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thought wistfully, although she knew perfectly well the ship had none.
    The liaison pulsed insistently. Glancing toward the shipkeeper, Melusine saw that his restrainment pod was finally beginning to thin and withdraw. Through the remaining translucence she saw that his tunic fell over a body of normal lines, that his face was once again smooth and unfurred, real skin with no shimmering protective sheath like … like … she couldn’t recall, and quickly ceased trying. And his color was good, a pale reddish gray. It was not like … she wouldn’t try to remember that, either.
    Reassured, she stepped closer to the navigator’s reservoir and looked into the murky fluid that surrounded and supported him. Like a womb , she thought, and not for the first time. He looked like himself. To her surprise, his eyes were open, protected only by his newly-returned shadowlids. And the ship had reabsorbed the breathing mask he had required during the last few emergences, leaving even less trace of its existence than it had of the restrainment pods. The navigator’s internal structure, then, must also be returning to normal. His chest rose and fell with ponderous regularity, his long-ago-altered lungs drawing sustenance from the oxygen-laden nutrient liquid.
    Raising her hands, Melusine thrust her fingers into the liaison. The central core pulsed again and extended a thread of concentrated brightness that twined itself around her fingers and crept up her wrist. At the same moment, another portion of the liaison dimmed. A globe appeared in the void, brown and green with clouds of white and vast expanses of blue. Melusine stared at it a moment and shuddered. Surely the blue could not all be water?
    The world we have sought is at hand. The liaison trembled with the navigator’s message, coming through that one bright tendril.
    “Are the people here as similar to us as our own appearance suggests?” she asked aloud. The liaison shimmered, sending her question to the navigator.
    That does not affect our purpose.
    As she had known it would not. “The dark domains you saw in our path—have we passed them by? Is that why we have been so nearly restored? We are beyond them?”
    The navigator stirred slightly, enough to induce minuscule waves on the normally glassy-smooth surface of the nutrient fluid. Melusine almost stepped back; it was the most she had ever seen him move. The liaison darkened in patches. The shift of light drew her gaze to it again.
    We are all but within their borders.
    “I do not understand.”
    Nor do I.
    Melusine waited, but the navigator said no more. They’d passed through so much dark matter, a greater concentration than she’d ever seen before. The matter fed the dark domains , Melusine knew, perhaps because its nature attracted and soured the things that live in the domains. Did that birth evil, or merely amplify it, she wondered. Or, perhaps, the matter only injured souls.
    She stared again at the world that floated within the liaison’s glow. It had faded to near transparency, as if the navigator lacked the strength to maintain it. Because the dark domains were so near? Did they drain his energy? His will?
    Troubled at the idea, she wondered what kind of beings could possibly inhabit a world that existed in a place like this. No matter that their physical appearance approximated her own, their minds almost certainly did not.
    And it was their minds with which she must soon deal.
    She took a breath to calm herself, and then glanced over her shoulder to see the augmentor coiling and uncoiling its myriad, thread-thin tendrils, as if impatient to begin its work, to reestablish the link that would bind them more closely than any lovers. Her scalp tingled with a mixture of revulsion and eager anticipation.
    ***

Chapter 5
    Carl Johnson
    Carl jerked awake. Sweating. Shivering.
    “Carl?” Shelly stood in the doorway. Both joyful and terrified, he staggered to his feet.
    “I—I didn’t think you’d be home