On Talyn she sleeps beneath a window.  And John once told her how stars and planets run across her face as they move.  She likes to think of herself that way.

"What do you dream about?" he'd asked, once, and leaned back as though to get a clear view of her.

"Sebaceans don't dream," she'd answered.  Though she realizes, now, it's more training than truth. (she is weary with finding that.)  And sometimes she closes her eyes and never wants to open them.

If she were human, she thinks, she would be accustomed to this.

She is woken (this time) by rapidly escalating light which filters red through her eyelids.  She's learned to open her eyes carefully, allow them to adjust, and when she has she raises her body on her arms and breathes against the silvered glass.  John shifts under the covers beside her.

There'd been a time when she'd have woken John reflexively for anything of these proportions, of this incalculable beauty.  But this is a spiral galaxy, a giant, the nucleus a cluster of stars and planets, radial arms stretching to finger the limits of visible space.  And she has seen almost identical images of the part of space he considers home.  She rubs her eyes and looks from nebulae and star clusters to him.  She frowns, decides.

"John?"  She places a hand on his shoulder through the covers and smiles involuntarily at his muffled grumbling.

"What is it?" he manages.  Then, as his head appears, "frell, it's bright out there."

"Galaxy," she says, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the glow.

"A spiral.  It's like-"  He is transparent and sleepy.

"It's like your Milky Way," she says.

He leans over her to peer through the window, calculating, tilts his head against the window to search the sky for nearby galaxies.  She watches him though there is no chance Earth is amongst the billions of stars and planets laid out before them.  She breathes carefully so as not to fog the glass.

Minutes later, "it's not mine," he says.

"No."

After a moment, "the Earth's solar system would be here, in the outer region of the-" his voice is broken. He traces a circle on the glass and the circle holds there, dark against the ever brightening sky.  She nods.

"You'll find your way there," she says at last, because this is what love is.

"I will."

He nods, at length, and starts to sing under his breath. "I think my spaceship knows which way to go."  She watches his lips and (as always) it looks like he's being dubbed.  As always, the words he mouths are nothing like those she hears.  As always she is alien.   Stars and planets skim across her face while she sleeps.

When he dreams, he dreams of going home.

"What do you dream of?"

"I dream of space, distance, inestimable distances, I dream of freedom."  None of it is true.  She closes her eyes and she dreams of this.