Poignantly haunting…

“… Floyd suddenly recognised him. The man lolled forward in the wheelchair, his jaw slack, a thin worm of drool curling down his chin. His skin was glued to his skull like a single layer of papier mache. His hands trembled with some kind of palsy. Beneath his blanket, it was said that the doctors had hacked away more than they had left behind. Whatever trickled through his veins was now more chemical than blood. But he had survived the cancers, just as he had survived that assassination attempt in May 1940, when the advance into the Ardennes had come to an inglorious end. The shape of his face was still recognisable, along with the outdated, priggish little moustache and the vain swoop of thinning hair, white now where once it had been black. It was almost twenty years since his ambitions had crashed and burnt during that disastrous summer. In the carnival of monsters that the century had produced, he was only one amongst many. He’d talked hate back then — but who hadn’t? Hate was how you made things happen in those years. It was the lever that moved things. It didn’t necessarily mean he believed it, or that he would have been any worse for France than any of the men who had come after him. Who could begrudge him a morning in the Tuileries Gardens, after all the time he’d served in the Gare d’Orsay? He was just a sad old man now, less a figure of revulsion than one of pity.

Let him feed the ducks.

‘Floyd?’

‘What?’

‘You were miles away.’

‘Years away,’ he said. ‘Not quite the same thing.’ “

- Alastair Reynolds, Century Rain