The ship was well aware that there was a small cult following that tracked news and sightings of the various bioships. Perhaps this Sessile was one of them. It had not dealt with any Sessiles before, but had been warned not to let them aboard; most living ships considered them parasites because of their mendicant mode of existence.

“I have been dreaming of the Spiral of Destiny since I was six years old,” he said. He could feel the rightness of the words as he spoke them. After years of waiting, moments he had seen all his life were being enacted, marking another step on the Spiral, and some of the possibilities of failure he had seen were falling away with every word as they passed this moment. His tongue savored the air, which was too moist, too full of pheromones for his liking, but even so, it tasted right, part of the significance. Every breath felt as though he inhaled exactly as the Universe wanted him to, as though the two of them were breathing in perfect tandem.

His eyes were bright with happiness; he tasted the air again and again and said, “I drew you in sand the first time, and then later when they taught me to write, I drew you instead.” He could see it in his mind’s eye, the thick pencil they had given him, the knobby lead letting him draw the wasp shape on the ruled page instead of copying the words written at the top. He had been beaten for that, but drawing it was the only way he knew to cope with the way things buzzed in his head and wanted out out OUT.

Later they taught him to meditate, to compartmentalize, to put things in neat little drawers and boxes in his mind so they could not control him as the images had. But even so, in recent days he had felt all of it pushing down on him, had felt the path coming to a major forking, a place where they could have gone in the direction of a dozen different disasters, a dozen possible endings. Yet they had escaped, had managed to make it through that labyrinth, the one that had worried him so.

This path had worse coming down it.

He tried not to think of that now and instead worked at convincing the ship.

The ship said, “I do not understand how any of this could be. Do Sessiles raise their children and tell them stories about bioships?”

“I am telling you that you are a being of prophecy,” Lassite said. The ship was a vain creature—and appealing to that vanity would surely work in his favor.

The ship chose to ignore the question for now. “Prophecy is only superstition. How did you know which way to go? When you were walking through the hallways.”

“I have walked them in my dreams.”