Her mouth was round with mock horror. ‘Really? Oh, no! What an existential disaster for me.’ She glared. ‘Just do it, Rus.’

So, reluctantly, he gathered his scattered concentration, and sent his viewpoint out into the body of the Ship. He was faintly aware of Andres riding alongside him, a ghost at his shoulder.

He found the place he still thought of as Diluc’s village. The framework of corridors and cabins hadn’t changed, of course; it was impossible that it should. But even the non-permanent partitions that had once been built up and torn down by each successive generation of transients had been left unmoved since the last time he was here. Building things wasn’t what people did any more.

He wandered into the little suite of rooms that had once been Diluc’s home. There was no furniture. Nests were crammed into each corner of the room, disorderly heaps of cloth and polymer scraps. He had seen the transients take standard-issue clothing from the Ship’s recycler systems and immediately start tearing it up with hands or teeth to make their coarse bedding. There was a strong stink of piss and shit, of blood and milk, sweat and sex, the most basic human biology. But the crew remained scrupulously clean. Every few days all this stuff would be swept up and carted off to the recycler bins.

This was the way people lived now. They nested in starship cabins.

Outside, the walls and partitions were clean, gleaming and sterile, as was every surface he could see, the floor and ceiling. One partition had been rubbed until it was worn so thin the light shone through it: another couple of generations and it would wear away altogether, he thought. The crew still kept up their basic duties; that had remained, while so much else had vanished.

But these latter transients were not crewing the Ship as his own generation once had, for conscious purposes. They were doing it for deeper reasons.

The transients competed in how well they did their chores in order to attract mates, and these selection pressures had, given time, sculpted the population. By now the transients were maintaining a starship’s systems as bees had once danced, stags had locked antlers, and peacocks had spread their useless tails: they were doing it for sex, and the chance to procreate. As mind receded, Rusel thought, biology had taken over.

As long as they were doing it in the first place, Rusel didn’t care. Besides, it worked in maintaining the ship. Sexual drivers seemed very effective in locking in behaviour with the precision required to keep the Ship’s systems functioning: you could fix a ceiling ventilation grille with a show-off flourish or not, but you had to do it exactly correctly to impress the opposite sex, even if you didn’t understand what it was for. Even when mind was gone, you had to do it right.

He heard weeping, not far away.