‘I don’t,’ Tahget said. ‘The Ask Politely does. On a ship like this, you go where it wants to go.’ Tahget blanked the table display and stood. ‘There is much you will never understand about this modern age, Michael Poole. Even about this ship. This meeting is over.’ He walked out.

Futurity and Poole stared at each other. Poole said, ‘So it isn’t just a cutesy name. On this ship, you really do have to ask politely.’

Futurity peered into the fish-tank display of Mara’s cabin, where the woman hadn’t moved since she lay down in Poole’s presence.

IV

The Ask Politely spent another day in orbit around 478. Then the ship slid silently away into deep space.

Futurity stood alone in the observation lounge, watching his home planet fold over itself until it became a dull grey pebble, lost against the glare of the Galaxy Core. He really was heading out into the cold and the dark. He shivered and turned away from the blister-window. It would be three days’ travel to 3-Kilo, said Tahget, with much delay at border posts as they cut across the territories of various squabbling statelets.

Futurity spent most of the first day alone. The bare corridors echoed; a ship meant to carry a hundred passengers seemed empty with just the three of them, counting Poole.

He quickly found his range of movement was limited. He had access to corridors and rooms only over two decks, confined to a lozenge-shaped volume near one end of the ship’s rough cylinder. The corridors were bleak, panelled with bare blue-grey polymer, with not a bit of artwork or personalisation in sight. Even within the lozenge many rooms were closed to him, such as the bridge, or just plain uninteresting, such as the refectory, the nano-food banks and the air cycling gear.

The lozenge of access spanned no more than fifty metres, on a craft a kilometre long. In fact this whole pod of habitation was like an afterthought, he started to see, an add-on bolted onto Ask Politely, as if these corridors and the people in them were not the point of the ship at all.

And nobody would speak to him. Tahget and his crew were busy, and as a mere earthworm, as they called him, they just ignored Futurity anyhow. The woman Mara slept throughout the day. Michael Poole stayed in the Captain’s office. He appeared to sit still for hours on end, immersed in his own deep Virtual reflections. Futurity didn’t dare disturb him.

Futurity thought of himself as disciplined. He wasn’t without inner resource. He had been assigned a cabin, and he had brought a data desk and other materials. So he sat down, faced his data desk, and tried to pursue his seminary studies - as it happened, into the divine nature of Michael Poole.