Charles Sheffield

Sometimes wealth and power merely created the desire for more of the same.

Mathematics is universal. But very little else is.

“I’ve been testing Kallen’s Law—my name for it, not his. Remember what he said? ‘Anything that can be put into a data bank by one person can be taken out of it by another, if you’re smart enough and have enough time.’ That’s one problem with a computer-based society, and one reason why computers were so tightly controlled on Pentecost: it’s almost impossible to prevent access to computer-stored information.”

You can learn more about a person by watching them eat one meal than by listening to them speak for a whole day.

Everyone was polite; no one was happy.

The partners were there; gravity was calling the changes, and the cosmic dance was ready to begin.

But humans had to learn to ignore appearance. No two beings who shared common thinking processes and common goals should be truly alien to each other.

“My aunt doesn’t even believe there is a Ship. She says we’ve been here on Pentecost forever.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. For someone with that view, logic is irrelevant—she’ll believe what she chooses, regardless of evidence. Her religion says God placed us here on Pentecost, and for her that’s the end of the argument.”

“And you?” Peron was aware that she had moved in very close to him. “What do you think?”

“You know what I think. I’m cursed with a logical mind, and a lot of curiosity.”

But mere plausibility did not make the statement true.

It might be an impossible task, but at least it was a well-defined one. The rules for performance were no problem. He had learned them long ago on Teufel: you succeed, or you die trying. Until you succeed, you never relax. Until you die, you never give up.

Where orbits are wildly varying, life has no chance to develop. Changes are too extreme. Temperatures melt tin, then solidify nitrogen. If it is once established, life is persistent; it can adapt to many extremes. But there is a fragility in the original creation that calls for a long period of tightly-controlled variations.

See, everybody looks at the world from his own point of view. I call it the ground state of the resting mind. And your brain does the same thing, left alone it returns to and thinks about what it’s really interested in.