“How did it begin?' Miss Cotton asked.When?' they replied.In the beginning,' Aunt Velma said.Wid tears,' they assured her.Wid tears,' Dahlia chimed.Ainsworth and the other children waited, but only silence responded to them. They were certain they had missed something; a few of them thought perhaps they had even fallen asleep. They asked those who sat beside them, but they could offer no explanation. Ainsworth looked at his mother and she was crying. He felt ashamed for her, but he nticed the woman beside her was also crying. He saw the faces of all the adults, including the men, and tears streamed down all their faces. The story was their memory. The story was the pain that produced tears. The story was what they had lived. The story was their petty jealousy that caused them to begrudge each other every minor success and plot ways to harm one another. The story was all that was lost to them because someone was too selfish to share, too mean to forgive, too blind to see the possibilities. The story was the beginning of their lives that had been old them over and over, but out of embarrassment they hadn't listened; so when the time came for those tales to be useful, they didn't know the details and groped in self-darkness. The story was in the first drop of salty tear that was shed for them, that they shed for themselves. Ainsworht lookd around at his mother and the other adults crying and felt cheated, until he found his own tears. Salty. Sticky. Inseparable from him, like the pain of birth. That was indeed the beginning.”

“He felt something trickle down his face and he wiped it away irritably. When he looked at the back of his hand, he found trails of red. He had never cried in his life; in fact, he could not cry with no tear ducts. But now, at last, he was. He was crying tears of blood. For her.”

“More than any of us, she had written her own story; yet she could not wash it out with all her tears, return to her victims what she had torn from them, and by so doing, save herself...”

“That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.”

“So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.”

“David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether or not the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.”