"Get up!" shouts a voice. The voice is a young female voice accompanied by a heavy Indian accent. "Get up! You are a ferrywoman now!"
The man, who has sat up by now, crashes back down. His ears are ringing, and he is visibly confused. After the ringing and confusion fade, he realizes that he is, in fact, not dead. He is sitting on the floor in a large black room, and a small woman is standing in front of him. She appears to be wearing some sort of formal business attire, but her incredibly tiny body and face are covered in a massive sheer veil.
A small necklace shaped like a crescent moon is sticking out of the veil, but she is careful to keep it hidden from view. The man decides not to ask about it, but determines that she is certainly the one responsible for his plight. He has no explanation for the ringing, and she does not volunteer one. Instead, she explains that she is the Ferrywoman and that he was meant to be in her service. She is impressed by fit, though almost child-like, appearance. After the traditional hiring procedure, the man accepts her offer, and she helps him across.
He finds himself on the other side immediately, plopped down on a bench. The woman jots a few words down on a piece of paper, and then hurries off. The ferryman, named Chakraborti, takes pity on the stranger, and serves up a few items from the vending machine. He tells the stranger that he must disembark; the ferryman has some passengers to ferry across. To his surprise, the stranger can hear Chakraborti perfectly well; he is not sitting in a surreal dreamlike void.
The stranger, Harlen Brill, gradually recalls his recent circumstances. He had been shot out of the sky, and was pulled out of the wreckage and interrogated by what he guesses was an enemy military. After a time, he was zipped into a cryo-bag and frozen, only to be rescued a few weeks later by an unknown hand. Having little idea of where he is, Harlen proceeds to explore the boat.
The boat turns out to be a medium-sized passenger ship, with a number of private rooms and a number of cargo holds toward the back. He doesn't meet any friendly faces, but does not meet any unfriendly ones either. The only other person he happens to see is a mysterious, hooded figure with a yellow triangle on the top of its head, laying face-down on the deck.
It is the ferrywoman (Harlen had later learned that was technically a ferryman), and she is not been doing well in her new job. The ferryman Chakraborti spends most of his time ferrying souls, and has very little time to help her with what she came here to do. She is dependent on him, because she is very inexperienced in her work. And, indeed, her inexperience leads her to make a number of mistakes.
Harlen eventually learns that the ferryman needs the ferrywoman to help negotiate land rights with the authorities on Earth. The boat was flying without permission over a restricted region of the United States, and if no one owned the boat, the international police would seize it. No one really knew who owned it. The boat is gaining a reputation as very unlucky, because its previous owners lost it in mysterious circumstances.
Harlen refuses to carry out ferrywoman's tasks without her permission, so she reluctantly agrees. She is not very functional at first, because she is picky and combative. She keeps harping on a series of conflicting instructions, which Harlen is forced to take literally.
