We live, we love, we inhabit this moment. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in a fleshly body or a cyborg larger than the whales of the Original World; those rhythms go on. 

I dance in the solar winds of a hundred suns.

I dance in the winking-out of the Jump.

I dance in my dreams, and my bare feet once more slap the silky dust of the dancing-ground on Karis. What luxury — living soil under breathable atmosphere, the Greater Moon riding high in the deep-blue sky, our feet bare and the air caressing our skin. 

What luxury, to be alive. 

It’s when people lose track of that, when they start counting up the unreachable and giving rein to unbounded desire — for the only infinite is human greed, human desire — we’re creatures who can be hungry in theory when we’ve just feasted to repletion on the first-fruits of the richest planet of the Inhabited Worlds.

***

Character interview with Yasmin Ship’s-Heart from Inside the Jump. “The only infinite is human greed” is paraphrased from Thomas Aquinas, as part of the theological rationale for the Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) strictures against usury; the psychological insight can be observed in the cycle of attachment to material things and is also commented upon extensively in Buddhist scriptures.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.