Echo looked into the distance, not speaking. Memo leaned forward, pushing her pad into the middle of the table. Surrounded by inky swirls was written:


Famine.

And in smaller letters underneath:

Both kinds.

Again the professor was shaking his head. "Memo, Memo, you're thinking with your heart instead of your head. Famine is bad, terrible, of course, but not the worst, not the source of the most pain. Many many people never experience famine of any kind. And many survive it."
Memo looked at him with a strange dark light in her eyes, and his life turned a corner then, but he didn't perceive it, he never knew, he never asked.

Dietz, the King, rolled his bottle at a slight angle from the vertical around on its corrugated bottom on the wooden table top, leaving a narrow trace of condensation. He looked up at the Professor, and drew a breath. "Betrayal is my answer." Memo looked at him quick. "Betrayal hurts more and worse than anything. You might have a different idea, and you might have your reasons, but you have my answer." He looked at Memo levelly, then at Echo, finally at the Professor.

The Professor set his eyes on him and didn't move, "Hope, Mr. Dietz."

"Hope was the very worst thing in Pandora's box. Hope is the root of all the other ills in there. Hope causes men and women to try when trying is in vain, hope is the source of the tyrant's power, the reason the criminal takes what isn't his, hope is the magnifier of sorrow, the sustainer of the tortured, the thing that imprisons the terminally ill in their suffering. Hope masquerades as goodness, but it is unforgiving and irresistible and utterly without scruple or principle. Hope, Mr. Dietz, it's with each of us all the time -- from the moment of our birth until the moment of our death -- and we are it's slaves, forever in bondage to the remorseless grip of Hope."

Dietz spit in his face.



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