He felt frigid cold all through his body.

"No mor.... What've You done?"

"Earth has vanished into the cosmic whirl, Raj. All the Earths are gone. Long time, remember? Now, there are only Shipme.... and you."

"Me, human?"

"You are original material."

"A clone, a doppelganger, original material?"

"Very much so."

"What are Shipmen?"

"They are survivors from the most recent replays - slightly different replays from the Earth which you recall."

"Not human?"

"You could breed with them."

"How are they different?"

"They have similar ancestral experiences to yours, but they were picked up at different points in their social development."

Flattery sensed confusion in this answer and made a decision not to probe i.... not yet. He wanted to try another tack.

"What do You mean they were picked up?"

"They thought of it as rescue. In each instance, their sun was about to nova."

"More of Your doing?"

"They have been prepared most carefully for your arrival, Raj."

"How have they been prepared?"

"They have a Chaplain/Psychiatrist who teaches hate. They have Sy Murdoch who has learned the lesson well. They have a woman named Hamill whose extraordinary strength goes deeper than anyone suspects. They have an old man named Ferry who believes everything can be bought. They have Waela and she is worthy of careful attention. They have a young poet named Kerro Panille, and they have Hali Ekel, who thinks she wants the poet. They have people who have been cloned and engineered for strange occupations. They have hungers, fears, joy...."

"You call that preparation?"

"Yes, and I call it involvement."

"Which is what You want from me!"

"Involvement, yes."

"Give me one compelling reason I should go down there."

"I do not compel such things."

Not a responsive answer, but Flattery knew he would have to accept it.

"So I'm to arrive. Where and how?"

"There is a planet beneath us. Most Shipmen are on that planet - Colonists."

"And they must decide how they are supposed to WorShip?"

"You are still perceptive, Raj."

"What'd they say when You put the question to them?"

"I have not put this question to them. That, I hope, will be your task."

Flattery shuddered. He knew that game. It was in him to shout a refusal, to rage and invite Ship's worst reprisal. But something in this dialogue held his tongue.

"What happens if they fail?"

"I break th.... recording."

KERRO PANILLE finished the last briefing on Pandoran geology and switched off his holo. It was well past the hour of midmeal, but he felt no hunger. Ship's air tasted stale in the tiny teaching cubby and this surprised him until he realized he had sealed off the secret hatch into this place, leaving only the floor vent. I've been sitting on the floor vent.

This amused him. He stood and stretched, recalling the lessons of the holo. Dreams of real dirt, real seas, real air had played so long in his imagination that he feared now the real thing might disappoint him. He knew himself to be no novice at image-building in his min.... and no novice to the disappointments of reality.

At such times he felt much older than his twenty annos. And he looked for reassurance in a shiny surface to reflect his own features. He found a small area of the hatch plate polished by the many passages of his own hand when entering this place.

Yes - his dark skin retained the smoothness of youth and the darker beard curled with its usual vigor around his mouth. He had to admit it was a generous mouth. And the nose was a pirate's nose. Not many Shipmen even knew there had ever been such people as pirates.

His eyes appeared much older than twenty, though. No escaping that.

Ship did that to me. N.... He shook his head. Honesty could not be evaded. The special thing Ship and I have between us - that made my eyes look old.

There were realities within realities. This thing that made him a poet kept him digging beneath every surface like a child pawing through pages of glyphs. Even when reality disappointed, he had to seek it.

The power of disappointment.

He recognized that power as distinct from frustration. It contained the power to regroup, rethink, react. It forced him to listen to himself as he listened to others.

Kerro knew what most people shipside thought about him.

They were convinced he could hear every conversation in a crowded room, that no gesture or inflection escaped him. There were times when that was true, but he kept to himself his conclusions about such observations. Thus, few were offended by his attentions. No one could find a better audience than Kerro Panille. All he wanted was to listen, to learn, to make order out of it in his poems.

It was order that mattered - beautiful order created out of the deepest inspiration. Ye.... he had to admit it, Ship presented an image of infinite disorder. He had asked Ship to show its shape to him once, a whimsical request which he had half expected to be refused. But Ship had responded by taking him on a visual tour, through the internal sensors, through the eyes of the robox repair units and even through the eyes of shuttles flitting between Ship and Pandora.

Externally, Ship was most confusing. Great fanlike extrusions dangled in space like wings or fins. Lights glittered within them and there were occasional glimpses of people at work behind the open shutters of the ports. Hydroponics gardens, Ship had explained.

Ship stretched almost fifty-eight kilometers in length. But it bulged and writhed throughout that length with fragile shapes which gave no clue to their purposes. Shuttles landed and were dispatched from long, slender tubes jutting randomly outward. The hydroponics fans were stacked one upon another, built outward from each other like mad growths springing from mutated spores.

Panille knew that once Ship had been sleek and trim, a projectile shape with three slim wings at the midpoint. The wings had dipped backward to form a landing tripod. That sleek shape lay hidden now within the confusion of the eons. It was called "the core" and you caught occasional glimpses of it in the passage...thick wall with an airtight hatch, a stretch of metallic surface with ports which opened onto the blank barriers of new construction.

Internally, Ship was equally confusing. Sensor eyes showed him the stacks of dormant life in the hybernation bays. At his request, Ship displayed the locator coordinates, but they were meaningless to him. Numbers and glyphs. He followed the swift movements of robox units down passages where there was no air and out onto Ship's external skin. There, in the shadows of the random extrusions, he watched the business of repairs and alterations, even the beginnings of new construction.

Panille had watched his fellow Shipmen at their work, feeling fascinated and faintly guilty. A secret spy intruding on privacy. Two men had wrestled a large tubular container into a loading bay for shuttle transshipment down to Pandora. And Panille had felt that he had no right to watch this without the two men knowing it.

When the tour was over, he had sat back disappointed. It occurred to him then that Ship intruded this way all the time. Nothing any Shipman did could be hidden from Ship. This realization had sparked a momentary resentment which was followed immediately by amusement.

I am in Ship and of Ship and, in a deeper sense, I am Ship.

"Kerro!"

The sudden voice from the com-console beside his holo focus startled him. How had she found him here?