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actinic
Good word
“I also need an updated summary paper on Venus. The latest. And I don’t have time to get another PhD to read it, so if it’s not in clear, concise language, fire the sonofabitch and get someone who knows how to write.”
“The mask is heavy today?” The mask, he called it. As if the person she was when she faced the world was the false one, and the one who spoke to him or played painting games with her granddaughters was authentic. She thought he was wrong, but the fiction was so comforting she had always played along.
He wore his age like a statement that fighting the ravages of time and mortality was beneath his notice.
Distant thunder mumbled and complained. The rain redoubled its angry tapping at the pane.
Prax led the way with the manic speed of someone who had one last thing to do before he died, and could feel the end close on his heels.
Amos had mastered a sort of constant glower that made people automatically put him onto their “not to be fucked with” list.
There was something liberating and terrifying about the first day on a new job. In any new assignment, Bobbie had always had the unsettling feeling that she was in over her head, that she wouldn’t know how to do any of the things they would ask her to do, that she would dress wrong or say the wrong thing, or that everyone would hate her. But no matter how strong that feeling was, it was overshadowed by the sense that with a new job came the chance to totally recreate herself in whatever image she chose, that—at least for a little while—her options were infinite.
“There’s almost nothing there. Lots of bullshit by overpaid consultants who think they can hide the fact that they don’t actually know anything by talking twice as long.”
looked good with wrinkles. He was a more handsome man now that he was older. As if the round-faced, comically earnest boy who’d snuck to her window to read poems in the night had only been waiting to become this.
“I love you, I have always loved you, if we are born into new lives, I will love you there.”
flunky
Good word
We’re not even a skeleton crew. We’re whatever you have when you don’t have a skeleton.”
She didn’t wait fifty seconds for a round of etiquette and farewell. Life was too short for that shit.
Cool word
It had been a failure, but it was a failure he understood, and that made it a victory.
Time took her strength but it gave her power in exchange. It was a fair trade.
Sepulchral.
Good word
You talk out your ass better than most people do using their mouth and sober.”
There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he’d just keep getting up and shuffling ahead toward his goal. Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks. Plodding along until he got to where he needed to be.
abattoir
New word
To do something the first time was an exploration. To do it again was to take all the things they had learned, and refine, improve, perfect.
All of human civilization had been built out of the ruins of what had come before. Life itself was a grand chemical improvisation that began with the simplest replicators and grew and collapsed and grew again. Catastrophe was just one part of what always happened. It was a prelude to what came next.
