Филип Керр - The Second Angel

For example, witness the temple of Heracles in Cadiz. Even those ancient heroes who did not become gods were often worshipped by their descendants — for example, Theseus in Athens. Descent is the key element here. Who and how they are survived. That is what matters if a memory is to be worshipped and a name venerated. Descent. All such mysteries shall presently be revealed.

Connex. A cognition-enhancing drug that works by making the synapses that connect neurons more responsive to natural chemical signals triggering concentration and learning mechanisms in the brain. Connex stimulates neurons to receive more of the glutenate molecules that carry electrical signals across brain synapses. In clinical tests, eight out of ten people who took Connex doubled their scores in tests of short-term memory recall and learning.

Kleenex nanotissue. Tissue that is designed to have a second life soaking up toxic chemicals in ground and water.

Clean Bill of Health Zone.

Erythrocytic Personality Trait Rating. The pseudo-science of blood temperaments, based on a taxonomy of personality based on blood types. EPTR draws upon Buddhist beliefs, as well as the work of Theophrastus, Hippocrates, Karl Landsteiner, Leon Bourdel, and Hans Eysenck, and was ‘discovered’ by J. Will Mott (1987–2041). EPTR has been challenged by a number of hematologists and psychologists as having no empiric basis.

In transfusion therapy, group AB recipients can receive all other ABO group red-cell components, because anti-A and anti-B antibodies are absent. Group AB red-cell components are infused only into group AB recipients. Group O recipients, on the other hand, can receive only Group O red cells, but can donate to any other group. Group O donors are known as Universal Donors.

Antoine Furetière (1619–1688), French poet and novelist.

Osteonecrosis. A disease characterized by dead bone tissue.

From the Greek paradeisos, meaning ‘paradise,’ and tropein, meaning ‘toward.’

Published 2042; cf. The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley (1954), in which that author describes his experiments with mescaline and LSD.

Quantum theory accounts for a very wide range of physical phenomena and replaces classical Newtonian mechanics for all microscopic phenomena. A ‘quantum’ is a general term for the indivisible unit of any form of physical energy. The difficulty with quantum things and what makes them hard to understand — even now, a hundred years after Niels Bohr led the way in their explanation — is that their motion cannot easily be visualized. Or even imagined. Of course, one of the pleasures of authorship is to be found in making difficult concepts seem simple. One of the aims of this book has been to include my own experience of quantum things and to enable the general reader to appreciate not just the molecular wisdom of the human body but, at a more fundamental level, the matter of existence itself I make no excuse for this. As Montaigne says, ‘I am myself the matter of my book.’

Elstein’s work was based entirely on the work of the seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, and physicist Blaise Pascal. ‘The incomprehension of the perplexed,’ Elstein wrote, ‘is to be overcome by means of the wager; if the theory cannot be proved then those who remain bewildered lose nothing by believing that the meaning of life, and the fabric of reality, has been explained, and in devoting themselves to living life for the present — to making heaven on earth; for if the theory is proved, then no one will have wasted any time in acting as if there was still something to be explained.’

The dimensions of the airship are as follows: one kilometer wide and five hundred meters high.

The resulting explosion would have rendered the whole country, an area of over a million square miles, uninhabitable for an estimated fifty thousand years.

Enteric bacteria strains resistant to antibiotics that killed several thousand Spanish citizens during the late 2050s.

See Makkoth 23b; attributed to Rabbi Shimon ben Yehuda ha-Nasi.

Blood quantum. A quasi-genetical idea governing race qualification.

Acts 17:26.

The Mygalomorph 8, designed by General Dynamics.

2013–2015.

Mihrab.

Imam.

Khatib.

Galen of Pergamum, born A.D. 129, died circa 199. Distinguished Turkish Anatolian physician whose influence dominated European medical thought throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Breccia. An impact rock made of a mixture of rock fragments and soil particles welded together by the energy of a meteor impact. Descartes is an area rich in these breccias, which lunar building engineers have traditionally used to make concrete. Carbonation hardening is achieved in zero atmospheric conditions with the addition of super-critical carbon dioxide, which makes the concrete very hard and dense — about 75 percent denser than ordinary concrete, and hence more resistant to meteorite showers. Concrete is painted gold to reflect the sun and is filled with nanographite and steel fibers to conduct electricity.

Extra-vehicular activity.

Assuming man could travel at the speed of light, it mould take one hundred thousand years to visit the center of our own galaxy and then return to Earth.

Highly unlikely in the Moon’s zero atmosphere. This mas one of the reasons why most blood banks mere located in space in the first place. It wasn’t just for reasons of high security.

In one-sixth of the gravity existing on Earth, just about the only physical activity that is enhanced on the Moon is sex. Most people still prefer to have sex slowly. Perhaps now more than ever in these frantic modern times. However, the Moon’s one-sixth gravity means that most of the types of gambling available on Earth cannot be played here. Playing cards are almost impossible to deal, craps dice won’t roll properly, and roulette wheel balls never drop down from the rim. Today the only legalized form of gambling on the Moon is pachinko. Pachinko is a machine game, for one player, in which you snap an eleven-millimeter steel ball on an upright nail-driven panel and try to put the ball into certain holes. Putting the ball in certain holes gains the player several balls in return. These can later be exchanged for money. Pachinko was developed in Chicago but became particularly popular in japan, which now supplies most of the current pachinko technology. The Moon’s largest pachinko parlor — larger than any parlor on Earth — generates over two hundred fifty million dollars’ worth of income per annum.