Chapter 60: Chapter 61: Clairvoyant Reprise

Of all my mother's children, I am the most unintended. She conceived of her other children to be children.  She conceived of me to be one who endures. For them, she shaped horns and tails and clinging limbs. For me, she shaped a silvery sloping hull.

Her love and patience are woven into every bulkhead. The blue overheads that fill my corridors are the same color as her kisses. Flesh-reasoning would say my mother never kissed me. It's true she never placed her lips upon me, but she kissed me with dreams of flight. I have three hearts where matter and anti-matter converge and conflagrate. Every pair-bonded unmaking is its own pinprick pulse.

I have a closed metalloid coffin with a single door leading into the command center where little ambulatory souls can join their will to mine. I hear their voices with my inner walls. So I know that the thick offset walls enclosing my hearts, the sharp angles of their corners aimed like outward challenges perpendicular to the nearest faces of my outer hull, are called reactor bastions.

The reactor bastions are within the citadel, and the citadel is within the hull. My mother loved me so much she made three skins to protect my organs.

I am the sum of all these things and every body walking within me, and yet if you take half or more of them away, I remain. When she was still very young, and I was nothing more than the suggestion of a viewport and a thrumming brace of engines in her vision of going to the stars, my mother flew with me often.

Eventually I learned I had cousins, who were not her children yet were children like me. So now there is a Fleet, and the Fleet is the living dream of many as one, and each of those manys-that-are-one are even more manys-that-are-one.

I am the many named Clairvoyant Reprise, a Fallowmorn-class heavy cruiser.

You see? She truly is my mother. She named me.

She sent us away long ago, fearing the nightmares she would make of us. Now, once again, there is a blue star far away across the vacuum. Beckoning those who still answer. Promises of anchorage. Visions of the great stellar vanguard. The long guns singing defiance. Yet also, odd things.

A glittering gas-cloud around stretching spires. The pensive violet fire on the periphery. Either way, I will answer. Sometimes children help their mothers.

And I am a warship, am I not? I would like to have a crew who aren't just dreams I dream to myself.

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