The Eavesdropper recalls her time spent as a mother as she travels through space, carried by a sentient spaceship that also contains many other sleeping humans. As she views the dreams of a comatose man, she is reminded of humans' conflict with aliens; the Eavesdropper stands out from other people in that she has had a personal encounter with this foreign species, but she struggles to remember it. She fears for her son, who is not in the spaceship. When she views a primitive human spacecraft on the horizon, she travels out in a floating pod to engage with it and see if her son is onboard. She approaches a human man who flies out to greet her and realizes that she is part alien. Her body is a hybrid of alien and human, distorted and monstrous.