Dajeil turned to look at the creature, which was staring intently over the couch at her with wide, unblinking eyes.

‘A change?’ Dajeil said, her voice betraying her in its shakiness. She stroked her belly again, then blinked and looked down at her hand as though it too had turned traitor.

‘I cannot be sure,’ Amorphia confessed. ‘But it is possible.’

Dajeil tore off her hair-band and shook her head, setting free her long dark hair so that it half covered her face as she paced from one side of the room to the other.

‘I see,’ she said, staring up at the tower’s dome, now sprinkled with a light, drizzling rain. She leant against the wall of holo screens, her gaze fixed on the avatar. ‘When will all this happen?’

‘A few small changes - inconsequential, but capable of saving us much time in the future if carried out now - are happening already,’ it said. ‘The rest, the main part of it . . . that will come later. In a day or two, or maybe a week or two . . . if you agree.’

Dajeil thought for a moment, her face flickering between expressions, then she smiled. ‘You mean you’re asking my permission for all this?’

‘Sort of,’ the ship’s representative mumbled, looking down and playing with its fingernails.

Dajeil let it do this for a while, then she said, ‘Ship, you have looked after me here, indulged me . . .’ she made an effort to smile at the dark-clad creature, though it was still intently studying its nails, ‘. . . humoured me for all this time, and I can never express my gratitude sufficiently or hope even to begin paying you back, but I can’t make your decisions for you. You must do as you see fit.’

The creature looked up immediately. ‘Then we’ll start tagging all the fauna now,’ it said. ‘That’ll make it quicker to round them up when the time comes. It’ll take a few more days after that before we can start the transformation process. From that point . . .’ It shrugged. It was the most human gesture she had ever seen the avatar make. ‘. . . there may be twenty or thirty days before . . . before some sort of resolution is reached. Again, it’s hard to say.’

Dajeil folded her arms across the bulge of her forty-year-old, self-perpetuated pregnancy. She nodded slowly. ‘Well, thanks for telling me all this.’ She smiled insincerely, and suddenly she could not hold in the emotions any longer and looked through tears and black, down-tumbled curls at the long-limbed creature arranged upon her couch and said, ‘So, don’t you have things you must be doing?’