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I’m not asking you to open your mind to all manner of nonsense, Doctor, merely to allow for the possibility of things you might previously have dismissed, or failed to give any consideration to whatsoever. Such as the fact that the world was not always this way, and by implication doesn’t have to be this way in the future.

Welcome to politics, Doctor. We don’t get to pick our allies. The best we can hope for is that we don’t despise them quite as much as our enemies.

Do you see us slavering for revenge, that most pointlessly biological of imperatives?

We were sowing so much misinformation that some of it came back and bit us.

“And you do not think that this is possible?”

“I’ll believe in anything when I see evidence for it.”

Hopefully they’ll accept me for what I am, not what I was. That’s all we can ever hope for, isn’t it?

It was easy to sound that confident; less easy to believe it in his heart. They had got this far did not give them an automatic guarantee of success. The world did not work like that. It took pleasure in punishing the cocksure.

“We don’t have enough evidence to decide either way,” Ricasso said, “so for now we may as well keep open minds.”

Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time.

They might have their airships and machine guns, but superstition wasn’t something that went away just because you had engines and bullets.

“I have only your word for that.”

“Yes,” the glass man said, “that’s rather the point. There’s going to have to be a lot more trust from this time forward. Why don’t we start as we mean to go on?”

The existence theorem says that it is always much easier to find a solution when you can be confident that one exists.