She felt like shit, and great, and hopeless, and euphoric, all at the same time.

The ship had brought her back to some sort of life.

Normally, that badly injured, that close to death after such major trauma to every single major organ save her brain, she’d have been left in a therapeutic coma for nine or ten days, and even then the change, the difference between her physical state at the beginning and at the end of that time, would have seemed nothing short of miraculous to people of a past age, taking her from good-as-dead to good-as-ever.

Instead, because of the Subliming, she had been repaired bit by bit, detail by detail, almost cell by cell, leaving her body a patchwork of pre-existing normality and dazzlingly fresh new bits, so that she felt jangled, vibrating, bruised beyond belief yet with nothing to show for it, perpetually astounded at being suddenly not dead, not seriously injured to the point of near-death …

She had listened in, from her sickbed in a much smaller but still-well-equipped module, to the debriefing QiRia gave on being reunited with the memories stored in the recovered eyes.

“You are, perhaps, the only Gzilt who will ever hear this,” the avatar told her.

The ship had made a new avatar. It looked and talked like Berdle had, before it/he had changed to look more like a Gzilt male, the first time they had set foot on the Girdlecity together.

“Sure you should be telling me?” she asked, huskily. Even her throat and lower tongue had taken a puncture wound in that last fusillade of fire from the android Agansu.

“I think you earned it,” the ship told her. It had yet to give its new avatar a name. It wouldn’t use “Berdle” again; it was sort of a tradition, it said, that when you lost an avatar you gave the next one a different name.

“Huh,” was all she would say.

Pyan heard the secret about the Book of Truth too – Pyan, now forever wanting to be wrapped, whimpering and cooing annoyingly round her neck, consoling, seemingly genuinely, honestly concerned for her after so nearly losing her – but the ship, at Vyr’s request, made sure that what Pyan heard of this, Pyan forgot again.

She still hadn’t managed to lose the elevenstring, either. As part of her personal effects, the ship had thoughtfully transferred it to the smaller shuttle craft before slinging the larger one, the one she’d been staying in, alongside the Girdlecity, to distract the Churkun.

It was a relief, albeit a guilty one, that there wasn’t room to play it inside the smaller craft.

It still took up an awful lot of space.

xGSV Empiricist

oLOU Caconym

oGSV Contents May Differ

oGCU Displacement Activity

oGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

oUe Mistake Not …

oMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

oMSV Pressure Drop

oLSV You Call This Clean?