Chapter 25

The interior of the ship felt like a mansion: fine tapestries lined the wooden walls and thick handwoven carpets adorned the floors. Most of it was decorated in the same fashion, with the engines and the assorted support mechanisms and infrastructure taking up little space. According to the Prosops it was a refurbished luxury yacht. The whole den back on the Centron had actually been a shipyard, something of a hobby the Centron had taken up to spent his endless time and unlimited resources, acute intelligence and insurmountable flair. The fact that a mere hobby could reach such a scale was mindboggling to Hilderich.

Even though Hilderich could not have known what other ships similar to this one looked like, he felt impressed by the taste the machine had shown, and genuinely believed it to be a fine ship, even though the Prosops had insisted on him using the term 'astrogational vehicle'. Hilderich had ignored the machine profoundly on that matter and kept calling the ship, 'ship'. He had warmed up on the machine's name though, and now called it as it had preferred to refer to itself: Ron.

Celia had kept mostly to herself and the child ever since they found her on the Waking Man's capsule. Ron had been evidently surprised to find out how she came about a player capsule. When they roused her from her stasis sleep, she was at first shocked and terrified, frightened of her child. But Hilderich managed to explain to her what had happened, though she wasn't sure how she had come to be in the capsule, nor what the data slab contained. She wept openly when Hilderich told her of Amonas demise. Since then though, she rarely spoke and when she did it was merely to ask for some amenity or help.

The Prosops was a good host though it seemed to lack some real skill with handling people. Hilderich knew that unfortunately he was not very apt in that department either so he felt he was unable to help and comfort her in some meaningful way. Perhaps he felt responsible for Amonas, he couldn't tell. He had hoped he would have met her under very different situations, but fate had decided otherwise. Perhaps in time, her grief would subside and her spirits lift. As far as he could tell, she hadn't been as impressed by the sheer scale of the newly found cosmos unfolding before them, unlike himself who spent hours gazing at the projection screen of what amounded to the ship's bridge.

Hilderich had been busy resting most of the time at first, but he did spend some time with the machine, which naturally saw to the daily routine of maintaining the ship, checking and plotting their course, as well as trying to update Hilderich on the workings of the universe and the general state of affairs in the civilized galaxy. It had never occurred to Hilderich that there could ever be more knowledge than he could ever hope to understand in millions of life-times, but he would sadly have to do with as much as he could manage in one life-time, which was quite a lot.

Ron had filled him in with as much detail as it could concerning the game, the shellworld and what had transpired according to what it now knew. He was shocked to find out there were literally thousands of shellworlds not very much different than his own, hosting games like the one that had been using everybody on his world as unwilling, unknowing pawns. What had really challenged his sanity though, was the sight of a world being destroyed. Celia could not bear witness, and she had remained in her quarters, tending to her lone child.

It was not something any one was supposed to ever witness in his life, and Hilderich had seen it happen in slow, aggravating detail, before finally averting his red sore eyes. At that moment he had decided to stop that from happening ever again, to the best of his ability. He had some new responsibilities now: himself, Celia and her child was everything that remained from their world. He would protect them now, not simply to honour Amonas' memory, but because he felt it was the most important thing he could salvage from the utter destruction of their world: hope.