WHEN THE SHIP was barely two hundred centuries into its voyage—when Washen was a midlevel captain finally beginning to show her promise—the original First Chair came to her with an assignment.

“I am honored,” Washen declared.

“That’s foolish to say, and a little funny,” Miocene replied. “You don’t know what I will ask you to do.”

But in her entire life, Washen had spoken to this great woman only at the Master’s banquet, and then only in the most glancing fashion. She felt honored, and she refused to backtrack from her declaration. “If I can help the ship, in any way, madam. In any little fashion.”

“Perhaps you should help me,” Miocene rumbled. A tall, narrow-faced soul famous for her personal drive and her unmatched talents as the Master’s best hand, she said, “I have a problem. Not a large problem, but rather difficult. I require a captain who can give an honest impression, and afterward, my request will remain with the three of us.”

“The three of us?”

“Or just you and me.” The woman laughed without real humor, adding, “Everything depends on your decision. Unless I don’t particularly like what you decide.”

The less-than-large problem involved a peculiar starship. It was tiny and powerful—one of the original streakships, according to its designation—but it was also poorly maintained and heavily damaged. Someone with minimal talents had repaired it and refueled its powerful engines. The ship’s AI had also suffered crippling abuse, leaving it stupid and almost entirely ignorant about its own past. According to the fragmentary logs, the little ship was meant to ferry a group of wealthy colonists to the Great Ship. Indeed, there were more than twenty names with empty apartments still waiting for their arrival, paid for by a transfer of wealth from a very distant human world. But the names and the people attached had never reached their destination. According to the AI, a chunk of cometary material had breached the hyperfiber armor, exploding into a bubble of superheated plasmas and radiation, shrapnel scattering backward at better than half the speed of light.

Everyone on board the ship was instantly killed.

But as it happened, one of the women was a little bit pregnant—an embryo sleeping in suspended animation inside her patient uterus. It was a common tradition among colonists: arrive at your new home with a child ready to be born. The intended mother died, but while searching for survivors, the brutalized AI discovered a single entity still alive, barely, entombed inside a mangled, now-headless corpse.

Using its last autodoc, the AI managed to coax the corpse back into a mindless life, saving the embryo. With most of its intellect stripped away and no clear instructions, the machine decided to do its best to help its only companion. A few months later, the girl was born inside a tiny volume of warm, barely breathable air, and she grew up on a diet of recycled meats and bone meal, nothing to drink but tainted water and sometimes her own diluted urine. The AI couldn’t directly communicate with her. It was too mangled and far too busy keeping the derelict ship functioning. Save for the slowly changing stars visible through the diamond ports, there was nothing to see. The girl grew up in an abysmally impoverished environment, suffering constantly, nothing to touch but the close cold walls and her own miserable self. So she did what was natural: In many ways, and for every good reason, the poor creature fell into a deep and simple insanity.

The comet’s impact had pushed the starship off course. Moving faster than the Great Ship, it slipped past unnoticed, its arrow-straight trajectory carrying it deeper into the galaxy, past countless suns before it moved back out to a place rather near the ship’s future course.

According to this very unlikely account, the AI pilot found a pair of close-orbit suns and the living world that revolved around both; and after some lovely or very lucky navigation, it managed to burn the last of its fuel, bleeding off most of its momentum, then jettisoning its lone passenger, sending her down onto the world’s largest continent.

With an immortal’s constitution, the woman survived both the impact and several temporary deaths. Then for the next few thousand years, she lived among the resident aliens—small humanoids called the Tila. In the early years, she was worshiped as a god. The Tila taught her their language and culture, and she played an occasional role in their development. During her long life, she watched as her foster species built their civilization, gradually learning about the universe and their world and the two suns that kissed one another in their bright beautiful sky.

“So how did you acquire your name?” Washen asked, during the first interview. She said the name twice: first as the Tila supposedly had, then as a human might. “Mere,” she said. “It means small. Tiny, and unremarkable.”

“I am,” the tiny woman said of herself. “Small. Tiny. And not all that remarkable.”

Tutors had taught this little creature the human tongue. But Mere spoke the alien language with much more skill and an unconscious ease, and she moved her limbs in ways no human ever did. She could have been raised by another species. There were a few examples on record, although nothing as lengthy or as unplanned as Mere’s supposed life.

“You say you were a god to them,” Washen pointed out. “Why would anyone name their god Mere?”

“Because I wasn’t much of a deity, they learned. Soon enough.”

A considerable sadness showed in her face and body, but the expressions weren’t quite like what a normal human would display. Starvation at birth and an alien diet of odd amino acids and the wrong minerals could conceivably produce a body like hers. But Miocene’s fear, and now Washen’s fear, was that this was not a genuine human, but instead another kind of creature wearing some elaborate camouflage. Washen’s assignment was to discern what was true, or at least to give her best guess. This little whiff of a body and the soul inside … were they really as simple and strange as they pretended to be?

Perhaps Mere understood the importance of the interview. Or maybe she wanted to lend her false story another set of telling details. Either way, she promised the young captain, “The Tila think quite differently from the way you think.”

“Do they?”

“And I think rather differently from the way you or they think. I don’t have a Tilan brain. I don’t have its skills. But judging by everything that the other giant woman said to me—”

“Miocene?”

“I think that you … meaning your species … I think humans entertain some odd little notions about the universe.”

“Little?” Washen laughed softly. “What do you mean?”

“Everything that is possible,” said Mere in a flat, certain voice, “is inevitable. Everything that can happen has no choice but to occur.”

“Is that what the Tilan believe?”

“It’s what they know, and it’s my firm, sure belief.” The big eyes gazed off into the far corners of the room. A prison cell, really, but infinitely more comfortable than the tiny habitat that somebody had added to her battered old starship. “The Tilan mind is very sensitive to the quantum effects of the universe. Every motion they make, every little thing that they see, is shrouded in a cloud of possibility. Life moves in all directions at once. Life always persists, in at least one thread of reality. And the universe—the real universe—encompasses too many realities to count.”

“But I know that,” Washen remarked, almost casually. Then with a quiet calculated laugh, she added, “We have several theories of the universe. Two or three of them believe in the many-worlds scenario.”

Mere laughed at her—Tilan fashion. Then with a tone dismissive in both languages, she said, “You have the mathematics. But do you believe the great equations?”