The sky around here was incredible .... Sirius was a Young star system .Still dusty and literate by debris , and the dust created a back ground glow of silvers , blues and whites .
( Le ciel tout autour était incroyable ... Sirius était un jeune système . Encore poussiéreux et encombré par des débris , et la poussière créait une lueur d'arrière-plan faite d'argent , de bleus et de blancs. )
»Self« could sense its universe in myriad ways: through density and water content and something that might be called the taste of silica, quartz, limestone, metal-sharp ores, and hydrocarbons: through the tug of gravity: through magnetic fields and the far weaker trickle of electrons within the Rock; through the life-giving heat of encompassing Rock and the dimly sensed "flavor" of remarkably concentrated metals now so close ahead.
With an analytical detachment more characteristic of the computers in its ancestry than of organic beings, the Sentry tracked the disturbance through local space. A ripple twisted the fabric of space/time, and the Sentry shifted across light-years, emerging alongside the massive object, traveling at precisely the object’s velocity.
To Western sensibilities, the tea ceremony is alien, flat, and lifeless. To Nihonjin, however, each motion, each aspect is charged with subtle meaning, providing aesthetic stimulation, refreshment, and the well-being and security of time-honored ritual. Here, surely, is the soul of Zen, understatement speaking directly to the mind.
—Japan: From the Past to Tomorrow
Frank Harrison
C.E. 2045
By the early twenty-first century, the lines between the biological and the machine, between natural intelligence and artificial, between physics and chemistry, between life and lifelessness, were already becoming blurred.
—The Golden Apples of the Stars
SHELLY WESTEGREN
C.E. 2457
It was a small world, to be sure-an artificial ring three thousand kilometers around, and five hundred wide,rotating to provide simulated gravity and with matrix fields across each end of the narrow tube to hold in the air.
The were called the Hunters of the Dawn
Analysis . . .
The vacuum was not absolute. There was matter beyond the cavern wall, a thin gas of recognizable elements combined in unfamiliar molecules. Oxygen was present, for instance, but as free O2 instead of the usual SiO2 or Fe2O3 of Rock. Self's knowledge of astronomy was nonexistent, but its understanding of physical chemistry was superb, its analysis of its surroundings flawlessly precise. »Self« was bathed in electromagnetic radiation as well, energy in two separate frequency bands, one between 107 and 1010 hertz, and another between 1014 and 1015 hertz. It suspected that the gap between the two sets of frequencies was the result of absorption by the tenuous gas that blanketed this place.
The constitution remember ? It says we work for the polititians .
Sound did not carry well , in near vacuum , but Doctor David.Alexander felt the slight , ringing vibration of each step thru the insulation of his Mars Suit boots .