Heaven by Ian Stewart Page B

families, from the very young to the elderly. But the family areas were off limits to Fat Apprentice
     and all the other polypoids, to minimize disruption.
    Ship was twenty times as long as No-Moon’s giant boat—a little over a mile. It was shaped like nothing that Fat Apprentice
     had ever come across, except maybe a very warty sea slug. Nothing about the starship was geometrically regular or simple;
     every surface that started to resemble something he could put a name to, like a sphere or a cone, merged into something else
     or just suddenly stopped.
    The reefwives, if they had put their mind to it, would have known why . . . but they had never seen Ship, nor had they ever
     needed to. However, if they had seen it, they would immediately have realized that the vessel had not been designed but had
     been evolved. It was closer to an organism than to a machine. Yes, everything about it was mechanical, made from metal and
     ceramic, but it had been grown more than built. In fact, Ship’s automata occasionally decided to modify some part of the vessel,
     often while it was in transit between stars. The Neanderthals and the rest of its crew seemed used to this. Fat Apprentice
     had been horrified, the first time he tried to go to a part of the ship that he had visited a few days earlier, only to find
     that the previous entrance had been remodeled and the layout beyond it changed out of all recognition.
    He couldn’t imagine deliberately tearing a boat to bits while it was sailing. The wind and waves of No-Moon did enough of
     that without assistance.
Rebuilding
a boat while it was sailing—ah, that they had to do all the time. But no mariner would voluntarily seek it out. And polypoids
     could
swim
across an ocean.
    Neanderthals couldn’t swim through space.
    All of this was lost on the crew. They seemed to trust Ship implicitly and never turned a hair when part of it was being melted,
     crushed, or unglued by robots outside their control.
    If the outside of Ship was weird, the inside was even weirder. The “cabins,” if that was the word—and Fat Apprentice knew
     no other way to describe the internal compartments of a boat—were of every conceivable shape and size. Some had gravity and
     some had not, and this was very disconcerting because you could easily wander from one to another without warning. The gravity
     was generally no more than a tenth of that experienced at the surface of No-Moon, though, so even if you accidentally wandered
     into a hundred-yard shaft, it was easy to grab something and arrest your descent. And on the one occasion when his desperate
     grab for a stanchion (or whatever the eel-shaped protrusion was) had failed, and it had dawned on him that even in one-tenth
     gravity he’d hit the bottom very hard, Ship itself had turned off the gravity-field before he had fallen more than twenty
     yards.
    For the first few seconds, though, it had been the worst experience of his young life. So now, when he explored Ship, even
     in areas he thought he knew well, he carried a small lump of rock, which he used to test new cabins for the presence or otherwise
     of a gravitational field before he let his suit roll him through the opened wall-iris.
    Many areas of the ship were closed to him altogether. The wall-irises were there, but they refused to recognize his presence,
     staying stubbornly shut. He wondered if that was because the conditions inside were unsuitable for him. Occasionally, as he
     wandered the passages and cabins, he encountered a crew member. He’d come across plenty of aliens at the seaports, but a lot
     of these guys were of species that were totally unknown to him. He was smart enough to understand that aliens often needed
     different atmospheres, temperatures, humidity, whatever. The tanks where the polypoids spent most of their time had been fitted
     out so that they could live comfortably without suits. Presumably, other parts of the vessel were designed for the home