She sniffed. ‘The Ship’s log. Your own archive. Come on, Rusel, we hardly have any secrets from each other after all this time! Pretty girl, though.’

‘What are you intending to do with this?’

‘We’ll show it to the transients. We’ll show you at your best, Rusel, you at the peak of your powers, you walking the same corridors they walk now - you as a human being, yet more than human. That’s what we want: engagement with their petty lives, empathy, yet awe. We’ll put a face to your voice.’

He closed his eyes. It made sense, of course; Andres’s logic was grim, but always valid. ‘But why me? It would be better if both of us—’

‘That wouldn’t be wise,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want them to see me die.’

It took him a while to work out that she meant that she, Andres, the first of the Elders, was failing at last. Rusel found this impossible to take in: her death would be to have a buttress of the universe knocked away. ‘But you won’t see the destination,’ he said peevishly, as if she was making a bad choice.

‘No,’ she said hoarsely. ‘But the Mayflower will get there! Look around, Rusel. The Ship is functioning flawlessly. Our designed society is stable and doing its job of preserving the bloodlines. And you, you were always the brightest of all. You will see it through. That’s enough for me.’

It was true, Rusel supposed. Her design was fulfilled; the Ship and its crew were working now just as Andres had always dreamed they should. But only two hundred and fifty years had worn away, only half of one per cent of the awesome desert of time he must cross to reach Canis Major - and now, it seemed, he was going to have to make the rest of that journey alone.

‘No, not alone,’ said Andres. ‘You’ll always have the Ship . . .’

Yes, the Ship, his constant companion. Suddenly he longed to escape from the endless complications of humanity and immerse himself in its huge technological calm.

He lay back in his Couch and allowed his mind to roam once more. This time his awareness drifted away from the bright warm human bubble at the Ship’s heart, out through the crowded torus of the hull to the realm of the pulsing ramjet engines, the wispy gravitational wings behind which the Ship sailed, and the vast spaces beyond. The Ship had covered only a fraction of its epic journey, but already it was climbing out of the galactic plane and the Core, the crowded heart of the Galaxy, rose like a sun from the dust-strewn lanes of the spiral arms. It was a stunning, comforting sight.

By the time he came back from his intergalactic dreaming, Andres was gone, her Couch disassembled for spare parts, her body removed to the cycling tanks.

VII