It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it.

Ignorance can't be pardoned. Only cured.

Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

The denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.