Kindle Notes & Highlights
“It almost matches us in size,” Carla pointed out. “A co should be smaller.”
powderstone as the target and pure air as the blade, and with calmstone as the target and traces of hardstone in the airflow to act as an abrasive.
OSORIS-REx
inasmuch as any one moment could be called an arrival, this was it.
Back when the surface of the Peerless had been suffering the sporadic flashes attributed to orthogonal dust, no one had ever managed to observe—let alone record—the light’s spectrum.
three generations of travelers had been left to speculate about the collisions.
A dazzling point of light blossomed against the grayness, like a sunstone lamp seen through a pin-hole.
“What could produce that?” Tamara asked. “A single, sharp ultraviolet line?”
there’s no reason why all of those steps should turn out to be identical in height!”
Then he switched the projectile from calmstone to hardstone, then powderstone, clearstone, mirrorstone, firestone and sunstone.
But in every case, a single ultraviolet line blackened the paper at exactly the same position.
this is an answer to the fuel problem?
the mission the Council approved: to take samples, to do calorimetry, then to trigger a blast that would leave this thing motionless.
Their new orbit would be much rounder than the last one, but still sufficiently elliptical for its closest approach to bring them almost to the surface.
Did you see that? What? The flash,
Contaminant in the air, he concluded.
they were too close now to risk using the jet. All they could do was follow the orbit down.
Ivo’s bold plan to grab a sample here might even have worked, if not for the blunder that had rendered his air blades as suicidal as any hardstone chisel.
She could feel the heat coming off the blazing ground now,
The tubes.
The Mite had passed its lowest point. She was alive, and she was moving away from danger.
He’d made an honest mistake that had put them in danger, but they’d both survived.
it wasn’t inconceivable that orthogonal rock could react differently to air built from positive luxagens than it would to its own,
Antimatter?
The UV line they’d seen in every fire on the Object was three tenths the maximum frequency of light.
A luxagen’s mass was three tenths the mass of a photon. So every photon in this ultraviolet line possessed the same energy as a stationary luxagen.
One positive luxagen, one negative,
Two luxagens came together, one of each sign… but instead of them simply bouncing off each other, the original particles were destroyed and two photons emerged.
“Air is made of positive luxagens,” Carla interjected. “Just like any other ordinary matter. That’s all it takes to set orthogonal matter on fire.”
“Who wants to break the news to Silvano?” Ada joked. “I don’t think he’ll be farming much wheat here.”
“We’ve removed three quarters of the Object’s velocity relative to the Peerless,”
“I’m in the early stages of an investigation into infrared communication in lizards.”
“So you think this is what carries an influence?”
Lizards had no males, so there was no question of cross-breeding, but in other species even when the groups were kept from making physical contact the next generation of young ended up with traits that could not be explained by ordinary inheritance.
Three generations away from the old world and its barbarities, there were still people who believed that a woman’s life was a kind of tenancy, devoted to protecting—and in due course, meekly vacating—a body that was never really her own.
“So far as we understand it,” she began, “every solid and every gas in the cosmos is built from luxagens. From a cosmic perspective all luxagens are identical, but because their histories through four-space are marked with a kind of arrow—Nereo’s arrow—we can distinguish between those luxagens whose arrows point toward our future and those whose arrows point toward our past. By convention, we call the first kind ‘positive’ and the second ‘negative’.
The Peerless and everything it carries is built entirely from positive luxagens, the Object entirely from negative ones.
there is no ‘positive’ light and ‘negative’ light.
‘coherent light’ could be used in much the same way as we originally hoped to use air jets: to manipulate small samples of orthogonal matter without touching them.”
Lasers.
“Doesn’t it seem strange, though? Sharing notes about the future of your offspring without even looking up from your meal?”
Once two lizards had been exposed to each other the infrared traffic between them was expected to die away, quite possibly for the rest of their lives.
a disease that could leap through the air from victim to victim as infrared light.
some traits we pick up don’t get expressed until the next generation.
We come across a healthy-looking group of strangers, exchange advice with them in infrared, and try some of it out on our children. If everyone’s being honest, there’s a good chance that everyone benefits.”
splice it onto instructions to the body to give birth to exactly two children…
The thought of a woman choosing death over childbirth seemed to unsettle her.
With universal biparity, there’d be no need for a market in entitlements and no need for orphans to be slaughtered.
Lucia spotted an arborine watching them across the gap.
the one thing that struck him most now was the uncanny similarity between the hands the creature had formed on its lower limbs and those the travelers themselves made when they were weightless.
“At least we can guess now which flower-cycle they’re treating as night,”
“What would Nereo say? First his particles have spread out into waves, and now they’re spinning at the same time.”
“We’ve managed to get tapes from a few people with infectious conditions—and they’re definitely putting out infrared.”
