Ecstasy hates company. - Robert Charles Wilson

Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves.

Ah, books." Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. "They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles.

Sometimes he wears the crown," Magnus Stepney once remarked, "and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off.