Lila is a brilliant but disturbed little girl who turns into a psychopath in the missing text. This was brought on by the fact that she was lonely, as the only child on the ship. She reprogrammed Bizmo to be her constant companion. With only a robot for a friend, her personality developed strangely.
Lila killed almost everyone on the ship, because they took her mother’s attention away from her. She did this by poisoning the food in the cafeteria where her mother worked — a few people at a time, thinking fewer mouths to feed would leave her mother more time to spend with her.
Captain Dan is an alien who would never be mistaken as a human being, with a soft chest susceptible to being ripped open by a child. Captain Dan and Lila’s mother were having an affair, and her jealousy of the attention she was losing to him drove her to kill him more directly than the others, by ripping his heart out. This leaves only Lila, her mother, and Bizmo alive at the end of the story, and Lila’s mother having to live for the rest of the trip with the knowledge that her daughter is a murderous psychopath, as a result of her neglect.
As the people died on board due to the poison, they were put “on ice” to be autopsied by an outside medical examiner when the ship finally arrives at its destination. At the end of the story, the ship consists of only two living humans — Lila, and her mother — and a bunch of cadavers on ice. Hence the title.
Copyright © 2003 by Dancer
