'I did not know whether to bring this problem to you or the captain or the sheriff.' The sheriff? 'You were closest.'

'What problem?'

It made an agitated little dance. 'A human has tried to kill me.'

'Good God!' I stood up. 'Who is it?'

'He is the one called Charlton.'

Cal, of course. 'Okay. I'll get the sheriff and we'll go find him.'

'He is in my quarters, dead.'

'You killed him?'

'Of course. Wouldn't you?'

I called Marygay and the sheriff and told them to come down immediately. 'Were there any witnesses?'

'No. He was alone. He said he wanted to talk to me.'

'Well, the ship will have seen it.'

It bobbed its head. 'To my knowledge, the ship does not monitor my quarters.'

I kissed for the ship and asked it. 'That's correct. The Tauran's quarters were improvised out of storage. I was not designed to monitor storage.'

'Did you see Cal Charlton headed in that direction recently?'

'Charlton got on the lift at 11:32 and it went down to the storage level.'

'Was he armed?'

'I could not tell.'

'He tried to kill me with an axe,' the Tauran said. 'I heard glass break, and he came running in. He got the axe from the fire station outside my quarters.'

'Ship, can you confirm that?'

'No. If he had pulled the fire alarm, I would have known that.' Well, that was an interesting fact.

'So you took the axe away from him?'

'It was simple. I heard the glass break, and correctly interpreted that. I stepped behind the door. He never saw me.'

'So you killed him with the axe.'

'Not actually. I believe I broke his neck.' It demonstrated with a convincing karate-like stroke.

'Well, that's ... it could be worse.'

'Then, to be sure, I took the axe and severed his head.' It made a gesture like a shrug. 'That's where the brain is.'

You don't want to be disrespectful of the dead, but it was a good thing the Tauran hadn't killed someone anybody liked. Cal was kind of a loose cannon when he was younger, and although he seemed to have calmed down in recent years, he did have outbursts. Married three times, never for very long. In retrospect, it's clear we shouldn't have brought him along; if he hadn't been in on it from the beginning, he probably wouldn't have been chosen, in spite of his many useful talents.

He was one of Diana's depression patients, it turned out, but when we looked over his belongings we found that he had taken one pill and then quit. Two days later, he tried to kill Antres 906.

If everyone aboard had liked Cal, we would have had a lynch mob. As it was, the council agreed with the sheriff that it was an unambiguous case of self-defense, and there was no public disagreement with that. So we were spared the knotty problem of a trial between species. No Tauran had ever committed a crime on MF. Antres 906 claimed that the Taurans had no equivalent to the human legal system, and it appeared to me that it didn't really grasp what a trial was. If there are no individuals in your race, what constitutes crime and punishment or morality or ethics, for that matter?

Anyhow, Antres 906 was in a kind of existential solitary confinement already, by choice. Whatever 'choice' means to a Tauran; I suppose they normally have their equivalent of the Whole Tree, and just follow its orders without question.

In solitary, but not alone. One of the council was always with it for several days after the killing, protecting it, armed with the tranquilizer rifle. It was a lot more time than I'd ever spent with a Tauran, and Antres 906 didn't mind talking.

One time, I brought along the five-page document from Earth, sentencing us to stay out of space. I asked it about that mysterious last line: 'Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable.'

'I don't understand this,' I said. 'Is it supposed to be a general statement about reality?'

It rubbed its neck in an almost human gesture, which I knew meant I'm thinking, 'No. Not at all.' It lightly ran its long finger over the Braille twice more.

'Our languages are very different, and the written language is subtle.

The translation is incomplete, because...' It rubbed the line again.

'I don't understand human jokes, but I think this is something like a joke. When you say something and mean something different.'

'What words would you use?'

'Words? The words are accurate. They are familiar, a saying in what you would call our religion.

'But when we use them, they are not inflected this way, which is what makes me think of your jokes. The word "unknowable" here, it means, or rhymes with, "un-namable," or "nameless." Which is sort of like fate, or God, in human terms.'

'It's supposed to be funny?'

'Not at all, no, not in this inflection.' It handed the paper back to me. 'Normally, it is meant to be an expression about the complexity of the universe.'

'That's reasonable enough.'

'But this inflection is not a generalization. It's directed at you, I suppose the one hundred forty-eight of you. Or maybe even all humans. And it is ... an admonition? A warning.'

I read the English again. 'Warning that we're headed for the unknowable?'

'Either that or the other way around: the unknowable is headed for you. The nameless.'

I thought about that. 'It could just be talking about relativity, then. It gets pretty mysterious.'

It scraped out a syllable of negation. 'Not for us.'

Seventeen.

It was little things at first. No pattern.

A whole bed of oysters stopped growing. The other beds were okay. It only interested me academically, since I had an oyster once and decided once would do it for me. But I helped Xuan and Shaunta run environmental tests, having been a fish farmer in another life, myself, and there wasn't one molecule of difference that we could detect between the affected bed and the others. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the oysters, except that they refused to grow beyond thumbnail size.

We finally decided to sacrifice the bed and harvest them immature, making about ten liters of soup, which I declined to savor. Then we drained and sterilized the pool and reseeded it.

All the movies and cubes that began with the letter C were missing. No Casablanca or Citizen Kane. But an article would preserve them, so we still had The Cat Women from Mars and A Cunt for All Seasons, so some ancient culture was preserved.

Little things.

The temperature regulator on the children's pool refused to work. It would run hot one day and not at all the next. Lucio and Elena took it apart and put it back together, and so did Matthew Anderson, who had an affinity with such things. But it never did work, and Elena took it out of the system altogether after she tested the water one morning and it was scalding. The kids didn't seem to mind the cold water, but it made them a little more noisy.

Something happened to the floor of the handball court. It got tacky; it was like trying to move around on half-dried glue. We stripped it and revarnished it, but of course it was the same varnish, and soon after it dried, it became tacky again.

That wouldn't have seemed important; just an unfortunate choice of materials, but it was the same varnish we used on all of the ship's fiber surfaces, and it only had gotten tacky in that one location. Handball players do sweat. As if weight lifters did not.

Then a small thing happened that had no reasonable explanation at all. It could only have been an elaborate but pointless practical joke: the air was sucked out of a food storage locker.

Rudkowski sent a report to me, annoyed, and I went down to look at the thing. It was a grain storage locker, free-standing, with no possible connection to vacuum.

There's no lock on the door, but when Rudkowski, a strong, fat man, had gone to open it, it wouldn't budge. Another cook helped him pull on it, and it jerked open suddenly, with a sucking inrush of air. Same thing happened the next day, and so he sent up the report.

We emptied out the locker and went over it minutely, and even had Antres 906 come up and use his differently acute senses. The only way for the thing to lose air would be for somebody to pump it out, but none of us could find any opening.

'Fearsome,' was the Tauran's only reaction. We were still annoyed, rather than scared. But then we had the locker watched all afternoon and night. No one came near it, but by the next morning it was full of vacuum again.

Against the obscure possibility of conspiracy, I stood watch over it all night myself, drinking what passed for coffee. The air disappeared again.

Word got out about this strangeness, and reactions were diverse. Some stolid people or people in ignorant denial didn't think it was a big deal. The locker was small, and the daily air loss from it was not even 1 percent of what we lost through normal accepted leakage. If we left it closed, we wouldn't even lose that.

Other people were terrified, and I had some sympathy with them. Since we didn't know what mechanism was sucking air out of the small space, how could we know that the same mechanism might not empty out whole rooms, whole floors the entire ship!

Teresa Larson and her co-religionists were actually smug: here was something going on that the scientists and engineers couldn't explain. Something mystical, that was happening for a purpose, and God would reveal Her purpose in due course. I asked her whether she would like to spend the night in the grain locker, to test God's sympathy with her belief. She patiently explained the fallacy behind my logic. If you 'tested' God, that was the direct opposite of belief, and of course She would punish you.

I kept my silence about that elaboration of foolishness. I like Teresa, and she is probably the best farmer aboard, but her grasp of reality beyond the tilled field or hydroponic tank is seriously impaired.

Most people were in the same middle ground that I inhabited. Something serious was going on that we didn't yet understand. For now, the practical course was to seal the locker and store the grain elsewhere, while people mulled it over.

The most disturbing reaction was from Antres 906. It asked for permission to do a complete systems check on the escape vessels, with the help of a few human engineers. It said we would need them soon.

Antres 906 approached me first. If it had been a human, I would have said no; we're close enough to panic, and don't need to fuel it. But Tauran logic and emotion are odd, so I took him up to Marygay for a captain's decision.

Marygay was reluctant to grant special permission, since of course we did have a regular inspection schedule, and it could look like panic. But there was no actual harm in it, so long as it was done quietly, as if it were routine. And she did have sympathy for Antres 906 in its isolation. A human locked in a ship with a hundred Taurans would be forgiven for odd behavior.

But when she asked it to elaborate on why it thought the inspection was necessary, the response was creepy.

'Not long ago, William asked me about that piece of paper? The one from Earth? "Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable."'

It did the little Tauran dance of agitation. 'We are inside the foreign. Your airless locker represents the unknown.'

'Wait,' I said. 'Are you saying that that homily is a kind of prophecy?'

'No, never.' The dance again. 'Prophecy is foolish. What it is, is a statement of condition.'

Marygay stared at him. 'You're saying we should be ready for the unknowable.'

It rubbed its neck and rattled assent and danced, and danced.

Book Four

The Book of the Dead

Eighteen.

It took two months for the unknowable to catch up with us. Marygay and I were asleep. A chime woke us up.

'Sorry, but I have to disturb you.'

Marygay sat up and touched the light. 'Me?' she said, rubbing her eyes. 'What's wrong?'

'Both of you. We're losing fuel.'

'Losing fuel?'

'It began less than a minute ago. The antimatter is steadily decreasing in mass. As I speak, we have lost about one half of one percent.'