The bird had looked about it, taking in the huge, gloomy volumes and supposing it ought to feel privileged; the ship had kept it out of these places for the last forty years, restricting it to the upper kilometre of its hull which housed the old accommodation areas and the majority of its Storees. Gravious had senses beyond those normally available to an ordinary animal, and it had employed a couple of them in an attempt to probe the bay doors and find out what lay behind them, if anything. As far as it could tell, the thousands of bays were empty.

That had only taken it as far as the general bay engineering space, the biggest single volume in the ship with the divisions down; nine thousand metres deep, nearly twice that across and filled with noise and flickering lights and blurringly fast motion as the ship created thousands of new machines to do . . . who-knew-what.

Most of the engineering space wasn’t even filled with air; the material, components and machines could move faster that way. Gravious was flying down a transparent traveltube set into the ceiling. Nine kilometres of that took it to a wall which led into the relative serenity - or at least, stillness - of the sea battle tableau. It was half way across that now; just another four thousand metres to go. Its wing muscles ached.

It landed on the parapet of a balcony which looked out into the rear of this set of general bays. Beyond were thirty-two cubic kilometres of empty air; a perfectly empty general bay, the sort of place where a normal GSV of this size would be building a smaller GSV, playing host to one which was visiting, housing an alien environment like a gigantic guests’ room, turning over to some sports venue, or sub-dividing into smaller storage or manufacturing spaces.

Gravious looked back at the modest tableau on the balcony, which in its previous existence, before the GSV had decided to go Eccentric, had been part of a café with a fine view of the bay. Here were posed seven humans, all with their backs to the view of the empty bay and facing the hologram of a calm, empty swimming pool. The humans wore trunks; they sat in deck chairs around a couple of low tables full of drinks and snacks. They had been caught in the acts of laughing, talking, blinking, scratching their chin, drinking.

Some famous painting, apparently. It didn’t look very artistic to Gravious. It supposed you had to see it from the right angle.