Despite his age, brilliance and genius, Leovinus was not always a sensible individual. He had passions. Passions that would rise up the inside of his being and take over his magnificent brain like cholera taking over a city. And not all these passions revolved around cub reporters. At present his one over- riding passion was the Starship. That magnificent creation. That crowning glory of his life's work.

Ever since his recent accident, Leovinus had been reluctant to go abroad, partly because his joints had stiffened up somewhat and partly because he didn't want to be seen without his eyebrows. Leovinus was not without personal vanity. He had therefore got into the habit of supervising the construction of his Starship by virtual reality and telepresence - both brought to such a pitch of perfection by Blerontinian scientists that it was sometimes hard to remember which was the real thing - particularly if you were getting on a bit and your mind was on cleavages.

For that is what Leovinus's mind had been preoccupied with for many months now - but not the cleavages of the young cub reporters. No. Leovinus's obsession was the cleavage of data-streams as they separated out into random thought fields; the cleavage of neuroconnectors as they bifurcated into the memory bank and the sensation retrieval system, the cleavage of separators and trans-joiners linking and distinguishing those two vital processes: thought and feeling. His obsession was the heart of his Starship. He called her Titania.

Titania was the heart, the mind, the spirit, the soul of the ship.

A massive cyber-intelligence system was required to run the ship, of course, but, as we now know, intelligence devoid of emotion is non-functional. However smart a robot or computer may be, it can only do exactly what you tell it to do and then stop. To keep thinking, it has to want to. It has to be motivated. You can't think if you can't feel. So the ship's intelligence had to be imbued with emotions, with personality. And its name was Titania.