Sublime

“Pareidolia,”

“We have initial evidence that the planet’s cytoshields are, despite long-standing assumptions, insufficient. The delver has heard our communications, and followed them to us. Repeat, the delver has returned to our station and…”

But then also to live in a good pseudoiterative, an interesting one, the pattern constructed as a little work of art. No matter the brevity of a trip, the dullness of the terrarium or the people in it, it was important to invent a pattern and a project and pursue it with all his will and imagination. It came to this: shipboard life was still life.

Adrift on a hostile planet, the captain knew he would die. Collapsed on the deck, doomed, he looked up. He did not see the churning ice-sea of nature’s riot, lit by perpetual lightning and ecstatic aurora. Instead, he saw a girl with a owl on her shoulder. She pointed past him to a corner in the ship’s research lab. The owl rotated its head to look

His farewell to a species turning from animal into data.

malaprop.

There was always the faint possibility of negotiating with something that had a mind.