She always dressed well, but he recognized the signs of insecurity; certitude was inversely proportional to the amount of makeup. - Gregory Benford

Law of the universe," she said. "The longer the menu description, the worse the food.

She felt a tingling, curiously pleasurable: her “curiosity reflex,” she had called it in high school, when she had first glimpsed the serene certainties of physics, starkly contrasting with the world’s raw hubbub.

Manuel stared at the place where Piet had been. The man he had known so little would now lie in this place far beyond the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome and the hammer of Marx, in a territory open and without plan, beyond man and his encasing theories, his filters, beyond the closed rooms of the civilized mind.