Sibilius was excited. The ship was arriving from Earth after once again filling its belly full of dirt, plants, water, grain and farm animals. It had been orbiting out toward Mars for the last seven months.

Thousands of years ago, a disaster had occurred disabling their ship so that it was no longer able to move between stars. The heavy elements necessary to restore their star drive were not available in this solar system. Trapped with the local life forms, their continued existence depended entirely on the whims of an unstable dwarf star and whatever preparations they could make for its inevitable demise.

“We are going to visit our new home,” Sibilius announced happily to Béla as he entered the lab.

He seemed to find it perfectly natural that she lived here in his laboratory. After all, this was where she’d been born. Her siblings in their Martian Drone bodies had insisted on personal housing, but Béla was perfectly comfortable sitting around naked in his lab all day. She was almost constantly mind-linked with the Praetor and she was learning a lot from it.

At night, or rather, during the off-duty period when most of the Deimosians rested, she would go out and fly. There was always a group of admirers there to gawk at her, but she didn’t mind. When she radiated love to them, they reinforced it and sent it back to her. They didn’t seem to be offended by her nakedness at all, probably because they weren’t the same species. Also, some of the locals seemed to think of her as a pet rather than an intelligent being; but they loved her just the same.

After her evening flying practice, she would quickly fall asleep in the lab and go dream-walk with Jake. At least she did when their sleep times coincided. And she made sure they did as often as she could manage it, sometimes by simply taking a nap in the middle of the day and leaving her body lying on the floor for Sibilius and his assistants to step over her like a pet dog.

“Am I going with you?” Béla asked, completely ready to go explore someplace new.

Sibilius looked lovingly at his daughter. “Of course you’re coming with me! Do you think I’d leave you behind, Child? But, there are a few rules…

“On the ship, you will have to wear clothes,” he told her. “You can’t go around disrupting crew members who are working by ‘flashing’ them. You could cause an accident. You don’t want accidents in space.”

He had picked up the term ‘flashing’ from her, actually, when she’d used it during a heated discussion about her casual lack of attire.

“But I don’t even look like them! How can flashing a member of a different species be disruptive? It would be like dressing your pet monkey or something!”

“That’s exactly right, Child!” he had replied, sternly. “And many of my people view you as a sort of… exotic animal! An intelligent one that can learn interesting tricks to keep them entertained!

“That’s nonsense! They treat me like a princess! They even call me Prince…

“Oh my God!” Béla exclaimed, suddenly subdued as she realized…

‘Princess’ is also a dog’s name…

~~~~~

The great ship left Deimos six weeks later after replacing the tired crew and restocking supplies for the journey to Jupiter. It carried, in addition to Béla and her father, about twenty percent of the remaining population of Deimos. That group also included Béla’s siblings, in their Martian Drone bodies and her father’s projects as they matured into fully grown hybrids for her siblings to inhabit.

It would take almost three years to orbit out to Jupiter. The reason for that, her father explained when she asked him, was they had a finite amount of fuel left, and it had to last several more centuries, as the technology no longer existed for them to make more. For most of their motion, they depended on the local star’s gravitational pull to orbit them to their destination. The return trip would be noticeably faster, dropping back down to the inner planets.

Béla had believed that the ship would be cramped because of all the people coming on this journey, but this thing was truly huge and she found vast spaces where nobody went.