Ship is silent. Ship is singing. Serenity, they call it. It's a humor, an irony, humor often hinges on just such semantic juxtapositions, depends, pensive, penitence, semantics is such a capricious science. Stop. Turn aside the parade of words. Is it more difficult when they are awake, when their thoughts pass through me unstoppable and unaware like neutrinos, or now when their dreams brush mine gently and forgettable, like lips on my cheek, and I can finally hear my own voice? And I must, finally, listen? And Ship is singing. Ship's hull pings, hums, squeaks. We left atmo four hours ago and still the hull moves as the panels cool and shrink, shaking off the dull sad memory of our visit to Hera by the hard, reliable logic of thermal creep, Ship's way. Ship doesn't know what was left behind there, Ship doesn't need the reference of logbooks or human memories, Ship feels heat and cold and the endless caress of the solar wind, Ship--can be touched. No touch can be so light, that my naked amygdala would not scream. Touch your eyeball, Jayne, scrape the open unconscious lens with your callous finger. Roll over now, Zoe, part labia and touch clitoris with one wet finger, stir your loneliness like soup with the wrong spoon. Brother, wonder in your sleep at the pressure outside of strange loved skin and pressure inside of raw selfless devotion. Captain, snore alone and proud wrapped tight in your stupid misplaced duty. No touch can leave me unhurt. But I can touch Ship. I can dance on metal and ceramic and plasteel, I stroke bulkhead and gasket and I know the function of each, I stand apart from the sustained snarl of the reactor and applaud its restraint and its elegant resolution to the problem that all machines made by Man face, that of just to what USE all this senseless Power might be put, I feel the strain of Ship's components as it bears its burden of Action and does it so well, and a little smugly--I hear Ship as Ship goes on through time and space doing its function. Like me, Ship accepts the function it was shaped for, and exists a little outside the place of those other living things blessedly unaware of their isolation. We are the same in this, after all, and at moments like this when all the others ramble through their mumbling guiltless dreams, I can reach out in the brief quiet and touch Ship. And Ship is singing.