Schummel took a deep breath and looked up at Frances. “This could take some time. Could you get me a glass of water, please?”

“Of course.” Frances quickly returned from the kitchen area, with a glass. David took a sip, then coughed a little.

“Okay. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about it until the day of departure. We boarded a ship in Kenya, as we had been instructed, a big city-class job, space for two or three hundred people in comfort. We thought that would be taking us all the way to the Enemy Domain. It wasn’t until we had taken off and were safely inserted into warp that they told us.

“We weren’t going to the ED at all. We were going to another galaxy: M32. It’s a small satellite galaxy of Andromeda. Look it up on your console.

“I remember all of us sitting there in the main assembly area of the ship. A robot stood up at the front and made the announcement. An odd-looking thing, it was: it had no skin on. I couldn’t believe what it was saying. The shock at being lied to, the confusion, but oh, the excitement. It was incredible. I remember turning to look at the expressions of the other people sitting around me. That’s when I twigged that what the robot was saying wasn’t news to most people in that room. Most sat there, faces impassive, just like this young lady here.”

He looked at Frances, but pointed to Judy.

“Oh, I was angry about that at the time, so angry. I wanted to know why I hadn’t been told. I calmed down later on when I realized that there was someone else with even more reason to be angry than I.”

“Justinian?” suggested Judy.

“Justinian.” David Schummel shuddered, took another sip of water. “Yes, Justinian. But that comes later. First we had to board the hypership…”

Schummel gazed into the distance, lost in thought. Gradually he collected himself and continued his story.

“The robot warned us about it. I don’t know how they built that ship, Judy. The robot told us it was beyond human comprehension. It’s not quite of this universe, its shell…You know, they wouldn’t let us see it as we flew to it. It was floating out in the Oort cloud, surrounded by baffles against chance discovery. We spent the journey out there wondering about that ship. How did it work? Why was it a secret? Why couldn’t we even see it? We tried getting the shuttle’s AI to put it up on the viewing fields, but it kept refusing. We tried all sorts of ways to get a proper look at it. Leslie caught some of the astronomers setting up a deep-radar telescope in their quarters, trying to get a picture of it through our ship’s hull. I remember, after that, he broadcast to the whole ship, warning us how dangerous it would be for us to see the hypership, warning us it was not a good idea for humans to look directly at it… But all the time he knew there was one human who would have to see it. One human who had no choice. The one who had to fly the shuttle. Me.

“Every time I flew up from Gateway, it was there. And me, alone in the cockpit of the shuttle, gazing up at it, hanging balefully over the planet…”

He shivered. “It was…long. No, that’s not the word. There isn’t a word to describe it. I don’t know…It always seemed to be much longer than the space it occupied. I used to get lost just flying towards it. I never knew for sure how far I had to go before I docked. It didn’t have a color, but there was a purple tinge at the boundary of where it existed-energy seeping through from somewhere else, Leslie once said. There’s something else…I could hear it. I could feel its presence.”

He looked deep into Judy’s eyes.

“You don’t believe me?”

Judy shook her head. At the moment she could feel everything. “I believe you,” she said.

Schummel gazed at her, not sure whether she meant it. He squeezed her white hands briefly, then continued.

“Oh, but inside it, there were three hundred of us inside it, and we all felt it. The ship’s…presence. I remember when we first boarded.

“We had to march from the warp ship down a silver corridor, but you knew you were in the hypership the moment it enfolded you. It was always cold inside, even though your skin was warm. Energy seemed to just leak away from inside you, though Leslie always denied that was the case. We had vivid dreams, even in the daytime. You would be speaking to someone, and then you’d realize that there was no one there; there never had been. The closer you got to the ship’s hull, the worse it was. The AIs that ran the ship said the effects were all psychosomatic. They offered to prove it, but I didn’t believe them. I don’t believe any AIs now, not after the way they lied to us. I don’t even believe the Watcher. There was a theory that circulated in the ship. I don’t know where it came from, but rumors were rife. It’s hard to understand what it means unless you’ve experienced it, but there was no Social Care on that ship. We weren’t constantly being cajoled and comforted and led down prescribed paths. I tell you, one time I even saw a fight. Yes, a fight! A real fight, born of anger. Kicking and punching and biting and…But I digress. No, there was a theory. That that ship was pulled from the fabric of somewhere else, and in entering it we had hung ourselves over this great sucking void, and that at any time it would claim us and take us down. I walked the corridors of that ship like a tightrope walker…”

“Tell me about Justinian,” Judy said, bringing him back on track.

“Justinian.” Schummel shook his head. Judy could feel him trying to clear it of the memory of the hypership. She wished she could help him; his thoughts were making her feel nauseated, too. “Justinian,” he said again, and then added more harshly, “You know, when people tell me about the Watcher and its great plans for humanity, I just think of Justinian and the baby.”

David Schummel glared at Frances as he spoke.

“When I first saw Justinian, he was walking through one of the recreation lounges, accompanied by Leslie. That robot never let him out of its sight; it was constantly controlling him, twisting his thoughts. It mapped out his life for him, and poor misguided fool that he was, he never saw it. Then again, who am I to call him a fool? AIs can do that to anyone. There but for the grace of the Watcher go I.”

He shuddered once more, took another sip of water.

“I didn’t know all that at the time, of course. If I had, I wouldn’t have felt so ill-disposed towards him when we first met. There he was, scheduled to go down to the planet, and what did he have along with him? His son. The baby.

“I hated him for that. Let Social Care understand and forgive me, but I hated him. By then we knew why we were going to Gateway, you see. We knew how dangerous the place was. If AIs were committing suicide without any reason, what was to stop humans doing the same?

“That’s before I discovered the truth. There were other babies on the ship. I remember one in particular: Emily, Mareka’s daughter. Mareka was meant to stay on the hypership at all times; she was never allowed to travel down to the planet. It was too dangerous, since there were BVBs down there. Black Velvet Bands that appeared from nowhere and then just shrank away to nothing. Once you had one of them around you, there was no getting it off. Can you imagine what would have happened if one of them had formed around the soft bones of a baby’s skull? I remember Mareka telling me about that as she was holding Emily. Pretty little thing, nine months old. I could see her fontanelle moving through her thin blond hair as she spoke, and I felt sick.

“I asked Mareka what she was doing here. She said she was an expert in human-AI psychology. She was to stay in orbit around Gateway and monitor the ship’s AIs. She had the authority to pull the mission at any time. On her say-so, the ship, the crew, everyone would make the jump back to Earth right away. I remember, I looked at Emily, and her alert little blue eyes stared straight back at me, and I thought that no way would I bring my own daughter here.