During this dialogue he had been busy opening a panel in the hull of one of the mortsafes.  Over this he now bent,  his head and shoulders inside, his elbows still visible as he worked at the exposed engine. Field effects rippled across the hold like luminescence in surf. All three mortsafes blurred, fogging the warm air with physics. Various kinds of musical sounds could be heard as they exchanged data. MP Renoko observed alien states of matter crawling across the walls as symbols, hallucinatory lights, scenes from his own past. Much of what was going on made him even tireder than usual. He massaged his left hand with his right. Stood up slowly, suddenly remembering the circus at dawn, some landing field on  a forgotten  planet.  Every morning  different, every morning  the same. The harsh light on cement, the air full of salt and fried food smells. A tiny Chinese-looking woman with piled up red hair and a tight emerald cheongsam, swaying like a mirage through the heat haze between the carnie booths, every eye’s focus, human or alien. ‘Can code enjoy sex?’ the media always ask. MP Renoko remembered something less easy to describe.

‘Do you ever see her?’ he said softly, one ghost to another.

The newcomer  grunted  in surprise  and  shook his head. This simple motion transferred itself to the dangling strips of flesh that comprised his lower half, causing them to whirl like a skirt.

‘No one sees her now, man. She’s got so much stuff to do. She’s working on behalf of others.’

‘I just wondered.’

‘We’ve all got stuff to do now.’

Shortly afterwards he left, saying only: ‘I’ll be back for you, Jack,’ which he seemed to find funny. MP Renoko, whose name had never been Jack or anything like it, laughed dutifully. He waited until the mortsafes had calmed down then he too left the hold, walking out the same wall he had entered by. Unaware of these kinds of events except as a localised cluster of internal surveillance blackouts, the crew of the Nova Swing slept, ate, screwed, stared out  the portholes  at the wonders  of space, and  drew closer to their next destination:  a G-type star, known to the navigational mathematics  as an 11-dimensional mosaic of co-ordinates,  but to the generations who lived and died by its light as ‘Scinde Dawk’.