Kindle Notes & Highlights
straddling the fence between two worlds may give you a foot in each world, but it also gives you a hell of a wedgie if you’re not careful.
But robots, however cleverly programmed, had three weaknesses. One, they were mechanical, so they were vulnerable to water, weather, and the sucking muds of the wilderness, however well sealed they might be made. Two, destroying them outright or turning them off was far less of an ethical problem for troops than slaying living sentients; colonists rarely hesitated to shoot robots when the two forces were even vaguely close to being equal. And three, they were reprogrammable, either to shut them off en masse, or turn them against their masters.
Fate is just what you’re handed. What you do with it is your Destiny
“The same thing goes for time travel. Yes, you could destroy your own grandfather, but then he wouldn’t be your grandfather. Not because that would make you disappear, but because someone else would have stepped in to fill up that space, and your life would have rearranged itself to give you motivation to kill the guy who would have and should have been.
“My abilities are simply a case of being able to see the shortest, easiest path to the heart of this complex for each person coming in from whatever angle of approach they might have. I can tell you how to get to the center in the most efficient manner possible from wherever you might be standing. I can also turn blue in the face telling you . . . but if you choose not to follow, there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it without picking you up and dragging you there. Which I don’t have time to do.
“They’re like little . . . Harper-clouds,” Ia finally offered, finding the right words for it. “Little scudding knots of I-don’t-know-whats. Or like those little optical illusions you get when you’re staring at a grid of black squares on white paper, and you see the little fuzzy gray squares at the center of every intersecting set of white lines. But you only see them with your peripheral vision because when you stare straight at them, they vanish, and all you see is a clean white crossroads in the midst of all those black city blocks—does that make any sense?”
If you are the one who saw the mess, that means you are the one expected to clean it up, and you’re not allowed to just walk by and leave it to rot . . .
“Think of viewing or even touching the past like it’s a river winding through a valley edged by mountains. You can shift the course of the river along the valley floor by digging a new channel or two on either side,” Ia explained, using her hands to shape the images in her words; she had zero holokinetic abilities, so it was the only way to show Sunrise her meaning. “But there comes a point where you just cannot fight the pull of gravity. “The farther up the valley—into the past—the closer the mountainsides are to the river, and the harder it is to reach that point and change the river’s
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gestalt not too dissimilar from our psychic gestalts, boosting and augmenting their abilities beyond what either one could add together . . . but while the whole ends up greater than the sum of its parts,
Safer isn’t the same as safe. Watch your own back.”
I hate politics. I’d much rather deal with people who can see reason on the first try—I’ll
Morals versus expediency . . . ethics versus efficacy. Damned personally if I do, but damned far worse for everyone else if I do not.
So very neatly turned back to the problem at hand.” “Life is a cycle,
Those who see a problem have the responsibility to help correct it. Preferably in a way that benefits the greatest number of people.
“It’s a failing of genius, and of supposed genius,” she murmured. “If you start believing in your own successes too much, you start believing in the hype and forget the hard work and careful thought that went into building that kind of reputation.
Your son is an individual with all the free will implied, and you can only guide him by suggesting and encouraging, not by dragging or demanding.
