Stephen Baxter

Mind you, flatulence was one skill he had bettered as he had got older.

“That’s the trouble with living so damned long,” Michael said. “Soured relationships last for ever.”

But you are a scientist, Michael Poole; and the skill of a scientist is in asking the right question.

If this was the basis of the faith of the Friends, then no wonder the Friends were so remote, so intense—so careless of their everyday lives, of the pain and death of others. History as it existed was nothing more than a shabby prototype of the global optimization to come, when the Ultimate Observer discarded all inferior worldlines.

And no wonder then, he thought, the Friends were so leached of humanity. Their mystical vision had removed all significance from their own lives—the only lives they could experience, whatever the truth of their philosophy—and it had rendered them deeply flawed, less than human. He opened his eyes and studied Shira. He saw again the patient intensity which resided inside this fragile girl—and he saw now how damaged she was by her philosophy.

She was not fully alive, and perhaps never could be; he pitied her, he realized.

Self-doubt is part of being human...but the main thing is to get on with the business of survival.

Bzya touched his shoulder. “But that’s why you and I are here, old man. To keep the world away from boys like Farr and Cris—to give them a place that seems as stable and eternal as your parents did when you were a child—until they are old enough to cope with the truth.”

“Hunger,” Hollerbach said. “The universal imperative.”

“It was a ploy, Jaar. I was trying to manipulate you, to get you to fight, to make you do what I wanted you to do.”

“I know that.” He smiled. “Of course I know that. But the motives behind your words don’t reduce their truth. Don’t you see that?”

“But Parz was better than nothing: it offered stability, regulation, a framework to live in. People gripe about their tithes—and nobody’s going to pretend that the Committee gets it right all the time—but most of us would prefer taxes to living wild. With all respect to you, my friend.” He bit into his cake. “And that’s still true today; as true as it ever was.”

The essential condition for life is the existence of sharp energy gradients.

The secret of a Scientist is not what he knows. It’s what he asks.