Xavier > Recent Status Updates

Johnny, earlier when you said that the Old Earth analog was
complete, | said, ‘Why, for God’s sake?’ and you said
something like ‘That may be the case.’ Was that just a
wiseass comment or did you mean something?”

“| mean that it might indeed be for God’s sake.”

“Explain.”

Als killing Als ... irrelevant!” | laughed but managed
to keep the laughter under control. “Jesus wept, Johnny.”

“Almost certainly.”

How will the TechnoCore respond to, my being here?”

“| have no idea.”

“Surely it must be a secret.”

“It is ... something they consider irrelevant to humanity.”

| shook my head, a futile gesture in the darkness. “The
recreation of Old Earth ... the resurrection of ... how
many? ... human personalities as cybrids on this recreated
world ... Als killing Als ... irrelevant!” | laughed but managed
to keep the

He saw men and women
with flesh hanging in burned strips carrying the dazed
children from the ashes of what once had been a city. Sol
knew that these images were no dreams, were the very stuff
of the First and Second Holocausts, and in his understanding
knew before the voice spoke in his mind what the answer
was. What it must be.


— The parents have offered themselves. That sacrifice already has been
accepte

Can that be Abraham’s answer to God? That he would be the offering,
not Issaac?


— It could have been Abraham's. It cannot be yours.
— Why?


As if in answer, Sol had the fever-vision of naked adults
filing toward the ovens past armed men, mothers hiding
their children under piles of coats. He saw men and women
with flesh hanging in burned strips carrying the dazed
children from the ashes of what once had be

You know something? This talking about yourself In the
third person is sort of therapeutic.

A person constantly busy accessing on his implants makes a pitiful sight in public and it didn’t take Helenda’s derision to make me realize that if I stayed home I would turn into an All Thing sponge like so many slugs around the Web.”



– The Poet’s Tale, Martin Silenus

No bill was too small, no issue too simple or complex for my input. The simple act of voting every few minutes gave me a sense of having accomplished something. I finally gave up the political obsession only after I realized that accessing the All Thing regularly meant either staying home or turning into a walking zombie.

For the first time in my life I became political. Days and nights would pass with me monitoring the Senate on farcaster cable or lying tapped into the All Thing . . . No bill was too small, no issue too simple or complex for my input. The simple act of voting every few minutes gave me a sense of having accomplished something. I finally gave up the political obsession only after I realized that accessing the All Thing

The light itself is yellow, rich as liquid butter,
filtered as it is through foliage and fronds eighty meters
above the brown surface of the Kans. | sit on the rusted tin
roof of the center passenger barge and strain to make out
my first glimpse of a tesla tree

You have been chosen to join the pilgrimage to the
Shrike,” said the image of the old CEO whom the press loved
to compare to Lincoln or Churchill or Alvarez-Temp or
whatever other pre-Hegira legend was in historical vogue at
the time. “The Templars are sending their treeship
Yggdrasill’ said Gladstone, “and the evacuation task force
commander has instructions to let it pass. With a three-week
time-debt, you ca

They had used the solar system as a
refuelling stop - as a booster station - call it what you
will, and had then spurned it completely, on their way to
more important business. They would probably never
even know that the human race existed; such monu-
mental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult.

But he had also failed. One might speculate endlessly,
but the nature and the purpose of the Ramans was still
utterly unknown. They had used the solar system as a
refuelling stop - as a booster station - call it what you
will, and had then spurned it completely, on their way to
more important business. They would probably never
even know that the human race existed; such monu-
mental indifference was worse tha

That was the obvious explanation, and therefore Nor-
ton viewed it with suspicion. His doubts grew as he exam-
ined the other columns, and conjured up the images
stored in their interiors

There was a story he had heard somewhere about a
President of the United States - was it Roosevelt or
Perez? - who had a sign on his desk saying 'The buck
stops here'. Norton was not quite certain what a buck
was, but he knew when one had stopped at his desk

'What degree of cooperation or understanding would
ever be possible between human beings and termites?
When there is no conflict of interest, we tolerate each
other. But when either needs the other's territory or re-
sources, no quarter is given.
'Thanks to our technology and our intelligence, we can
always win, if we are sufficiently determined. But some-
times it is not easy, and there are those who believe

Mr President, distinguished fellow delegates, I would
like to begin with a brief summary of the situation which
now confronts us.'
From some delegates, that phrase 'a brief summary'
would have evoked silent groans among all listeners; but
everyone knew that Hermians meant exactly what they
said.

Long ago, the astronomers had exhausted Greek and
Roman mythology; now they were working through
the Hindu pantheon. And so 31/439 was christened
Rama.
For a

it mean? Who needs a forest of glass pillars?'
Norton rapped gently on one column. It sounded solid,
though more metallic than crystalline. He was completely
baffled, and so followed a piece of useful advice he had
heard long ago: 'When in doubt, say nothing and move
on

Norton walked towards the nearest column and dir-
ected his beam into its interior. Refracted as through a
cylindrical lens, the light fanned out on the far side to be
focused and refocused, getting fainter with each repeti-
tion, in the array of pillars beyond. He felt that he was in
the middle of some complicated demonstration in optics.
'Very pretty,' said the practical Mercer, 'but what does
it mean? Who

and still less were they completely trusted.

It had even been proposed that
Hermian lasers would one day thaw out gigantic Jupiter,
but this idea had not been well received on the other
worlds. A technology that could cook Jupiter had too
many tempting possibilities for interplanetary black-
mail.
That such a concern had ever been expressed said a
good deal about the general attitude towards the Her-
mians. They were respected for their toughness and e

'Mr Ambassador,' the scientist began, 'I have been
analysing the curious behaviour of Rama during the last
few days, and would like to present my conclusions. Some
of them are rather startling.'
Dr Perera looked surprised, then rather smug. He
strongly approved of anything that startled Professor
Davidson.

Most of them had felt that the
astronomer, with his well-known cosmic viewpoint, was
not the right man to be Chairman of the Space Advisory
Council. He sometimes gave the impression that the activi-
ties of intelligent life were an unfortunate irrelevance in
the majestic universe of stars and galaxies, and that it was
bad manners to pay too much attention to it. This had
not endeared him to exobiologists such

Next to her the electric toad flopped and rustled in its box; she wondered what it "ate," and what
repairs on it would run. Artificial flies, she decid

And the killers throw the rocks; it's they who're doing it. Still pursuing him. And all of us,
actually. Did one of them cut your check, where it's been bleeding?"
"Yes," he said wanly.
"Will you go to bed now? If I set the mood organ to a 670 setting?"
"What does that bring about?" he asked.
"Long deserved peace," Iran said.

. Really weird. Sometimes it's better to do
something wrong than right."
"It's the curse on us," Iran said. "That Mercer talks about."
"The dust?" he asked.
"The killers that found Mercer in his sixteenth year, when they told him he couldn't reverse time
and bring things back to life again. So now all he can do is move along with life, going where it goes,
to death. And the killers throw the rocks; it's they

You were right this morning when you said I'm nothing but a crude cop with crude cop
hands."
"I don't feel that any more," she said. "I'm just damn glad to have you come back home where you
ought to be." She kissed him and that seemed to please him; his face lit up, almost as much as before
- before she had shown him that the toad was electric.
"Do you think I did wrong?" he asked. "What I did today?
"No."

"After I finished. I couldn't stop because there would be nothing left after I
stopped.

"Once I began on it there wasn't any way for me
to stop; it kept carrying me along, until finally I got to the Batys, and then suddenly I didn't have
anything to do. And that - " He hesitated, evidently amazed at what he had begun to say. "That part
was worse," he said