Connie Willis

Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else—cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments—as long as the paperwork’s filled out properly. And in on time.

“Baine, what do you think of this?” Tossie said, indicating the bishop’s bird stump. “Don’t you agree it’s the most beautiful piece of art you’ve ever seen?”

Baine straightened and looked at it, blinking water out of his eyes.

There was a considerable pause while Baine wrung out his sleeve. “No.”

“No?” Tossie said, making it into a screamlet.

“No.”...

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean the sculpture is a hideous atrocity, vulgarly conceived, badly designed, and shoddily executed,” he said, folding the shawl carefully and bending to lay it back in the bundle.

“How dare you say that,” Tossie said, her cheeks very pink.

Baine straightened. “I beg you pardon, miss. I thought you were asking my opinion.”

“I was, but I expected you to tell me you thought it was beautiful.”

He bowed slightly. “As you wish, miss.” He looked at it, his face impassive. “It is very beautiful.”

“That makes no sense,” I said.

“This is the Victorian era,” she said. “Women didn’t have to make sense.”

Ah, Hollywood, where everybody wants to be in the movies and nobody’s ever bothered to watch one.

Therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct.

“How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant.”

“Yes, miss,” he said wearily.

“You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters.”

There was a long pause, and then Baine said, “All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary.”

“Plebeian?” Tossie said, bright pink. “How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed.” She pointed imperiously at the house. “Pack your things immediately.”

“Yes, miss,” Baine said. “E pur si muove.”

“What?” Tossie said, bright red with rage. “What did you say?”

“I said, now that finally have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely,” he said calmly.

“You are not in a position to speak to me at all,” Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. “Leave at once.”

“I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it,” Baine said seriously. “I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.”

In my log, there's nothing worse than working for a government with the guilts. All we were doing on Boohte was surveying the planet, but Big Brother didn't want anybody accusing them of “ruthless imperialist expansion” and riding roughshod over the indidges the way they did when they colonized America.

So they set up all these rules to “preserve planetary ecosystems” (which was supposed to mean we weren't allowed to build dams or kill the local fauna) and “protect indigenous cultures from technological contamination” (which was supposed to mean we couldn't give ’em firewater and guns), and stiff fines for breaking the rules.

Which is where they made their first mistake, because they paid the fines to the indidges, and Bult and his tribe knew a good thing when they saw it, and before you know it we’re being fined for making footprints, and Bult’s buying technological contamination right and left with the proceeds.

“Servants don’t travel with their employers.”

“How do they do without them?”

”They don’t.”

Barbie’s one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.

There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I’d like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O’Reilly’s macaques, which have to have more sense.

It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.

“They’re absolutely necrotic, aren’t they?” Colin whispered behind his order of service.

“It’s late twentieth century atonal,” Dunworthy whispered back. “It’s supposed to sound dreadful.”