The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut Universe, #1)

by Mary Robinette Kowal

This man … he must have escaped Germany, only to have this happen when he thought he was safe. And yet, he had survived. As had I. That’s what we did. We survived. And we remembered.

“I was trying to calculate how much energy it would take to move the Meteor to prove that there was no way the Russians could have done it.” He stopped in the doorway. “Please don’t tell me that they could have done it.” “No.” In a way, that would have been better. I stood next to the desk and looked at the pages covered with calculations. “No, but I think this could be an extinction event.”

“Yes. Marriage, too, is a threshold between Before and After. We have many of these, every day, which we do not recognize. The threshold is not the question. There will always be Befores and Afters. The question is: what do you do after you cross that threshold?”

Someone had brought gin, and of course that meant we had to experiment with other cocktail variations. For science. Chemistry is a very important part of rocketry. Holding a gin and blackberry “bramble,” Helen leaned in to bump me with her shoulder. “Betty asked about you.” “That’s nice.” Which is Southern for “fuck that.”

“Still. You make math seem interesting.” “Well, it is.” I shrugged. “Oh, I know it isn’t for most folks, but I think they’ve just been put off by people who taught them to be afraid of numbers.”