The avatar turned to him again with a small smile on its face. ‘I agreed to pretend to become Eccentric; suddenly I had a freedom very few craft ever have, able to indulge my whims, my fantasies, my own dreams.’ It flexed one eyebrow. ‘Oh, in theory, of course, we can all do that, but Minds have a sense of duty, and a conscience. I was able to become very slightly Eccentric by pretending to be very Eccentric - while knowing that I was in fact being more martially responsible than anybody else - and, in appearing to enjoy such Eccentricity with a clear conscience - even enhance my Eccentric reputation. Other craft looked on and thought that they could do what I was doing but not for long, and therefore that I must be thoroughly thoroughly weird. As far as I know, not one guessed that my conscience was kept clear by having a purpose serious enough to compensate for even the most clown-like disguise and regressively obsessive behaviour.’

It folded its arms. ‘Of course,’ it said, ‘you don’t normally expect to be continually reminded of your folly every day for four decades, but that was the way it was to be. I didn’t anticipate that at the start, though it became a useful and fit part of my Eccentricity. I picked Dajeil up a short while into my internal exile. She was the single last significant loose end from my previous life. All the other stories didn’t concern me so directly, or bore no similar weight of responsibility, or were well on the way to being satisfactorily resolved or decently forgotten through the due process of time elapsing and people changing. Only Dajeil remained; my responsibility.’ The avatar shrugged. ‘I had hoped to talk her round, to cause her to accept whatever it was had happened to you both and get on with the rest of her life. Bearing the child would be the signal that she was mended; that labour would be the end of her travails, that birth mark an end.’ The avatar looked away, out to sea for a moment, a frown creasing its brows. ‘I thought it would be easy,’ it said, looking back at him. ‘I was so used to power, to being able to influence people, ships and events. It would have been such a simple thing even to have tricked her body into giving birth - I could have started the process chemically or via an effector while she was asleep and by the time she was awake there would have been no going back - that I was sure my arguments, my reasoning - grief, even my cherished facility at emotional blackmail - would find scarcely more of an obstacle in her will than all my technologies could face in her physiology.’