I have a bad feeling about this.
It knew, in that instant, that it was doomed.
The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million: they were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline.
You sure don’t talk like a machine…
My muscles are mechanical now, the limits are built in! No matter how hard I try, a hundred percent is all I got.
The smile she gave him mingled impishness with just a hint of apology, and then she told her prosthetic hand to flex in a movement which should have brought the tip of her index finger into contact with the tip of her little finger. But the neural impulses which would have moved the fingers of her original hand in that pattern did something completely different now, and a rectangular patch of skin on the inside of her forearm, perhaps two centimeters long and one and a half across, suddenly folded back. A small compartment in the artificial limb opened, and as she closed her fist, a thirty-round pulser magazine ejected itself.
Instead of kicking feet, Helva’s neural responses started her wheels; instead of grabbing with hands, she manipulated mechanical extensions.
“We were moving out, boy, with the three hundred suns of the Pleiades glittering like a puddle of jewelled milk on our left, and all blackness wrapped around our right. The ship was me; I was the skip. With these sockets—” he tapped the insets on his wrists against the table, click “—I was plugged into my vane-projector. Then —” the stubble on his jaw rose and fell with the words “—centered on the dark, a light! It reached out, grabbed our eyes as we lay in the projection chambers and wouldn’t let them go. It was like the universe was torn and all day raging through. I wouldn’t go off sensory input. I wouldn’t look away. All the colours you could think of were there, blotting the night. And finally the shock waves; the walls sang. Magnetic inductance oscillated over our ship, nearly rattled us apart. But then it was too late. I was blind.”
He had forgotten how the Patrol officer had exposed his eyes to the Sun–something to do with transferring the yacht’s personnel–but he could still hear his father reading the end of the report: “these actions are deemed to be in accordance with the tradition of the Patrol.”
Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?–TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.
Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature–a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price.
“We do what we have to do,” she said in a voice that matched the smile perfectly. “And if we can’t do it the easy way, then we do it the hard way. But I’ll tell you this now—all of you. There aren’t enough Peeps in this galaxy to keep me from taking my people home, and I am not going to leave a single person I promised to get off this planet behind me when we go!”
Tired of your planet? Seek religious freedom, adventure, fresh air? Want to run from creditors? Hartford would lease you a ship–for an astronomical sum, but at very generous rates.
And for all the richest and most successful merchants, life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they’d settled on - none of them was entirely satisfactory: either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
Nimbus spoke of diverse alien races - Earthlings and Divians and Cashlings and several other species whose names did not stick in my mind - but they all had two qualities in common. First, they had been “uplifted” by the Shadill: approached in their native star systems, given new homes elsewhere in the galaxy, and presented with sophisticated Science Gifts as a welcome to the League of Peoples. Second, ever since their uplift, these species had all grown more decadent, temperamental, and culturally sterile… particularly those uplifted for the longest period.
They’re made out of meat!
She even knew I had mustard on my tie.
“No, if you want a doughnut, go catch your own, you rotten feline! Or at least go pester Chris for one. This one’s mine, calories and all!”
The chef will be upset.
The best cooks and drinks mixers, and they don’t give a wet slap about anything else.