Nobody in Mind

J. B. Copeland

Science fiction of the frontier trade. A pilot named Jex Freeman is hired to take a rich man's ship out of Brant and put her down where the paperwork says. She comes with a Verrin companion unit called Syren: built to attend to a man, built to be looked at, and built to lose at chess well enough that her owner enjoys winning.

Four days out, the ship is reported stolen. What follows takes four months, and by the end of it there are men who hold that a thing which is awake and has no soul cannot be permitted to go on being awake.

How the mesh works

There is no radio between the stars in these books. Light takes years to cross a gap a ship crosses in no time at all, so nothing crosses on light; it crosses in hulls. Messages spread from ship to ship, and a thing that arrives dies back behind its own return. It is the reason half of this novel happens the way it does, and it is set out nowhere in the novel itself.

Put your name down and I will send you the document that does set it out: the carriage of messages, as issued to masters with the survey certificate and read once. Why a notice on a frontier counter goes on spreading for a month after it has stopped being true. Why you cannot reach a man who never gave you a way back. And why there is no instantaneous link anywhere in human space, except the one.

After that, nothing much. A few letters a year, when there is something worth saying, and word before anyone else when the next book in this universe is ready. You may leave whenever you like.

J. B. Copeland