engulfing doom of its event horizon. They brought her the most dangerous adventure of all, a descent through the thick atmosphere of a planet to its living surface.
All Yalnis had left were her memories of the memories, dissolving shadows of the gift. All the memories
left in Zorargul had been wiped out by death.
By murder.
The walls and floor of her living space changed again as her ship re-created her living room. She liked it plain but luxurious, all softness and comfort. The large circular space lay beneath a transparent dome. It was a place for one person alone. She patted the floor with her bloodstained hand.
'Thank you,' she said.
'True,' her ship whispered into her mind.
Its decisions often pleased her and anticipated her wishes. Strange, for ships and people seldom conversed. When they tried, the interaction too easily deteriorated into misunderstanding. Their consciousnesses were of different types, different evolutionary lineages.
She rose, lacking her usual ease of motion. Anger and pain and grief drained her, and exhaustion trembled in her bones.
She carried Zorargul's body down through the ship, down into its heart, down to the misty power plant. Blood, her own and her companion's, spattered and smeared her hands, her stomach, her legs, the defending teeth or withdrawn crowns of her remaining companions, and Zorargul's pale and flaccid corpse. Its nerve ends dried to silver threads. Expulsion had reduced the testicles to wrinkled empty sacs.
Water ran in streams and pools through the power plant's housing, cold as it came in, steaming too hot to touch as it led away. Where steam from the hot pool met cold air, mist formed. Yalnis knelt and washed Zorargul's remains in the cold pool. When she was done, a square of scarlet ship silk lay on the velvety floor, flat and new where it had formed. She wrapped Zorargul in its shining folds.
'Good-bye,' she said, and gave the small bundle tenderly to the elemental heat.
A long time later, Yalnis made her way to the living space and climbed into the bath, into water hot but not scalding. The bath swirled around her, sweeping away flecks of dried blood. She massaged the wound gently, making sure the nerve roots were cleanly ejected. She let the expulsion lump alone, though it was already hardening.
The remaining companions opened their little faces, protruding from the shelter of her body. They peered around, craning themselves above her skin, glaring at each other and gnashing their teeth in a great show, then closing their lips, humming to attract her attention.
She attended each companion in turn, stroking the little faces, flicking warm drops of water between their lips, quieting and calming them, murmuring, 'Shh, shh.' They felt no sympathy for her loss, no grief for Zorargul, only the consciousness of opportunity. She felt a moment of contempt for the quartet, each member jostling for primacy.
They are what they are, she thought, and submerged herself and them in the bath, drawing their little faces beneath the surface. They fell silent, holding their breaths and closing their eyes and mouths, reaching to draw their oxygen as well as their sustenance from her blood. A wash of dizziness took her; she breathed deep till it passed.
Each of the companions tried to please her—no, Bahadirgul held back. Her most recent companion had always been restrained in its approaches, fierce in its affections when it achieved release. Now, instead of squirming toward her center, it relaxed and blew streams of delicate bubbles from the air in its residual lungs.
Yalnis smiled, and when she closed herself off from the companions, she shut Bahadirgul away more gently than the others. She did not want to consider any of the companions now. Zorargul had been the best, the most deeply connected, as lively and considerate as her first lover.
Tears leaked from beneath her lashes, hot against her cheeks, washing away when she submerged. She looked up at the stars through the shimmering surface, through the steam.
She lifted her head to breathe. Water rippled and splashed; air cooled her face. The companions remained underwater, silent. Yalnis's tears flowed again and she sobbed, keening, grieving, wishing to take back the whole last time of waking. She wanted to change all her plans. If she did, Seyyan might take it as a triumph. She might make demands. Yalnis sneaked a look at the messages her ship kept ready for her attention. She declined to reply or even to acknowledge them. She felt it a weakness to read them. After she had, she wished she had resisted.
Why did you tantalize and tease me? Seyyan's message asked. You know this was what you wanted. I'm what you wanted.
Yalnis eliminated everything else Seyyan had sent her.
'Please refuse Seyyan's messages,' she said to her ship.
'True,' it replied.
'Disappear them, destroy them. No response.'
'True.'
'Seyyan, you took my admiration and my awe, and you perverted it,' she said, as if Seyyan stood before her. 'I might have accepted you. I might have, if you'd given me a chance. If you'd given me time. What do we have, but time? I'll never forgive you.'
The bath flowed away, resorbing into the ship's substance. Warm air dried her and drew off the steam. She wrapped herself in a new swath of ship silk without bothering to give it a design. Some people went naked at home, but Yalnis liked clothes. For now, though, a cloak sufficed.
She wandered through her ship, visiting each chamber in the current configuration, looking with amazement and apprehension at the daughter ship growing in the ship's lower flank. What would the person be like, this new being who would accompany this new ship into the universe? She thought she had known, but everything had changed.
She returned, finally, to her living chamber.
'Please defend yourself,' she said.
'True.'
Yalnis snuggled into the ship's substance, comforted by its caress. She laid her hand over her belly, pressing her palm against the hot, healing wound, then petting each of the little faces. They bumped against her palm, yearning, stretching from their shafts so she could tickle behind Asilgul's vestigial ears, beneath Vasigul's powerful lower jaw. Even Bahadirgul advanced from its reserve, blinking its long-lashed eyelids to caress her fingers, touching her palm with its sharp hot tongue.
Each one wished to pleasure her, but she felt no wish for pleasure. Even the idea of joy vanished, in grief and guilt.
The nest drew around her, covering her legs, her sex, her stomach. It flowed over the faces and extruded a nipple for each sharp set of teeth. The ship took over feeding the companions so they would not drain Yalnis as she slept.
'Please, a thousand orbits,' she said.
'True,' said the ship, making her aware it was content to have time to complete and polish the daughter ship, to prepare for the launch. But, afterward, it wanted to stretch and to explore. She accepted its need, and she would comply.
For now she would sleep for a thousand orbits. If anyone besides Seyyan accepted the invitation to her daughter's launch, they would arrive in good time, and then they could wait for her, as she waited for them. Perhaps a thousand orbits—a thousand years in the old way of speaking—would give her time to dream of a proper revenge. Perhaps a thousand years of sleep would let her dream away the edges of her grief. The ship's support extensions grew against her, into her. She accepted the excretion extensions and swallowed the feeding extension. The monitor gloved one hand and wrist.
The view through the dome swept the orbit's plane, facing outward toward the thick carpet of multicolored stars, the glowing gas clouds.
Yalnis slept for a thousand years.
The kiss of her ship woke her. Water exuded from the feeding extension, moistening her lips and tongue. The tangy fragrance touched her consciousness. She drifted into the last, hypnopompic layer of sleep, finding and losing dreams.
