Home > Work > Ancestral Night (White Space #1)
81 " We used to call ourselves Team Zed. It sort of fell out of use after we had built up a decan of better reasons to feel like a family, but it still gets a wink and a grin every once in a while. "
― Elizabeth Bear , Ancestral Night (White Space #1)
82 " Well, one of the things you learn about sharing a small space with strong personalities you can’t escape from is to practice your boundaries even if you’ll never be really good at them. "
83 " If it was any of my business, somebody would tell me about it eventually. "
84 " Nothing in space is ever really standing still, so all visitors and accelerations are, not to put too fine a point on it, relative. "
85 " The station was not yet in sight ahead, and we had plenty of time to kill before we caught up with it. Of course this meant that Singer and Connla started arguing about the nature of consciousness again; (I’m sorry, “discussing”.) "
86 " It didn’t matter because it was out of my control, and my energy needed to go to things that I could control, or at least hope to affect the outcome of. "
87 " Am I just a sufficiently complicated and randomized construct that I adequately simulate intelligence? Or am I just a mock-up? "
88 " Plans. I thought about plans. Plants and plants. "
89 " You bumped your psychopathy up, didn’t you?”He smiled generously. “Of course I did. I’m flying. Can’t be distracted by doubts. "
90 " Maybe I was haunted, because I swear I felt a fleeting sense of contact, then, like the brush of immaterial fingers in my hair. "
91 " It’s why I want us to be very careful what we commit to while we’re dealing with this station. They make bad governmental choices, and by patronizing them, we’re just validating their choices. "
92 " I shrugged, and wondered if Pearl could see in that simple gesture the pain of losing an enforced religion because somebody gave you the switch and you were curious enough to turn it off. "
93 " You can turn off sex, and you can turn off romantic love-but it’s really hard to turn off all the human emotional responses to a powerful individual without also turning off your humanity. "
94 " I…discovered I liked my own dance. So I stayed away and they requested another retreat on, which they were legally obligated to give me. And that I decided I wasn’t going back at all. "
95 " She looked like a planetary: not tall, but her body bulky with high grav muscles, shoulders wide and sleeves of her coverall rolled up to show off sculpted forearms. She had a broad face with high, slanted cheekbones; coffee-dark eyes with a moderate fold, straight black hair chopped at the ear except for some longer locks, those dyed in fluttering streaks of red and gold. "
96 " There were other, messier details in the story, but we didn’t need to go into those now, and here. "
97 " The full story was not for strangers in bars. "
98 " Her light gold complexion was dusted in cobwebs of silver. "
99 " One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be more ethical. "
100 " Shall I compare thee to a docking ring? Thou are more beautiful and more temperate, though that’s not really hard when you’re talking about an airlock whose external temperature is measured on the low end of kelvins. On the other hand, I’m not sure I could have been happier with anything or felt more raw, unfettered love than I did for that docking ring, right there. Free and my afthands on metal, I stretched against the rotational acceleration and I sighed. "