Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
It’s poetry in motion
She turned her tender eyes to me
As deep as any ocean
As sweet as any harmony
Mm, but she blinded me with science
She blinded me with science
And failed me in biology, yeh yeh
Now uh, huh huh
When I’m dancing close to her
Blinding me with science, science
Science
I stand atop a spiral stair
An oracle confronts me there
He leads me on, light years away
Through astral nights, galactic days
I see the works of gifted hands
Grace this strange and wondrous land
I see the hand of man arise
With hungry mind and open eyes
“Yes, but…what do you actually see?”
“A world on fire.”
The other path held long patches of gray obscurity except for peaks of violence. He had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor.
“Maybe the locking mechanism shorted.”
“No, no, it’s a fire, and it’s a bad one. Everybody, get over to the other side of the compartment! Move!”
Someone’s trying to lock down the ship. I can’t stop them but I think I can slow them down.
So it was I had my first experience of the New Accelerator. Practically we had been running about and saying and doing all sorts of things in the space of a second or so of time. We had lived half an hour while the band had played, perhaps, two bars. But the effect it had upon us was that the whole world had stopped for our convenient inspection. Considering all things, and particularly considering our rashness in venturing out of the house, the experience might certainly have been much more disagreeable than it was.
“You think it’s too convenient.”
“I think it’s a–”
“Trap. As do I. But we still have to check it out.”
My heart pounded annoyingly in my ears, and it was getting harder to stay focused. I’d almost gotten trapped in here, and now I’d come back. Sometimes I did have truly terrible ideas.
Quizzie rolled her eyes. “It was a terrible idea to ram the cruiser with the Rimbolan, but it was still beautifully executed,” she said
My ship – the Demeter, was a star-liner operated by the Red Star Line. I say ‘was’ because of the events you will read about in this account. This is a long letter, I know, but I had quite a long time to write it. You probably already know this, having seen the commercials running on all the major channels for the last twenty years or so, but the Red Star Line is the largest cruise operator in the known universe.
“You are Beowuif Shaeffer, former chief pilot for Nakamura Lines.”
“He remembered a pilot telling him once, 'They pay us a hundred thousand dollars or more a year, Brian, and they really do it for just one reason. They know that in almost every pilot’s career, there are thirty or forty seconds when he might actually make a difference. They pay us not to freeze when those seconds finally come.”
The pilot of the Crazy Eddie probe lay disassembled on the smooth white plastic surface. Its organs were arranged in a semblance to the positions they’d had before dissection, with black lines drawn across the flayed skin to join them to points on the skin and the exploded skeleton
On the surface, Eli seemed perfectly normal, but now and then Victor would catch a crack, a sideways glance, a moment when his roommate’s face and his words, his look and his meaning, would not line up. Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other’s skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of cracking and showing the color of the thing beneath.
The membrane is a psychoactive substance we call Skin. Through a combination of psychokinesis and redaction, the practitioner is able to muster healing energies own mind and body. Injuries, disease, cancers, the debilities of age–all respond to treatment if the patient’s mind is strong enough to cooperate with the healer.
Her people, like all the other people on earth, were too self-centered, too introspective. Perhaps that was inevitable, for their isolation was well enforced. But as a result the healers has been too shortsighted; by protecting the dreamsnakes, they had kept them from maturing.
Protector was the adult form of the human species. Child, breeder, protector. At middle age—younger for some species of hominid, older for a few, around forty five for humans—a breeder can become a protector. His/her skin thickens and wrinkles to armor. The brain case expands. A second two-chamber heart grows where the femoral arteries run into the legs.