Except. The mood on board the streakship remained stubbornly pensive, whiffs of despair emerging on the bad days. The ship’s interior felt cramped and overheated, and most people blamed their new passenger. O’Layle was a moody, simple, and decidedly odd soul. After decades of being loved and entertained by an organism as large as a world, he found himself abandoned, forsaken to the company of strangers who weren’t as simple or moody as he was, and who were odd in ways he couldn’t begin to decipher. His misery was a little bit infectious. Pamir noticed it in the first days. Their guest would pass through the galley, make a few pained observations about the cold and blackness surrounding them, and after vanishing again, some little spat would break out between best friends, the tension spreading like a subtle, meme-born disease.

Pamir had always possessed a useful paranoia. Watching Perri and Quee Lee exchange half a dozen sharp words at dinner, he instantly set the autodocs to work. There were a few notorious examples of aliens crippling one another with caustic notions and vivid imagery. Was that O’Layle’s purpose here? Yet after several more years of study and help from distant experts, the machines couldn’t blame anyone but O’Layle himself. Clinically speaking, he was a bit of shit. An egomaniac and a determined coward, and in the same way that a person’s body could live almost forever, his flawed character and brittle personality had persisted for hundreds of centuries without meaningful change.

Besides, it took more than one man to cause the ugly moods. Even as they passed through that tunnel of scrubbed space, the AI pilot continued to spot little hazards and fire the maneuvering rockets. And the black dust played its nefarious role, packed thickest around the tunnel’s edges—in effect, making everyone blind. There was also the brutal, relentless cold lying just beyond the hull. And there were the polyponds themselves: Despite everything seen and all that had been learned, the aliens remained mysteries, enigmas of the worst kind, without charm or any obvious human quality.

The Great Ship had many odd and baffling passengers, but in most cases, people learned how to interact with the important and social species. The average human, given time and the motivation, would find or imagine traits that were reassuringly familiar. But the polyponds had never given them that chance, and if the future went as promised, they never would.

“What do you make of them?”

Every day, that was the central question. Someone would pose it, usually early in the morning, in the cramped little galley, and someone else would offer an old intuition tweaked just enough to seem fresh.

“They have no choice but to let us pass through,” most argued. “But they’re xenophobes, and this is difficult for them. Or they’re arrogant bastards, and it’s easy to dismiss us. Or they are afraid of us, which is smart. Since we represent the Milky Way, after all. We are millions of living worlds and every technological advance, while they’ve lived in total isolation. So they’re naturally terrified of what might follow in our wake.”

“What might follow us?”

This was relatively early in the voyage home. Unlike almost every other morning, O’Layle came out of his tiny cabin for breakfast. Entering the galley, he looked at no one, and again, he asked, “What might follow us?”

Perri had voiced that shrewd opinion. But he had too much charm and grace to act self-conscious. A big shrug and a sad smile preceded the obvious words: “I don’t know what. I’m just saying—”

“We’re the first wave of an invasion?” O’Layle grumbled.

“No.” Perri’s smile sharpened. “I just meant things might seem that way. If you’re a hermit—a hermit living in a windowless cabin—and if somebody suddenly knocks on your locked door, telling you that they’re in trouble and need to come inside your home … well, it’s only natural to worry …”

The logic won a brief, disagreeable pause.

“We don’t mean to invade anybody’s space,” Quee Lee offered. “Nobody planned to put our ship on this trajectory.”

O’Layle squashed his mouth to a point, considering the matter.

With a calm voice, Pamir asked, “So what do you think?”

Silence.

“You have experience with our new friends,” he reminded O’Layle. “In your opinion, how does your old girlfriend regard us?”

The mouth relaxed.

After a moment, O’Layle took a deep breath. And another. Then with a dismissive, almost amused tone, he remarked, “She doesn’t have much regard for you.”

“No?”

“That’s my impression.”

Perri gave a low snort. “You never mentioned that before.”

With a shrug of the shoulders, O’Layle explained, “It’s just my impression. A feeling. I don’t have any hard evidence—”

Pamir interrupted, asking, “What other intuitions are you hiding?”

“None.”

Everyone stared at the interloper, waiting.

Finally, O’Layle shook his head and smiled, smugly pleased to be the center of attention. “She loves me,” he announced with a chilling fondness. Then after a deep breath and a clicking of the tongue, he added, “The Blue World told me … early on, she confided to me that it was her greatest moment … when she saw a little lost ship falling toward her … !”

He hesitated.

Then he dredged something new out of his memories, or at least found a fresh perspective. “I assumed that she was talking about my ship,” he said. “And about me … of course, of course, of course …”

TWENTY-FOUR DAYS AND fifteen hours later, the ship’s AI woke Pamir.

“Debris,” the voice reported.

The timing was far from unexpected. But because of the chance that undetected sensors had been smuggled aboard, either through the unaware shore party or mixed with the cold hydrogen, the incident had to seem utterly harmless. Playing a role devised decades ago, Pamir asked, “What debris?”

“Our own,” the machine reported. “It’s too massive and quick for the polyponds to push out of our way.” Details were fed into the appropriate nexus, including points of origin, the distribution, and each object’s current velocity. “There’s a small but important chance of impact.”

“Agreed,” Pamir replied.

Then in the next breath, he said, “Sweep the trash out of our way.”

“In any particular direction?”

Yes. Just yesterday, Mere had transmitted a glimmer broadcast, feeding Pamir detailed instructions. And he had already instructed the AI, on encoded channels. But for an audience that had little chance of being real, and even less likely chance of appreciating this conversation’s significance, Pamir said, “I don’t particularly care. Kick it wherever your mood tells you.”

Bolts of laser light raced ahead.

Each little piece of Mere’s ship was slathered with excess diamond. The carbon boiled, erupting in neat jets of plasma, while the hyperfiber beneath felt the hard shove of coherent photons. And with a deftness that looked too casual to be planned, her ship was neatly ushered out of the way, tracing new trajectories that would soon take Mere into the surrounding wall of dust, and afterward, deep inside the nebula itself.

IN THE END, during those final busy days, moods shifted again.

For that instant, they were outside the Inkwell again. The Great Ship was familiar and welcome, and it looked lovely in the last glimmers of starlight. Decades of work and millions of hands had repaired the hull, making it glisten like a vast frozen tear, gray and elegant. It seemed as if every square kilometer on its forward hemisphere had its own laser or shield generator or upturned mirror. Diving toward the nebula, only a tiny portion of the lasers needed to fire at oncoming debris. Bits of comet and clods of stone were obliterated in an endless fusillade. With so much firepower, nothing could stop the ship. If its full rage were unleashed, it would pound its way through any conceivable barrier.