more snippet-bombing... man, this novel... ::shakes head::

[cimorene]

The stations are part of the Floating World too even though they are in space. It's true that they float, but of course everything floats in space; it is the floating cities which are important, and you can't even tell that until you're out of one of them. The shuttle that takes her to Ishtar Station for the first time--the sabbatical year before matriculation, which Perwian has mostly spent in the New Damascus library and the computerized nerve center--is the first to carry her away from her mother's city, and when she looks at the viewscreen, she's astonished to see it floating like an angular collection of jewels caught in wire nets above the surface of the blurry blue and white earth, like a feather or a scrap of colored paper on the surface of water, and all the air between New Damascus and Old (a dark speck in the white and blue by now, smaller even than New) is the water.