"How did they know I'd need a wide bed?" she wants to know when she sees her room.

"I sent a message ahead so they had it prepped."

"Messages go faster than the ship?"

"Yeah - takes them a few days to get from Samaria to here."

And when they reach the Keetim part: "How do you mean it's sentient? Is it like Jovah, or... something else?"

"Jovah's sentient?"

"He - it - not like a person exactly. But enough to hold a conversation."

"You mean Jovah the ship? Or uh, the diety?"

"Same thing."

"Mm."

"Uh, I'm not actually clear on what it is you currently know about Jovah but I don't want to poke it if it's a sensitive subject you don't want poked at?"

"I've had some time to process it by now. I still don't - understand all of it as well as I might from another context with more spaceships in it, but I have the gist."

"Uh, if you're comfortable I wouldn't mind you summarizing it? Alleluia was very vague about things."

"Our ancestors - well, as you know, came from a very warlike background. They wanted to put down everything that seemed to them related to it and make sure that their descendants couldn't go right back to making war on each other. They built a ship. It has a - machine, a very complicated machine, I can hardly imagine how complicated, which - controls the ship, grows crops and manufactures medicines and controls the weather, in response to prayers. And the settlers... I guess thought that it would be easier, for everyone to get along, if they all believed in a god commanding them to do so. - if we don't all show up, representatives from every group of people on our world, to sing the Gloria every year, it'll start attacking the planet rather than let us dig into whatever conflict would prevent us from observing it together."

"Well. That seems bad."

"And uh, probably not like the way Keetim is intelligent - Keetim is a monster from my home planet who's... I'm realizing that my standard way of explaining monsters as 'probably not magic but closer than most other things are' might not differenr-iate it from Jovah to you?"

"Well, I would have called him divine rather than magic, but yes."

"I suppose Keetim might differ in how persony it is? Keetim doesn't have pre-set goals like some artificial intelligences have?"

"What does it want then?"

"Mostly to be a city that is friends with the people living in it I think?"

"Does it talk?"

"Not really but it can understand people and communicates with gestures of various sorts - like with cobblestones orienting them-selves in the direction it is directing someone to go. Or roofs bending in ways that give you the impression it's angry or sad or happy? I'm not sure how to describe it."

"Jovah talks."

"Huh. There's a sentient computer simulation of sorts that talks, she's basically a normal human mentally."

"I didn't talk to Jovah for very long so I'm mostly going on what Alleluia told me."

"Ah."

"Do you trust her?"

"- what? I suppose? Why?"