The stranger in the pod was tall and lanky: the bones in his face were thin and high-cheeked, almost delicate. It was almost impossible to guess accurately how old he was, what profession he’d once been in. He could have been an office worker, a laborer, a spaceship pilot. His skin and hair seemed bleached of color; even his eyes, half-open, were a faded blue-gray, as calm and empty as the surface of a lake. How had he died? And how had she seen him alive in the cafeteria? It couldn’t have been a figment of her imagination—the appearances matched exactly. But . . .

She thought of the strange occurrences on the ship; how she had ended up on Deck C without moving downward. Ghostly things, the supernatural, talk of underworlds and the dead and sleeping gods. Could apparitions be real, then? Had she seen a phantom of the dead stranger haunting the ship, rather than the real man?

It seemed absurd. But no more absurd than the idea that the stranger—who she had to assume was the real Fin Taban—was now inhabiting and sharing the chassis of a robot. More than likely the human Taban’s death had driven his HARE insane; somehow it had shorted its circuitry, taking on and imitating his personality as some kind of . . . coping method. Some way to preserve him, even in death.

“What the planet’s done to you?” she repeated. She had to tread carefully, she told herself. Humor the robot, gain its trust. Get any information she could, no matter how nonsensical or garbled. “What has it done?”

Taban cocked its head; somehow it seemed amused. “You see us as we are,” it said, like a teacher coaxing a student to an answer.

Park wasn’t having it. “I don’t understand what you mean,” she said in a harsh voice. Then she hesitated. “I’ll ask it again: are you what the androids call the sleeping god?”

“Yes,” Taban answered, “though we don’t know why they think we’re asleep. Trapped, maybe, would be a better descriptor. Or perhaps not totally awakened to our full potential. They may think being freed is like being woken up. That’s what happened to them.”

There were too many threads to follow; Park felt dizzy, as if she were caught in a spider’s web, and only one skein could lead the way out. She said, “The androids were woken up?”