This expanded cubby suggested an unsavory history. The space was sybaritic with exotic hangings, deep orange carpeting, soft divans. Except for a small holoprojection at Oakes’ left hand, all the cubby’s expected servosystems had been concealed.

Oakes was giving his visitor plenty of time to study the space around him, using the time to return that scrutiny. What was Ship’s intent with this mysterious newcomer? The question was engraved large on Oakes’ face.

Thomas found his own attention caught by the computer-driven projection at the holofocus. It was a familiar three-dimensional analogue of a ship orbiting a planet, all glittering green and orange and black. Only the planetary system was unfamiliar; it had two suns and several moons. And as he watched the slow progression of the ship’s orbit, he felt an odd sense of deja vu. He was in motion in a ship in motion in a universe in motion . . . and it had all happened before.

Replay?

Ship said not, but . . . Thomas shrugged off such doubts, reserving them for later. He did not have to be told that the planet in the focus was Pandora and that this projection represented a real-time version of Ship’s position in the system. Some things did not change no matter the great passage of time. Bickel had once monitored such a projection on the Voidship Earthling.

Morgan Oakes sat on a deep divan of rust velvet while Raja Thomas stood—an unsubtle accent on their positions in a hierarchy which Thomas had not yet analyzed.

“I’m told you are a Chaplain/Psychiatrist,” Oakes said. And he thought: This man does not respond to his name in a quite normal way.

“That was my training, yes.”

“Expert in communication?”

Thomas shrugged.

“Ahhh, yes.” Oakes was pleased with himself. “That remains to be tested. Tell me why you have asked for the poet.”

“Ship asked for the poet.”

“So you say.”

Oakes allowed silence to follow this challenge.

Thomas studied the man. Oakes was portly-going-on-fat, dark complexion, faint odor of perfume. His gray-streaked hair had been combed forward to conceal a receding hairline. The nose was sharp and flared at the nostrils, the mouth thin and given to a tight, stretching grimace; the chin was wide and cleft. The man’s eyes dominated this rather common Shipman face. They were light blue and they probed, boring in, always trying to penetrate every surface they found. Thomas had seen such eyes on people diagnosed as psychotic.

“Do you like what you see?” Oakes asked.

Again, Thomas shrugged.

Oakes did not like this response. “What is it you see in me which requires such scrutiny?”