The vehicle doctrine is the load-bearing idea, and it is also the one that makes the ending legible without making it inevitable. If the body is a container issued for a term, then gender, hunger, family attachment and sexual desire are all properties of equipment rather than of the person, and the discipline of the class is aimed squarely at that identification. It produced a group with an unusually flat internal life: no romance, no factions built on kinship, no property to argue about. It also meant that when the craft was said to be arriving, the argument for leaving the vehicle behind had already been made and accepted for twenty-two years.