There was the obvious answer. Submasters and captains and even many of the passengers understood what lay across the ship’s path. But the Janusian was asking larger, more complex questions. “What follows?” was an opening to predict the future. “What waits?” was a plea for someone, anyone, to define those things that were inevitable.

Washen triggered one of her nexuses, and a chart appeared before them. The Great Ship was a carefully defined point falling through a mist of little suns. The suns and their various worlds had been mapped, while the sunless worlds between and the occasional primordial black hole wore navigational labels. The starry mist was relatively brief, barely seventy light-years thick, and beyond those suns stood the smooth, vast, and perfectly black face of a nebula. The nebula was a conglomerate of cold gases and lazy dust, ice particles and perhaps a few half-born suns. Before the Waywards, the occasional brief survey had peered inside that deep frigid blackness, finding traces of odd heat and soft radio voices—the hallmarks of high technologies busily at work.

Washen avoided the obvious. If the ship fired its working engines tonight and for the next two hundred years, their course wouldn’t change any important distance. They would pass by every sun at too great a distance for a useful flyby, the nebula would eventually engulf them all the same, and then with their fuel nearly exhausted, they would have no choice but to plunge through the black dusts and opaque gases. The wiser course would be greedily to hold on to their hydrogen oceans while repairing their shields and lasers, and always make plans, then make more plans, and finally scrap all of those wise contingencies, inviting new ideas to push aside the obvious and useless.

Washen said none of that.

For a long moment, she made no sound. Rising to her feet—an imposing woman who had always had more grace than strength; the consummate captain wearing a mirrored uniform seemingly designed for her before anyone else—she looked out across the open water, thinking back to a childhood spent on this little shore. Some feeble half memory nipped at her. For the second time today, she was thinking about her parents. The three of them sitting together, talking. About what? She still couldn’t recall the subject, and probably never would. Let it go, she kept telling herself. Then with her face and stance and wise silence, she looked at each of her companions, a genuine fondness preceding the smile that came before she said, “Whatever happens.”

Then just as suddenly, she paused.

Even the aliens and the swift-minded machines felt curious, waiting patiently for the next word or little gesture.

“Whatever happens,” she repeated. Then with a nod, she said, “It will be an endless surprise, I think. And hopefully, a sweet surprise.”

A warm reassurance rippled through her audience.

Everyone who was sitting began to rise.

Except for the Master Captain. She remained planted upon her chair, her golden face taking a quick measure of her new Submasters. A figurehead now, she still managed a massive dignity, and with a whisper of her old self, she cleared her throat, demanding the full attention of others.

“A proposal,” she said. “May I?”

Washen immediately turned toward her. “Yes, madam.”

The Master climbed out of her black chair, her feet apart to hold her body steady. “Each of us should imagine ten distinct futures,” she suggested, her bulk dwarfing even the harum-scarums. “Ten possible and awful futures, well-defined and thoroughly simulated. Then as an exercise, we will trade our futures, and before the next Master’s banquet, each of us needs to save our ship ten times.”

With an appreciative nod, Washen said, “Yes, madam.”

“As an exercise,” the ancient woman repeated. “That’s all I intend here.”

“Of course.”

Then with a charm that hadn’t been seen in aeons, the Master admitted, “I know what I am now. Full well, I understand my new role here. And while I don’t enjoy it, I most definitely deserve it.” The ageless face grinned, sadness mixed with an almost childlike resignation. “But please, if you will, Washen? Would you allow me the tiny honor of declaring this meeting complete … please … ?”

Three

In his dreams, he was always the walker. He would find himself strolling past odd shops and entertainment emporiums, cafes and apartments, the avenue decorated with alien skies and the occasional exotic tree or sessile animal planted in solitary steel pots, or sometimes many of them planted in elaborate groves designed to seem just a little wild and pleasantly mysterious. At the border of every district was an alien statue carved from marble or light, and with a human voice it would say, “Careful, sir. You are about to enter a different atmosphere.” In life, the demon doors produced a slight and mostly ignorable tingle. But in his dreams the doors were heavy cold curtains clinging like a statically charged cloth to his restless body. He had to push his way through the invisible barrier, and suddenly the air was thick and oven-hot, or it was mountaintop thin and cold enough to blister his lungs. Yet he wouldn’t stop, and somewhere in the next few hundred steps his dream body would adapt to the new environment. Then came more shops to visit and new aliens to watch—by the hundreds and by the thousands, the endless avenue jammed with their vast and tiny and always odd and wondrous bodies—and in the midst of that chaos, he would spy friends sitting around a little table, eating exotic fare while chatting amiably. In every dream, he approached the table and smiled. He could feel his face grinning while his heart beat harder. He would hear his own voice above the mayhem, saying to these dear lost friends, “Hello.”

A moment would pass, then another. Finally, one of the friends would look up—usually a human friend, oftentimes a former lover—and what might or might not be a smile would precede the mouthing of his name.

During his long tenure aboard the ship, the man had possessed half a hundred identities. Or more to the point, those identities had possessed him. There was no guessing which name would be used now. People who never knew him by one name would use it regardless, and to his great distress, he realized that everyone at the table could peer inside his soul, cutting loose every secret. He felt transparent. He was simple and obvious and quite helpless. O’Layle was his final name, but none of his dream-friends ever used that appellation. Even his most recent lover would refer to him as someone officially dead and lost, then with a warm hand, she might touch him on the back of his suddenly cool hand, the smile falling into an easy scorn as a slow loveless voice asked, “Don’t you feel foolish now?”

Very foolish, yes.

“We survived,” she would proclaim. “It looked bad for a little while, but we managed to avoid obliteration. We clipped the fringes of that dying sun, but that’s all. A touch. Little more than a kiss, really. And then we missed the black hole entirely, and now everyone is safe and happy again.”

Good for you, he would say.

“What about you?” His final lover was little older than a child, and she was pretty in a thousand ways, and as happens with youngsters, she had been intrigued by his life of petty crime and low-grade corruption. “Are you still alive?”

I am very much alive, O’Layle would claim.

“Not to me.” Then with a casual scorn, she would laugh. Her hand would retreat, and her beautiful eyes—bright cold white eyes set in a dark brown face—would turn away from him. To other friends and ex-lovers, she would say, “This man is very much dead.”

“The fool,” another would spit.

“Idiot coward,” a third might add with conviction.

Then everybody sitting around the table stopped hearing O’Layle. He would sit among them, speaking to them, explaining his good smart reasons for everything. And then he would scream at them, fiercely defending what he had done. The Waywards had appeared suddenly, and just as quickly, they were defeated and gone. But the Great Ship had been pushed toward catastrophe, with everybody sure to be killed when the monster trapped at Marrow’s core was set free.