The old murals came from the heart," Zima said. "I painted on a huge scale because that was what the subject matter seemed to demand." "It was good w… - Alastair Reynolds

Is he dead?" Irravel asked.
"Depends what you mean by dead.

We're pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we've even got machines in the Oort cloud. That's where it gets stickier. If we're going to do anything useful out there, we'll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers." "You're not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago," Geoffrey said. "Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines…It's going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.

The new regime which had succeeded his after the coup had become as fragmentary as the old, in the time-honoured way of all revolutions.