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I would be happy to.
here is the shark battle:
Quote:I had never tried swimming before with my hands tied in front of me. It is my earnest hope that I never have to try it again. Only the strong salinity of this world's ocean kept me afloat as I kicked, floated, flailed, and thrashed my way north. I had no real hope of reaching the raft; the current began running strongest at least a klick north of the platform, and out plan had been to keep the raft as far away from the structure as we could without losing the river withing the sea. It was only a few minutes before the colored sharks began circling again. Their shimmering, electric colors were visible beneath the waves, and when one moved in for the attack, I stopped trying to swim, floated, and kicked at its head in precisely the same way as I had seen the late lieutenant hold the things at bay. It seemed to work. The fish were undoubtedly deadly, but they were stupid -- they attacked one at a time, as if there were some unseen pecking order among them -- and I kicked them in the snout one at a time. But the process was exhausting. I had started to remove my boots just before the first color-shark attack -- the heavy leather was dragging me down -- but the thought of kicking bare feet at those fanged, bullet-shaped heads made me keep the boots on as long as I could. I also soon decided that I could not swim with the pistol in my hands. The saberback things were diving during their actual lunges at me, coming up from beneath seemed to be their preferred mode of attack, and I doubted whether a bullitt from the old slug-thrower would do any good through a meter or two of water. Eventually I tucked the pistol back into its holstrer, although I soon wished I had dropped it altogether. Floating, swiveling to keep twin dorsal fins in view, I finally pulled off my boots and let them slip away into the depths. When the next shark attacked, I kicked harder, feeling the sandpaper roughness of the skin above its tiny brain. It snapped at my bare feet but moved away and began circling again. This is the way I swam north, pausing, floating, kicking, cursing, swimming a few meters, pausing again to twist in circles waiting for the next attack. If it had not been for the combination of the brilliant moons and the saberback things' glowing skin, one of them would have pulled me down long before. As it was, I soon reached the point where I was too exhausted to try to swim any longer -- all I could do was float on my back, gasp for air, and get my feet between those white teeth and my legs every time I saw the colors flashing my way.
and here is the part about God:
Quote:Part of my tired mind had been pondering theology during all of this -- not praying, but wondering about a Cosmic God who allowed its creatures to torture each other like this. How many hominids, mammals, and trillions of other creatures had spent their last minutes in mortal fear such as this, their hearts pounding, their adrenaline coursing through them and exhausting them more quickly, their small minds racing in the hopeless quest of escape? How could any God describe Him - or Herself as a God of Mercy and fill the universe with fanged things such as this? I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how, -- alothough raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform - he had become an atheist while studying a terrestial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until it was time for the hatched wasp larvae to burrow its way out of the living spider's abdomen.
and when Raul Endymion thinks he is dying:
Quote:Then I saw the ultramorph injector in the girl's hand and I began to struggle. I did not want to be knocked out: if I was going to die, I wanted to be awake when it happened. Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
****Tavern Wench of DOGMA, the Defenders of George Martin's Art****<i></i>
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