The Sunborn

Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man’s belt—big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.

There was more known, but always more to be known.

Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable.

“Why paired?” Viktor asked. “Have two sexes?”

“Hard to imagine how electromagnetic creatures could,” Mary Kay said.

Viktor grinned. “Lack of imagination is not an argument. Especially lately.”

Nobody out here was going to find an alternative here to Earth’s tiresome clash of selfish individualisms and stifling collectivisms.

Would an alien outsider judge America’s performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?

Anyway, the Shanna woman was abrasive, self-obsessed, smug—and those were her good points. Julia suspected that in a pinch the woman might also be careless, the one sin reality never forgave.

None of the above. That’s often the right answer, and bugger the exams.

She had always admired the way bureaucracies spontaneously produced leaden prose, blandly sliding from the mouths of people who absolutely believed everything they said.

Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.

After weeks of indoor work it actually felt good to be doing something—clean, direct, muscles and mind.

Not sure. When don’t know, do experiment.

Exercise erased cares.