The avatar looked at the woman with a strange, lost, wild look in its eyes, and for a moment Dajeil was worried that something had gone wrong, that the ship had suffered some terrible injury or division, that it had gone quite mad (after all, its fellows regarded it as being half-mad already, at best) and left Amorphia abandoned to its own inadequate devices. Then the black-clad creature unfolded itself from the chair and paced to the single small window that faced the sea, drawing aside curtains to inspect the view. It put its hands to its arms, hugging itself.

‘Everything might be about to change, Dajeil,’ the avatar said hollowly, seemingly addressing the window. It glanced back at her for a moment. It clasped its hands behind its back. ‘The sea may have to become as stone, or steel; the sky, too. And you and I may have to part company.’ It turned to look at her, then came over to where she sat and perched on the other end of the couch, its thin frame hardly making an impression on the cushions. It stared into her eyes.

‘Become like stone?’ Dajeil said, still worrying about the mental health of the avatar or the ship controlling it, or both. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We - that is the ship . . .’ Amorphia said, placing one hand on its chest, ‘. . . we may finally have . . . a thing to do.’

‘A thing to do?’ Dajeil said. ‘What sort of thing to do?’

‘A thing which will require that our world here changes,’ the avatar said. ‘A thing which requires that - at the least - we have to put our animated guests into storage with everybody else - well, save for yourself - and then, perhaps, that we leave all our guests - all our guests - behind in appropriate other habitats.’

‘Including me?’

‘Including you, Dajeil.’

‘I see.’ She nodded. Leaving the tower; leaving the ship. Well, she thought, what a sudden end to my protected isolation. ‘While you?’ she asked the avatar. ‘You go off to do . . . what?’

‘Something,’ Amorphia told her, without irony.

Dajeil smiled thinly. ‘Which you won’t tell me about.’

‘Which I can’t tell you about.’

‘Because--’

‘Because I don’t yet know myself,’ Amorphia said.

‘Ah.’ Dajeil thought for a moment, then stood up and went to one of the holo screens, where a camera drone was tracking a light-dappled school of triangular purple-winged rays across the floor of a shallow part of the sea. She knew this school, too; she had watched three generations of these huge, gentle creatures live and die; she had watched them and she had swum with them and - once - assisted in the birth of one of their young.

Huge purple wings waved in slow motion, tips intermittently disturbing little golden wisps of sand.

‘This is a change indeed,’ Dajeil said.

‘Quite so,’ the avatar said. It paused. ‘And it may lead to a change in your own circumstances.’