Polostan (Bomb Light #1)

by Neal Stephenson

What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? —Richard Feynman

The country as a whole might be bogged down in depression, but it had somehow resolved to send a lot of steel and a lot of men to this one place to get a thing done. And as much as he hated the country and the people who ran it, his engineer’s heart thrilled to see it.

The others—half a dozen workers strung out along a span barely wide enough to plant their valenki—leaned back against the riveted iron plates of the stack and lit huge cigarettes, which, before setting out, they had fashioned out of loose tobacco and old copies of Pravda.

She had been learning that getting respect was a matter of acting like you deserved it while pretending you didn’t care;

She was thinking about how a few simple items could transform your experience of the world. How rapidly one could come to expect the conveniences of air travel and warm toilets, how desperately one would long to have them back if they were taken away, the lengths one would go to, to preserve one’s access to them. For all that Beria and his ilk had soldiers, police, and torturers at their beck and call, their ability to give or take mere conveniences must, in the aggregate, confer more power by far.

You didn’t go to a funeral to break new ground in a friendship. You just showed up, made small talk, nibbled on things, and went home. It was really just a way of taking a census, a head count of who was still alive.

One of those walks.