From the top of the rain-blown tower, the woman watched the avatar as it retraced its steps along the narrow path through the sparsely treed water meadow to the foot of the two-kilometre cliff, which was skirted by a rough slope of scree. The thin, dark figure - filling half her field of view and grainy with magnification - negotiated a last great boulder at the base of the cliff, then disappeared. Dajeil let muscles in her eyes relax; meanwhile a set of near-instinctive routines in her brain shut down again. The view returned to normal.

Dajeil raised her gaze to the overcast. A flight of the box-kite creatures was poised in the air just under the cloud surface directly above the tower, dark rectangular shapes hanging still against the greyness as though standing sentinel over her.

She tried to imagine what they felt, what they knew. There were ways of tapping directly into their minds, ways that were virtually never used with humans and whose use even with animals was generally frowned upon in proportion to the creature’s intelligence, but they did exist and the ship would let her use them if she asked. There were ways, too, for the ship to simulate all but perfectly what such creatures must be experiencing, and she had used those techniques often enough for a human equivalent of that imitative process to have transferred itself to her mind, and it was that process she invoked now, though to no avail, as it transpired; she was too agitated, too distracted by the things Amorphia had told her to be able to concentrate.

Instead, she tried to imagine the ship as a whole in that same, trained mind’s eye, remembering the occasions when she had viewed the vessel from its remote machines or gone flying around it, attempting to imagine the changes it was already preparing itself for. She supposed they would be unglimpsable from the sort of distance that would let you see the whole craft.

She looked around, taking in the great cliff, the clouds and the sea, the darkness of sky. Her gaze swept round the waves, the sea-marsh, and the water meadows beneath the scree and the cliff. She rubbed her belly without thinking, as she had done for nearly forty years, and pondered on the marginality of things, and how quickly change could come, even to something that had seemed set to continue as it was in perpetuity.

But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.