She had always admired the way bureaucracies spontaneously produced leaden prose, blandly sliding from the… — Gregory Benford

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.”