Particularly the part where Ship is crying.
When I have the globes repaired and now all of them are sparking and pulsing and moving, Ship asks me, “Is the intermind total again!”
So I say yes it is, and Ship says get upshaft, and I go soft through that glowing panel and I’m back in the passage. I go back to the dropshaft and go up, and Ship tells me, “Go to your cubicle and make yourself clean!”
I do it, and decide to wear a clothes, but Ship says be naked, and then says, “You are going to meet a female!” Ship has never said that before. I have never seen a female.
It is because of the female that Ship sent me down to the forbidden place with the glowing yellow globes, the place where the intermind lives. And it is because of the female that I am waiting in the dome chamber linked to the airlock. I am waiting for the female to come across from—I will have to understand this—another ship. Not Ship, the Ship I know, but some other ship with which Ship has been in communication. I did not know there were other ships.
I had to go down to the place of the intermind, to repair it, so Ship could let this other ship get close without being destroyed by the defractor perimeter. Ship has not told me this; I overheard it in the intermind place, the voices talking to one another. The voices said, “His father was vicious!”