Singapore stank. Not as bad as London, which you could smell for miles out to sea, but it was thickly rank nevertheless. The odor roiled through the port, the effect of thousands of people and their animals, the smoke from their cooking, their food and the resulting effluvia. He stared at the source of the stench and saw in it a microcosm of the whole of humanity. People working and playing. Eating and fucking. Being born, living their lives, and dying. His had been a clean sort of limbo, and he’d gotten too used the cold asepsis of a place above and past and done with all of this. He didn’t feel ready to wade back into the filth of being alive. “See, here’s how this works, Commodore. They put the pretty board down to the pretty dock, and you walk across it and off my pretty ship. Savvy?”
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Date: 2011-02-07 01:13 am (UTC)Singapore stank. Not as bad as London, which you could smell for miles out to sea, but it was thickly rank nevertheless. The odor roiled through the port, the effect of thousands of people and their animals, the smoke from their cooking, their food and the resulting effluvia. He stared at the source of the stench and saw in it a microcosm of the whole of humanity. People working and playing. Eating and fucking. Being born, living their lives, and dying. His had been a clean sort of limbo, and he’d gotten too used the cold asepsis of a place above and past and done with all of this. He didn’t feel ready to wade back into the filth of being alive.
“See, here’s how this works, Commodore. They put the pretty board down to the pretty dock, and you walk across it and off my pretty ship. Savvy?”
Then again, it wasn’t like he had a choice.