[To be read while listening to Chronophagie, “The Time Eaters”: Music of Jacques Lasry, played on Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet (Columbia Masterworks Stereo MS 7314).]

Ship: the only place.

Ship says I’m to get wracked today at noon. And so I’m in grief already.

It seems unfair to have to get wracked three whole days ahead of the usual once-a-month. But I learned long ago not to ask Ship to explain anything personal.

I sense today is different; some things are happening. Early, I put on the spacesuit and go outside—which is not common. But a screen got badly scored by meteor dust; and I’m here, now, replacing it. Ship would say I’m being bad because: as I do my job, I sneak quick looks around me. I wouldn’t dare do it in the forbidden places, inside. I noticed when I was still a kid that Ship doesn’t seem to be so much aware of what I do when I’m outside.

And so I carefully sneak a few looks at the deep black space. And at the stars.

I once asked Ship why we never go toward those points of brilliance, those stars, as Ship calls them. For that question, I got a whole extra wracking, and a long, ranting lecture about how all those stars have humans living on their planets; and of how vicious humans are. Ship really blasted me that time, saying things I’d never heard before, like how Ship had gotten away from the vicious humans during the big war with the Kyben. And how, every once in a long while Ship has a “run-in” with the vicious humans but the detractor perimeter saves us. I don’t know what Ship means by all that; I don’t even know what a “run-in” is, exactly.

The last “run-in” must have been before I was big enough to remember. Or, at least, before Ship killed my father when I was fourteen. Several times, when he was still alive, I slept all day for no reason that I can think of. But since I’ve been doing all the maintenance work—since age fourteen—I sleep only my regular six-hour night. Ship tells me night and Ship tells me day, too.