There is a justice system that only focuses on the big crimes, and the small crimes go unpunished. People shrug off the small crimes as human nature, or the accidents of life.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
“There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud’s being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more - that dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then.”
I was happy in the dream; but when I woke up it was with a feeling that I was falling apart, that I was cracking up from the inside and slowly falling to pieces. My heart was jumping and grating like a cold engine that doesn’t want to start. My skin was crawling, and I couldn’t manage a single clear thought. It was as if all my thoughts were crushed to bits just as they began to take shape. I didn’t get much done that day.
The list went on and on, and there’d been a time when she’d craved those medals, those confirmations of achievement and ability. She was proud of them even now, but they were no longer the stuff of dreams. She’d learned too much about what those bits of ribbon cost.
Picture fifty feet of baby-blue Christmas ribbon one inch wide. String it in a circle, on edge on the floor, and put a candle in the middle. Now expand the scale: The Ringworld was a ribbon of unreasonably strong material, a million miles wide and six hundred million miles long, strung in a circle ninety-five million miles in radius with a sun at the center.
His first impression was of a bright, pale world - a watercolour world out of a child’s paint-box, a moment later he recognised the flat belt of light blue as a sheet of water, or of something like water, which came nearly to his feet. They were on the shore of a lake or river.
Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.
But he would think of something.
“I propose that we defer that issue for the moment,” said Berry, almost brightly. “Let me think about it, for a bit. Since I’m apparently going to be the new Queen, I ought to do something useful for a living. I’ve gotten to know quite a few people over the past few weeks. Maybe I can think of someone.”
Jeremy and Du Havel gave her a look which bordered on suspicion.
“Please,” she said, in that winsome voice with which, over the years, Berry had managed to cajole damn near anything she wanted out of Anton.
He watched the future head of government and his bloodthirsty secretary of war cave in just as fast. And tried—it was so hard—not to smirk.
*Try to use MY girl as your tool, will you? Good luck, you chumps. *
Treat a queen like a whore and a whore like a queen. You can’t go wrong.
“If a queen isn’t meant to fly, why does she have wings?” asked Lessa.
She is the queen – the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure – even the Pentagon’s infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium’s autonomy for now.
Ripley: It’s a queen.
Dr. Gediman: How did you know that?
Ripley: She’ll breed. You’ll die. Everyone in the company will die.
But it hadn’t worked out that way, and he shuddered as he recalled what had happened. Summervale had moved like a striking serpent while the bitch hadn’t seemed to move at all. She’d simply stood there, facing her killer—and then she’d fired before Summervale’s gun was halfway into position.
North Hollow’s jaw had dropped, his face blanching, as Summervale staggered. The whole thing had happened with blinding speed, yet time had crawled, as well. He’d heard each shot, each separate, explosive burst of sound. He’d seen his highly-paid killer jerking like a marionette as the bullets slammed home, and his eyes had been wide and shocked as Summervale’s head exploded with the last round.
They try to kill us. Maybe that’s why they attacked you: they thought you came from the Demarchy. Or maybe they wanted your ship; anybody’d want this ship.
“If we really want that ship intact, this is about to become a boarding action. I think it’s about time to let the ground commander take over.”
“You intend to take them on one-on-one?”
“I think we have to, if we don’t want them to get away,”
No, we absolutely should do it. If we can capture such a motherlode, it could make a pivotal difference in the coming war. We need it. AEGIS needs it, my mother needs it. This is why we’re here.
First to drop out was the carbon dioxide—when you’re shoveling for water, you have to make sure you don’t go too high and get any of that stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make the fire go out. Next there’s the nitrogen, which doesn’t count one way or the other, though it’s the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there’s the oxygen that keeps us alive.
There’s so much blood and oxygen pumping through your brain, it’s like rocket fuel!
“That’s nonsense. Nobody would use that stuff as rocket fuel! For one thing, the mercury would corrode any aluminum components in seconds, and for another, if you spilled even a couple of drops on the launch pad you’d have a permanent no-go zone! Why not just use liquid methane or something?”