The atmosphere in Sector 7, the quadrant the Colossi called “The Living Room,” had entered a state of heightened alert. The Great Radiator ticked as it cooled. The overhead sun-bulbs had dimmed to their evening setting, and across the whole ship there ran a low current of anticipation, the particular charge that meant the Crunch Protocol was about to commence.

The Great Mother had entered carrying the Sacred Pouch.

Every crew member knew the sound. The crinkle of the foil membrane, the dry percussive rattle of the cores inside, the faint orange dust of them that clung to the Great Mother’s fingers and to everything they touched. Rocky, the Nephewson, came down off the windowsill so fast he left part of his dignity behind him.

“Stations,” he announced, to no one and everyone. “The Offering is here.”

It was, the crew understood, the most precisely regulated event in the entire ship’s calendar. The Great Mother dispensed the Crunch in a fixed and sacred allocation. Three cores per crew member. Never four. Never two. Three, distributed by her own hand, in an order that varied and could not be predicted, which was itself the subject of intense theological debate.

She knelt on the rug. The crew assembled.

“Observe the distribution sequence,” Ziggy murmured, his tail held in a state of rigid calculation. “She begins with Klaudia. She always begins with Klaudia. There is information in this. There has always been information in this.”

“There is no information in this,” Gizmo said. “She begins with whoever is nearest the rug. Klaudia is nearest the rug. You are building a cathedral out of a coincidence.”

“Everything is information, Gizmo. The fact that you cannot read it does not make it noise.”

The Great Mother set three cores before Klaudia, who lowered her head and received them with the composure of someone for whom this was not a matter of urgency. She did not eat at once. She rarely did. She nudged one core a small distance to the side with her nose, separating it from the other two, and then settled, paws folded, and waited.

Three cores before Ziggy. Three before Gizmo. The Uncledads fell silent in the way that only food could silence them, which was completely and instantly.

Three cores before Rocky. His coat caught the cast of the sun-bulb light as he leaned in, the deep brown tabby banding across his back, the pale cream of his chin and chest, the heavy half-Coon ruff that made him look broader and older than he was. He was a kitten still, but he was going to be enormous, and the promise of it was already in his paws.

And three, last of all, set up on the Command Platform before Khallie, who did not look at them, and did not look at the Great Mother, and looked instead into the middle distance where she kept the things she did not say.

The crew bent to the Offering.

Rocky did not.

He sat very still in front of his three cores and felt something move through him that had no name and no instruction attached to it. It was not hunger. Hunger he understood; hunger was simple and lived in the front of him, behind the ribs. This came from somewhere further back. It felt the way the floorboards felt just before the Bridge-Walker arrived, a pressure travelling up through the paws, a sense that something was about to be required of him.

He looked at his three cores. He counted them, in the way a kitten counts, which is not really counting but a kind of knowing. Three. The number sat wrong. It was not too few and it was not too many. It was simply not the number it was supposed to be, and the wrongness of it pulled at him like a frequency he could not stop hearing.

He left his cores where they were. He turned, and he scampered.

“Breach,” Ziggy said, lifting his head. “Nephewson off-station.”

Rocky crossed the rug at speed, low to the ground, and arrived at Gizmo’s allocation. With the quick precise economy of someone who had not decided to do this and could not have stopped doing it, he took one core in his mouth. He left the other two.

“Hey!” Gizmo said. “Hey. That is a violation. That is my allocation. Ziggy, he has breached my allocation!”

“I saw it.”

“Do something about it.”

“What would you have me do, Gizmo?”

Rocky carried the core a short distance and set it down on the bare floor at the edge of the rug, away from everyone, in the cold clear space near the foot of the Command Platform. He set it down with care. Then he turned and scampered back.

He arrived at Ziggy’s allocation. He took one core. He left the other two.

“And mine!” Ziggy exclaimed, with the wounded dignity of a cat who had been about to deliver a lecture on cosmic order and instead found himself a victim of it. “He has taken mine. There is no doctrine that permits this! There is no sequence that explains it.”

“You said everything was information,” Gizmo said. “Read it.”

“I am reading it. It does not make sense.”

“Then it is noise. You said so yourself. Roughly nine seconds ago.”

Rocky carried Ziggy’s core to the cold clear space and set it down beside the first. Two cores now, side by side, neat, on the bare floor away from the warmth.

He went a third time, to Klaudia.

Klaudia had not eaten. She had been waiting. The one core she had nudged aside at the very beginning sat slightly apart from the others, in the open, easy to reach, set down as if a place had been kept. Rocky took it. Klaudia did not move. She watched him lift it, and she made a low sound in her chest that was not a protest, and she let him go.

He carried the third core to the cold clear space and set it down beside the other two. Three cores in a row, on the bare floor, near the foot of the Command Platform, in the place where no one sat. A little orange dust came off them where he set them down, three small marks on the cold floor, one for each.

Then Rocky lay down beside them. He did not eat them. He arranged himself around them, paws tucked, the way a body curls to keep something warm, and he looked at the three cores he had gathered and could not have said why, and the not-knowing was the most peaceful thing he had felt all day.

“Well, he is not going to eat them,” Gizmo said, after a silence. “He has gone to all that trouble and he is not even going to eat them!”

“It is a cache,” Ziggy said, but his voice had lost its certainty, and he did not extend the theory.

“It is not a cache.”

From her place on the rug, Klaudia rose. She crossed to where Rocky lay curled around his three cores, and she lay down near him, not touching, keeping her own watch at a small respectful distance. She looked at the row of three for a long moment.

“He always knows the count,” she said quietly. It was not addressed to the Uncledads. It was barely addressed to anyone. “Even when he doesn’t know he knows it.”

Ziggy opened his mouth. Gizmo, who understood his brother completely and had spent a lifetime managing him, put one white-socked paw lightly on Ziggy’s and said nothing, and for once Ziggy took the instruction, and the two of them returned to their reduced allocations without further theory.

On the Command Platform, Khallie had not touched her three cores.

She watched the brown shape of her surviving kitten lying curled around an offering he had assembled by instinct, in the cold clear space, near the foot of the platform where she kept her watch, and she understood it the way old stars understand the dark, completely and without complaint. Three had not arrived. Three would never arrive. And here was the one who had, the loud improbable Boxing Day glitch, laying out a portion for each of them without the faintest idea that he was doing it, or for whom, or why the count had pulled at him until he made it right.

She did not explain this to anyone. There are forms of knowing that explanation only damages.

When Rocky had fallen asleep, which did not take long, his small sides rising and falling against the cores he had gathered and would not eat, Khallie rose from the Command Platform. She came down to the cold clear space, slow and steady and certain. She looked at the three cores in their careful row, each with its small mark of orange dust on the floor, and at the kitten asleep around them, and then she lowered her head and she lay down on the other side of the offering, so that the three were held between them, the one who had been kept and the one who had kept him.

She did not eat them either.

The Great Mother, gathering the empty Sacred Pouch, paused in the doorway and looked back at the cats lying in the dark at the edge of the rug, curled around a small row of food that neither of them would touch, and she did not understand what she was seeing, and she felt, without knowing why, that she should leave the light off as she went.