It was, in the end, a sinecure; it had been explained from the beginning that he would not really have anything to do on Pittance; he would simply be there; a symbolic human presence amongst the mass of quiescent weapons, a witness to the Mind’s silent sentinelship over the sleeping machines. Gestra Ishmethit had been perfectly happy with that lack of responsibility, too, and had now been resident on Pittance for one and a half centuries, had not once left to go anywhere else, had not received a single visitor in all that time and had never felt anything less than content. Some days, he even felt happy.

The ships were arranged in lines and rows sixty-four at a time in the series of huge dark spaces. Those great halls were kept cold and in vacuum, but Gestra had discovered that if he found some rubbish from his quarters and kept it warm in a gelfield sack, and then set it down on the chill floor of one of the hangars and blew oxygen over it from a pressurised tank, it could be made to burn. Quite a satisfactory little fire could be got going, flaring white and yellow in the breath of gas and producing a quickly dispersing cloud of smoke and soot. He had found that by adjusting the flow of oxygen and directing it through a nozzle he had designed and made himself, he could produce a fierce blaze, a dull red glow or any state of conflagration in between.

He knew the Mind didn’t like him doing this, but it amused him, and it was almost the only thing he did which annoyed it. Besides, the Mind had grudgingly admitted both that the amount of heat produced was too small ever to leak through the eighty kilometres of iron to show up on the surface of Pittance and that ultimately the waste products of the combustion would be recovered and recycled, so Gestra felt free to indulge himself with a clear conscience, every few months or so.

Today’s fire was composed of some old wall hangings he’d grown tired of, some vegetable scraps from past meals, and tiny bits and pieces of wood. The wooden scraps were produced by his hobby, which was constructing one-in-one-twenty-eighth scale models of ancient sailing ships.