When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.
“I’ve got skills. I can trade them.”
“Sorry, the brothel’s full.”
Fine! I’ll go build my own lunar lander, with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the lunar lander and the blackjack. Ahh, screw the whole thing!
Of course I’m going to be the fastest man to ever travel in space, because they’re sending me up in a convertible.
“They’re about a week outside the Hermes system, Captain.”
“Helm, set a course – best possible speed!”
It was a rigorous result in information theory that once you could learn in a sufficiently flexible manner – something humanity had achieved in the Bronze Age – the only limits you faced were speed and storage; any other structural changes were just a matter of style.
You know what the difference is between you and me? I make this look GOOD.
In fact, he didn’t really look like a troll, either, she admitted. He actually looked more like a granite boulder, or perhaps an artist’s model for a mountain dwarf. The grim, dangerous sort of mountain dwarf.
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
The flying mountain on which he stood was too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the Milky Way.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the whole damned universe!
Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.
“I’m not dead, then?” he asked, hearing the words come out in a whisper so weak it was ridiculous.
“Dow used the wrong weapon on you, Cletus,” said Mondar. “Darts that trigger a state of physical shock and collapse are all right for killing ordinary men, but not one like you, who’s trained his physiological processes to obey his will automatically.”
In the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year.
This is a disaster. On the up-side, this is also the one scenario that lets me go ahead and kill everybody.
All of us snap, sooner or later–you can’t spend so much time jacked into grimspace without losing part of yourself. Jumpers know the risks and yet the drive toward exploration, the need to be the first to see a new rim world, make first planetfall with our pilots, these things fire us along an ultimately self-destructive course.
We’ve got to get out of this trap!
Before this… decadence… saps
our wills. I’ve got to be strong,
und try to… hang on!
Or else, my mind may well snap!
Und my life… will be lived…
[singing]…for ze thrills…[/singing]
I suppose they went through all the possibilities you were working for somebody else under hypnotics. You don’t know what language you spoke before you lost your memory?
The sleep is still in my eyes
The dream is still in my head
I heave a sigh, and sadly smile
And lie a while in bed
I wish that it might come to pass
Not fade like all my dreams
Just think of what my life might be
In a world like I have seen
He cleared his throat. “The future that would have been, I should say. There would be a revolution here in England. Starting not many years from now. By the end of it, you would rule the country—and have the king’s head on a chopping block.”
The face drew back, now shadowed again. Only the nose still showed in the candlelight. “You are something of a Puritan yourself, Thomas, as I recall. Predestination, is it?” A wintry chuckle came from the corner of the cell. “Leave it to King Charles to kill a regicide’s wife and son, and leave the regicide alive. I advise you to have me executed. For I will do my best, I can assure you, to see that God’s will is not thwarted.”