Fishing Stars
an excerpt

Everyone knows the sun-blown islands, drifting gently along the currents of the system, spinning from black to silver and back again in their own private simulation of day and night, carried by wide white sails. They’re filled with hopeful colonists, living in their solar-driven bubble, hoarding their tiny stocks of seed and water, passing endless time just watching the sky float around them. They’ve got nowhere to grow to, nothing to achieve, they’re looking for a little place that’s theirs and no one else’s.

They say there’s one that’s been looping around the sun for an age and an age, since way back when the islands first were made, and its people never grew old. They feel only the weight of the sun against their feet, not the pull of old man Earth. Their life is simple, so is their time – nothing but night and day, sleeping and waking. They’ve got no need for wars or fighting, they left all that on the ground. It’s a paradise, circling far away from all the trouble and pain, and from time to time there’s people who say they’ve seen that Island of the Sun, just a glimpse, of that one perfect colony of men. But no one’s ever found it and returned, and no one ever will. You can become part of paradise, but you can’t bring it back with you.