[b]Dyssia![/b]

"Oh, isn't that the question I keep asking?" said Aphrodite as he sat down besides you. He is a young man; his suit fits perfectly, the poppy in his breast pocket in full bloom to commemorate the dead, a his satchel bag was full of spraypaint cans. "My colleagues, my family, they keep declaring to me: No, Andy! We shall simply overcome our desire and live lives of enlightened, disconnected bliss! We shall escape the cycle of samsara, wanting for nothing!"

He sighed, a thick, pleasurable sigh like an enormous cat that has had its fill of custard. "A mere bottleneck. Every time Blue tries to enlighten a civilization there are always enough defects that slip through the cracks. They escape the mass death, like seeds popping off a burning eucalyptus tree, and within a generation or two things are right back to where they were. Confucius works on a different scale; tweaking the laws of physics at the source, seeing if she can build a just galaxy by altering the math. They're musicians, trying to raise and lower the tempo, experimenting with new songs, but at the end of the day they're bound by their instruments."

He lit a cigarette, then another, and put the second one against your lips.

All the context of the world flooded in with that breath of smoke.

"You don't like the galaxy as pointless light and sound," said Aphrodite. "So see it my way. That Ceronian over there? She has been practicing this maneuver since the day she was decanted. The way she cuts thrust and spins before reigniting, letting the plasma wash of her Engine act as a blowtorch - she inherited that from Sky Marshal Lorventus during the ARM days. Every time she does it she's filled with a rush of pleasure, adrenaline and satisfaction. Jenkins, up there in the Engineering Knight? She loves the sound of her mine pistol firing; the kinesthetics, the recoil, the feeling of weight and heft and the simple 'hurr hurr hurr' comedy of seeing a target blunder into one of her prepared traps. It's a sound that brings to mind lifting her daddy's power tools when she was a kid, makes her feel strong and constructive and in control. It's a simple fact that in order to have good drama people have to want things, and to have the [i]best [/i]drama people have to want things they [i]cannot [/i]have."

Aphrodite flicked his cigarette away. "And that, simply, is the ball game. If you give a civilization unlimited wealth and power then the Endless Azure Skies are inevitable as a simple expression of people trying to wield the forbidden power of the Gods. There is no version of Icarus' story where he did not fly too close to the sun; hubris was encoded in the wings themselves. So you are right; there is no beauty without meaning - but there is no meaning without [i]hubris[/i]. The mere fact of the Gods demands life break itself against us. You cannot escape this reality, it is encoded in your very essence, in your deepest heart and secret values, and were you to ever break from it you would be nothing at all."

He breathed out a long plume of smoke through his nostrils. "And so, we shall do this forever. Mine, forever."