Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home

People, of course, seemed to need also to talk and talk, which was a pity because their talk was mostly without meaning.

The American black who goes to Kenya often discovers he is an American first and an African second, no matter what they did to him in Newark.

He heard himself humming and decided to lock the whole thing into autopilot. No matter what shape that computer was in it would be saner than he was.

Did you know you get clobbered for calling a polyglot a linguist?

Somewhere in his head a couple of neurones twitched, but they didn’t connect.

Because dying, any time, is an experience you don’t survive.

You can understand why a system would seek information—but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?

Man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him, it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re about to die trying.

Stupid,” I husked to George. “Harem slaves don’t blow up the harem and themselves just to keep the new girls out. They wait and poison the new girls when they can get away with it. That does us no good.”

“Nor do historical analogies, after a point.”

“Analogic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame.

Eerie blue, the wide old eyes reminded him of a place he had never seen.

If it worked it would be like trying to wipe your eye with a blowtorch.

She sounded sane as soap.

Entropy! The development of reliable knowledge is anti-entropic. Science’s task in a social system is comparable to the function of intelligence in the individual. It holds against disorganization, isolation, noise, entropy. But we, here—we’ve allied ourselves with an entropic subsystem. We’re not generating structure, we’re helping to degrade the system!