Apparently they have no taste for light comedy. Liberdade Figueira de Medici, "Report on Intertribal Patterns of Lusitanian Aborigines," in CrossCulturalTransactions, ::There wasn't much to do during interstellar flight. Once the course was charted and the ship had made the Parkshift, the only task was to calculate how near to lightspeed the ship was traveling. The shipboard computerfigured the exact velocity and then determined how long, in subjective time, the voyage should continue before making the Park shift back to a manageable sublight speed. Like a stopwatch, thought Ender. Click it on, click itoff, and the race is over. hackett quilted jacket Jane couldn't put much of herself into the shipboard brain, so Ender had the eight days of the voyage practicallyalone. The ship's computers were bright enough to help him get the hang of the switch from Spanish to Portuguese. Itwas easy enough to speak, but so many consonants were left out that understanding it was hard. Speaking Portuguese with a slowwitted computer became maddening after an hour or two each day. On everyother voyage, Val had been there. Not that they had always talked Val and Ender knew each other so well thatthere was often nothing to say. discount moncler sale But without her there, Ender grew impatient with his own thoughts; they nevercame to a point, because there was no one to tell them to. Even the hive queen was no help. Her thoughts were instantaneous; bound, not to synapses, but to philotes thatwere untouched by the relativistic effects of lightspeed. She passed sixteen hours for every minute of Ender'stime the differential was too great for him to receive any kind of communication from her. If she were not in acocoon, she would have thousands of individual buggers, each doing its own task and passing to her vastmemory its experiences. But now all she had were her memories, and in his eight days of captivity, Ender beganto understand her eagerness to be delivered. hackett of london By the time the eight days passed, he was doing fairly well at speaking Portuguese directly instead oftranslating from Spanish whenever he wanted to say anything. He was also desperate for human company hewould have been glad to discuss religion with a Calvinist, just to have somebody smarter than the ship'scomputer to talk to. The starship performed the Park shift; in an immeasurable moment its velocity changed relative to the rest ofthe universe. Or, rather, the theory had it that in fact the velocity of the rest of the universe changed, while thestarship remained truly motionless. No one could be sure, because there was nowhere to stand to observe thephenomenon. It was anybody's guess, since nobody understood why philotic effects worked anyway; the ansiblehad been discovered half by accident, and along with it the Park Instantaneity Principle.
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