Text 1:
For a sickening moment he tried to retain his old
up-and-down orientation, his body attempting to right itself,
searching for the gravity that wasn't there. Then he forced himself
to change his view. He was hurtling toward a wall. That was down.
And at once he had control of himself. He wasn't flying, he was
falling. This was a dive. He could choose how he would hit the
surface.
I'm going too fast to catch ahold and stay, but I can soften the
impact, can fly off at an angle if I roll when I hit and use my
feet--
It didn't work at all the way he had planned. He went off at an
angle, but it was not the one he had predicted. Nor did he have
time to consider. He hit another wall, this time too soon to have
prepared for it. But quite accidently he discovered a way to use
his feet to control the rebound angle. Now he was soaring across
the room again, toward the other boys who still clung to the wall.
This time he had slowed enough to be able to grip a rung. He was at
a crazy angle in relation to the other boys, but once again his
orientation had changed, and as far as he could tell, they were all
lying on the floor, not hanging on a wall, and he was no more
upside down than they were.
"What are you trying to do, kill yourself?" asked
Shen.
Text 2:
The woman was one of the lucky ninety percent who
survived jacking intact, and she did give Alliance questioners the
names of three other tenientes who had been in on the
Portobello massacre. For her own part in it she was sentenced to
death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was
sent to the large POW camp in the Canal Zone, the jack in the back
of her skull guaranteeing that she wouldn't be part of any
conspiracy there.
Unsurprisingly, during the four hours it had taken to get her to
Portobello and install the jack, the three other tenientes
and their families had dissolved into the bush, driven underground
- perhaps to return. Their fingerprints and retinal patterns tagged
them as rebels, but there was no real guarantee that the ones on
file were authentic. They had had years to effect substitution. Any
one of them might show up at the entrance to the camp at Portobello
with a job appliance.
Text 3:
Lamont said angrily, 'Immortality! You're talking of
pipe dreams.'
'Perhaps you're a judge of pipe dreams, Professor,' said Chen,
'but I intend to see that research into immortality begins. It
won't begin if Pumping ends. Then we are back to expensive energy,
scarce energy, dirty energy. Earth's two billion will have to go
back to work for a living and the pipe dream of immortality will
remain a pipe dream.'
'It will anyway. No one is going to be immortal. No one is even
going to live out a normal lifetime.'
'Ah, but that is your theory, only.'
Lamont weighed the possibilities and decided to gamble. 'Mr.
Chen, a while ago I said I was not willing to explain my knowledge
of the state of mind of the para-men. Well, let me try. We have
been receiving messages.'
Text 4:
"Your daughter chooses her own way," The woman was
frowning at me. "You and I do not determine it. The cycle is
turning and she is here."
"If I send her away? Where will you send her? The cycle is
turning. When the world changes, everything will change. And why
will you send her away? She belongs here, just as you belong
here."
"The turning of the cycle doesn't matter," I said, suddenly
angry. "This is not..." I stopped short of voicing my thoughts.
"This is not real?" Zuhuy-kak calmly finished the sencence. Her
voice was very sift.
Text 5:
There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to
point in my machete. When I blow across the mouth-piece in the
handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered,
the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth.
When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the
eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes.
And since I have been playing music I've been called all different
kinds of fool - more times than Lobey, which is my
name.
Text 6:
Inside the inn once more, I ordered breakfast and good
bread warm from the oven, newly churned butter, pickled duck's
eggs, and peppered chocolate beaten to a froth. (This last a sure
sign, though I did not know it then, that I was among people who
drew their customs from the north.) Our hairless gnome of a host,
who had no doubt seen me in conversation with the alcalde the night
before, hovered over my table wiping his nose on his sleeve,
inquiring about the quality of each dish as it was served - though
they were all, in truth, very good - promising better food at
supper, and condemning the cook, who was his wife. He called me
sieur, not because he thought as they sometimes has in
Nessus that I was an exultant incognito, but because a torturer
here, as the efficient arm of the law, was a great person. Like
most peons, he could conceive of no more than one social class
higher than his own.
Text 7:
Descent of course is reckoned, all over Gethen, from
the mother, the "parent in the flesh" (Karh. amha).
Incest is permitted, with various restrictions, between
siblings, even the full siblings of a vowed-kemmering pair.
Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep
kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair. Incest
between generations is strictly forbidden (in Karhide/Orgoreyn; but
is said to be permitted among the tribesmen of Perunter, the
Antarctic Continent. This may be slander.).
Text 8:
The two thieves also had the relief of knowing that,
with the satisfaction of a job well done, they were straight home
now, not to a wife, Aarth forbid! - or to parents and children, all
gods forfend! - but to Thieves' House, headquarters and barracks of
the all-mighty Guild which was father to them both and mother too,
though no woman was allowed inside its ever-open portal on Cheap
Street.
In addition there was the comforting knowledge that although
each was armed only with his regulation silver-hilted thief's
knife, a weapon seldom used except in rare intramural duels and
brawls, in fact more a membership token than a weapon, they were
nevertheless most strongly convoyed by three reliable and lethal
bravos hired for the evening from the Slayers' Brotherhood, one
moving well ahead of them as point, the other two well behind as
rear guard and chief striking force, in fact almost out of sight -
for it is never wise that such convoying be obvious, or so believed
Krovas, Grandmaster of the Thieves' Guild.
Text 9:
The bureaucrat fell from the sky.
For an instant Miranda lay blue and white beneath him, the
icecaps fat and ready to melt, and then he was down. He took a
highspeed across the stony plains of the Piedmont to the heliostat
terminus at Port Richmond, and caught the first flight out. The
airship Leviathan lofted him across the fall line and over
the forests and coral hills of the Tidewater. Specialized ecologies
were astir there, preparing for the transforming magic of the
jubilee tides. In ramshackle villages and hidden plantations people
made their varied provisions for the evacuation.
Text 10:
"The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud,
Old Father Eternity," he said. "They say: 'Be prepared to
appreciate what you meet.' "
And he thought: Yes, mother mine--among the Fremen. You'll
acquire the blue eyes and a callus beside your lovely nose from the
filter tube to your stillsuit ... and you'll bear my sister: St.
Alia of the Knife.
"If you're not the Kwisatz Haderach," Jessica said, "what--"
"You couldn't possibly know," he said. "You won't believe it
until you see it."
And he thought: I'm a seed.
Text 11:
Remembering-
Do you hear, my little red? Hold me softly. The cold grows.
I remember:
-I am hugely black and hopeful, I bounce on six legs along the
mountains in the new warm! ... Sing the changer, Sing the
stranger! Will the changes change forever! ... All my hums have
words now. Another change!
Eagerly I bound on sunward following the tiny thrill in the air.
The forests have been shrinking again. Then I see. It is me!
Me-Myself, MOGGADEET-I have grown bigger more in the winter cold! I
astonish myself, Moggadeet-the-small!
Text 12:
The first day that Shadow hung from the tree he
experienced only discomfort that edged slowly into pain, and fear
and, occasionally, an emotion that was somewhere between boredom
and apathy: a grey acceptance, a waiting.
He hung.
The wind was still.
After several hours fleeting bursts of colour started to explode
across his vision in blossoms of crimson and gold, throbbing and
pulsing with a life of their own.
The pain in his arms and legs became, by degrees, intolerable.
If he relaxed them, let his body go slack and dangle, if he flopped
forward, then the rope around his neck would take up the slack and
the world would shimmer and swim. So he pushed himself back against
the trunk of the tree. He could feel his heart labouring in his
chest, a pounding arrythmic tattoo as it pumped the blood through
his body...
Text 13:
Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from
his forehead. He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead
with a towel, took a quick sip of water from the bicycle bottle
beside the Hosaka, and checked the map of the library displayed on
the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept through the outline of a
doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that indicated the
location of the Dixie Flatline's construct. He wondered what it was
doing to her leg, to walk on it that way. With enough endorphin
analog, she could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. He tightened the
nylon harness that held him in the chair and replaced the
trodes.
Text 14:
I was out with Blood, my dog. It was his week for
annoying me; he kept calling me Albert. He thought that was pretty
damned funny. Payson Terhune: ha ha. I'd caught a couple of water
rats for him, the big green and ochre ones, and someone's manicured
poodle, lost off a leash in one of the downunders; he'd eaten
pretty good, but he was cranky. "Come on, son of a bitch," I
demanded, "find me a piece of ass." Blood just chuckled, deep in
his dog-throat. "You're funny when you get horny," he said.
Maybe funny enough to kick him upside his sphincter ass-hole,
that refugee from a dingo-heap.
"Find! I'm not kidding."
"For shame, Albert. After all I've taught you."
Text 15:
"A girl," Elizabeth Camden said. Ong hadn't expected
her to speak first. Her voice was another surprise: upper-class
British. "Blonde. Green eyes. Tall. Slender."
Ong smiled. "Appearance factors are the easiest to achieve, as
I'm sure you already know. But all we can do about slenderness is
give her a genetic disposition in that direction. How you feed the
child will naturally--"
"Yes, yes," Roger Camden said, "that's obvious. Now:
intelligence. High intelligence. And a sense of daring."
I'm sorry, Mr. Camden, personality factory are not yet
understood well enough to allow genet--"
"Just testing," Camden said, with a smile that Ong thought was
probably supposed to be lighthearted.
Elizabeth Camden said, "Musical ability."
Again, Mrs. Camden, a disposition to be musical is all we can
guarantee."
"Good enough," Camden said. "The full array of corrections for
any potential gene-linked health problem, of course."
"Of course," Dr. Ong said. Neither client spoke. So far theirs
was a fairly modest list, given Camden's money; most clients had to
be argued out of contradictory genetic tendencies, alteration
overload, or unrealistic expectations. Ong waited. Tension pricked
in the room like heat.
"And," Camden said, "no need to sleep."
