"Singularity Sky"

[fiefoe]

<One-liners:>

• You aren't paying the extra premium for insurance against divine retribution, are you?
• Presently, the Critics' bodies began to twitch.
• The Admiral was having a bad morning: his false pregnancy was causing problems again.
• Sister Seventh sat up and inhaled deeply. "One loves the smell of wild assemblers in the morning."
• By the time Rachel returned, her trunk was half-empty-and almost all her ready-made clothing had escaped.
  

The science bits mostly just slow down my reading, but I'm sure it makes sense to some people:
    A slower-than-light freighter had spent nearly a hundred years hauling the quantum black box at the core of the causal channel out from Septagon system;  a twin to it had spent eighty years in the hold of a sister ship, en route to Earth. Now they provided an instantaneous communications channel from one planet to the other; instantaneous in terms of special relativity but not capable of violating causality, and with a total capacity limited to the number of qubits they had been created with.

The mimes are scary:
    It had once been a woman. Now it was powder white, except for blood-red lips and bobble nose: layers of white clothing shrouded its putrefying limbs, held together with a delicate lacework of silvery metallic vines that pulsed and contracted as it moved. It swayed from side to side as it approached, bending coquettishly at the at the hips.

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