life if you don't live it? What's even the point, though? People don't ask themselves that enough.
He doesn't tell people these things, though. He hasn't told anyone the life he led as a weaver of antique rugs on a work-colony planet out in the outskirts. He hasn't told people about his stint in the royal court of the Amari clan, where every surface of his bedroom was covered in thick Oushak rugs.
But it's there. Those experiences linger there, ready and waiting for him to call on them to build an accurate portrait. To play a character.
Acting, to some extent, is pretending. But who more accurately pretends to be on a boat when they're really on dry land: a sailor, or a hick from inland who's never seen the ocean?
Hoshi has muscle memory for a thousand different tasks. He can be a sheepherder's son and he can be a corporate lobbyist and he can weld and he can dance. And what he hasn't done himself, he's read about, during inter-system flights when decades passed and he spent a few months researching the next job.
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