Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 562
permeated the Archipelago. He chose not to do this.
It felt so strange to be here. He had so far refused to
sleep in the ship’s freefall zone, where Marya had taken up
residence. He wanted the feel of gravity, and of real sheets
instead of aerogel. Maybe because of that, he had waked
disoriented today, expecting to see his breath frosting the air,
and had flung his hand out to meet neatly stacked, laundered
clothing where he expected damp soil.
Axel had not said to Marya that Ventus felt more real to
him than the Archipelago; he was afraid of what that might
mean. Maybe there was an intimacy in connecting with cold,
indifferent soil that no amount of intelligent, sympathetic
machinery could match.
"Isn’t it marvellous?" she said as she came to stand next
to him. "I have never been here! Not physically, I mean." She
was dressed in her illusions again, today in a tiny whirlwind of
strategically timed leaves: Eve in some medieval painter’s
fantasy.
"You haven’t missed much," he said.
Marya blinked. "How can you say that?" She went to
lean on the window, her fingers indenting its resilient surface.
"It is everything!"
"That’s what I hate about it." He shrugged. "I don’t
know how people can live here, permanently linked into
inscape. All you can ever really learn is that everything you’ve
ever done or thought has been done and thought before, only
better. The richest billionaire has to realize that the gods next
door take no more notice of him than he would a bug. And
why go explore the galaxy when anything conceivable can be
simulated inside your own head? You know what Mars is
like--a hundred billion people stacked in pods like so much
lumber, dreaming their own universe into being while the