Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 630
would happen. She had been preparing herself for the day ever
since their first meeting with Galas, when she realized that the
queen was both comparatively young, and also beautiful.
We take what pleasures in life we can, while we have
them.
Armiger walked around the horses, spotted her, and
smiled. His anger seemed to be forgotten instantly, and
Megan’s heart soared. She ran up and kissed him.
"I’m ready to go," she said.
The Earth rotated around the long corridor where Axel
floated. It took about a minute per revolution, which was not
enough to be annoying, but enough to make him feel
something was spinning--him or the universe, he wasn’t sure.
The corridor was walled in glass, as was the giant
spindle-shaped habitat along whose axis it ran. As the whole
thing turned, sunlight light glinted off distant spars and freefloating
structures inside the long bulging lobes of the place. It
was like little supernovae popping all over. Outside, space was
littered with colonies, ships, rotating tethers, solar power
stations, slag bags from construction sites, and zipping parcel
drones. L5 was a busy place these days.
Every day he spent here, Axel grew more depressed. He
supposed the Archipelago was wonderful. But he was acutely
aware of how little attention the people who lived her actually
paid to their immediate environment. They seemed cut off
from their own senses, cocooned away from their bodies in the
infinite spaces of inscape. Cybernetic realities were more real
to most people now than their own lives, it seemed. And any
connection between those internal spaces and the physical
world seemed entirely accidental.
More and more, he was coming to realize the wisdom of