A synthetic creation made for a cleaner explanation. On some forgotten world, biosculptors could have assembled a cocktail of organisms, using their creation to seed icy moons or wandering comets. Terraforming would have been the noble goal. Add heat and light to the watery bodies, and the artificial Gaian would rebuild the world around it. If some of those cocktails had slipped free, or if their makers had strewn them about a little too indiscriminately … well, some combination of circumstances and blunders might have brought them into the Inkwell, and then in some distant past, set them free …

But that again explained very little.

Dark nebulae were too cold and far too dangerous to appeal to most sentient life-forms. Whatever the polyponds had accomplished inside the Inkwell, this was not the sort of home where most species went first or willingly. Besides, despite decades of hard searches, both in the sky and through the available histories, there was no trace of polyponds or anything bearing any resemblance to them in the surrounding districts. No potential cradle worlds. No watery colonies drifting among the comets. Polyponds lived where they lived and nowhere else: Not so much as one warm puddle drifted on the fringes of the cloud, in full view of a universe infinitely vaster and more amazing than anything that could be found in the darkness.

Better than most, Mere understood darkness.

She was born inside a crippled starship, after all. For what seemed like forever, her entire world was barely any bigger than her own stunted body and her starving little mind. For centuries, the only voice she heard was her own, and the only sound she made was a pained wail broken up with weak little sobs. Existence was miserable and fearful, and, by a hundred different criteria, Mere would have seemed perfectly insane. But even at her worst, that half-born creature had an enduring sense of identity—a concept of self and place, of events that strung together to form a sloppy history. Even in that eternal hell, there was a dust-blasted pane of scrap diamond that afforded her a view of the universe. Squinting, she could make out a few hundred blue-shifted stars, and with the sluggish passage of time, those stars would move. They shifted positions relative to each other, and the stars on the fringe sometimes drifted toward the edge of the window; and then despite all of her pressing and digging, forcing her big eyes flush to the cold diamond, each star would silently and bravely pass out of view.

Whenever Mere thought about the polyponds—and she thought about little else—her mind inevitably fell back to the darkness of her youth. Even in those narrow circumstances, change had proved to be a genuine force. Little happened to her, and nothing obvious changed with her ship. But at least the sky taught her that certain things were not meant to be forever and always, and maybe there were moments when she derived hope, if not exactly joy, from that starved little insight.

MERE’S SHIP WAS an ensemble of tiny pieces. Minus fuel, the entire machine didn’t possess even a thousand metric tons of hyperfiber and aerogel, diamond and patient flesh.

Yet in another sense, it was vaster than the Great Ship.

Through the long voyage, her engines and fuel tanks, mirrors and twin habitats moved with the same precise trajectory, each piece wearing an entirely different set of disguises. Some components were connected to their neighbors with fullerenes or feeble com-lasers. But most were fully independent, obeying a series of sophisticated strategies while keeping themselves in reasonable repair. A casual eye would see debris left over from Pamir’s original boost cone. A thorough examination would identify shards of diamond and several masses of water ice, plus what seemed to be pieces of machinery halfway melted by the giant lasers. The two identical habitats were barely visible, even with the best instruments. Each was smaller than a comfortable room, and both used a shifting set of tricks to appear even tinier than that. One habitat served as Mere’s home, the other held in reserve. Like the rest of the mock debris, the habitats drifted along in the wake of the streakship, slower by a wide margin and gradually spreading out, currently scattered across a volume better than a hundred thousand kilometers in radius.

The heart of her habitat was a padded cavity barely two meters long and half as wide. Yet even that seemed like a tremendous waste of space. Before her mission began, Mere’s body was carefully frozen, tissues and bone plunged into a rigid state on the brink of absolute zero. Only her mind lived, and then only through a series of tricks and cheats, its heat signature diminished to a manageable flicker. Given any choice, other humans would never tolerate this kind of existence. This endless abuse. But Mere had experienced miseries worse than this inconvenience, and really, she was exceptionally good at keeping her cold mind busy.

Breakfast was a few gentle sips of electrical energy. Lunch and dinner were the same, delivered directly from a finger-sized reactor through a cable implanted into the back of her neck, the current translated into compounds suitable for an anaerobic crisis-metabolism. But Mere always took the trouble to select a menu, letting her mind experience the flavors and textures of whatever she would have prepared inside her little kitchen at home. Sometimes she ate Tilan food, or at least what she remembered to have eaten on the world of her youth. Outside her mind, no such cuisine existed. No such world existed. Which lent every imaginary bite a uniqueness and importance—feasting at the table of a billion ghosts, in a sense.

Mere’s large brown eyes had been eased out of their sockets and frozen, a pair of superconductive taps lending her a larger vision. At any moment, she could look everywhere. Immersion eyes fixed to the scattered pieces of her ship shared input, fabricating a vividly detailed and constantly changing set of images: the last stars passing beside her; the Milky Way strewn out behind her, bright and chill; and the Inkwell directly in her path, black and seemingly endless and very nearly perfect—save for a minuscule tunnel through which Pamir and the others had already vanished.

Slowly, patiently, Mere followed after them.

Each day had its schedules and goals, responsibilities and perfect freedoms. In the past, friends and lost lovers had asked Mere, “How do you live that way? How do you survive the day in that kind of solitude?”

But it wasn’t difficult. She reminded them about her first long voyage—the toxic food and the absolute lack of even the slightest stimulation—which made this an infinitely better existence. Whenever she wished, she read. Whenever she needed conversation, she woke one of the tiny AIs that rode with her. Each had a familiar voice and a distinct personality. Each was a friend, and in careful terms, Mere hinted that they might serve as occasional lovers, too.

She read alien works, mostly. Quirky texts and difficult texts. Sometimes in their original language.

She also read about the polyponds, digesting the fresh reports as well as dipping into the oldest for the hundredth time.

Every day, Pamir sent home his latest data and recorded discussions from among his crew. He was a thorough captain, smart and determined, and certainly better than most when it came to understanding alien species. But he wasn’t nearly as talented as Washen could be on her good days; and without a shred of self-consciousness and very little pleasure, Mere knew that nobody on board the streakship or the Great Ship brought to bear half as much talent as she possessed.

Each day, without fail, Mere consumed and examined the latest report. There were always a few missteps. Errors of decision; errors of pure bias. The crew knew they were on an important mission, and that’s why they were quick to embrace anything that might be a clue, applying it like wet lumps of clay to the most recent models. The polyponds were born here, were born there. They intended this, and they wanted that. Obviously, they were friends to the human species. Or they were scared of the Great Ship. Or the aliens were brazenly hiding critical secrets, and as the emissaries dove deeper into the Inkwell, their paranoia was growing. Accelerating. Threatening to take wing.