Consider Phlebas

Epilogue

Gimishin Foug, breathless, late as usual, sizeably pregnant, and who just happened to be a great-great-great-great-great-great-grandniece of Perosteck Balveda (as well as a budding poet), arrived on board the General Systems Vehicle an hour after the rest of her family. The vehicle had picked them up from the remote planet in the greater Cloud where they’d been holidaying, and was due to take them and a few hundred other people to the vast new System class GSV Determinist, which would shortly be making the crossing from the Clouds to the main galaxy.

Foug was less interested in the journey itself than in the craft she would be travelling on. She hadn’t encountered a System class before, and secretly hoped the scale of the vessel, with its many separate components riding suspended inside a bubble of air two hundred kilometres long, and its complement of six billion souls, would provide her with some new inspiration. She was excited at the idea, and preoccupied with her new size and responsibility, but she remembered, if a little late, to be polite as she arrived on board the much smaller Range class vehicle.

“I’m sorry, we haven’t been introduced,” she said as she disembarked from the module in a gently lit Smallbay. She was talking to a remote drone which was helping her with her baggage. “I’m Foug. What are you called?”

“I am the Bora Horza Gobuchul,” the ship said, through the drone.

“That’s a weird name. How did you end up calling yourself that?”

The remote drone dipped one front corner slightly, its equivalent of a shrug. “It’s a long story…”

Gimishin Foug shrugged.

“I like long stories.”

END