Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
Back in Athena, whatever elaborate metaphoric action they’d used to instruct the communications software to halt them, append suitable explanatory headers and checksums, then turn the whole package bit-by-bit into a stream of modulated gamma rays, it could never have fully prepared them for the fact that in a subjective instant they’d be stepping ninety-seven years into the future, and ninety-seven light years from home.
We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
She had no idea what the future would hold for any of them, beyond possibilities as infinite as the stars. And really, that was enough.
I stare at the stars… And even though there are so many and they look so close together, I know they are light years apart. The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another, but they are so distant, so very far apart, that they cannot feel the warmth of each other, even though they are made of burning.
This is the secret of the stars, I tell myself. In the end, we are alone. No matter how close you seem, no one else can touch you.
Space flamed around her, a firestorm, hydrogen kindled to fluorescence by that supernal sun which was forming at the heart of existence, which burned brighter and brighter as the galaxies rained down into it. The gas hid the central travail behind sheets, banners and spears of radiance, aurora, flame, lightning. Forces, unmeasurably vast, tore through and through the atmosphere: electric, magnetic, gravitational, nuclear fields; shock waves bursting across megaparsecs; tides and currents and cataracts. On the fringes of creation, through billion-year cycles which passed as moments, the ship of man flew.
In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. […] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. […] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.
Not for the first time, Ofelia wondered if humans had thought of anything really new in the past ten thousand years. Had they only wandered the stars because they were tired of their stale jokes and curses?
Blanca jumped, the orphan followed — and the cloistered square dissolved into a billion stars.
Sometime during the night, they had spun the car on its vertical axis, enough to give the feeling of one-third gravity. We all wanted to see how high we could jump, but after Stinky bumped his head, Dad told us to stop, which we did–at least while he was watching.
How can a planet be in the wrong place? It should have been back there where I scooped you up. We should be in its gravity belt by now.
“What the?”
<unintelligible>
“Ah… we’ve come out of hyperspace into a meteor shower, some kind of asteroid collision. It’s not on any of the charts.”
“What’s going on?”
“Our position is correct, except… no Alderaan.”
They’d only been gone sixty years when the hyperspace drive became a large-scale reality.
This is a reality check.
Please perform a soft interrupt now. Pattern-scan this text for embedded code and check it against the reference verifier in the blind spot of your left eye.
If there is no match, resume as you were; this message is not for you. You may rationalize that the text you are reading is no more than a mildly amusing and easily-forgotten piece of entertainment-fluff in an stylish modern magazine.By the time you figure out what’s really happening, I’ll have transcended this reality.
“Tell you my plan? I can’t tell you my plan. My plan is so complex, your brain doesn’t have the capacity to comprehend it. This entire universe doesn’t have the capacity to comprehend my plan - there aren’t enough quarks to encode the simplest overview. I’ve got fifty-five million backup universes grinding away at figuring out what I have to do next, and that’s just the underlying logic, not the user interface. No way can I tell you my plan.”
“In other words,” I said, “you do not have a plan.”
“Well, I’ve got a few rough ideas. My greatest strength is improvising.”
First of all, you’re copying me from when I said I had a plan.
An idea was forming in his mind. It was only rudimentary, but in the circumstances, it could be called a plan. He loathed the alien for attacking them, without any provocation. He hated the way it was smashing up his ship – and all of them – with hardly any effort or regard for life at all.
You will not deviate from your objective no matter what the provocation.
“Sir, it’s an emergency.”
“Come back when it’s a catastrophe.”