For a moment Cam just dangled there, and she saw the flurry of parts moving within. “This is very little of me,” he said at last. “This I is merely an organ, apparent to the whole only when I fail to perform my function. In the same way that you only attend to your stomach when your digestion is inadequate.” It paused. “Yet, my wider mind is much the same. My consciousness lacks the illusion of unity that governs yours, Lee. Every individual aspect of my existence is governed by a separate centre of cognition. These meet as a council does, to report and make decisions. But their everyday business remains separate. I do not believe this is a native state, but it has come upon my species through our long lives. I am over one hundred million years old myself. Some of my kind are twice that. Gone so far into the cosmos that we will never hear from them again.” Cam stopped, and Lee wondered for the first time if it had wanted to make that journey too.

“It was hard to make this part of me, this I, so I could speak to you,” Cam continued. “But the greatest difficulty was not in absorbing your culture and language, alien as these were. It was in remembering how and why I should communicate with anything…outside the congress that makes up my own mind. I have spent millions of years travelling the stars, experiencing everything that there is. I’ve heard a thousand voices…and all of them are mine. But now there are others. It is hard to listen, yet after we part company—if we are successful in our task—there will be a part of my mind that speaks with your voice. For as long as I live, an impression of you will exist within me.”

Mal came back with the news that Dr. Khan had, apparently, gone out. She found Lee quiet and wide-eyed, without words.

Kay Amal Khan was up top, on Cam’s shell. By the time they finally located her, though, the moon was up, close to full. They could see her masked figure sitting, watching the stars. As they approached, she lifted her mask up. She hastily put something to her lips, then let out a cloud of what looked like smoke. The mask snapped shut.

“Dr. Khan,” Lee said, weirdly scandalized. “Are you…smoking?”

Khan was distinctly unamused. “No, I am vaping, love,” she said. “Because our beloved ‘transport’ digested a century of health warnings along with our language. So it won’t let me light up inside. Only, after it sent me out here to this majestic bloody smoker’s oubliette, I remembered there isn’t enough oxygen out here to light up. So I am making do, love. I am making bloody do.”

“We need to talk to you, Dr. Khan.”