Never could remember all those funny Baltic bits.
Did you ever go to a place – I think it was called Norway? That was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges.
Miles had never once worn all his accumulated honors, in part because four-fifths of them related to classified activities, and what fun was a decoration you couldn’t tell a good story about?
“Explains how you could have missed the modest little four-meter bronze statue of me, standing on top of an eight-meter—polished!—obsidian column, in the square at the very foot of the main stairs to the North Portico so that every single soul who ever walks through any of the Hall’s public entrances will have to walk right past it at eye level.”
The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.
When you’re invisible, the only one really watching you is you.
Invisible Boy: [after becoming invisible for a moment and reappearing naked] I’m invisible. Can you see me?
The Blue Raja, The Shoveller, Mr. Furious, The Sphinx, The Bowler, The Spleen: Yes!
Mr. Furious: Wow.
The Blue Raja: Two hands there, son.
[Invisible Boy covers up]
The Bowler: Maybe you should put some shorts on or something, if you want to keep fighting evil today.
I mean I could kill the guy who designed this suit. Why couldn’t it have… narrow lapels and a cutaway jacket? Why’d it have to be long johns and a cape?
Getting Aivars Terekhov into full scale Mess Dress had been almost as hard as Helen had been afraid it would. He’d started to dig his heels in the instant she opened her mouth, pointing out that nobody had mentioned anything about stupid Mess Dress uniforms to him in the original invitation. She’d headed that one off by reminding him that although the request was a late change, it was also one which had been made at the Quadrant’s Minister of War’s personal request for important political reasons. He’d glowered at that one, then brightened and pointed out that he didn’t have a Commodore’s Mess Dress uniform . . . at which point Chief Steward Agnelli had silently opened his closet and extracted the captain’s Mess Dress which she had thoughtfully had re-tailored for his new rank during the voyage out from Manticore.
For those who don’t recognize the term: Mess dress uniform - Wikipedia
That’s funny, I thought it said “General” on my uniform.
I wonder what the folks back home would think if they knew I was having dinner with a beautiful moon woman.
The moon, by her comparative proximity, and the constantly varying appearances produced by her several phases, has always occupied a considerable share of the attention of the inhabitants of the earth.
The moon is a harsh mistress.
I find that very disconcerting.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
"They were religious zealots looking for a home so far away no one would ever bother them. I guess they figured five-hundred-plus light-years was about far enough in an era before hyper travel had even been hypothesized. At any rate, the ‘Church of Humanity Unchained’ set out on a leap of faith, with absolutely no idea what they were going to find at the other end.”
There are no strangers in God’s universe.
“Listen, three eyes,” he said, “don’t you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”
“The Medusans, like every other sentient species we’ve encountered, use a means of communication we can perceive and analyze, Your Grace. In the Medusans’ case, it’s a combination of spoken sounds, body language, and scent emissions. We can duplicate the sounds, although we require artificial assistance to reach some of the higher frequencies, but the body language and scent emissions were much more difficult. Partly, of course, that’s because they have six limbs, not four, and they’re radially symmetrical. More to the point, because Medusan faces are immobile, they don’t use facial expressions, which makes the body language even more important, since their gestures have to carry the weight of both body language and expression. Fortunately, their gestures are mostly confined to their upper limbs. They’re . . . vigorous—that’s why Doctor Sampson described them as ‘berserk semaphore machines’ in one of his early reports—but the restriction to just the upper limbs greatly reduces the total signal set. On the other hand, they still have three arms to our two, and no human could possibly duplicate the range of motion possible for a Medusan.”
A quaddie could grip a handhold and a drink bulb and still have two hands left to draw and aim a weapon. It hardly seemed fair.