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81 " the small knot of raincoated citizens loitering at a waxman’s booth suddenly cast off their waxed raincoats to become iridescent birds of paradise and pulled from the waxman’s awning long, streaming banners with which they danced through the crowds of workaday citizens, wrapping them in rippling silk and mystery while from the back of the booth roman candles ignited and fountained silver fire into the air. "
― Ian McDonald , Out on Blue Six
82 " Tell me, how is it that Courtney Hall can have all her life mapped out for her from beginning to end for the maximum personal happiness and satisfaction and still be neither happy nor satisfied? "
83 " Answer me, Enlightened One, Empowered One, Mother of Velocity. "
84 " are they, will they be, have they ever been truly happy? "
85 " Only one man was not surprised. He was not surprised because he had no concept of normality that the events in Neu Ulmsbad Square could violate. "
86 " Hi, honey, I’m home!” she shouted. The furniture stared at her. Her own sour little joke ever since the Ministry of Pain Department of Interpersonal Relationships had decided it was best for her to annul her five-year relationship with Dario Sanducci, a yulp counselor in the Department of Housing and Welfare. "
87 " she tried instead to summon up the sixteen-o’clock dream. Something flying. Dashing, darting, weaving between the concrete behemoths of the arcologies and co-habs … she closed her eyes, tried to persuade her imagination into creating a flying something that might complete her fragment of a dream. And the window wall of her thirty-third-level apartment exploded. "
88 " Courtney Hall, cartoonist by disappointment, sat phantom-white where reflex and shock had thrown her against the far wall. "
89 " The man called Kilimanjaro West watched with wonder and delight and everything was new. "
90 " Citizen Grissom Bunt of the yulp caste, in the name of the Compassionate Society you are under arrest for a Category Twelve PainCrime and LifeRight Violation; "
91 " Have you anything to say for yourself?” “Sergeant.” “Have you anything to say for yourself?” “Sergeant …” “In a moment, Constable, after the formalities have been completed. Have you anything to say for yourself?” “East, Sergeant. Kilimanjaro East.” “In one moment, Constable.” “This is West, Sergeant.” “Come again?” “Kilimanjaro West, Sergeant.” “Well, snug … "
92 " Nameless "
93 " … COLD. “Cold,” he said, and understood. Cold was the meaning for his shivering body, the steaming billows of his breath, the trickleways of water down the windows, "
94 " I am cold,” he said. The three words shattered. Before them he had not known that he could speak, that there even existed a thing called speech. “I am cold, and I can speak,” he said. The words sounded good to him. "
95 " So many names in this … “place. "
96 " In the dying moments of the Happening, each knew themselves to have been touched by something quite precious and rare and extraordinary. Something that had been taken from them years and years before. Something that some of them had never known they could experience. "
97 " he marveled at that word that had come to his lips out of nothing. “Water, forefinger.” The words were coming fast now, tumbling, streaming out of that noplace where the names of all things waited to be used. “I am cold, I can speak, and I am tracing this water down this window with my forefinger. "
98 " Sights, sounds, smells, sensations, the whole profusion of anarchic impressions fell into ordered patterns around the geometrical entities of their names. "
99 " This piece of Performance Art entitled ‘The Elector Passes’ has been brought to you by the members of the Raging Apostles, "
100 " And the names drew about themselves a nimbus of quality, of good and bad and color and weight and hardness, a state of existence to come, a state of existence that was and a state of existence that had been. "