The soft, reedy voice echoed under the dome of the ceiling; but the room itself had changed—receding, taking on the shape of the mindship—curved metal corridors with scrolling columns of memorial excerpts, the oily sheen of the Mind's presence spread over the watercolours of starscapes and the carved longevity character at the head of the bed—for a confused, terrible moment as Suu Nuoc woke up, he wasn't sure if he was still in his bedroom in the Purple Forbidden City on the First Planet, or hanging, weightless, in the void of space.
And we're off to a good start! I like the idea of watercolours of starscapes, but I imagine they'd be rather hard to achieve, no?
I'm marking the time waiting for de Bodard's latest novella to be available through Kobo so I can buy it in Canadian dollars by reading this other novella of hers that I'd been thinking about reading but had never gotten around to.