1) "The space-dwelling nations of Shis'urna divided the universe into three parts. In the middle lay the natural environment of humans---space stations, ships, constructed habitats. Outside there was the Black---heaven, the home of God and everything holy. And within the gravity well of the planet Shis'urna itself---or for that matter any planet---lay the Underworld, the land of the dead from which humanity had had to escape in order to become fully free of its demonic influence."

2) "It seems very straightforward when I say 'I.' At the time, 'I' meant Justice of Toren, the whole ship and all its ancillaries. A unity might be very focused on what it was doing at that particular moment, but it was no more apart from 'me' than my hand is while it's engaged in a task that doesn't require my full attention.
Nearly twenty years later 'I' would be a single body, a single brain. That division, I---Justice of Toren and I---One Esk, was not, I have come to think, a sudden split, not an instant before which 'I' was one and after which 'I' was 'we.' It was something that had always been possible, always potential. Guarded against. But how did it go from potential to real, incontrovertible, irrevocable?"