“I’m not talking,” he grumbled.

“Thank you,” she snarled.

“When did you sleep last?”

“Fifty minutes ago,” she reported.

“For how long?”

Washen felt a knife in her stomach. But she kept smiling, and with only the barest tension, she added, “Ten-minute naps can accomplish worlds. If you know how to space them.”

“If you know,” he echoed.

She couldn’t linger and debate. Washen had intelligence reports begging to be digested, half a dozen mood campaigns to launch, and a huge proposal from Aasleen to study. At her prompting, the chief engineer had devised the means to make the ship’s enormous rocket nozzles into telescopes. Thin mirrors would be applied after every burn, focusing mechanisms eating the starlight and correcting the clumsy reflections until they could be trusted. As many as five engines might be employed, each vast and capable of being tilted at relatively steep angles, and working with the existing telescope fields on the ship’s trailing face, they could theoretically peer farther into the cosmos than any other array in the galaxy.

“Of course every time we fire an engine, we’ll have to rebuild the telescope,” Aasleen mentioned, skepticism mixed with the occasional damning figures. “And we don’t dare try this now, since we’re shooting off little burns every few weeks.”

The tunnel through the Inkwell was open and empty. The polyponds weren’t speaking to them anymore, but the forward-facing telescopes saw a clean, well-scrubbed path through the center of the Satin Sack. Little burns meant they were on course. The barest nudge today meant falling down the middle of the path, not glancing against any edge.

“But still,” the chief engineer continued. “This has me wondering. Why invest time and energy to look back at where we’ve been? What are you thinking? That someone is following us?”

“I have no idea.”

“But you do have an idea,” Aasleen pressed. “I lived on Marrow. For a good long while, that was my home. And, Madam First Chair, I know exactly what this obsession is about.”

“Whatever is true,” Washen began. Then her voice lost its way, and her eyes closed, and after a moment, she asked, “Wouldn’t you want to know what’s out there?”

“No, I don’t think I would like to know.”

The women shared a grim little laugh. Then the meeting ended with an obligatory discussion about the polyponds and motives. Aasleen offered one fresh and incredible suggestion, but before Washen could take it seriously, she dismissed her proposal for a hundred thorough reasons. Then she repeated what had always been the official hypothesis. “We’re talking about children,” she reminded Washen. “The buds just want a close look at us. That’s all.”

Except the Blue World, and the several of the other full-grown polyponds, were climbing after them, too.

“Old doesn’t mean incurious,” the chief engineer joked.

“Yes it does,” Washen joked, then sent her friend away, skipping her next scheduled sleep, preferring to use her scarce time to study a tangle of social projections and poll results and crew reports and rumor studies. Then it was suddenly tomorrow, and one of her nagging nexuses reminded her of another key appointment. She couldn’t be late. In a tiny swift and unmarked cap-car, she arrived at the correct apartment in a matter of minutes. The door greeted her warmly and explained that her son had been detained. “But breakfast is ready in the Marrow room,” the voice added. “Locke says to go and make yourself comfortable.”

She went there, but comfort was nearly impossible.

Alone, she sat at the edge of the lava field. To re-create the life cycles of the Marrow creatures, Locke had flooded one corner of the big room with liquid iron. The succession process had barely begun. Beneath a dim gray sky, Washen claimed a simple chair woven from fire-weeds and jeweled beetles, and she ate most of a hammerwing while her mind leaped from nexus to nexus, dealing with a hundred little jobs before a voice—a distinct and quite familiar voice—declared, “Here is something that you need to understand, dear.”

Washen looked up to find a dead woman standing before her.

The narrow face grinned, enjoying her surprise. Then Miocene stepped closer, looking like a suffering woman or an exceptionally vigorous ghost. Her flesh was gray and smoky. Her uniform was composed of Marrow materials, lacking the brilliance and endurance of Washen’s clothes. The only First Chairs that the ship had ever known stared at one another in the evening glare, and the standing woman said, “I worked hard, always. Everything I earned came from my strength and my deep determination, and all that endless work.”

The sitting woman flinched.

“Since you’re the best at a thousand jobs,” the dead woman continued, “you are smart to do them all for yourself.”

Washen struggled to stand.

“What do you think?” Miocene continued. “That I was an insufferable bitch through the whole of my life?”

Washen woke, finding a hand upon her shoulder and Locke saying, “Sorry. I let you sleep, and our time’s done.”

“What time is it?” she muttered, momentarily confused.

Through a hundred nexuses, she learned the name of this particular moment. And then the moment was gone, left behind and lost, and that’s when she finally talked herself into taking the vacation.

IT WASN’T ENOUGH just to silence her buried nexuses. Pamir had agreed, and with a calm insistence, he added, “You also need to be somewhere without people. Without crew or passengers, or me.”

“I’ll miss you,” she mentioned.

“We barely see each other,” he reminded her, just enough of a barb in the words to make his disgust plain. Then he proposed an itinerary for an unusual, one-of-a-kind holiday.

“The Grand Ocean,” he began.

An image took hold of her. She laughed, interrupting him to ask, “Why not just a little pond in an unlit room? Wouldn’t that be just as dark and alone?”

“We’ll light the sky for you,” he promised.

The waste made her queasy.

“And while the cavern’s lit,” he continued, “Osmium’s troops can search for secret colonies and illegal adventurers. So there is a good purpose in this business, other than keeping the ship’s head sane.”

The Grand Ocean was not a single cavern; it was a vast array of linked caves that happened to lie at the same depths inside the ship. The first humans mapped the great volume, and then flooded it with melted ice from a hundred higher caverns. The Ocean’s surface area was larger than the Earth’s. Reaching more than a hundred kilometers deep, it was the biggest body of water on the ship and bigger than most of the galaxy’s other oceans, too. And it was empty. Except for a tiny quantity of dissolved minerals and salt, it was nothing but pure, cold, and unlit water, kept in reserve for the homeward leg of the ship’s voyage. Except for the rare autotrophic bacteria, nothing lived in this realm. Just with her presence, Washen had nearly doubled the bioload of the entire sea.

She hadn’t swum so much since childhood. Every morning for the last thirty mornings, Washen had practiced a variety of strokes, muscles gradually relearning the rhythm and feel of pressing against the water. Then the swimming became unconscious, and she could push her ageless long body to its limits, steady hard strokes eventually making her gasp and giggle.

Thinking about the Great Ship wasn’t allowed—at least not until the long swim home. And when she did think of large subjects, she kept her mind fixed on the broadest matters, no little jobs or urgent timetables nipping at her now. In that seemingly infinite span of water, Washen kept finding a sweet comfort: the ship’s size and age, and the unimaginable distances that it had crossed, always on its own. She loved this glorious orb of high technology and simple stone, and how could she not feel a little foolish to worry about threats, real or imagined?