Baji-naji, nand' paidhi. Fortune has a human face and bastard Chance whores drunken down your streets. - C. J. Cherryh

But how could anybody of her generation pull all those hours of recorded history up, and listen to all of it, and understand it? You’d have to live all the hours of all those negotiations, and all the simultaneous other hours of every other record, and you still wouldn’t get the gestalt of having grown up in it. You knew more, viewing it from the perspective of another generation, because the hidden things came out, but you knew less, too, because the context that made it all make sense had gone away.

There was a wicked man once who called a hatani. ‘Kill my neighbor,’ he said. ‘That’s not hatani business,’ the hatani said and went away. The wicked man found another hatani. ‘My life is wretched,’ the wicked man said. ‘I hate my neighbor. I want to see him die,’ ‘That is a hatani matter,’ the hatani said. ‘Do you give it into my hands?’ ‘Yes,’ the wicked man said. And the hatani struck him dead. Do you understand the solution?” Thorn

But his political sense kept up a persistent itch that said: A, Given ignorance in the mix, stupidity was at least as common in politics as astute maneuvering; B, Crisis always drew insects; and, C, Inevitably the party trying to resolve a matter had to contend with the party most willing to exploit it.