CAPTAIN-ENGINEER NIRAI WENIAT might have been the only person in the swarm who liked threshold winnowers. It wasn’t that he thought their destructiveness was funny, although people had accused him of thinking destruction in general was funny. It was the purity of the winnowers’ function: death that caused death that caused death. The universe ran on death. All the clockwork wonders in the world couldn’t halt entropy. You could work with death or you could let it happen; that was all.
