The life-support collar was in a box with the other emergency medical supplies, thoughtfully located below waist level so you could crawl to it. Byr clamped the collar on and curled up on the floor, clamped and curled around the fissure in her abdomen and the long gory umbilical of shiningly red sheet. Something hissed and tingled around her neck.

Even staying curled up was too much effort. She flopped over on the tiles’ soft warmth. It was easy, all the blood made it so slippery.

XI

XI

In the dream, he watched as Zreyn Tramow rose from a bed of pink petals. Some still adhered, like small local blushes dispensed upon her pink-brown nakedness. She dressed in her uniform of soft grey and made her way to the bridge, nodding to and exchanging pleasantries with the others on her shift and those going off-watch. She donned the sculpted shell of the induction helmet, and - in half an eye-blink - was floating in space.

Here was the vast enfolding darkness, the sheer astringent emptiness of space colossal, writ wide and deep across the entire sensorial realm; an unending presagement of consummate grace and meaninglessness together. She looked about the void, and far stars and galaxies went swivelling within her field of vision. The view settled on:

The strange star. The enigma.

At such moments she felt the loneliness not just of this fathomless wilderness and this near-utter emptiness, but of her own position, and of her whole life.

Ship names; she had heard of a craft called I Blame My Mother, and another called I Blame Your Mother. Perhaps, then, it was a more common complaint than she normally allowed for (and of course she had ended up on this ship, with its own particular chosen name, forever wondering whether it had been one of those little conceits of her superiors to pair them so). Did she blame her mother? She supposed she did. She did not think she could claim any technical deficiency in the love attending her upbringing, and yet - at the time - she had felt there was, and to this day she would have claimed that the technicalities of a childhood did not cover all that might be required by certain children; in short, her aunts had never been enough. She knew of many individuals raised by people other than their natural parent, and to a man and to a woman they all seemed happy and content enough, but it had not been that way for her. She had long ago accepted that whatever it was she felt was wrong, it was in some sense her fault, even if it was a fault that derived from causes she could do nothing to alter.

Her mother had chosen to remain in Contact following the birth of her child and had left to return to her ship not long after the girl’s first birthday.