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The world they’d thought they were raising her in had vanished.
Pretty men could be so fragile.
A drawing up of a muscle in her face, and Holden filled with hope and warmth and even a kind of grim optimism that said the universe couldn’t all be shit if it had a woman like this in it.
Oksana and Laura were sitting on the deck, their harps almost touching as they played through an old Celtic melody.
Plagues and wars and disasters weren’t supposed to impinge on the manufactured world of entertainment, but of course they did.
“We’re not people,” he said. “We’re the stories that people tell each other about us. Belters are crazy terrorists. Earthers are lazy gluttons. Martians are cogs in a great big machine.” “Men are fighters,” Naomi said, and then, her voice growing bleak. “Women are nurturing and sweet and they stay home with the kids. It’s always been like that. We always react to the stories about people, not who they really are.” “And look where it got us,” Holden said.
the Mark Watney, out of Mars.
The millions of skin-bound complications of salt water and minerals that were human bodies scattered throughout the Belt still needed food and air and clean water, energy and shelter.
Long corridors with high ceilings and full-spectrum light like what used to fall on Earth before Marco threw a bunch of their mountains into their sky.
was the drift of humanity left to live on whatever schedule they chose instead of being chained to the twenty-four hours of Earth and Mars. Belter time.
Most of it was an interview with a couple of musicians he’d met up in the shitty part of the station. Two Belters with patois so thick, he’d fed it through a translation program, but their voices were musical and there was an affection in them that transcended the language. Monica had redone the subtitles, putting them at the top of the image, so that the
As he watched, they talked about the music scene on Ceres, the difference between live music and recordings, between what they called tényleges performance and using microphones. They didn’t talk about Earth or Mars, the OPA or the Free Navy. Holden hadn’t asked, and the few times that they’d strayed in a political direction, he’d brought it back to the music. Two more reminders that not everyone who lived outside a gravity well had dropped the rocks on Earth.
My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.”
The temptation to lie back, put his head to the pillow, and let his gritty, tired eyes close was as powerful as hunger and sex had been four decades back.
Whoever screws up last loses. Whoever screws up second to last wins. That’s what war is.”
A soft, chiming music played like flowing water with a melody.
Light’s nonionizing radiation, and plants have been harvesting that since forever.
She hated to guess how many other little fuckups she’d passed by without even noticing.
And shit floated against the spin, that was all it was.
“Why bother pushing off the inners if it’s just to have a Belter foot stepping on our necks instead?”
Music played on the speakers so softly it might almost have been Dawes’ imagination: harp and flute and a dry, hissing drum.
You use a welding rig to weld things. You use a gun to shoot things. You use a Bobbie Draper to fuck a bunch of bad guys permanently up.”
Back on the Pella, music was playing over the ship system. A bright mix of steel drum and guitar and men’s ululating voices raised together in celebration.
Syncopated harp-and-dulcimer music, which was apparently in fashion these days.
“Saving humanity doesn’t prevent bone-density loss or muscular atrophy,”
History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.
“Always good to have a penis in uniform in the room,” Avasarala said sourly. “God knows they might not take me seriously otherwise.”
“The fishing part? No. The standing out on the edge of a lake or being in a boat while the sun’s just coming up? That a little bit.”
“Everyone hold on to your feathers. We’re maneuvering to dock.”
Behind them, Bobbie was humming a melody Naomi didn’t recognize, but it was syncopated, upbeat, even playful.
“Bobbie? Make sure you bring enough of him back we can regrow the missing bits.”
Human violence as a kind of fractal—self-similar on all scales from bar fight to system-wide war.
It was the widest concerted attack ever. Hundreds of ships on at least four sides. Dozens of stations, millions of lives. Among the stars, it didn’t stand out.
“As long as you always see the next step, you can walk the whole way.”
“That’s the problem with things you can’t do twice,” Naomi said. “You can’t ever know how it would have gone if it had been the other way.”
That moment of shaking had been a whole battle too abrupt for a human mind to follow. He wasn’t sure if that was amazing or terrifying. Maybe there was room for both.
A thousand kilometers from one side to the other, and beyond it, the weird nonplace of the slow zone, the other gates,
“No one lives forever, sir,” Bobbie said, “but as long as it doesn’t compromise the mission, I’ll try to live through it.” “Thanks.”
Like cities back on Earth where era had built on era had built on the era before, the systems of Medina were shaped by long-forgotten forces. The thinking behind each decision was lost now in a tangle of database hierarchies and complex reference structures. Finding something interesting was easy. It was all interesting on some level. Finding some particular piece of information—and knowing whether it was the most recent or complete version of the data—was very, very difficult.
“A massive n equals one study where our null hypothesis is that we all get killed.”
I’ll do whatever I can, but you might have to make do with being avenged. Sorry about that.
Maybe, if they could find a way to be gentle, the stars would be better off with them.
