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.