The screen headups showed She was now several thousand miles away. The figure on the Bridge was keeping its shape but losing its substance, turning back to an open basketweave of vapour. For the first time since Susanna Cyr had inhabited it it made a deliberate movement, putting what had once been its hands up to what had once been its throat. If it had been more distinct, it might have looked like it was trying to breathe.
She was now tens of thousands of miles behind them, less than a smear on the Bridge screen. The screen chose that moment to return to the original magnification, patching in Her image as if She was sixteen hundred feet away, and She chose that moment to consume another millionth of what was in the midsection crater. Again there was an explosion in its recesses and again the unnameable colour burned there; but this time, as She rolled with the force of the explosion, something was different. She rolled along Her entire length but also pivoted around Her midsection, backwards and forwards and side to side, turning the roll into a clumsy figure-of-eight movement which She fought to bring under control. Nothing She does is clumsy, thought Foord. She’s in trouble.
They caught fragmented glimpses of Her underside and starboard and dorsal surfaces as She rolled. Her manoeuvre drives fountained to correct the movement and the roll ended before the port side came back into view; then began again in the opposite direction, dorsal to starboard to underside. Her manoeuvre drives fountained again to correct the movement, and again to correct the correction, and overcompensated. She rolled a third time, underside to starboard to dorsal to port, and came unsteadily to rest. They stared, across tens of thousands of miles and sixteen hundred feet, at Her port side. Maybe, they thought, these projections were damaging Her internally.
Cyr pounded her console in pleasure, then swore viciously as she thought how she’d look if she hit something important—not what damage she’d do, just how she’d look. Foord and Thahl were still watching the screen.
“Cyr…” Foord began.
“Yes, Commander, we’re still in beam range.”
Foord nodded, and looked at the midsection crater; it glowed exactly as before, steadily and patiently. It might have been another screen, patching in a picture from another universe. Alarms murmured.
The empty figure on the Bridge, Foord noticed, was no longer empty.
•
Elizabeth Kaang stood blinking in the cold light, her breath frosting in front of her face. She looked round the Bridge at them, one by one, and found Kaang. Their eyes locked.
“What’s missing?” Kaang asked.
“Nothing, I think,” said Elizabeth Kaang. “I’m just the same as you.”
To the others on the Bridge, she was: blonde, plumpish, a pale complexion verging on pastiness, and pleasant but unremarkable features.
“I’m sorry,” Kaang said, “but something’s missing.”
“Oh, that. Over there,” Elizabeth Kaang pointed at the Bridge screen, where Faith hung in silent counterpoint to their mundane conversation, “they said you’d spot it immediately. To me it doesn’t feel any different. It was never in me to begin with.”
“Over there. Who are they?”
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t let me remember.”
“What do they look like?”
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t let me remember. Look, I’m nothing, really. What they told me to say will only take a few moments, less time than the others, and then I’ll go. …This ship has only two things which can outperform them. The first is its particle beams, which are stronger than theirs, but that’s only tactical.”
“And the second,” Kaang said, “must be me.”
“Yes. Over there they have nothing, living or otherwise, to match you. You know that yourself. You’re nothing really—I can say that, you see, because I’m the same as you—except for what you do as pilot. Even genius doesn’t describe it. Genius comes once in a lifetime, but what you have may never be repeated. You’ve always had it, and you’ve never had to work at it, and you don’t know what it is. Neither does the Commonwealth.”
Kaang glanced down at her console to check; Thahl had rerouted her Pilot’s functions through to himself. “Nobody,” she said, “has any idea what it is.”
“They do, over there,” said Elizabeth Kaang.
“No! I don’t believe you!” Kaang’s voice shook. “I don’t believe you, you’re lying.”
“I’m sorry,” said Elizabeth Kaang, “but they told me exactly what it is and how it works. Of course I didn’t understand, and anyway they wouldn’t let me remember.”
“No! You’re lying!”
“They made me without it, to show that if it ever leaves you, the rest of you will be unchanged.”
“You can’t prove any of that!”
“The first thing you said to me is ‘What’s Missing?’”
“You still can’t prove it. You’re lying!”
“Look, I said I won’t take as long as the others, and I’m almost finished. You have a gift that you don’t understand and didn’t ask for. You’re on an Outsider ship with a crew of outsiders, and it even sets you apart from them. They need you because of what you can do, but you’re not anything like them, not in any way. You’re a different kind of outsider. You’ve never done bad things. You wouldn’t know how to decide to do bad things.” She smiled, almost apologetically, and her features started to sink into the substance of the figure.
The last thing she said, sounding further and further away, was “I asked them over there, if they understood your gift, could they copy it and make others like you? They answered me, but they wouldn’t.”
“Let.”
“Me remember.”
“I’m alright, Commander,” Kaang told Foord, for the second time. “There was nothing there I didn’t already know…Thahl, can you route my Pilot’s functions back to me? Thank you.”
“Kaang, She didn’t intend any of us to come through this unaffected. She took damage, just to put that thing into the Bridge. So please, go and rest.”
“Because I’m nothing really? Because except for what I do as your pilot, I’m the weakest one here?”
Foord paused. “Yes.”
“I’m glad you answered plainly, Commander. If you’d said anything except Yes, even Yes But, you’d have been lying.”
Foord did not reply.
“But I can’t rest, Commander. If She really does understand what I have, I need to be here. If She really can make others like me, She’ll come after us.”
“She doesn’t, and She can’t,” said the figure on the Bridge. “She was lying.”
•
The empty figure had become a seven-foot column, approximately humanoid. It was grey and glistening, and its eyes were startlingly large and intelligent; warm, and golden.
“She was lying,” it repeated.
“And what business,” Smithson said, “have you here?”
The rest of their conversation was conducted in Smithson’s own language, a series of scratches and chirps made by the rubbing together of chitinous surfaces in the neck, amplified through the throat and modulated by the mouth: a language of almost electronic speed and intensity, evolved by Smithson’s ancestors when they were herds of plains planteaters who needed to develop a more sophisticated social organisation than the packs of impressively-organised carnivores and omnivores who hunted them. That, and their physical strength, and their development of the most efficient digestive system in the galaxy for extracting energy from plant matter—it worked subatomically, and meant they didn’t have to spend all their time grazing, but could develop intellectually—let them turn evolution upside down and become the dominant lifeform.