Charles Sheffield

“How did you do that?”

The Hymenopt inclined her head. “With respect, Professor Lang, great intellectual power, even at the level you possess it, is not always a substitute for humble practical experience.”

Don’t confuse caution with cowardice.

That’s why we want it. Impossible gadgets are always the most valuable.

Once you were committed to a course of action, you didn’t waste your time looking back and second-guessing the decision, because every action in life was taken on the basis of incomplete information. You looked at what you had, and you did all you could to improve the odds; but at some point you had to roll the dice—and live or die with whatever you had thrown.

“Professor Lang’s important work, with all due respect, does not answer that question.”

The knife, sliding in hidden behind the compliment. “With all due respect” meant “with no respect at all.”

Darya stood up, heard her voice rising, and knew she was doing what she insisted what a scientist should never do: allowing passion and the defense of personal theories to interfere with logical analysis.

Hans Rebka sat on a rounded pyramid never designed for contact with the human posterior, and thought about luck.

There was good luck, which mostly happened to other people. And there was bad luck, which usually happened to you. Sometimes, through observation, guile, and hard work, you could avoid bad luck—even make it look like good luck, to others. But you would know the difference, even if no one else did.

Well, suppose that for a change good luck came your way. How should you greet that stranger to your house? You could argue that its arrival was inevitable, that the laws of probability insisted that good and bad must average out over long enough times and large enough samples. Then you could welcome luck in, and feel pleased that your turn had come round at last.

Or you could hear what Hans Rebka was hearing: the small, still voice breathing in his ear, telling him that this good luck was an impostor, not to be trusted.

But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data.

Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; It was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E. C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful.

“We’re all here,” said Louis Nenda’s voice.

“Where’s here? Can you see?”

“Not a thing. Black as a politician’s heart.”

Human culture is built around four basic elements: sexual relationships, territorial rights, individual intellectual dominance, and desire for group acceptance. The H’Sirin model using just these four traits as independent variables enables accurate prediction of human behavior patterns. On the basis of this, human culture is judged to be of Level Two, with few prospects for advancement to a higher level. —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)

Didn’t anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it and instinct for self-preservation).