A whore should be judged by the same criteria as other professionals offering services for pay-such as dentists, lawyers, hairdressers, physicians, plumbers, etc. Is she professionally competent? Does she give good measure? Is she honest with her clients?
It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.
“You mean that every time I told a lie you* knew*–and you went along with it?”
“Basically.”
“There’s a reason Her Majesty’s asking me, instead of Nimitz or Ariel,” she told her guests. “As it happens, I’ve been hanging around with treecats long enough to have caught to at least some of their abilities. I can’t read minds, but I can read emotions, and I know when someone’s lying.”
It was astonishingly easy for her to make that admission to the leaders of the star nation she’d fought for her entire adult life.
Pritchart blinked at her, then those topaz eyes narrowed in thought, and the president began nodding—slowly, at first, then more rapidly.
“So that’s why you make such a fiendishly effective diplomat!” she said with something very like an air of triumph. “I couldn’t believe how well a total novice was reading us. Now I know—you were cheating!”
“You know what cheers me up? Other people’s misfortune.”
Oh, you’re giving me the smirk face!
"I’m not going to say anything like “this will be a milk-run” or “we don’t expect any trouble on this trip.”
“But we don’t expect any trouble on this trip, right?”
“AAAAUGH! Take it back! You’re going to doom us all!”
“I used to bull’s-eye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They’re not much bigger than two meters.”
We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment…
Victor was hopelessly lost within minutes. In that short space of time, the woman leading him had managed to take him through more streets than he could remember—including four elevator transits, three occasions when they passed through huge underground “plazas” filled with vendors’ booths and shops, and even one instance in which she strode blithely through some kind of lecture or public meeting and exited by a door in the back next to the toilets. The only logic to her route that Victor could follow was that the “streets” always got narrower, the ceiling lower, and the artificial lighting dimmer.
Not in play: That was always one of my favorite quotes, DD (as if you couldn’t guess…)
Yes, I thought so. I like it too.
Back in play:
“It’s like looking through a microscope your whole life," he said. "You miss the whole picture. Sometimes you need to get lost in order to discover anything.”
Don’t you understand? This is the greatest discovery since van Leeuwenhoek first looked through a microscope and saw an amoeba!
Yeah, but he wasn’t down there with the amoebas!
In other studies you go as far as other have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.
Before any of you unwisely take this as your cue to step further out of line than you were already planning to, I’d like to say two words in my capacity as the company’s munitions commander and resident mad scientist: guinea pigs.
There’s always someone else smarter out there, who may not have ethics.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.
Once upon a time the Tursiops, or bottlenose dolphin, had been about the least likely cetacean to beach himself. But genetic engineering had upset the balance somewhere. As the genes of other species were spliced onto the basic Tursiops model, a few things had been thrown out of kilter. For three generations human geneticists had been working on the problem. But for now the fins swam along a knife edge, where irrationality was a perpetual danger.
Pha loves Pa.
sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs
You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. So you took my happiness, and stole my songs.
Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.