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It Was A Truism That All Civilizations Were Basically Neurotic Until They Made Contact With Everybody Else And Found Their Place Within The Ever-changing Meta-civilisation Of Other Beings, Because, Until Then, During The Stage When They Honestly Believed They Might Be Entirely Alone In Existence, All Solo Societies Were Possessed Of Both An Inflated Sense Of Their Own Importance And A Kind Of Existential Terror At The Sheer Scale And Apparent Emptiness Of The Universe.

It Was The Day My Grandmother Exploded.

...[changers] Were A Threat To Identity, A Challenge To The Individualism Even Of Those They Were Never Likely To Impersonate. It Had Nothing To Do With Souls Or Physical Or Spiritual Possession; It Was, As The Idirans Well Understood, The Behavouristic Copying Of Another Which Revolted. Individuality, The Thing Which Most Humans Held More Precious Than Anything Else About Themselves, Was Somehow Cheapened By The Ease With Which A Changer Could Ignore It As A Limitation And Use It As A Disguise.

What Is Any Achievement, However Great It Was, Once Time Itself Is Dead?

I'm Too Drunk To Recall Much Of What I've Said. Which, Come To Think Of It, Is Probably Just As Well, Judging By The Way People Who Are Normally Quite Sensible Dissolve Into Gibbering, Rude, Opinionated And Bombastic Idiots Once The Alcohol Molecules In Their Bloom-stream Outnumber The Neutrons, Or Whatever. Luckily, One Only Notices This If One Stays Sober Oneself, So The Solution Is As Pleasant (at The Time, At Least) As It Is Obvious.