If a lion could talk we could not understand him, it pronounced. She was absolutely certain it could have no real grasp of what a lion was, but maybe it had found the quote on Sabreur’s phone. Or possibly it had just downloaded the entire human datasphere into its unimaginable consciousness, and identified this as the key concept it wanted to convey.

“Does it mean we can’t communicate? Is this rigmarole just so it can tell us it can’t talk to us?” Khan complained.

“We can talk to it,” Matchell stated. “But this is not the ship. The ship…is alive, it has a mind I can’t even…Prop me up, Spiker.” Abruptly her knees folded, but Sabreur had her, gathering her to him so she didn’t fall. The air in the room had dropped five degrees in as many seconds, and Matchell’s breath ghosted white from her lips. “This isn’t the mind of the creature we’re within.” She indicated the simulacrum, the words rattling from her in fits and starts. “There is a mind out there, and it’s as alien to the Ice Mind as it is to me. It’s vast, segmented. It can compartmentalize itself, whereas the Ice, the Ice is a whole planet of thinking engine. They can both…lower themselves, degree by degree. If a lion could talk we could not understand him. But if we had a sequence that ran without break from lion to human then perhaps we could pass words up and down the chain. This isn’t the ship entity here, this is…an organ, a specialized limb it has evolved to speak to monkeys like us.” Her eyes were screwed shut and sweat sprang up on her brow and instantly froze. Frost crept across Sabreur’s light stubble, making him look ten years older. “The entity is barely aware of us as a group, certainly not at all as individuals,” Matchell got out. “It can just conceive of Stig’s people as a whole, and through them it understands that there is something similar but distinct, which is us. Even the rats are almost identical, to it. But it has a big mind. It understands that we might help. It…Damn me, that hurts!” She sagged, shaking her head.

We are all children of Earth, the specialized appendage said.

So sayeth the lion, Lee decided, and we cannot know what it means by it—only load it with our own preconceptions. She had signed up for an extra philosophy A level once, under her parents’ insistence that no university would look at her if she only had four to her name. Now—for the first time—she regretted bunking off most of the lectures.

“Look.” It was Sabreur, speaking to Stig because he obviously didn’t want to face the ship’s avatar again. “Just tell it to let us off. Please.” The word obviously cost him a lot.