Kindle Notes & Highlights
“They must have injected him with something,”
If she wanted to see Carlo alive again, what she needed most of all was a way to turn everyone on the Peerless against him.
If cos were allowed to hear this news together, why not co-steads?
“In such a world, who would raise the children? Their mothers? Nature has never had reason to shape women’s temperament to that task.
A society of struggling women would be fragile enough—but mixing in an equal number of men, all robbed of their natural purpose, would be disastrous.”
“But what need will there be for men? Why would anyone give birth to a son, when he’ll consume his share of the entitlement for nothing?”
“But do we really have to shy away from identifying our choices, out of fear that someone, someday might abuse that knowledge?”
What I want is a co-stead who will give me two children of my own. If you can’t accept that prospect any more, our obligations to each other are over.”
autopsy report on two arborines:
The mother’s body had been found to contain a second blastula,
If she kept taking holin and nothing went wrong, she might live for another six or seven years.
any object crossing the sky so rapidly had almost certainly come from the Peerless itself.
It was a person,
the gaudy streaks of the old stars were changing places with the short, crisp trails of their orthogonal counterparts.
Carla couldn’t meet anyone’s gaze. “I forged the autopsy notes,” she said. “I just wanted the kidnappers…”
“We’ve lost the forest.” “What do you mean, lost it?” “Someone set it alight.
“We need a woman to give birth, before the vote. To prove that it works, to prove that it’s safe. To show the whole mountain that it really is possible.”
Tamara said, “I’d do it myself, but I don’t have an entitlement. I can’t bring a child into the world if I can’t feed her.”
“What if I signed over a twelfth of mine?” Patrizia offered.
Ada said, “She’s right. I’ll offer you a twelfth as well. And I’ll take this to as many other women as we need—if it’s really what you want.”
Every other woman went into childbirth expecting death.
if she brought back this prize—or nudged it within reach of every woman on the Peerless before it slipped away into the void—it would be worth infinitely more than the Object.
maybe the people who care for children will always be known as men.”
“You have a daughter, and she’s fine,”
Erminia might be in danger for her entire life, but the greatest protection would come when she ceased to be unique, then ceased to be unusual.
Tamara spotted Erminio and Tamaro. She let her gaze slide over them, as if she hadn’t recognized them. They were stony-faced, but she could imagine their rage.
Their lives and hers were disentangled now, surely. Let them follow their rules with anyone who wished to share them, and she’d follow her own.
“By tomorrow, there won’t be a woman on the Peerless who thinks this is too dangerous to pursue.”
“It’s not every day you see a new kind of rocket.”
“Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.”
Leonia took it upon herself to start counting down to the launch. Soon everyone was joining in.
“Where is this ‘rebounder’ thing again?”
“And you expect us to believe that that is going to accelerate forever?” “Until it overheats,” Carla replied. “With luck, it could keep going for half a year.”
a part of him still refused to believe that a lamp in a box could have the power of flight.
But the brashly named Eternal Flame did ascend,
Its exhaust was a coherent beam of ultraviolet light,
the sight of so many women eating in public was hard to ignore.
“I’ve had everything I wanted from life. I’ve completed everything I hoped to complete. Our children should be born now, before you’re much older. Don’t you want to see our grandchildren?”
Carla’s tarnished mirrors do have their closest match in one seminal experiment from the early days of quantum theory: the photoelectric effect.
electrons in our universe, or luxagens in the novel.
