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Tonight the heavens are especially fertile and when we move onto wide sections of the river we can see a tracery of brilliant meteor trails weaving the stars together. Their images burn the retina after a while and I look down at the river only to see the same optic echo there in the dark waters.
A CAVALRY CHARGE was something beyond Kassad’s experience. Watching twelve hundred armored horses charging directly at him created internal sensations which Kassad found a bit unnerving.
Lights shone through a thousand holes, here and there becoming colorful rays where they found a colloidal base in a floating haze of dust or blood or lubricant.
From where Kassad hung, twisting with the lurch and tumble of the ship, he could see a score or more of bodies, naked and torn, each moving with the deceptive underwater-ballet grace of the zero-gravity dead. Most of the corpses floated within their own small solar systems of blood and tissue.
Even as he watched, a star moved above the limb of the planet, laser weapons winked their ruby morse, and a gutted ship section half a kilometer away across the gulf of vacuum from Kassad burst again in a gout of vaporized metal, freezing volatiles, and tumbling black specks which Kassad realized were bodies.
The clumsiness of the suit almost caused him to miss the squid. He thought briefly that such an anticlimax would be the universe’s fitting verdict on his martial pretensions: the brave warrior floating off into near-planet orbit, no maneuvering systems, no propellant, no reaction mass of any sort—even the pistol was nonrecoil. He would end his life as useless and harmless as a child’s runaway balloon.
IN THE BEGINNING was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
On Heaven’s Gate, I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.
William Gass, once said in an interview: “Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.”
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
“Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
“Look,” said Tyrena. “In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”
WHEN YOU THINK about it, the cause-effect begins to resemble some mad logic-loop by the data artist Carolus or perhaps a print by Escher: the Shrike had come into existence because of the incantatory powers of my poem but the poem could not have existed without the threat/presence of the Shrike as muse. Perhaps I was a bit mad in those days.
a child psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.
The sun seemed to dry up everything, thought Sol, even worries and bad dreams. The light was a physical thing. In the evening their house glowed pink for an hour after the sun had set.
“What is amusing, M. Lamia?” “Your concept of death,” I said. The hazel eyes looked sad. “Perhaps it is amusing to you, but you have no idea what a minute of…disconnection…means to an element of the TechnoCore. It is eons of time and information. Millennia of noncommunication.”
You see, kiddo, with a retrieved personality, you let it live in its world via full-scale sim and then you just sneaked a few questions in via dreams or scenario interactives. Pulling a persona out of sim reality into slow time…” This was the cyberpukes’ age-old term for the…pardon the expression…real world.
BB LIVED ALONE in a cheap apartment at the base of a cheap tower in a cheap TC2 neighborhood. But there was nothing cheap about the hardware that filled most of the space in the four-room flat. Most of BB’s salary for the past standard decade had gone into state-of-the-art cyberpuke toys.
“When I self-destruct my AI persona,” said Johnny, “the shift to cybrid consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but during that time my section of the Core perimeter defenses will drop. The security phages will fill the gap before too many more nanoseconds pass, but during that time…” “Entry to the Core,” whispered BB, his eyes glowing like some antique VDT.
I’ve seen a nuclear explosion firsthand. When Dad was a senator he took Mom and me to Olympus Command School to see a FORCE demonstration. For the last course the audience viewing pod was farcast to some godforsaken world…Armaghast, I think…and a FORCE:ground recon platoon fired a clean tactical nuke at a pretend adversary some nine klicks away. The viewing pod was shielded with a class ten containment field, polarized, the nuke only a fifty-kiloton field tactical, but I’ll never forget the blast, the shock wave rocking the eighty-ton pod like a leaf on its repellers, the physical shock of
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A section of datumplane seemed to flash and then to implode on itself, reality flushed down a drain of pure black. “Hang on!” BB screamed against datumplane static that rasped at my bones and we were whirling, tumbling, sucked into the vacuum like insects in an oceanic vortex.
Johnny stopped me with a touch. “I love you, Brawne.” I nodded, still tough. I forgot that my visor was up and he could see my tears.
The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections.
Above them, a single spark separated itself from the continuous patchwork of explosions, grew into a bright orange ember, and streaked across the sky. The group on the terrace could see the flames, hear the tortured shriek of atmospheric penetration. The fireball disappeared beyond the mountains behind the Keep.
I stared at the blue and white limb of the planet until the seas were down and we were in atmosphere, approaching the twilight terminator in a gentle glide at three times the speed of our own sound. We were gods then. But even gods must descend from their high thrones upon occasion.
We rose higher above the rough water and headed north into the night. In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
“I’ve been to a lot of places you’ve never seen,” I said at last. It sounded petulant and childish even to me.
Above the shouts and constant susurration of the surf rose the unmistakable notes of a Bach flute sonata. I learned later that this welcoming chorus was transmitted through hydrophones to the Passage Channels where dolphins leaped and cavorted to the music.
“Hello!” she called and the translated greeting echoed from the transmitter; a high-speed bird’s call sliding into the ultrasonic. “Hello!” she called again. Minutes passed before the dolphins came to investigate. They rolled past us, surprisingly large, alarmingly large, their skin looking slick and muscled in the uncertain light. A large one swam within a meter of us, turning at the last moment so that the white of his belly curved past us like a wall. I could see the dark eye rotate to follow me as he passed. One stroke of his wide fluke kicked up a turbulence strong enough to convince me
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A school of tiny crimson warriorfish flickered above us while the dark shapes of the dolphins circled farther out.
