Her schooner called to her with the only nexus she allowed herself—a simple navigational beacon whispering, “This way, yes. This way.” Back on her temporary home, she prepared a huge meal and ate all of it, and she raised the sails with her increasingly strong back and arms. The artificial sun had darkened her limbs. A steady wind always rose by midday, carrying her for another few kilometers before the sun dropped and darkness descended. But it wasn’t the perfect black that ruled here normally. Pamir had painted a starscape both odd and familiar. Without nexuses, Washen couldn’t feel sure about its origins; but when she looked at the smears of light and occasional feeble star, she realized that she was gazing at the galaxies of the Virgo cluster—a vast realm of suns and unnamed worlds, gas clouds and raw energy that might, in many millions of years, meet the Great Ship.

Alone, Washen would hold long, elaborate conversations with herself, enjoying the sound of her own voice and the quick well-rested thoughts that slipped between the words.

She slept hard for six or even seven hours at a stretch—the longest uninterrupted sleep she could remember—and she woke rested, alert eyes gazing across an emptiness of quiet water that couldn’t seem more lovely.

On the thirty-first morning, she swam again.

At first, Washen lay on her back, one arm after the other reaching over her head, swift hands cutting into the water and yanking hard. When she felt warm and loose, she turned over onto her belly, and like a happy porpoise, she did a rolling stroke, browned arms reaching together as the body bent like a wave, every muscle working with an instinctive grace, pointed feet delivering the final hard kick.

It was an expensive stroke for a human body. Eventually she collapsed into a simple crawl, from time to time pausing, looking back over her shoulder. The horizons were far away, but her boat was a little thing, and she had only good human eyes to look across all that bright smooth water.

Once the masts and folded sails had vanished, she turned for home.

With a simple patient breaststroke, Washen made the return voyage, her tanned face held out of the water and her long black hair streaming behind her. Quietly, she talked to herself. About nothing, usually. She spoke to dead people and lost lovers, and sometimes she imagined the grandchildren whom she had left down below, fighting for their lives on Marrow.

“What are you doing now?” she asked them.

Then she apologized for leaving. “I did what was best. I hope. For the ship, which means for you, too.”

It was the last morning of her holiday.

Halfway back to the boat, while thinking about nothing clear or certain, she hesitated. Her arms pulled up beneath her and stopped, while her tucking legs remained tucked. A body just buoyant enough to float now drifted along on the last of its momentum, and then she pulled herself into a tiny hard ball, exhaling hard enough to leave her lungs deflated and small.

Washen sank.

A minute passed, and most of another. Then she surfaced again, breaking into a hard clean crawl fed by deep quick breaths. Water splashed. Legs thundered. She reached the schooner in less than ten minutes, too exhausted to climb the ladder on her first attempt, or her second.

Struggling, Washen managed to clamber up onto the dampened oak deck.

Still naked, she tucked herself into a fetal ball, eyes open and seeing nothing. Nothing. She was focused and slack-faced. Even as her breathing slowed, she didn’t seem to notice, a deeply distracted attitude clinging to her as she dried herself and dressed.

“Make breakfast or not?” she asked herself.

“Make it,” she decided.

But somewhere in the middle of the preparation, watching blocks of salted fat and round dabs of cultured eggs cooking in the hot skillet, she said, “Stop.”

Alone, she climbed up on deck and sat on the narrow bow.

To herself, she said, “Okay. I guess that’s it then.”

Several hours before her vacation was scheduled to end, she woke one of her nexuses, and with a calm, smooth, and certain voice, she said, “Pamir.”

“It’s too early,” he snapped.

“Listen,” Washen said.

“What?”

“As soon as possible,” she said.

Angry silence.

Then she glanced out over the empty water, feeling the day’s delicious wind playing across her face. “We need to change course,” she said to Pamir and to herself. “Today, I mean. This minute. And I couldn’t be more sure.”

Twenty

“Two three-engine burns,” Washen promised. “In thirteen hours, then fifty hours later. Brief burns, the second putting us on a parallel course. Here. We’ll be moving ten AU removed from our present route. Here. Outside the tunnel wall, no polyponds or major obstructions visible. Of course we’ll send warnings beforehand. We don’t want to be impolite. And yes, we’ll have to absorb extra impacts. Piercing the wall, then a fortyfold increase in the base erosion rate. But that’s within tolerances. Ten years to cross the Sack, and what’s the best guess? Between nine and eleven hundred Class-4 impacts, and half a hundred Class-3s. With nothing large enough, at least so far, to cause a Class-2 or worse.” Washen threw a sturdy look down the length of the table, telling the Submasters, “I’ll offer my reasons, starting with the most obvious and weakest example.” She paused for a moment, then admitted, “I don’t trust our hosts, and a prudent course correction that puts us on a new, unexpected trajectory … well, that’s going help me sleep tonight.”

Again, she fell silent.

The meeting room was long and plainly decorated, one of the short walls overlooking the ship’s bridge. Better than a hundred captains were visible below them, standing at their stations, accomplishing their work with a smooth competence. But sometimes one or two would glance up at the Submasters, narrowed gazes and a few muttered words hinting at the curiosity and the raw worry that was already seeping through the ranks.

Why this emergency meeting? they wondered. And why were the other Submasters staring at the First Chair with those stunned expressions? What had she said that was so awful?

A fef raised a middle arm, human fashion.

“Just a moment,” Washen cautioned. Then she leaned across the long table, adding, “The polyponds aren’t talking. But if we do the unexpected, maybe we can generate a fresh dialogue with them.”

The alien arm dropped, but an urgent voice said, “Madam.”

“Change course,” Washen argued, “and we might disrupt our hosts’ plans. Whatever they happen to be.”

“Madam—”

“How long would it take the polyponds to barricade the tunnel ahead of us?” Washen looked at the chief engineer. “Since they only need to drag matter across a few tens of thousands of kilometers—”

“Hours,” Aasleen reported. “They could push a gram of material into every thousand cubic meters, and manage it in less than twenty-four hours.” Then she allowed her own skepticism to surface, calmly adding, “If, if, if that happened to be their desire.”

Washen magnified portions of the most recent charts, feeding them into her colleagues’ nexuses. “I see five concentrations of matter,” she pointed out. “Scattered beside the tunnel, we have congregations of dust and cometary grit, and inside this last mass, there’s enough iron to fashion a good-sized asteroid. It might have been an asteroid that wandered into the Inkwell and was mined to dust. For all we know, these features have always been here. They’re entirely benign. But if not … if the polyponds wanted to pull this moon back into a single mass and then drop it in our way—?”

“They still can,” a deep voice interrupted.

Washen glanced at Pamir. “Elaborate,” she said.

“Your new course doesn’t get us far from these maybe-hazards,” he pointed out. “The only advantage, from what I can tell, is that we’ll be outside the tunnel, which means outside that wall of dust. Our eyes will work a little better now. If something approaches, we might see it sooner.”