My every flinch, every flicker of pain, will be magnified a hundred times over, then dissected by the pundits and talking heads. But I’m told it’s necessary; the world needs to see me vulnerable and wounded. I cannot appear not to care or to lack remorse, but that removes a crucial component of my self- defense mechanism and leaves me bleeding for all the world to see.
The Shrike was on its feet, three meters of chrome and blades and other people’s pain. It showed no damage. Someone’s blood ran in narrow rivulets down its wrists and carapace. Its mindless grin seemed wider than before.
I had to grin. Morris was shocked and horrified. I’d shown him a brand new sin.
Now they’re all going to leave the ship and find their friends and family mulched in the garden. And if they don’t smile about that? It’s going to be the end of the human race.
The Creed War had done more than devastate the landscape of our once-thriving country. It had made enemies of friends and families. Proselytes and their sympathizers were cast to the desert to eke out an existence the best way they could, which was damned near impossible. Two generations of scholars and scientists were lost, even before the declining birth rate.
We’re planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets… so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we’ll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate.
The totality of human endeavour is nothing when set against the stars.
The stars appeared now to be stationary.
He’d done the maths in his head before they entered the module. Their speed relative to the Orbital was now about a hundred and ten kilometres per second.
The neutron stars circled each other slowly, confined to a translucent plane representing their universe. The worm added two more planes, above and below, with stars drifting across them at random: adjacent universes, separated by one quantum of distance in the macrospherean dimensions.
You command the stars to do your bidding? I know you can’t. And you can’t. And you can’t. And you won’t. But I have…
From the ground, we stand;
From our ships, we live;
By the stars, we hope.
Even when the world throws it worst and then turns in its back, there is still always hope.
But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.
[Planet surface]
(The landing party is Kirk, Spock, Scott, Uhura and two security guards. Among remains of fluted columns and fragments of Greek-style buildings is an irregular dough-nut shaped object with lights in it.)
KIRK: These ruins extend to the horizon. Begin recording.
UHURA: Recording, sir.
As far as they were concerned, big changes were coming on the horizon. The virus was playing a huge role in that. They had to see the full picture. This was about their ultimate survival.
Why were those great shiny arrays Five was building that swayed from horizon to horizon as the planet turned always pointing toward its little star? (“Energy accumulators,” the matter-analogue informed its master–but how odd to be tapping energy from outside the star!)
The first of the group took with them a fusion and displacement generator to punch through into interspace to provide an energy tap. This was so subsequent travellers could arrive accurately at the same location—the inaccuracy of time travel increasing proportionally to the temporal distance from a suitable energy source. In this they succeeded. But being able to transport only a few personnel and small amounts of equipment on each trip, it still took them too long to establish a base.
One might time travel and understand at last the unimaginable, utterly baffling process by which the solar system came into being.
The truth is, time travel is hard, and people are lazy.
This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Tralal literally (it said "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists: instead of “Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists”), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening’s ultragolf.