Burning Chrome

Quotes

1. Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things.

2. 

   "But why?" Korolev shook his head, deeply confused. "Why have you come?"

   "We told you. To live here…Who'd want to live out here for the sake of some government, some army brass, a bunch of pen pushers? You have to want a frontier—want it in your bones, right?"

   Korolev smiled. Andy grinned back.

3. 

   When the knocking came, he knew that it must be a dream as well.

   The hatch wheeled open.

   He saw that the woman was black. Long corkscrews of matted hair rose like cobras around her head.

   "Andy," she said in English, "you better come see this!"

   "Is he alive?"

   "Of course I am alive." said Korolev in slightly accented English.

   The man called Andy sailed in over her head. "You okay, Jack?" His right bicep was tattooed with a geodesic balloon above crossed lightning bolts and bore the legend SUNSPARK 15, UTAH. "We weren't expecting anybody."

   "Neither was I," said Korolev, blinking.

4. 

   Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour blackout that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight.

5. 

   We strolled past bales of raw wool and plastic tubs of Chinese microchips. I hinted that my employers planned to manufacture synthetic beta-endorphin. Always try to give them something they understand.

6. 

   There was coffee. Life would go on.

7. 

   We were looking for the world's heaviest fence, for a non-aligned money laundry capable of dry-cleaning a megabuck online cash transfer and then forgetting about it...It was the Finn who put me on to what we needed. He even had the number. You want a fence, ask another fence.

8. 

   If I was looking to be depressed, I’d come to the right place.

9. 

   Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff, liberty-headed dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stamp-and-coin stores, while more cautious bettors slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D.VIIs. The room fell silent.

10. 

    Kosmograd's hull rang again...

    "East Los Angeles," the woman said. "That's the one with the kids in it." She took off her goggles, and Korolev saw her eyes brimming over with a wonderful lunacy.

11. 

    Korolev stared at the man, who had the blundering, careless look of someone drunk on freedom since birth.

12. 

    "Macao," the Finn said.

    "Macao?"

    "The Long Hum family. Stockbrokers."

    The Long Hum people were so oblique that they made my idea of a subtle approach look like a tactical nuke-out.

13. 

    But then there are days when it's like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God's own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she'd merged with the net, crossed over for good...

14. 

    Deke looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversize sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference.

15. 

    I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back. Because she was dead, and I'd let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I'd helped her get that way. And because I knew she'd phone me, in the morning.

16. 

    So now it's cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years...Charmian says that contact with "superior" civilizations is something you don't wish on your worst enemy.

17. 

    Coretti didn't know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease.

18. 

    We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified...

19. 

    For more than three decades the Americans had been gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline. Space, he thought ruefully, they should have gone into space. He'd never understood the strange paralysis of will that had seemed to grip their brilliant early efforts. Or perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination, of vision.

20. 

    "Hell of a world we live in…"

    "That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect."

21. 

    "Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County," Kihn said. "I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted 'bya bar hade.'"

    "A what?"

    "A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer…Now that is the…straight goods from the mass unconscious. That little girl is a witch. There's just no place for her to function in this society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been brought up on 'The Bionic Man' and all those Star Trek reruns. She is clued into the main vein."

22. 

    Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy's Jungle. It was a massive console cased in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model, heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to buy a gun than a hot bath.

23. 

    "If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you saw a semiotic ghost," Kihn said. "All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties' comic art."

24. 

    “As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources.”

    “You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.”

25. 

    I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy.

26. 

    Colonel Korolev twisted slowly in his harness, dreaming of winter and gravity. Young again, a cadet, he whipped his horse across the late November steppes of Kazakhstan into dry red vistas of Martian sunset.

27. 

    She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke...she moved through her natural element, one bar after another.

28. 

    The part of Coretti that was dialectologist stirred uneasily; too perfect a shift in phrasing and inflection. An actress? A talented mimic? The word mimetic rose suddenly in his mind, but he pushed it aside to study her reflection in the mirror; the rows of bottles occluded her breasts like a gown of glass.

29. 

    "The sun balloons!" cried Grishkin, pointing toward the earth.

    Kosmograd was above the coast of California now, clean shorelines, intensely green fields, vast decaying cities whose names rang with a strange magic. High above a fleece of stratocumulus floated five solar balloons, mirrored geodesic spheres tethered by power lines.

    "And they say that people live in those things?"

30. 

    They had better luck with the seashell. Exobiology suddenly found itself standing on unnervingly solid ground: one and seven-tenths grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial. Olga's seashell generated an entire subbranch of the science, devoted exclusively to the study of...Olga's seashell.

That’s all the quotes.

30 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more