She is brought back babbling into the Argonos . Bartolomeo returns to the alien ship, and finds another torture chamber, even larger than the one on Antioch. That may be the burden of Ship of Fools , too. None of the SF puzzles it poses are solved. None of the failures in communication that cripple its cast are redeemed by more than a few firefly flickers of consanguinity, before fading into entropy and melancholia and chill.
Disasters mount, but the cast is paralyzed.
The Argonos , with a rump crew aboard, disappears into an interstellar hole, leaving behind in shuttles Bartolomeo and a few thousand fellow humans, all as desperate as he is, with nowhere to go but Antioch, which may be a very bad destination. Russo may have despaired of this novel, for the melancholia which suffuses it sometimes spills right off the page. So he may have had no choice but despair. Now you bite it, too. John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction.