His real job – the job that the Owners paid him for – was to be an observer of the human condition as it was so richly displayed from day to day within these walls.
Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. The goal of all such persons seems to be to make themselves cuddly and nonthreatening.
The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores.
An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.
But the Owners really valued the Crow’s Nest partly as a cultural institution and partly because it gave them access to the sort of information about the lives, thoughts, and deeds of important persons that could only be had in a bar.
Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.
I get it,” Richard said. “But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?
It wasn’t only the Lorites who said that is not a new result. People re-invented the wheel all the time. There was nothing shameful in it. If the rest of us oohed and aahed and said, “Gosh, a wheel, no one’s ever thought of that before,” just to make that person feel good, nothing would ever get done.
This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an adventure or lean something. But we have been changed. We are standing close the Heraclitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces.
When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn’t been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.
Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?
I feared he might be trying to grow a beard again.
He had always admired his colleagues in the life and earth sciences who could hit the road on short notice with a fully stocked backpack and live rugged adventuresome lives in exotic locales. But he had admired them from a distance.
All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that’s why we can’t do anything else when we’re sleeping: it’s when we work hardest.
Zipper the Fatlanders called it. Cock-catcher it was to Hunfast, the hapless.
Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This.
Ty got the feeling, from cues in the Teklan’s physique and general style of movement, that he was some manner of Snake Eater.
If no one is barfing, then none of us is likely to die, at least over a time span of weeks.
The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I.
Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah’s preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian. Yuri.