Kindle Notes & Highlights
“I need you to kill two of my children,” he said. “I can’t do it myself. I’m not that strong.”
Silvano had left the children encased in a tarpaulin that was tethered to two of the ropes that crossed the room.
When a woman scourged her body with hunger to protect the Peerless, surely they all owed her children a simple act of decency
In the long run nothing mattered but the size of the harvest and the number of mouths to be fed.
“I’m sorry,” Carlo whispered. “I’m sorry.”
What was life, when a father had to plead for an assassin to murder half his family, just to save the rest from starvation?
What miracle could put an end to hunger and infanticide?
most women would rather starve themselves in the hope of having only one daughter than contemplate a regime where for every two sisters, one would be compelled to die childless.
there was nothing to be seen here but the usual mundane star trails.
what lay ahead now was open to everyone: the chance to observe a body of orthogonal matter in unprecedented detail.
Chemicals sensitive to ultraviolet light had been known since before the launch, but no one had managed to achieve the same feat at the infrared end of the spectrum.
The Peerless’s reserves of sunstone, burned in the usual manner, would barely be enough to bring the mountain to a halt, let alone carry their descendants back to the home world.
We should build a smaller rocket, just for this journey—something we can take as close to the Object as we dare. Then we can measure what we like, observe what we like… carry out experiments, maybe even bring back samples.”
“If the tiniest speck of orthogonal rock is a liberator for calmstone,” he said, “who knows what the same material in bulk could do to our fuel?”
“The Gnat?” “That’s what they’re calling the little rocket now,”
the home world’s cycle of plant light by night and sunshine by day,
Nereo’s equation, which connected light to the “source strength” of the hypothetical particles he’d called luxagens, much as Vittorio’s equation connected gravity to mass.
What I was really looking for was a way to keep the flowers open for a greater portion of each day
“I want to find a way to inhibit quadraparity.”
It’s an innate property of women’s bodies that they produce four offspring under ordinary conditions.
“Holin isn’t perfect,” Carlo protested, “but where’s the damage or the pain from that?” “Putting reproduction on hold isn’t the same as modifying the outcome.”
The culture now is to accept the women’s famine.
Total separation was a bad idea: it left women at an elevated risk of spontaneous fission, and no amount of holin could eliminate that entirely.
light produces a strong tarnishing effect when four times the frequency exceeds a certain number.
“Once it passes us, it’s never coming back.”
this might be the only substantial body of orthogonal matter to come within our reach for generations.
The whole point of the Peerless was to grant its inhabitants as long as they needed to find a way to deal with the Hurtlers. If time on the endangered planet began to creep forward for the travelers, however slowly, that advantage would be lost.
“A small explosion,” he said, “could correct the Object’s course, transforming it from a fleeting marvel whose passing we might recount to our grandchildren into a resource that they can study and exploit for as long as they wish.
Though she couldn’t see how to salvage the whole elaborate scenario, its complications had been wrapped around an insight as beautiful as any from the glory days of rotational physics.
why don’t we see two different kinds of tarnish?”
Long before the journey began they would have wrapped the space around them in light, in geometry, in numbers.
“Once this precious lode of orthogonal matter is suspended in the void, the Gnat will have done its job,
never perform a demonstration whose outcome she could not predict in advance.
you don’t want to be confusing these youngsters with the messiness of real science when they’re still trying to learn the basics.”
The green light crossing the container was being scattered—and in the process it was turning red.
“Blue becomes green, green becomes red, yellow becomes infrared.” At least the shift was in the same direction each time.
Carla plotted all the measurements on her chest, then dusted her skin with dye and made copies for the students to keep.
What could be more terrifying than a universal liberator: a substance that could set anything on fire?
If you’re vain enough you could spend your life imagining you’re going to discover the Eternal Flame.
“Except for the starving, would things have been so different if we’d been born back home, before the Hurtlers?”
The really striking thing about these curves is the way the greatest angle of deflection always turns out the same!
there’s a maximum angle at which the heavier particle can end up being knocked off course, and it only depends on the ratio of the masses—the energy of the collision doesn’t come into it.”
“Surely this means there’s some kind of particle, moving at the speed of the light itself? Not trapped in the wavefronts, like a luxagen would be, but actually traveling with the light.”
let’s call them ‘luxites’, just to give them a name.”
“Luxite” was the term that had been used by disciples of the ninth-age philosopher Meconio, the man who had first proposed—without a trace of evidence—that light was composed of “luminous corpuscles”.
“Let’s call them ‘photons’,” Carla suggested. “Different root, same meaning.”
The four and the five in the frequency ratio are just the numbers of photons that have to be created by the luxagens in order to escape from the valley.”
treat the frequency of light as a surrogate for the energy of a particle moving at the same speed,
If it turns out that we can run the engines on orthogonal rock, you’ll have all the sunstone you could wish for.”
We all know that a flying mountain can be turned into a farm, but for well-fed women to start having two children sounds more like turning people into voles.”
