He grinned, looking abruptly like the old Anders, the one who’d departed Earth. She’d actually forgotten there was a difference. “Thanks, Beanfield.”
“Sure,” she said. “Anytime.”
* * *
—
Anders attended the next engagement without prompting, and afterward performed a robust, thoughtful debrief. Jackson did her best to remain impassive, but Talia detected amazement in the lift of her eyebrows. As they were leaving, Jackson gave her a brief, barely perceptible nod, which Talia read as: You know what, Life Officer Talia Beanfield, you’re all right.
This would be temporary. Anders had been bated, not solved.
But it meant she could relax for five minutes. She found herself thinking about the hot room. They were dotted all over the ship. She hadn’t paid them attention before; they were just rooms she didn’t go into. But now she couldn’t pass one by without a lingering glance. She’d known the ship was powerful, of course, but she hadn’t physically felt it. It reminded her of a picture book she’d read a long time ago about a little girl who lived on the back of a whale and didn’t know it; the girl thought she was on an island. She battled monkeys and pirates and only at the end did she realize the whale had been protecting her the whole time.
“Hey, Gilly, I have a bone to pick with you,” she said a few days later, when she was finishing on the treadmill and he turned up for a run. “You said the ship isn’t alive, right?”
“Right,” he said cautiously.
“Even though it said hello when we boarded.”
He nodded. “That was probably a default message from a subsystem.”
The treadmill beeped and she dropped to a walk. “And you said we are throwaway survival machines for genes. We think we have free will, but really we’re doing whatever’s best for our DNA. Right?”
He looked slightly impressed that she remembered. “Right.”
“So the ship is our throwaway survival machine.” She looked at him triumphantly.
He blinked.
“We built it,” she said, “to get around in, and keep us safe, and fight to protect us. Just like genes did with us.”
“That’s . . . I mean, that’s true. If you want to think of the ship as a body, then we’re like its genes. Yes. That’s a pretty good analogy.”
She was thrilled, because she’d been thinking about this for a while, and had felt sure Gilly would find a way to poke holes in it. “That means the ship is alive, doesn’t it? Because it’s the same as us. I mean, genes might not consider us to be alive, because we’re so different to them, but we are. We’re just a different kind of life. Isn’t that the same for the ship? It’s life, but at a higher level?”
“I have to think about that,” he said after a minute.
She felt happier than she had for a long time. She began to talk to the ship. Not when anyone could see. And, obviously, with no expectation of a reply. It was just somewhere to direct the kinds of thoughts she might otherwise have put into a feed, or a message home. “I feel bad about not replying to Maddie before we went dark,” she told the ship. Maddie was her sister, pregnant, according to her last message before they entered VZ, which was really amazing. “I’m worried she might think I’m not happy for her.” The ship listened. That was the thing. It was physically there. Wherever she went, it was with her. Like a friend. Her best friend in a million miles. Sometimes she didn’t even need to say anything. She could lie in her bunk, facing the wall, and just reach out and touch it. She could honestly feel something. A connection. A presence.
5
[Gilly]
THE ATTACK
It was not as bad as he’d thought. It was almost better. The first few days after discovering he had no real duties, he had lain in his cabin or wandered the decks, not knowing what to do. Then he realized the answer was simple: He could do whatever