Slowly the closeness faded. The sounds of the craft — the snuffling of the feeding Air-pigs, the soft whirr of the turbine axle, the slow hissing of the wood-lamps — seeped back into her awareness. Hork's bulk seemed separate from her once more, and she became aware of folds of cloth trapped uncomfortably between their bodies, of a stiffness in her back as her body leaned forward over his belly.

Gently she pushed him away. His penis fell out of her with a soft, warm sound.

He looked into her eyes, smiled — he looked as if he had been crying, she thought briefly, startled — and tucked his penis back into its cache. He hauled his coverall around the circumference of his stomach, and she reached for her discarded clothes.

"Well," she said at last. "Where did that come from?"

He drifted away from her and settled back into the small seat close to the control console; she saw how his sparkling coverall was noticeably less elegant now, crumpled and sitting askew on his shoulders. "Fear," he said simply. His composure was restored, she saw, but he wasn't bothering to restore his usual abrasive front. The atmosphere between them had changed; the tension which had pervaded the ship in the days since its launch had dissipated. "Fear. Obviously. I needed — comfort. I needed to lose myself. I don't know if that's enough of a reason; I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Absently she reached up and fed more leaf fragments into the pigs' hopper. "I wanted it too."

He ran his hands over the simple instruments before him. "I meant what I said, you know. For myself, I'd rather be here, running this ship, than anywhere in the Star. In Parz, the problems I have to deal with, day to day..." For a brief, empathetic moment she could imagine how it must be to be in a position like Hork's — with the welfare of not just himself, not just his family, but of thousands resting on his shoulders. She watched the set of his face and recalled the hint of weeping she thought she'd detected; briefly she felt she understood him. He said, "Nothing ever gets solved, you see. That's the trouble. Or if it does, the next day it is worse. At least here..." He grasped the simple controls. "At least here, I am doing something. Going somewhere!"

"Yes, but doing what? Going where?"

He looked up at her. "You know there's no reply to that. We're seeking help, from whatever came out of the Core once before to destroy us."

"And how are we supposed to find it?"

"You sound like the Finance sub-Committee," he said sourly. "All we can do is put ourselves into a position where they can find us... whoever they are."