Nothing he said indicated that he was that angry. I mean, there's a difference between angry and murderous. Isn't there?" "Less than you'd think. - Alastair Reynolds

That was my plan. But there is an old saying about plans and war.
I would have done well to heed it.

She rapped on for a while about how the nineties milieu was best addressed as a system of infections: sexual illnesses, rogue advertising slogans, computer viruses, proliferating junk mail…the kind of jive that had spread into all the glossy style magazines, as if, she mused, the viral paradigm was a metavirus in its own right.

In Clavain’s experience, it was the less comforting possibility that generally turned out to be the case. It was the way the universe worked.