Oh! We're so tired
Watching the world expire
Time that we retire
Up in cathedral spires.
Watching the world expire
Time that we retire
Up in cathedral spires.
— "Cathedral Spires" by Judas Priest
I began to come among the ruins of the Secular Ancients. Not that there was anything spectacular about them. Fanciful drawings often portray the ruins of the last century as tall buildings, ragged and hollow as broken teeth, forming vine-encrusted canyons and shadowy cul-de-sacs. No doubt such places exist—most of them in the uninhabitable Southwest, however, where “famine sits enthroned, and waves his scepter over a dominion expressly made for him,” which would rule out vines and such tropical items—but most ruins were like the ones I now passed, mere irregularities (or more precisely, regularities) in the landscape, which indicated the former presence of foundations.
Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century
