Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 577
Oh, I inherited my emotions from Calandria May, and I
understand now that each human has a ruling passion, one that
serves as the fountainhead from which flow all semblances of
happiness, sadness, anger and joy. I understand you better for
this, Axel; oh, I thought about you for long hours and days,
make no mistake. I wished that I had modelled myself after
you, instead of her, for your fuel is a kind of rage driven by joy
that finds no outlet. But hers--she is like a wave of sorrow,
swelling slow and implacable across the earth she treads. She
is nothing but sorrow, and that is what I inherited. So I walked,
and I wept.
I was so sunk in misery one day that that I walked into
vacuum without realizing it. I suddenly realized I had not
breathed in several minutes, and looked up to find myself in a
giant cavern, looking at a distant cave mouth that let out out on
the airless surface of Diadem. I had come through a cylinder
airlock and the air had flown out without my knowing. Here I
was, supposedly human, standing hipshot and indifferent in
hard vacuum in a place whose temperature my feet told me
must be a hundred degrees below zero.
Oops, I mouthed, but it was too late--my cover was
blown. The realization came as a flood of relief; I could never
have deliberately revealed my identity to the Winds, but chance
had done it for me. Maybe they would grant me the grace of a
quick end now.
But no, there were no sensors on the walls of this cave.
There had been, but I could see where they had been ripped
out. Near me, blocking my view of the larger area of the
cavern, stood a giant oily-surfaced cube half the height of the
cave mouth--fifty meters at least. I saw movement there:
dozens of multi-limbed metallic forms crawled over its surface,
teasing it apart. Pieces of it lay strewn across the cavern floor.