An original unity differentiated itself into countless avatars, like waves on a sea. That life was not organic, animal and vegetable and lesser kingdoms, growing, breathing, drinking, eating, breeding, hunting, hiding it kindled no fires and wielded no tools from the beginning, it was a kind of oneness. The uncertainty principle wrought mutations variants perished or flourished forms competed, cooperated, merged, divided, interacted the patterns multiplied and diversified at last, along one fork on a branch of the life tree, thought budded. Quasi-stable quantum states appeared, linked according to Schrodinger's wave functions and their own entanglement, more and more of them, intricacy compounding until it amounted to a set of codes. “In the intricate and mutable space-time geometry at the black hole, in-falling matter and energy interacted with the virtualities of the vacuum in ways unknown to the flatter cosmos beyond it. By Stichling, you know - almost as sensitive a writer as Brochet.” “I was only quoting the renunciation scene in Gently Come Twilight.

I did not mean it literally,” IZK-99 explained. Tunny, who was no mamma’s boy - he had worked his way through college as a whale herder and bossed construction gangs on Mars - was so appalled by the robot’s language that he could only whisper, “She did not. To be sure,” IZK-99 mused, “the relationship is not unlike that between the nun and the Diesel engine in Regret for Two Doves, but still… At any rate, if Miss Forelle has finally told you to go soak your censored head in expurgated wastes and then put the unprintable thing in an improbable place, I for one heartily approve. Ever since I looked upon my first copy of that exquisitely sensitive literary quarterly she edits, I have failed to understand what she sees in you. Yes, I believe so, thanks ot my study of the authors, poets, and critics who devote their lives to the exploration and description of Man. Hah! Do you think you do, you conceited hunk of animated tin?” “You simply do not understand the human condition,” said the robot.

Poul anderson's the high crusade