Peter Watts

You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is.

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:

You wake in an agony of resurrection

Scylla and Charybdis

the gates of Heaven

"I love you, son."

Where are you? Are you coming back?

"Thanks," I said again. "That's good to know."

you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a workaround. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It's limiting. Maybe whatever's out here doesn't even use it

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf

Look, I'd said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It's kind of a slap in the face.

Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied.

Then you don't know whether they're doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they'd rather have ignored. But if you don't tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there's no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it's sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is— and then celebrating it—if they didn't honestly like you.

There's no reason they should talk even if they are smart. Language and intelligence aren't all that strongly correlated even on Ear—"

I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe