Struggle. Prisoners of Darkness - стр. 12

"Do you hear, slave? Do you hear?" – Karak went into hysterics. He couldn't believe this was even happening. It was simply impossible. He shouldn't be the one on trial – someone else. For thirty-five years he'd been in charge of this region, he'd had no complaints, and then suddenly here he was.

After a series of blows of varying strength and emotional coloring, Manhir stepped away from the half-dead, universally hated number 726629A1 toward the window and gazed into the distance. And for the first time in his destructive lying life, he looked objectively at the sky. Imperial propaganda had portrayed the Earth Sky without a shadow of a doubt as some kind of natural error: in their world, the sky was purple. Now it didn't seem like dogma, or a weighty statement at all. For the first time, Manhir could feel his own self, already separable, albeit at an insignificant distance, from the Empire. He had formed his own opinion.

"Your own opinion? – thought the karak. – What does it represent without everything else? Nothing. No… It does. It's me, after all. Manhr. But I'm separate now… Nonsense. How can anyone be separate? It's impossible. It's possible. That's how the Maquis live. No. That's humans. It's not like that with humans. They're people. Not us. We're better. Why are we better? Why are we better?"

Something stuck in Manhra's head, then everything else stopped. The whole machine came to a standstill. And all because of one trivial question, "Why?"

Chum turned around and looked at the still lying Pozharin, "How am I better than him? This is nonsense! He's a piece of garbage incapable of anything. Of course I'm better than him!… Him yes, but there are millions more people… They're working now. They sleep only eight hours. They endure such conditions… I couldn't do that… But then why did we defeat them if they're stronger?"

Manhir sat down at the table and leaned forward and clasped his head with his hands: he had never had to think before, he had only thought of money before. He was faced with a dilemma: on the one hand he thought of the superiority of the humans over the plagues, on the other hand he knew for sure that the humans had lost the war. It was impossible to reconcile the two, and it was simply not possible to cancel any of the theses. The second thesis was almost an irrefutable fact. And the first one was so ingrained in his soul, so obvious that it made him literally pick up arguments in his favor.

"Do you hear that, slave?" – Without moving his hands away from his head, Manhr asked.