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for Radu to put
his arm around her, too, and so they walked, clasped together.
    “Real work,” Laenea said thoughtfully.
    “Yes… hard work, with hands or mind.” He
picked up the second possible branch of their previous conversation without
hesitation. “We do the work ourselves. Twilight is too new for machines
— they evolved here, and they aren’t as adaptable as people.”
    Laenea, who had endured unpleasant situations in which
machines did not perform as intended, understood what he meant. Methods older
than automation were more economical on new worlds where the machines had to be
designed from the beginning but people only had to learn. Evolution was as good
an analogy as any.
    “Crewing’s work. Maybe it doesn’t strain your
muscles, but it is work.”
    “One never gets tired. Physically or mentally. The job
has no challenges.”
    “Aren’t the risks enough for you?”
    “Not random risks,” he said. “It’s
like gambling.” His background made him a harsh judge, harshest with
himself.
    “It isn’t slave labor, you know. You could quit
and go home.”
    “I wanted to come —” He cut off the
protest. “I thought it would be different.”
    “I know,” Laenea said. “You think it will
always be exciting, but after a while all that’s left is a dull kind of
danger.”
    “I did want to visit other places. To be like —
in that I was selfish.”
    “Ahh, stop. Selfish? No one would do it
otherwise.”
    “Perhaps not. But I had a different vision. I
remembered…” Again he stopped himself in midsentence.
    “What?”
    He shook his head. “Nothing.” All his edges
hardened again. “We spend most of our time carrying trivial cargoes for
trivial reasons to trivial people.”
    “The trivial cargoes pay for the emergencies,”
Laenea said.
    “That isn’t true!” Radu said sharply,
then, in a more moderate tone, “The transit authority allows its
equipment to be used for emergencies, but they’re paid for it, never
doubt that.”
    “I suppose you’re right,” Laenea said.
“But that’s the way it’s always been.”
    “It isn’t right,” he said. “On
Twilight…” He went no further.
    “You’re drawn back,” Laenea said.
“More than anyone I’ve known before. It must be a comfort to love a
place so much.”
    At first he tensed, as if he were afraid she would mock or
chide him for weakness, or laugh at him. When, instead, she smiled, his wariness
decreased. “I feel better, after flights when I dream about home.”
    If Laenea had still been crew she would have envied him his
dreams.
    “Is it your family you miss?”
    “I have no family — I still miss them sometimes,
but they’re gone.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “You couldn’t know,” he said quickly,
almost too quickly, as though he might have hurt her rather than the other way
around. “The epidemic killed them.”
    Laenea tightened her arm around his shoulder in silent
comfort. She regretted her thoughtless question. She should have expected that
Radu had lost family and friends during Twilight’s plague.
    “I don’t know what it is about Twilight that
binds us all,” Radu said. “I suppose it must be the combination
— the challenge and the result. Everything is new. We try to touch the
world gently. So many things could go wrong.”
    He glanced at her, the blue of his eyes deep as a mountain
lake, his face solemn in its strength, asking without words a question Laenea
did not understand.
    They walked for a while in silence.
    The cold air entered Laenea’s lungs and spread through
her chest, her belly, arms, legs… she imagined that the machine was cold
metal, sucking the heat from her as it circled in its silent patterns. She was
tired.
    “What’s that?”
    She glanced up. They were near the midpoint of the
port’s edge, approaching lights that shone vaguely through the fog. The
amorphous pink glow resolved itself into separate globes and torches. Laenea
noticed a high metallic hum. Within two paces