The snow coils and bounces as it falls, the whole mass rippling gelatinously in a beautiful, sourceless snowlight. One—not me exactly—imagines a snow world saturated with limpid lightsyrup and light shining through light. Imperturbable trees in a swarm of light shed by a milky low sky. Buildings seen from the train emerge and vanish in intensely calm, shimmering white ... in a silent activity I’m being hollowed out. It’s a village. Silhouettes, anonymous and uniform, stagger by the walls, stiff arms swinging in streets the snow has erased. I wake and escape through the door into the dim day; cross to the rail, and see a patch of slush, or some white thing, on the waves.

This brutal sleep pushes everything else aside, bullying me with its demands. A soul in this body, or is there only body? Once a crisis, but now that I’m older, these two ideas lie locked together in an iron sleep. Back in my bunk I can’t get away from the heat of my pillow and my blanket, and I can’t tolerate the touch of the air. I shake out of my skin and back into the darkness, close, hot-and-stifling. I hear the dark; it drones at me.

Alarms jangle me awake even though I wasn’t asleep and I stagger again to the door. Soldiers streak this way and that, crane over the railing and then dash off frantically. A woman I don’t know pulls me from the doorway and propels me a little along the wall, saying “Come on.”

Her level voice kicks away the last drugs of sleep—“My medic’s bag—” I mumble, rushing back for it.

She’s gone when I return, and I proceed in the direction she took. Through the alarm I hear faint thuds and now my heart is pounding. I come round the paddle wheel cowling and out to the foredeck—a warship in the distance. Crash of spray as a ball gouges the water between us.

I look up. Cold air, white fog, white dark sky, dark and bright at once. Soldiers near to me pointing and shouting in alarm—past their pointing fingers spots are moving deliberately on the horizon. Two far off and one in the middle distance and we’re heading nearly straight into them. Angling away from us, a steel-flanked cruiser larger than our ship is trying to bring its broadside to bear. Its outlines shiver a moment and now crashing erupts on all sides, gouts of foam as the sea face is mauled by their shot, rags of spray all over, but no jar, no hitting. I dash for the steps trying to find my usual refuge with Makemin, running half doubled over—as I climb, a flapping mass flies past the top of my head arcing down over the side. Saskia strikes the water feet-first and sinks only as far as her waist. She kicks her feet vigorously and begins to rise and move weirdly along the surface as I look down on her from nearly over her head. She has on her Yeseg legbands, and she bounds sideways across the water in a long arc, swinging her out toward the nearest enemy ship.