''The ability to project force. That's all there ever has been. Every human on this planet is the descendant of slavers and the enslaved.  As the survivors, we are merely the winners and the assimilated.  If any of us went down one line of our family tree 3,000 years our ancestors would spit on us and consider us "other," "bastards," "traitors".  Our very identities are false, as unsteady as shifting sands, with our memories and self-concepts as dunes; nothing but temporary arrangements blown about by winds of power.  There are no dunes, there are no mountains, there is no sea. There are only ever temporary arrangements of heterogenous, fractious atoms incorporated by tenuous bonds''.