Ash is a professional interrogator and at times has served as a torturer. He enlists an alien friend to help him cope with one of his victims, and the alien, one of the peculiar 31-1s, is witness to a pivotal moment in the lives of two immortal humans. "Objects were responsible for nothing but their locations, fixed and outside time. The giant starship didn’t plunge through vacuum at any fraction of light-speed. No, the Great Ship was set where it was needed, where the universe demanded it to be, and the competent mind inside the Ship had found a rich location, and that’s where he remained. Rigid as a statue, he stood inside a succession of brilliant days and the nights that were nearly as bright as day. The avenue beneath him was paved with glowing shells and frozen resins. The locals were dissimilar in appearance from one another and relatively poor compared to the typical passenger. These creatures had never seen a 31-1, and many of them did not see this 31-1. They were too busy or too indifferent to notice his existence in one place and another place and a third location midway between the two. They didn’t see him watching faces for the one face that mattered. But of course all faces mattered, each being a mask obscuring long rich lives that he would never understand. Not in any reality worth the calculation, that is." The Great Ship is an ongoing project. Robert Reed has written numerous stories set on that gigantic starship, and a few more astonishments remain to be told.