17 Quotes by Sue Burke

We had not expected paradise. We had expected hardship, danger, and potential failure. We hoped to create a new society in full harmony with nature, but nineteen people had died of accidents and illnesses since we arrived, including three who had died the day before for no apparent reason.

I have a significant and inescapable communication to enter into with them. Animals never grow smarter, but I do. Ours will be a rewarding relationship.

The war had begun long before we arrived because war was their way of life. It took its first victims among us before we understood what was happening, on an evening that seemed quiet.

We had said we expected hardship, no paradise, but we really wanted both. We thought we could come in peace and find a happy niche in another ecology. Instead we found a battlefield. The east vine turned us into servile mercenaries, nothing more than big, clever fippokats helping it win another battle. We had wanted to begin the world afresh, far from Earth and all its mistakes. That had not happened, but only I realised it, and I kept my disappointment to myself.

I had so much to learn. We knew that Pax was a billion years older than Earth. On Earth, plants had separated from animals less than a billion years ago. Probably Pax plants had more time to evolve.The greenery around me held secrets I would never learn.

... what bothered them more were the pink slugs twenty centimeters long they found eating old carcasses. The slugs would attack anything and dissolved living flesh on contact.

The plants here aren't like anything on Earth," I tried to explain one night. "They have cells I can't explain. On Earth, all seeds have one or two embryonic leaves, but here they have three or five or eight.""And RNA," Grun said, "not DNA. Nothing has DNA except us.

The architecture texts, when I could access them, showed beautiful and inspiring buildings, completely impossible because we didn't have pre-stressed concrete or structural steel, in fact hardly any iron because the satellite hadn't found any ore deposits. We had only bricks and lumber but I'd tried to learn what was practical and apply it and now my first building was falling apart on top of me because people who hadn't studied architecture were sure they knew better.

Sterility was the Pax curse, that's what the parents muttered, and population was the Pax problem. Half the parents were dead now and they'd only had twenty-four surviving children, and half the cache of sperm and ova from Earth had been lost in a refrigeration failure in a storm. We children had produced only thirteen grandchildren so far, none from me, and I was now eighteen Earth years old, fourteen Pax years, and fertile, and a lot of parents thought I had a duty to fill.