“How did you do that?” The Hymenopt inclined her head. “With respect, Professor Lang, great intellectual… — Charles Sheffield

When a person was so consistently wrong, it was time to give up having opinions.

Happy endings were for children’s stories and fool. You live in misery, and then you die. Life, by definition, was not designed to end happily.

Louis continued aft. No happy ending, then. That was a fact, certain as death itself. He was living at the moment in a dream, an imagined world where everything went right.

But—dreams are real while they last. Could you say more of life?

A dream sequence was no more than a happy interlude, but maybe a happy interlude could last for an awful long time.

Nothing in life produce a more powerful joy than a near miss by the Angel of Death.