‘I’ll miss her, though.’

‘Yes. And then there were two. Rusel, we need to talk. We need a new strategy to deal with the transients. We’re supposed to be figures of awe. Look at us. Look at poor Selur! We can’t let them see us like this again.’

He glanced cautiously at the transient nurses.

‘Don’t worry,’ Andres said. ‘They can’t understand. Linguistic drift. I don’t think we should allow transients in here any more. The machines can sustain us. Lethe knows there are enough spare parts, now we have so many empty Couches! What I suggest is—’

‘Stow it,’ he said crossly. ‘You’re always the same, you old witch. You always want to jam a solution down my throat before I even know what the problem is. Let me gather my thoughts.’

‘Stow it, stow it,’ she parroted, grotesquely.

‘Shut up.’ He closed his eyes to exclude her, and laid back in his Couch. Through the implant in the back of his skull he allowed data from his body, the Ship, and the universe beyond filter into his sensorium.

His body first, of course, the slowly failing biomachinery that had become his prison. The good news was that, more than two centuries after his brother’s death, his slow ageing had bottomed out. Since he had last checked - Lethe, all of a month ago, it seemed like yesterday, how long had he slept this time? - nothing had got significantly worse. But he was stuck in the body of a ninety-year-old man, and a frail old man at that. He slept almost all the time, his intervals of lucidity ever more widely separated, while the Couch fed him, removed his waste, gently turned him to and fro and manipulated his stick-thin limbs. Oh, and every few weeks he received a blood transfusion, an offering to the Elders from the grateful transients outside the Cloister. He may as well have been a coma victim, he thought grumpily.

His age was meaningless, his condition boring. Briskly he moved on.

His Virtual viewpoint roamed through the Ship. Despite the passage of centuries, the physical layout of the corridor-village that had been Diluc’s was the same, save for detail, the same knots of corridors around the ‘village square’. But the people had changed, as they always did, youth blossoming, old age crumbling.