They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it’s back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death — death in t… - Thomas Pynchon

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They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it’s back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death — death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die…. “I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday — that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level — and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive…..” The guest star retires down the corridors.