The boy was looking around the Cloister. His eyes were unblinking, his mouth pulled back in a kind of nervous grin. None of the Elders was hot on empathy, especially with transients, but suddenly Rusel felt as if he saw this place through this child’s eyes.

The Cloister was like a library, perhaps. Or a hospital room. The Elders sat in their chairs or walked slowly through the silence of the room, their every step calculated to reduce the risk of harm to their fragile, precious bodies. It had been this way since long before Poro had been born, these musty creatures pursuing their cold interests. And I, who once loved Lora when she wasn’t much older than this child, am part of this dusty stillness.

‘What do you want, Poro?’

‘Diluc is ill. He is asking for you.’

‘Diluc . . . ?’

‘Your brother.’

It turned out that Diluc was more than ill; he was dying.

So Rusel went with the boy, stepping outside the confines of the Cloister for the first time in years.

He wasn’t at home out here any more. The original crew had died off steadily, following a demographic curve not terribly different to that they would have endured had they remained on Port Sol. Rusel had grown used to seeing faces he had known since childhood crumple with age and disappear before him. Still, it had been a shock when that first generation reached old age - and, since many of them had been around the same age at launch, their deaths came in a flood.

He knew none of the faces of the younger transients. Everything about the new generations was different: the way they rebuilt the Ship’s internal architecture, their manner with each other, the way they wore their hair - even their language, which was full of a guttural slang. The transients knew him, though, even the youngest. They stared at him with curiosity, or irreverence - or, worst of all, awe.

The basic infrastructure of the Ship itself, of course, remained unchanged. In a way he came to identify with that level of reality much more than with the flickering, fast-paced changes wrought by the transients. Though his senses were slowly dulling - the Qax treatment had slowed his ageing but not stopped it entirely - he felt he was becoming more attuned to the Ship’s subtle vibrations and noises, its mechanical moods and joys. Transients came and went, fiddling with the partitions, and the other Elders were awkward old cusses, but the Ship itself was his constant friend, demanding only his care.

As they walked he saw that the boy had a bruise on his forehead. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Punishment.’ Poro averted his eyes, ashamed. One of his teachers had whacked him with a ruler for ‘impudence’, which turned out to mean asking too-deep questions.