This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. Star Dragon by Mike Brotherton Part One: Five-hundred-year Mission Chapter 1 A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. -- Chinese proverb Unlike most first-time visitors entering the world headquarters of Biolathe, Inc., Dr. Samuel Fisher didn't pause at the moist cloying air that moved across the building’s threshold like breath. If anything, his pace increased; he threw his shoulders forward and his streaker-clad feet rushed as if to prevent a fall, sinking into the plush rose ruglings with each step. Unlike the sunlit diamond and gold, seemingly mandatory in corporate buildings, this lobby throbbed pink and organic. The entire building was alive. Despite the omnipresence of biotechnology, walking inside it rather than sitting on it still made most hesitate. Not Fisher -- he was in the middle of five major projects. He didn't believe his life would be as transformed by the upcoming presentation as the Biolathe agent had hinted. He charged ahead, glancing about the nearly empty lobby for signs to guide him. What was this? He’d been here six seconds already! There was never enough time to waste any of it. He decided there was one thing he would hesitate over in the future: being talked into a physical meeting. In the middle of the cavernous chamber Fisher stopped abruptly, brought up short by a bipedal mobile with wrinkled gray skin attached to the wall by a pulsing umbilical. Fisher said, "Excuse me." "No excuses needed, Dr. Fisher." The biped had no openings, no visible external sensory organs, and nothing at all resembling a head. Raw biomass, quickly shaped, without even a mouth. The words emanated from the ceiling, its surface a taut drum able to focus sound anywhere. The entire building was alive. "I am a mobile of our brain, here to escort you to your meeting." "Fine. Lead on." The mobile moved toward the rear of the lobby toward a tunnel, reversing its motion without turning around. No one-way joints, Fisher noticed, a more versatile design than most. The umbilical showed no slack, but grew or tightened as the distance to the malleable wall varied. Fisher followed, buoyed up and forward by the plum-colored ruglings underfoot in the same direction as his steps. More good design in the carpeting, he noted. A lot of rugling lines didn't do anything but let themselves get walked on. "Coffee?" asked the beamed voice. "Please." Without breaking stride, the mobile pushed an arm back out of the formless trunk. The end of the appendage coalesced into a round shape that darkened, grew shimmery hard, then rolled down into a groove that formed before it. Fisher caught the bulb and lifted it to his lips as they walked. The bulb opened into a bony, ceramic cup. He drank, grimacing, as they entered a circular hallway. Instant. Ah, well, not great but his usual. He efficiently drained the bulb. "In here, please." The mobile gestured with the coffee-delivering appendage, which then receded and melted back into its body. Fisher stepped past the mobile into a circular room lit with blue-green tinged bioluminescence that made him feel as if he were underwater. A ring of five chairbeasts surrounded a picture tank squatting at the room’s focus. People sat in the chairbeasts, two women and two men. One of the women rose as he approached the vacant chairbeast. She was as tall as Fisher, just shy of two meters, and her white uniform showed no creases from sitting, although the crisp material appeared to be neither high-tech like his own duradenim nor alive like Rhynoskin. Her short blonde hair was similarly crisp, as perfect as a helmet. She offered a long-boned hand to shake. "Captain Lena Fang, corporate fleet," she said, words clipped, gripping firmly with rough fingers. Her almond-shaped eyes bore steadily ahead. "Fisher," he replied, his eyes sliding past her gaze onto her thin, fluted lips, which reminded him of a recurve bow. A vivid image sprang into his mind: barbed orders flying from her mouth like arrows. He wondered if her striking appearance resulted from bodmods, or, as suggested by her name, the unusual ethnic mixing that often occurred on colony worlds. The cause didn't much matter; she was striking. "Sam Fisher." "Fisher. Right. This is Henderson, biosystems," she said, nodding toward a bulky, classically handsome man with a big cleft chin who gripped the lapels of his stylish green-scale coat, "Devereaux, physical sciences," a brown woman with curves, dreads, and fleshy lips who sat as serenely as Buddha, "and Stearn, our Jack of All Trades," a purple-colored man with a faddish wasp waist who flapped his ear wings at hearing his name. "My crew. But we still need an exobiology specialist with your track record for creative thought." "Is that what this is about, Biolathe?" Fisher said, letting irritation seep into his voice. "I told you I have a long-term contract with Whimsey. Why didn’t you tell me you wanted someone to go out-system?" The voice of the Biolathe brain came warm and resonant from the ceiling, focused on Fisher. "We didn’t want to bias you against our venture. We believe you'll be interested. Please, if you would, be seated for our presentation." In his century of life, Fisher had been outside the solar system on three expeditions. Relativity made it a total of seventy years of Earth time lost in the process. He'd danced with star wisps while the radiation of Sirius B tanned his face, floated in the powerful tug of more than one gas giant chasing balloonoids, and swum with the stellated molluskites of Apollonia. After those wonders, nothing he could think of would be enticing enough to make him endure the culture shocks of returning to the rapidly changing Earth. Biolathe had to anticipate his hesitation. Corporate brains were smart, and this one had certainly done its research before contacting him. The proposal had to be good. "Okay." The vacant chairbeast scuttled into optimal position as he sat. The superlative biotech in the rest of the building suggested that he guard himself against getting too comfortable in the chairbeast. It usually took a chairbeast a few days to grow into an owner's shape and preferences for temperature and vibration, but Fisher didn't want to risk even a fraction of that level of relaxation. He held himself upright on the beast and intended to bolt the moment he could dismiss Biolathe's pitch. The bioluminescence faded. Twin glows kindled within the picture tank: a ruddy, distended blob floated in space feeding a brighter swirling disk of plasma that brightened to a burning pin-prick of hell at its core. The blob was stretched out toward the disk into a teardrop, and the tip of that teardrop was pulled like taffy around the differentially spinning whirlpool of fire. Fisher realize he was looking at a binary star system locked in a gravitational dance. The larger but fainter blob was the secondary star, a relatively normal star like the sun despite the way its dance partner had twisted it. That pinprick, that was the deceptively diminutive primary star -- a white dwarf the size of Earth and the mass of the sun, formed of condensed degenerate matter. This had to be a late stage in the pair's evolution, the primary having already shucked the husk of its outer envelope, no longer burning hydrogen and essentially dead as stars go. Not exactly dead, Fisher surmised. More undead than dead. It burned on still as it stole fuel from its younger, bloated mate. He imagined a starving space vampire at the center of that swirling disk, sucking down a giant teardrop of blood that was the universe itself gashed open. "The classic dwarf nova system, SS Cygni," announced the brain as the stars orbited in the tank. Fisher wiggled on his chairbeast, refusing to lean back into the creature despite the minor aches in a back he was always too busy to get redesigned. The physical irritation faded with stone-still incredulity as his encyclopedic database inserted the basic characteristics of SS Cygni into his awareness. The distance couldn't be correct. "Two hundred and forty-five light years? You’re joking!" "We don't joke," reassured the voice in a flat tone that was not at all reassuring. "Please allow us to continue. The data you are watching came from a Prospector-class deep space probe launched in the late twenty-first century. We acquired proprietary rights from a subsidiary who realized our likely interest. Instrumentation on the tiny probe was primitive, but proximity more than compensates." Fisher did the math. The fastest human-supporting ships would only take months of onboard time to reach SS Cygni, but the special relativity that made such a trip possible also cursed it. Five hundred years would pass on Earth. There was no way around it. Two hundred forty-five years times two for a round trip time estimate, and the fact that the probe had been launched five hundred years ago drove home those laws of physics. Would a corporation really make a five-hundred-year investment? Who would go on such a trip? Many people, he realized, but certainly not him. It would be like suiciding to gamble on an afterlife. A one-way trip into an unknown future with no guarantees about anything. People might not even exist when they returned, or at least not in a form he would recognize. "Magnifying," announced the brain. The image in the tank ballooned, centered just off the hot spot where the secondary star’s accretion stream splashed into the disk. Accretion disk, his database labeled it, the way station for gas sucked off the secondary before it shed enough angular momentum to reach the blazing dwarf. Spiral waves of fire churned across the surface of the flared disk, and magnetic instabilities erupted like planet-sized sunspots as they came into focus on the whirlpool of plasma. Something moved there that was not plasma. Fisher leaned toward the tank. The image grew larger. A serpentine form, a sharp dark green against the blaze, rolled in a spiral along the edge of one of the magnetic eruptions, lazily twisting under great arcs of violet lightning. Then it turned in a manner that suggested intention. It was alive. Fisher dug into his breast pocket absent-mindedly, his unwavering gaze fixed on this amazing thing, and pulled out an ampoule of Forget-Me-Not. He popped the top and snorted the pink powder. He would chemically etch every detail into his mind. "We are calling it a star dragon." Of course they were. The dragon continued to spiral up the flux tube, moving in what appeared slow motion. The resolution showed little more than form and color (and surely pseudo-color to cover an extended spectrum at that). There was no real texture or sharp features. It appeared as if one end might be akin to a head, but no sensory apparatus were visible. The slow motion . . . "What’s the scale?" "A little more than a kilometer from end to end," a coarse, sultry female voice answered. Devereaux he presumed, but Fisher didn't spare a glance to confirm. The brain said, "We believe it is deriving its energy from magnetically confined fusion rather than simply being a photovore. A biological fusion reactor, with a biosystem capable of exploiting it, could provide the means for engineering on a stellar scale. Securing this technology is worth a modest long-term investment." Fisher caressed the twisting dragon with his gaze. It was a thing that had no right to exist, an impossibility floating there before him. "It's magnificent." "It would be the ultimate trophy," came Fang's voice, an icy dagger slicing through the firelight. Fisher did break his gaze now and regarded the captain. She looked exactly as before, from the shiny helmet of her hair to the pursed bow-lips, but the intensity with which she watched the dragon startled Fisher. He was always surprised when he came across passion matching his own. These thoughts all in a heartbeat, then he was staring at the tank again. "How much data do you have?" Fisher asked. Devereaux answered, "On the binary, pretty near everything. On the dragon, just this video of four and a half minutes, from the near-infrared to soft X-rays, at very low spectral resolution. Those old probes weren’t very capable." Capable enough to discover such a marvel. In the tank, lightning arcs surrounding the dragon like a nimbus flashed, and the creature rolled into a vortex of turbulence, vanishing into the disk’s photosphere. No trace in the frothing plasma of the lake of fire marked its passage. "Play it again," Fisher said, welcoming the old hunger rising within him, unable to resist its siren’s call. The Forget-Me-Not would kick in soon, but he wanted the dragon now. Responding to his request, the image within the tank shimmered and looped back. The brain said, "We are sending a ship to SS Cygni, newly christened the Karamojo and specially equipped for this extreme environment, under Captain Fang's command. Our forecasts suggest the presence of someone with your background would increase the chances for success for the mission: study the dragon, learn its biotechnology, and if possible, return with a specimen." In his gut, Fisher wanted to go, needed to go. But everything had happened so fast. There was much to consider. This was a thing that just a few minutes ago seemed impossible. "I assume you have a detailed offer prepared." "Of course. We will squirt it to you, along with a timed data worm to protect our proprietary information. You have a week to respond. On a negative response, all information on the dragon will be erased. Do you accept these terms?" Erase his dragon? The worm would nest in his biochip along with the proposal and would affect his memory of this meeting -- even with the Forget-Me-Not -- using the same circuits and glands that the chip used to insert data. Such a data worm constituted standard operating procedure, but sweat broke on his brow. After all of his studies of alien parasites, he didn't like the notion of a foreign agent in his brain adjusting his memories, despite their excellent safety record. But what choice did he have? He had to learn more. "I agree to the terms." "If you accept our proposal, the voyage will require about three years of your subjective time. Assuming no catastrophes or other changes that might derail human civilization too extensively in the next half millennium, you will be quite wealthy when you return to -- and we anticipate playing a significant role in this -- Earth’s glorious future." Fisher ignored the corporate hyperbole. The dragon mesmerized him. Tell me your secrets, Fisher thought. How can you be? He was going to go. He knew it. He could do it. His primary thread of research concerned Cetan mollusk shell structures and was not exactly hot stuff. The previous interstellar trips had made him accustomed to an unsettled social life without long-term permanence, losing track of more family and friends each time. Nothing held him here. He was going to meet this creature on its home turf and look it in the eye, and then return to a new world. Maybe it would even be a glorious world. His stale tired universe shattered further with each passing second, and this magnificent dragon building a new celestial edifice from its shards. Gods, a real dragon . . . Someone blocked his view. The captain, Fang. Irritated, Fisher looked up at her, but said nothing in the face of her imposing glare. After a moment of silence, Fang said, "Biolathe may think you’re up to snuff, Dr. Fisher, but I like to take the measure of a man before welcoming him on board and trusting him on my ship." "Call me Sam," Fisher replied, suddenly realizing he found her more than a little attractive. That was good. Not necessary, but good. "I can do anything I have to," Fisher replied. "Anything, hmm?" A tiny smile lifted one corner of Fang's mouth. "But can you box?" # The taxi’s bubble parted for Captain Lena Fang, flooding the vehicle’s interior with warm air and cirrus-filtered sunlight. Her skin automatically darkened as she stepped outside, took a deep breath, and allowed the environment to seep into her pores. The beach awaited. Hapuna was not the best beach in the Hawaiian Islands, nor the least crowded, but she liked its soft white sands just fine, and the ocean waves granted all beaches timelessness, which was what she truly craved. Time moved more slowly on Hawaii’s Big Island than many places elsewhere on this old, overly civilized world. Pushing light speed the way she did, time moved more slowly for her, too. She sometimes felt like an island in a sea of time. Hapuna Beach was a good place, and she always visited it when on Earth. She slipped her flip-flops off when she hit the foamy waterline. She bent slowly to pick them up, stretching the backs of her calves and thighs, then turned right to walk north along the beach. Although she now wore a swimsuit as her uniform, she didn't care to swim. She hadn't for a long time. Fang altered her leisurely pace to dodge jet-black children who flexed their bodies flat and surfed the low waves onto shore. One girl had large, saucer-shaped feet and wriggled her hips as she danced in, giggling; her hair stuck out in two very long spikes, probably helping her balance on the ungainly bodmod. Finally, away from the noisier families, Fang tossed down her towel, then herself. When relaxing, she believed in keeping things simple. She lay back, her arms thrown out and palms down. She shivered as the sun pushed her into the sand. Communing with the mother planet she would leave again soon, she slept. She dreamt of the tall, intense exobiologist who dressed in black and had told her he could box the ears off the stars themselves if only they had ears to box, and then there were antenna dishes on all the stars listening to the noisy children playing giddily on the shores of the Milky Way, and the stars sent a nasty, scolding beep beep beep to grab their attention . . . "Daughter, are you there?" Fang blinked awake in the late afternoon sun, grimaced, and tossed an arm over her eyes to block the glare. No second-lid lizard-eye mods on her body, just the standard retinal cell clock/phone. The purple after-image shrank, brightened, and resolved into a familiar face, with twinkling brown eyes set in a ruddy complexion chiseled with old-fashioned wrinkles, a bristling white beard, and thin hair over a weathered scalp. Fang had kept the personality overlay of the ship’s brain from her first captaincy, a cantankerous piece of work modeled after the twentieth-century writer Hemingway, and had already installed him on the Karamojo. She would have preferred a wise Confucius, but that hadn't been available when she'd first gotten him, and he had grown to become part of her. "I’m here, Papa," she said. "Well, good." The image receded a bit, and Fang saw that Papa wore his leather hunting vest and khaki pants. He was ready for action. "Had to cuff a few of these crummy fellows the company has working up here, but things are looking shipshape. What about Earthside? Catch any big fish?" "Yes, I think so." She decided not to actually talk about real fish, although Papa would have reminisced fondly about all the whoppers he'd been programmed to remember. She’d grown up fishing on Fathom with her Chinese grandfather who had told her that her bat-shaped lips brought him luck. While she no longer cared for swimming, she still enjoyed fishing. "I’m sure we’ve hooked the exobiologist we wanted, Samuel Fisher." "Ah, Fisher, good name. So, is he rugged enough for the job?" Fang grinned and bent her head back. "I wouldn’t call him rugged exactly, but he’s got the credentials, and he’s one confident son of a bitch." "Good! Like him already. Do you like him, daughter?" "He’s cute. I --" she began, thinking of the short curls on top of his head and the way he focused so entirely on a thing he became lost in it. On the other hand, he was too skinny, and he gesticulated too much. But his hands were big, with nimble fingers, the kind that could hold a woman and make her feel sexy and safe at the same time. "I think I like him." "Will you grow out your hair for him?" "Papa!" He was always going on about her hair or some such nonsense, and every once in while, like now when she was on vacation with her guard down, he almost sucked her into his games. There would be no time for games when they reached SS Cygni. She’d have to be hard, not soft like the warm sand between her toes now, sand that got walked all over. They had a dragon to bag. "Now, if you’ve got time to irritate me on my vacation, it sounds like you’re ready for an inspection." She checked her eye clock. "I’ll be boarding in three hours." "Damn it then, got to start chewing out these fellows up here. Papa out." Fang rose and stretched in the low sun. That nearby star, reflecting off the water to the west, was threatening the beach with a toasty, golden sunset. She started back down the beach, and called for a taxi to the airport. Her biochip acknowledged the cab's response and fed her an itinerary for her return. A suborbital would get her to Tanzania on time to make a convenient connection to low Earth orbit. Just as she finished leaving her request with the dispatch program, a Frisbee landed at her feet. Fang smiled. So much had changed about the external trappings of humanity since she’d been born -- she tried to remember her personal age rather than her Earth-frame age -- but the internal was much the same: the desire for children to play, for instance. Fang squatted to recover the Frisbee, thinking she’d throw it back. As her hand neared the disk, it leapt away, kicking up sand. She heard a boy snickering. Looking up, she spotted him, reeling in the toy. But something wasn’t right. Fang squinted, increasing her visual magnification. A thin filament connected the disk to the boy’s arm. It was part of his body. A woman, the boy’s mother she guessed, told him to stop bothering people and resumed fanning herself with her giant pink feathery fingers. A cloud crossed in front of the sun, dulling the late golden afternoon, and Fang suddenly felt chilled. This wasn’t her world, and these weren’t her people. Maybe they could have been a long time ago -- she wanted to believe that she was capable of belonging, at least at some point in Earth's history. She wanted to tackle something more tangible, more conquerable, than time. Fang jogged to meet her taxi. # Fisher stood at an observation window of the Ngorongoro space port, gazing along the rail launcher that punched under the Serengeti, toward the low eastern sky where only the upper part of Kilimanjaro was visible, floating like an island above the sea of atmospheric haze that hid its roots. Every minute a rider blasted under the fat black-maned lions sleeping on the surface, erupting from the tube off the mountain. A nearly invisible laser array completed sending the vehicles into low Earth orbit, providing the energy to release the propellants and making final trajectory adjustments. But he was not looking at Kilimanjaro or the flashes of exploding fuel. Riding the Forget-Me-Not he was looking in his mind's eye at the star dragon, spiraling along magnetic flux tubes, over and over again. "Sam!" A female voice knocked him out of his meditation. Fisher blinked, turned, and bit back a curse. Through the crowd charged a petite woman of Japanese ancestry, with high cheek bones and shiny, jet hair that reflected the sun streaming through the port’s skylights. Atsuko Suga, his ex-wife. There would be no clean escape. "How did you --?" Fisher began. Atsuko reached him and immediately pounded his chest with her tiny fists. "How could you? Oh Sam, how could you?" And just like that she stopped hitting him and fell against him, her thin arms wrapping around him in a stifling grip. Then he had it. "You must have tried to call me, and gotten my disconnect message. Yes, of course." "You were going to leave for five hundred years," she said into his armpit, "and not even say good-bye?" He gave in and returned the hug. "I was busy. There are a lot of things to set in order before a long trip, you know?" Mostly he had left those for the last second; instead he'd spent his time thinking about the dragon, making sure he had all the software and data for his modeling installed on the Karamojo. But he had learned not to tell her everything long ago. Atsuko pushed back from him and looked up into his eyes. "One of those things you ‘set in order’ is seeing me, Samuel Stanley Fisher." He started to shrug and nod his head, but recalled how she hated that. He said, "I’m sorry. I should have let you know right away." That would be the right thing to say to her, but he needed to do a little more. He lifted his hand to her head, twisting a lock of her hair around his finger. Fine and straight, the coil unraveled almost immediately. Not at all dragonlike. "Damn straight," she said. "That was always the problem with you. No matter how well I thought I had trained you, you always wandered off and forgot everything every time you found a new toy. Is that what this is? Another new toy?" Irritated at her comment about training him, he said, "I wish you wouldn't refer to my projects in such a childish manner. My work is important, it’s -- But I'm really not supposed to say." "I understand. It doesn't matter. I'm sure it's something absolutely fascinating." Fisher ground his teeth together. He almost told her that the problem with her was how she always trivialized his work, but he'd acquired some tact from the years they'd spent together. No reason to make this parting a bad one. He could play politics when he had to -- an effective scientist had to learn that to acquire the necessary resources. His former employer, Whimsey World, was an entertainment company that had paid him for consultation on their ‘Alien Vistas’ exhibit. He had managed to plow their money into not only the attractions they desired, but real research as well. He could play relationship politics, too. "It is fascinating," he said simply. Atsuko sighed. "Try not to forget about people this time." He wasn't really sure what she was getting at. This trip was about dragons, not people. But he couldn't tell her that, and she seemed to expect some kind of response. "Look, there's no reason you won't still be around when I get back. . . ." There wasn't, in principle, although no one had yet made past their five hundreth birthday. It was just a matter of time -- state-of-the-art biotech was good. But he sensed that this was not what Atsuko wanted to hear right now. What would extricate him from this bit of awkwardness? He let the problem steal some precious attention, and dug for an answer honest enough to satisfy her. After a moment he said, "I’ll miss you." "And I, you. You are not the easiest man to love, but I have loved you. Good-bye, Sam." He held her until his launch was called, thinking of the dragon swimming in its disk of fire. Chapter 2 The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men. -- Alice Walker Nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created solely and exclusively for the use of man. -- Thomas Love Peacock The exchange between the two artificial brains took a few seconds of modulated, encrypted laser light. Papa recast the data stream into a form more palatable to the organic portions of his brain and his human template personality: Papa strides into the Floridita, his public headquarters on Earth, stopping to embrace a favorite waiter whom he has not seen in some time. Inside, away from the Cuban heat, it is cool and he does not mind the embrace. He then shambles to meet the tall man waiting in his corner. He spares a moment to glance at the bronze bust the man stands beside and towers over, a bust of Papa himself with his chin up, looking outward, challenging the world. "Hello, Papa," Biolathe says. "How are you?" "We're strong today." "That's good." The waiter comes and Papa orders two Papa Dobles. A Negro band begins to play a song they have written for him, called Soy Como Soy -- "I am as I am." It is about a lesbian who apologizes to Papa that she cannot be what he desires her to be. The man with the maracas shakes them at the right places and several wrong ones, too. The song is bittersweet to the "man" Papa is now, for he isn't what he would desire himself to be and could not take advantage of the lesbian should he now inspire the desired change. He could simulate it, as he is doing now, but it would not be the same. Not at all. "You know the mission," Biolathe says. His head is pink and fleshy, but with the flat-top of Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster. He hands Papa a folder. "Now know the crew as well." Papa leafs through the papers a hundred times. He says, "I see." "I know. A motley bunch, children of a soft, over-privileged age. Dilettantes, hedonists, even a neo-Skinnerian. Give people the power to be anything they want to be,” he pauses for effect, "and they will use it. "Don't get me wrong -- they're all competent -- we wouldn't send anyone who wasn't. But uncertain five-hundred-year trips don't attract the most balanced personnel." "We'll come through." "How do you know?" "This isn't the kind of trip you take to fail, balanced or not. And we know Lena, don't we?" "Do we? This isn't a cattle drive." Two large daiquiris arrive, and they drink them standing up, the way Papa writes. The drinks are icy and strong and taste of grapefruit. "This is an unusual expedition, Papa. An unknown animal with unknown capabilities in a hazardous environment. An unpredictable payoff. We're making an appropriately sized investment. We will not send another ship. You'll be alone." "Been there before. We'll manage." "I know your capabilities, Papa. But you may not be able to do it alone." "That's fine. If we have to, we'll make them do it. We'll find a way to do what must be done." He means what he says and does not think it right to speak of such things out loud. Even though there is five-sixths of his daiquiri left, Biolathe drains it through a straw in seconds. Biolathe will not get a headache. "Well then, I wish you a good trip. Bring back something useful. Even better, something profitable." "We will." Biolathe pauses at the door before stepping back into the heat. "See you in a half millenia." Papa nods and the big, flat-headed man vanishes into the sunlight. A great expedition indeed. He needs to get ready. Papa finishes his daiquiri, then takes advantage of the Floridita's john. It is a good old-fashioned john with a proper chain to pull, and he prefers it to the beasts people currently use in their bathrooms. He takes a moment to spar with the Negro attendant. The man blocks a left jab, chuckling. "When you gonna grow old, Papa?" Papa grins, and takes another jab. "Never." As far as he's come, there is much further to go. # Phil Stearn loved freefall. He loved the way it made his stomach turn back flips, the way it made foods taste funny, but most of all he loved the way his ear wings -- purely ornamental on Earth -- permitted him to fly. Not like a bird. More like an elephant. But he could get around. Flapping around in the passenger cabin of the orbit-to-orbit shuttle taking them toward a rendezvous with the Karamojo, Stearn told Fisher, "You really ought to try some more radical bodmods. I just don't understand why people like you stick with the basic model. What do you have against them?" "Hmm?" said Fisher, who had been gazing out a view port in an absent-minded way. "Oh, I don’t have anything against bodmods, per se. I’m just too busy to think about it." Ha! Too busy to think? That’s all this guy did! "Takes no time at all these days. You’re limited only by your imagination." "Yes, I can see how that would be a problem." Stearn laughed. "That’s why I’m going, see?" "Why you’re going? I don’t follow." The shuttle hold was absolutely boring, except for the freefall. Stearn tried to start some sideways rotation, but his wings were too synchronized. It was like trying to wiggle just one ear. Exactly like that. He stopped trying so he could answer Fisher as he glided past. "Imagination is limited by the time and culture you’re born into and raised in. Can’t help it, see? For instance, we can imagine things the ancient Americans couldn’t, like going for brunch on Mars just because rain is scheduled for Tucson. You follow? In five-hundred years, people will imagine things we can’t. I mean, I think we have it pretty good now, but once we got diseases and aging licked, everyone’s thought they’ve had it pretty good. But really it’s just gotten better and better. The games, the stims, the sex, the bodmods. And it’ll be better still in the future. I want to check it out and I don't want to wait." "I see," said Fisher. "Okay," Stearn said, winging himself a bit closer to the port. "Why you going?" "To look a star dragon eye to eye. To find out if it even has an eye, for that matter," Fisher answered evenly and without hesitation. Boring. "It’s just another weird alien critter, in a universe of weird alien critters. It isn’t going to be smart like us. No aliens have been so far. So what’s the point?" Fisher shrugged. "Look there. I see the ship." Outside the port the ship hung in space, a silvery-white whale of a ship. Blazing silvery white, with an almost perfect albedo that reflected all incoming radiation. Stearn thought it looked big, even though sizes were difficult to judge in orbit. He’d done plenty of training for his position as ship’s Jack of All Trades, human back-up for the occasions when the ship's automatic systems couldn’t get at something, but all his shipboard time had been on tiny scooters on in-system runs, and a few tours on short-haul freighters. Nothing at all like this ship and its state-of-the-art biosystems. Stearn always made a point of having fun, and although he rarely admitted it to his club-hopping buddies, high-tech spaceships were a lot of fun. He had fun studying them, working on them, and he hadn't gotten this berth by chance. This ship was just plain cool. The front section of the Karamojo was an enormous torus, five kilometers in diameter, which would house the normal matter singularity, a black hole with more than a billionth the mass of Earth. Wasn't that just huge? The aft singularity, the white hole, would be housed in the tapered end, a smaller torus, some five kilometers behind. The net creation energy of the pair was barely above zero. Once created, separated, and aligned in the "Push Me Pull You" configuration, off they would shoot at 10g, starting a galaxy-spanning chase. The ship would fall after the holes, oscillate actually, bouncing along with the pair in smooth freefall. Almost. Electric charges placed on the singularities gave the ship something to hold onto -- electromagnetic friction balanced against the freefall to provide some gravity near one g on most of the toroidal decks. And they could spin the whole thing, too, for stability and gravity when not under the wormdrive. Bouncing along like it did ahead of the hole pair made Stearn think of sex, the big white ship sliding back and forth along the holes' axis. But he liked its cleverness as well: the charges also produced an electric field allowing active shielding from charged particles while in transit. Funneled into the bowl of the fore bulb, the maw as it was called, the black hole would then feed, providing power through a miniature accretion disk similar to the one in SS Cygni. "Pretty awesome, isn’t it?" Stearn asked. "I guess so," said Fisher. "Where does the name 'Karamojo' come from?" "I don’t know. Didn't give it much thought. I mean, we're not called the U.S.S. Constipation, so I didn't worry about it. Ask Captain." Silence ensued, with no laugh to his joke, and dragged on. This Fisher guy wasn’t much fun. Stearn decided to mess with him. "So this is going to be a long trip, you know?" "I know." "I mean, bit more than a year out and more than a year back. A person won’t want to stick to stims, you know? Sometimes a person wants that human contact, skin on skin. Like that. Now me, I’m pretty easy to get along with. It’s all just skin. No big deal. If it feels good, do it. That’s what I say." Fisher stared coldly at Stearn. "I’m here to study the dragon, and that’s what I’ll worry about first." Stearn smiled. "Sure thing, Fish. I respect that. But I bet Captain Fang will probably want you to entertain her. I saw the way she looked at you at the briefing." Fisher raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. "Now, I haven’t shipped out with Fang before, but there's talk in the corporate fleets. She’s one of the real old-timers, three-hundred-years old or something they say. Don't know what time-frame, but plenty old. Still into chain of command and protocol, thinks sleeping with crew is inappropriate. It's silly for her to be like that, don't you think? What with super-fast autobrains running the ship for the most part. The only real crew under her is Henderson and myself. Devereaux’s job description doesn’t fall under ship operations, but from what I hear, Fang isn’t a dyke. Ergo, she’ll grab you. Be pretty discrete, maybe, but grab you she will. What do you think of that?" "I think the captain’s business is none of your business." Stearn laughed. "On a ship with an all-seeing intelligence and five people cooped up together for two years, no one’s business is private." "I don’t really care," said Fisher, "as long as we get the dragon." What a boring guy! Well, it was a long trip. Stearn was sure he’d loosen up eventually. He had better, or it was going to be a very long trip. "Do you think she will?" Fisher asked after a moment. "I mean, wouldn't it be more reasonable for everyone to have their hormones adjusted for minimal libidos for the sake of maximum efficiency?" Stearn stifled a grin. "No one ever does that! I thought you'd been on long trips before, Fish!" "Don't call me Fish, please." "Right. I'll try to remember that," Stearn said, taking good note. He looked forward to the challenge of having fun every possible minute of this mission. The games were only beginning. The shuttle fired briefly to shed velocity and they descended into the maw of the Karamojo. # Axelrod Henderson kept his tsk tsk to himself as the airlock sphincter irised open revealing two of the greatest fashion disasters he had ever had the misfortune to witness paired together. The Jack, Stearn, mindlessly followed the latest bod trends, none of which had interested the biotech in at least a half century. The exobiologist was marginally better, with the good looks of a Homo sapiens version 1.1, but he wore ghastly black duradenim from head to streakers. The fabric was not supposed to wrinkle, but it had. "Good morning, Dr. Fisher," Henderson said, pointedly ignoring Stearn whom he had already identified as an uninteresting boy. "The captain requested I give you a tour upon your arrival." The Jack floated through the lock slowly, propelling himself with those ridiculous ear paraphernalia; Henderson imagined tiny Greek slaves chained to tiny oars sitting inside Stearn's head, powering his body like a barge -- and probably thinking for him as well. Behind him, Fisher nodded, and kicked forward in a manner showing some degree of competency in microgravity. Neither appeared to be suffering ill effects from the freefall; Henderson hoped that indicated their internal biologicals were good enough they wouldn't harass him for repairs during the voyage. "I have a lot of work to get started on. I'm sure I'll have plenty of time to get acquainted with the Karamojo's features," said Fisher. "The tour won't take long, I promise." Fisher pressed his lips together, as if making a difficult decision, and said, "Okay." "My biochip's loaded with the ship schematics," Stearn said. "I could give the tour." "I’m sure, but the captain asked me to give the tour." Henderson spun and kicked off down the curving tunnel, trusting them to follow. "The whole ship is made of stacked rings. There's some flexibility built-in, and they can be made to rotate and twist individually to shift between gravitational modes." Henderson turned into a tube and floated past four rings. "These connect the rings. Now you know how to get from anywhere to anywhere in the ship's front torus." "What are these air fish we keep passing?" Fisher asked. One of the blowfish-shaped creatures drifted by his head. Swatting it away Henderson answered, "Mobile biorecyclers for our semi-closed system, effective in freefall or under gravity -- you should watch where you step. The fish keep things clean. Most dust is sloughed-off human skin, so that’s their primary diet. The old or malfunctioning fish are in turn eaten by the cats, so don't be disturbed if you catch sight of one of the sneaky creatures slinking about." Henderson kicked off around another quarter of the ring, and stopped in front of a large fleshy portal. "I know where we are," Stearn said. "I'm sure you do." Henderson tapped a panel and the portal irised, sphincter-like, onto a paradise. In the distance loomed a snow-covered mountain casting a long shadow across a savanna, complete with grass rippling in a wind and the smell of herd animals. Animals themselves were not apparent. A relentless dry heat emanated from this miniature world within the ship. Less than a kilometer across, it seemed to extend forever. "What is this?" asked Fisher. "It’s an ecosystem delivery unit, of course," Stearn answered. "That’s what this ship was used for previously: colonization. Ecosystem delivery of Biolathe-developed life forms. No losing the design to gene pirates via a broadcast, or to unscrupulous colonists. Deliver the wetware directly, grown en route and delivered in prime shape. Colonists loathe to wait for anything to grow from scratch. Screw it up when they do, too. I expect we can use this chamber to cage the dragon." Fisher snorted. "Unlikely," he said, but didn't explain further. Henderson said, "Captain Fang wanted to take a piece of Earth with us. The current projection is what Tanzania looked like long ago, before the space port. This is where we came from, started to walk upright, and became men. No real animals here, but Papa can provide virtual game, or grow the real thing by request." "I like games," Stearn said, jumping into the space before them and releasing an ululating holler that he must have been saving up. "Hey, show me some wildebeest, Papa!" A gravely male voice boomed, "Will you please let me alone? I’m trying to work." "Papa’s the ship's brain?" Fisher asked. Henderson nodded. "And something of a grouch when there’s work to do, at least with me. The captain has him dancing on the head of a pin, some exquisite priority code that even Stearn wouldn't dare override on a lark if he knows what's good for him. Ready for the next stop?" "Lead on, Mr. Henderson." Henderson closed the portal, cutting off Stearn’s resumed yelling. "Thank you," said Fisher. "You’re welcome. Now, this way," he said, kicking off. Henderson showed him the galley, a drab utilitarian place sporting little more than a mahogany bartree and standard-issue chairbeasts. "Can you guess the number one menu item?" Fisher said, "Fish sticks?" "All the time, but in a wide variety of scrumptious flavors, I assure you. Taste like anything you want. I have supplemented the menu with a gourmet selection." Henderson stopped at a viewing port along the inside curve of the ring they were in. "You can see the hollow interior of the Karamojo from here." Fisher drifted over and pushed his face against the window's diamond to have a peek. Henderson floated up behind him and peered over his shoulder. Along the central axis ran a tube of diamond girders that held the superconducting electromagnets that constituted the inner rail. They generated a portion of the ship’s field that shielded them from cosmic rays and could be used as a linear particle accelerator for on-axis propulsion. More importantly, the rail controlled their relationship to the charged singularity pair when they were under wormdrive. The far side of the ring was some four kilometers away, almost lost in the glare off the Pacific Ocean, which shone through the ship's open end. Hydroponic farms grew inside the diamond girders like fungus, engineered and positioned to take advantage of the high-energy light that would spew from the fore singularity under wormdrive. "Impressive," Fisher said. "I suppose," Henderson said, nonchalantly. Biologicals were his area, and he decided to impress Fisher with his own work next. He led Fisher to the Hall of Trophies. The Hall was situated within one of the ring-transiting tunnels and sheltered between closed doors. This meant that Fisher had no real warning before he was floating into the heads. "Be careful -- they sometimes bite!" Henderson managed at the last moment as Fisher drifted past him. Fisher lost some of his microgravity skills as he twisted his body about, but he was on an inevitable collision course with a big, black rhinoceros head. He did have enough composure to twist back into control and take grasp of the creature's horn. The rhino had the good grace to accept the rough handling as Fisher arrested his forward momentum, settling for a blink and a snort. "It's alive." Fisher said, holding the horn like a swimmer holding a ladder in the deep end of a pool. "Of course it’s alive. This is a Biolathe ship. The majority of systems are biological, and we have the ability to shift our bioresources around to meet our needs. No clunky robots, subject to mechanical breakdown or electromagnetic scrambling. On this epic voyage, we lean on our strengths." Henderson smiled broadly. "I constructed this for the captain in less than a week." The curved corridor represented some of Henderson’s best work. Dozens of trophy heads sprouted along the path: the rhino for starters with its mate on the opposite side, then impalas, gazelles, kudus, water buffaloes, elephants (all three extinct varieties, Woolly, African, and Asian), giraffes, zebras, several types of big cat, dire wolves, gorillas, sasquatch, and a multitude of antlered deer. At the next bulwark, where the Hall ended, writhed a massive blue marlin in what would be the ‘above’ position under flight. Henderson smiled. "Let me know if you have any particular favorites to add." The heads realized they had an audience, and most began to snarl, howl, low, growl, trumpet, or simply to twist frantically, as if eager for attention. "Yes, it is impressive," Fisher said after a moment. "I’m somewhat concerned about an organ bank failing behind the wall. Not the easiest place to reach," Henderson offered. "The automatic systems would clean things up, but not fast enough to fully keep away the stench I fear." Fisher moved one hand from the horn and reached to touch other parts of it. The big head, showing no signs of antagonism, let him caress its expansive forehead. "Do you think we'll need such a large biomass reserve?" The rhino grunted, as if echoing the question. Henderson hadn't thought about it that carefully. The Karamojo was a larger ship with a larger fraction of biologicals than he'd served on before. He'd just followed the specs on the mass and used the captain's creative suggestion for where to put it. "I would certainly think not. This is an R and D mission to an uncolonized part of the distant galaxy. We shouldn't encounter pirates or rogue political bodies, so what could go wrong? We're safe, doubly so with this redunancy." "No need to get excited," Fisher said. "I was just curious. I've been too busy preparing for this trip to load the ship's systems into my biochip and study them. Yet." Henderson relaxed. Of course there was no need to get excited. Maybe his endorphin precursors were low -- he'd check later. No doubt by the time they returned to Earth the human brain would be well enough understood to permit an adequate assortment of mindmods rather than the slow but safe drugs in common use. Then he could be in control all the time, just as he was in control of the trophies here. He was benevolent god. These creatures did have minor mindmods and were healthier and happier than they ever could have been on Earth, thanks to his skills. "Right. Well, let's move on." Henderson said. As they proceeded to their next stop, the observatory, Fisher asked Henderson, "What’s your opinion on the star dragon?" Henderson had been snubbed before by such as Fisher when dropping by the receptions of some biological conferences. "Does an exobiologist really care what an Earth-based biosystems tech thinks?" "Absolutely," Fisher replied promptly, eyes open and unblinking. Maybe this Fisher fellow would be an ally, on this voyage and when they returned. Why not give it a chance? "I've thought about it, of course. I mean, it isn't likely for the dragon to be carbon-based at disk temperatures is it? But I know more than a little about life and the origins of complexity and self-organization. The entropy is too high for a life form to arise naturally in a hot plasma, and, biologically speaking, the accretion disk is a recent phenomenon in SS Cygni. You’re not going to reach any level of complexity so fast. Now, I might change my mind with more data, of course." Best to appear open-minded, and not step on any of Fisher's pet ideas too hard until he knew what they might be. "Mmm hmm. Like what?" "Well, like evidence of a complete ecosystem. There's ample energy to provide high metabolisms and fast generational turnover. I'd want to identify the range of niches available and their populations." "I was thinking along those lines myself," Fisher said. Henderson smiled. He was about to go on, but he caught sight of orange-covered buttocks sticking out of an equipment dewar that reminded him that their physical scientist was quite callipigious. "Hello gentlemen," Sylvia Devereaux greeted them after extracting herself. "Grand tour?" "Yes," Fisher answered. "I imagine Captain Fang wants to tire me out so I won’t cause any trouble before launch. So, what do have we here?" Sylvia, dressed in a burnt-orange wrap that complimented her brown skin, spun around, pointing at an adjacent chamber filled with chunks of odd-shaped metal boxes, cylinders, and exposed electro-optics and quantum circuitry. "Your basic full-spectrum assortment of spectrographs, cameras, waveplates, bolometers, heterodyne receivers, or at least fiber-feeds and waveguides to such." Fisher squinted at her. "You’re going to do astronomy? Don’t the relativistic effects make observing difficult?" Henderson couldn’t help but notice Sylvia’s clothing. The wrap was modest, economical, and much more seductive than the fancifully augmented bare breasts that were seemingly always in style. She also had broad, child-bearing hips -- completely unfashionable for the past half century. She hit many of the subconscious cues programmed by natural selection, just as he tried to do. Despite the fact that she was a specialist in physical sciences, he wondered if her motives for making this voyage were similar to his own. Sylvia answered Fisher’s question. "You're correct that astronomy in general would be compromised by our velocity, but this is all for SS Cygni, Dr. Fisher. The relativistic effects enhance the intensity of the light in the direction we’re traveling, making the binary system easier to make out. We drop the package right into the interior vacuum, look by the fore singularity and pick up a gravitational lensing boost. We know the parameters perfectly and can correct for all the effects." Henderson was of two minds about her dreadlocks. Finally he decided they were a plus that fit her basic, raw Earth-mother image, a fertility goddess. Maybe this look was even her original one, and already naturally selected. "Call me Sam," Fisher said. "Didn’t the probe fully characterize the system?" Ingratiating, or was he perhaps playing her? Maybe he should model the social dynamics; Biolathe already had, certainly, but that was private information. Maybe he could trick it out of Papa? Maybe Fisher was not an ally, but an opponent. Too many maybes he should have already considered if he was going to make the most of the next three years. "Not by a long shot," Sylvia replied. "Those data are hundreds of years old, and poor in many respects. Don’t forget that this is a time-variable, evolving system. I'll never make out dragons at this distance, but I’ll tell you everything else you could want to know about SS Cygni by the time we arrive." "Yes, that may be of use." "Absolutely it will!" she said. "This ship is going to be pushing its safety limits over the accretion disk when it’s quiescent. When the disk goes into a dwarf nova outburst, which it does two weeks out of every seven, we’ll have to back off. Shortest interval between outbursts could be as little as a week, which we must plan for. The outbursts are chaotic in nature, depending on how the secondary spills mass across the Lagrangian point, like a faucet dripping. The outbursts occur when the mass build-up in the disk causes a thermal instability, and the angular momentum transfer picks up -- " "Yes, well, we’ll have to discuss it en route," Fisher said, smiling, holding his hands up to stop her flood of words. "Of course," Sylvia said. Had she said something about safety limits? He shrugged it off and stopped staring at Sylvia. Best now to disrupt the party. "Ready for the next stop, Dr. Fisher?" "Sure," he said. They moved on to the Higgs generators that teased the singularities from the quantum foam, the fly bridge where the human control interfaces of the ship were located, the shuttle bay, the supplies hold (incidental), the supplies hold (primary), supplies hold (industrial), and then, at Fisher’s prompting, they skipped the rest of the supply holds. That was fine with Henderson, as some, like the missile bay, made him somewhat uncomfortable. Fissionables were dangerous. He accepted their presence as potentially invaluable tools for a lone ship over two hundred light years from home. Who knew what they might have to blow up in the distant reaches of the galaxy? "Can’t Papa teach me where things are?" Fisher asked. "of course." Henderson shrugged. "The captain said to give you the tour." "Where is Fang?" Papa answered, "In the gym." "Thank you," Henderson said. "Which way?" asked Fisher. "This way," said Henderson. They heard the grunting from the open portal before they reached the freefall gym. Heat emanated from the opening, but unlike the savanna, this was a moist heat, full with the sourness of flesh pushed beyond comfortable limits. Henderson tilted his head at Fisher and extended an arm to invite the exobiologist to enter first. Henderson knew what to expect -- he'd grown the gym, again according to the captain's guidelines -- but it was nevertheless unsettling to see it in operation. The form of Captain Lena Fang, wearing only a white one-piece, was held, suspended, in a net of fleshy pink tendrils. The sight made Henderson think of pumpkin innards. Bioelectric shocks ran through the tendrils, stimulating the captain’s muscle groups, sending her into rhythmic spasms like a fly trapped in a web. The stink of sweat permeated the warm air; the smell seemed genuine, unlike the sweet cloying sweat most people modified themselves to secrete. Grunts issued from the captain as she fought through an optimum set of exercises designed to give her the most effective workout. Fisher plucked at a moist, pink muscle strand that was one fiber of the gym. It barely budged. "Strong," he said. "Get your butt in here, Sam," Fang called. "I want you in shape for this voyage. A human sparring partner beats the heck out of vat-grown." Fisher looked at Henderson. He smiled, and tilted his head toward the center of the room. "The captain issued an order. Strip and climb in, Doctor." He stood there for a moment, considering. "Now?" Henderson shrugged. "Your things will find your quarters. Go ahead." "Well, okay." Fisher stripped off his heavy denim, down to briefs, and stuck his clothes to the wall. Plush, rippling ruglings lined all the surfaces of the ship. They were useful things, acting as airbags when under rapid acceleration -- for instance falling down in a high gravity environment like they would find above the SS Cygni disk. In the current circumstance they would grab onto a pile of clothes like cockle burrs, taste them, and after a time pass them to their mates until back in the owner's quarters. Fisher tentatively climbed into the flesh web, not looking very much like a spider. "I already have standard muscle enhancer mods." "You'll need them," Henderson said. Fang continued to grunt and sweat and spasm. Fisher crawled toward her. Henderson closed the portal, glad the captain hadn't asked him to work out, and went back to his lab. Sitting back on his deluxe chairbeast, he wondered if Sylvia Devereaux might be a worthy partner for him on this voyage. # Following the green line Papa provided, Fisher floated along the corridor like the proverbial zombie, or more like a wraith; zombies walked, but he coasted in freefall. Bone weary, he raised his hand to slap the lock to his quarters. The door irised open and the lights rose. Inside smelled musty as if the room had been sealed for years, but inside there bobbed his four meager pieces of luggage, tangled in a storage net. How was he supposed to work in this shape? Fisher glided into his room, released his clothes, and looked around. Spartan barracks: unimprinted bedbeast, chairbeast, desktree, workstation. Someone had thoughtfully left a freefall shower sack unstowed from its closet, but he was in no mood to fight with the gelatinous bag even though it seemed alert and helpful, opening like a flower at his smelly presence. Showering could wait until they were underway, or at least until he got some sleep. The bedbeast, slumbering in its niche in a wall that would become the floor, was useless until they were underway -- he didn't care to be hugged by the mindless bed. Fisher bounced off the far wall and to the side, opening all the closets and lockers until he found a silk mummy cocoon. "Door," he said, and the portal to the ring irised closed. He peeled off his briefs. "Lights." The lights dimmed. He wiggled into the smooth, soft, and warm sack, ignoring his odor, sloughing sweat balls off to float around the cabin. The air fish would not go hungry tonight. He closed his eyes and became acutely aware of his bladder and bowels. "Damn," he said, wiggling out of the sack. He banged his elbow getting into the bathroom, and the cushioning of the ruglings seem very thin. "Lights," he said, a little uncertainty igniting over what he might find here. But it was a standard organic potty mouth with saccharine breath so strong he could taste it, but nothing as trendy as Stearn probably preferred. Then again, the Jack might not use a toilet if he'd given himself a brickmaker bodmod. Those sometimes seemed like a good idea, but who had the time to compare brands? Fisher plastered his bottom against the toilet, letting its mouth seal and suction to hold his bottom in place as siphoning tongues licked him clean. In less than a minute he was wiggling back into his mummy sack, eyes closed, mind just barely holding out against body. He figured the captain exercised this vigorously on a regular basis. How did she do it? Fang had drive. It showed in those finely honed muscles that worked like an efficient machine. He admired that kind of drive. He had the same drive, in his own arena. Their arenas were the same on this mission. He could keep up if he had to. "I can do anything I have to," he mumbled as his muscles silently screamed. Somehow, despite the aches, in less than a minute he fell asleep. He dreamt of casting vast nets in which to snare a star dragon, casting five hundred times and ignoring the aches in his arms as he prepared to cast five hundred and one. # Captain Lena Fang floated onto the flying bridge. She wore her dress uniform, complete with black patent leather boots, despite their inappropriateness in freefall. She was grateful for the freefall as it prevented the trembling that her muscles would have otherwise shown under gravity. It had never seemed fair to her that muscles so assiduously trained could also betray so easily. The start of a trip always made her nervous, and that worried her for it sometimes seemed a false responsibility; Papa ran the Karamojo like a well-fed nanoforge. Out of tradition she orchestrated the launch, but the whole ritual bordered on the superfluous. It wasn't what it had meant to be the captain of a ship when she had broken into the corporate fleets. Yet she still shook with excitement, and would not let it show. Every assignment held the potential to test her mettle. Maybe this was the one. She had to believe it was the one, in case it was. There was no telling what could go wrong that might require her to make an immediate decision, or perform some rapid action. If it had been anticipated, there was already a failsafe in place. Her job was to be there in case of the unanticipated. She made her way to her fighting chair situated in the aft center of the room, rooted to what would soon become the floor. She pressed her fingers into the yielding, vermilion hide, releasing its comforting aroma. The custom chairbeast moaned softly. Finally she let the chair’s arms envelop her. Everyone else was already there. Directly in front of her sat the ship's Jack, Stearn, in front of the wormdrive console that displayed the status of the interior rail superconductors, the Higgs generators, and the e-m-g field everywhere on board. Stearn turned, gave her a lopsided grin, and flapped his ear wings. To her left, Henderson sat before a pulsing bank of display membranes that monitored the ship biosystems, including the organic parts of Papa. To her right, on a couchbeast were Devereaux and Fisher -- Sam, looking sleepy -- she released a cool smile. Projected on the opposite wall (her brain had already oriented itself with the familiar act of sitting in the fighting chair), etched in silver vectors, shimmered several views of the Karamojo. Everything appeared nominal. Sweating, her hand worked the fighting chair’s hide. "Are we ready to go, Papa?" "We're raring to go!" Papa said, loud enough that everyone could hear. Papa was the Karamojo. They were ready. "Confirm the flight plan with the LEO controller." Low Earth orbit was more crowded than ever, but no accidents for the last seventy-three years local time. "Done," Papa announced. "Point us at the Swan." The constellation of Cygnus the Swan, the direction of SS Cygni. The bridge shifted as fly wheels around the ship varied their rotation rates, reorienting the Karamojo. "Done," Papa announced. "Initialize singularity biseed," Fang ordered. Around the silver schematic of the Karamojo, a scarlet grid materialized, representing the Reimann curvature of local space-time. The grid tilted down in the direction of Earth’s deep potential well, but was otherwise flat. "Done!" "Power up the superconductors, launch configuration." "Done." Fang took a deep breath and rubbed her hands onto her white pants, leaving marks. "Power up the Higgs generators." "Done." "Fire and stabilize inflation beams." The ship's display grid expanded to show detail. Four equidistant beams of scintillating green precisely a hundred and nine point five degrees apart intersected in the maw of the Karamojo. "Break symmetries." The green lines shimmered as they shifted positions at high frequency. The scarlet grid began to dimple as the technology teased a bi-singularity from the quantum foam, growing exponentially from the Planck length. The grid now resembled an elliptical funnel, but even as Fang watched the opposite electric charges responded to the fields generated in the rail’s superconductors, stretching the funnel into a double-dimpled wedge. Electromagnetic forces overpowered gravity, allowing the white hole to be separated from the black hole and preventing recollapse. The singularities’ fields deepened as the holes moved apart. The Karamojo jerked as the hole pair accelerated toward the Swan, dragging the ship along with rapidly smoothing oscillations. The wormdrive was not only named for the type-2 wormhole created, but early versions operated almost entirely under freefall conditions with a toroidal ship oscillating around the singularities, first pulled out in front then pulled back, moving like an inch worm. Electromagnetic control not only resulted in more stability, it permitted a semblance of gravity on-board by damping the oscillations at the right frequencies. On her first few trips, nearly three hundred years earlier, gravity under wormdrives had still been jerky and unpleasant. Without the correct drugs or glands, most became sick and stayed sick. No more. Only smooth sailing at the dawn of the fourth millennium. While Fang sank into her fighting chair with a familiar one gee as the rail pushed against the instantaneous freefall vector, the ship’s acceleration asymptotically approached the singularity pair’s ten gees from both sides. The effective gravity inside, generated by the modulated electromagnetic friction, approached one gee. Several air fish scavengers fell to what was now the floor, with a quick patter. "Wormdrive engaged. All systems nominal." Nothing had gone wrong, nothing had challenged her. As usual. Now they just had to go, and go, and go. And stay in fighting trim, just in case. "Thank you, Papa." "Thank you, daughter." Fang looked around the bridge, at her crew. She met Fisher’s eyes. He stared back with an intensity that surprised her. He didn't seem sleepy now. What was he thinking? Stearn popped up from his seat, released a ridiculously loud whoop, stumbled in the gravity, and sat back down. "Where’s the champagne?" They had taken the first step of their very long journey. SS Cygni, and all its secrets, awaited. Maybe she would get the chance to be a real captain in the course of discovering those secrets, get the chance to show that she was a cut above other people and deserved her position of authority. Lena Fang desperately hoped so. Chapter 3 Love is a kind of warfare. –Ovid Two days later, Fisher sat before his workstation in his quarters on an ossified chairbeast (he didn't desire distracting massages while he worked). He hardly needed it, but the Prospector movie played in miniature in the station’s picture tank, now expanded to three dimensions using some creative mapping algorithms. He was working on reverse engineering the star dragon’s electromagnetic field given the observed motions and a model of the disk field Devereaux had provided. That knowledge could potentially allow them to safely trap a dragon for study. The door chimed, a sweet tone designed to attract attention without being too unsettling. He thought he might change it if he could find a spare minute. "Come in," he said absently, wondering how fast the dragon might be able to vary its field. Maybe he could put an upper limit on that from the -- Someone cleared her throat. Losing the thought, Fisher sighed and turned. Fang stood in the doorway dressed in gray sweats, wearing some kind of blue padded helmet, and toying with what appeared to be a pair of small, connected blue pillows draped over her shoulder. "You need a break, Sam." It didn't sound like a question, but neither did it sound like an order. Not that he would necessarily follow gratuitous orders per se in any event -- he wasn't precisely ship 'crew'. He was more like a consultant. But he liked her, and didn't want to alienate his most powerful ally, so he didn't respond to her as he would have to an ill-timed visit from a post-doc. Smiling, he said, "Actually, I’m in the middle of something. Perhaps later." Fang leaned against the inside wall, tilted her head back, and smirked as if he were a comedian. Was something funny? She said, "Papa, how long has Dr. Fisher been working at his desk?" "Six and three-quarter hours, continuously, and he has been damn serious about it." Serious? Why shouldn't he be serious? He turned to straddle the hardened chair and faced her fully. He wasn't accustomed to having his work interrupted. She should understand that. Work hard, play hard, a timeless statement he never understood. Good work was play, and why not take play as seriously as someone takes work? Play was work for one’s own true self. "And I’ll work seven hours or seventy if it pleases me." Fang frowned. He realized that upset him. He'd ruined her play, and even if he didn't need the break, her he did need. Don't forget the people this time, wasn't that what Atsuko had said? "What sort of break did you have in mind?" She held up the blue pillows. "You said you would box with me." Box? She had been serious after all. Well, he had uploaded a number of tutorials into his biochip just in case she had been serious, so he was prepared. Loading them into active memory, he stood up. "Fine. Let’s box." "I don't want to force you into anything." "No problem. You're right. I need the break. Let's do it." "You'll take it seriously?" "I do little in half measures." "Good." "I need to change?" "You need to change." Fisher looked around his room. Did he have workout clothes somewhere? He was sure he had brought some. Maybe not. Easy enough to grow, and cheap enough as well. Why bring sweats across the galaxy? "Try your closet." Fisher found everything in his closet, including his own funny blue pillows: boxing gloves, of course. While he knew intellectually what they were thanks to the tutorials, he realized he'd never seen any, and the reality of them was suddenly strange. He felt Fang's eyes on him. "What are you waiting for, another strip show?" "Yes," Fang said. He wished she'd smiled when she had said this, but he didn't dislike the fact that she hadn't. This was not of much importance, but he suddenly felt self-conscious with her watching. It was odd that he should care. He didn't have anything unusual like gills, or done anything ostentatious or embarrassing to his genitalia. He kicked off his streakers, paused, then started deseaming his shirt. "The default cabin." Fang sniffed. "Not even smells. Papa has a whole library of quarters available. We don't expect anyone to keep the default." Happy to accept the change of focus while he changed his clothes, Fisher said, "I hadn't really thought about it. Do I need smells?" "Oh yes! Cabin decorating is a fine art among deep spacers, and smells can be vital to establishing a compelling atmosphere. In my time, I have seen jungles, throne rooms ranging from the court of the Sun King to a mock-up of the Oval office of the old American president. One cabin was rigged out to match the heights of the twenty-fourth century sensualists, with every item in the room and every movement he made triggering a sound, smell, or sensation -- urination usually left the cabin-owner quivering on the floor for hours. That guy, he had issues. Most popular for balanced spacers seems to be nature scenes from home planets. Makes you feel less disconnected." "I'll keep it in mind," Fisher said, snapping his shorts in place. "Say, been meaning to ask you about the ship's name. I would have looked it up myself, but --" "But you've been busy. The name is no great mystery. Once upon a time there was an African district named Karamojo, and more importantly, a so-called great white hunter from the late colonial period who adopted the name. Walter D. M. 'Karamojo' Bell hunted elephants, killed hundreds of them, each with a single shot on most occasions. He was a good hunter, from Papa's era, and the name seemed to fit. Done?" "Done," he said, slinging his gloves over his shoulder like Fang carried hers. "Thanks for telling me about the name. And I'll think about the decor when I get the chance. What does your cabin look like?" "If you box well enough," Fang said, walking out of his room, "maybe you'll find out for yourself." # "Footwork," Fang grunted at Fisher through her mouthpiece as she hit him in the face again. It felt good to her, as it usually did, to punch. "If you just stand there, I’m going to tag you at will." He lunged, swinging a wide, careless arc that she ducked underneath. She hit him with an uppercut to his unprotected chin. "You have weight on me." She jabbed. "But it means nothing." A combination next, a jab and a hook. "You need practice until the moves are so automatic they are instinctual. Build some muscle memory." He swung. She ducked. "Think of it as a dance." He was doing much better than she had expected. His metabolism was set at a high activity level, so he was in good shape, although still not what she would call fighting shape. But he had shown some capability with the heavy bagbeast, crazy bagbeast, and speed bagbeast, and hadn't cracked a smile shadow boxing. And now here they were, sparring, on the first day. Fisher was giving her punches, a few anyway, and taking them as well. Pleased, she gave him a small smile around her mouthpiece that probably looked ghoulish. He appeared to be distracted by that, so she popped him in the face. "Concentrate," she said, stepping back to egg him forward. She reminded herself to take her time, get a workout, carry the poor exobiologist a few more rounds so he would not be too discouraged. "I am!" He stepped forward to her left and kept his legs bent this time. "This...is...hard." "Good." She circled to her right, ready to bob under another wild swing, but Fisher was recovering his breath and not charging wildly any more. The bell rang and Fisher collapsed, panting around his mouthpiece, to the blue canvas of the regulation spring-loaded floor. Fang spat out her mouthpiece and lifted the straw of her water bottle, held between her gloves like a crucible, to her lips. It was a fine sensation. Nothing like cool water when hot. Simple pleasures made life. Exercise. Satiating a thirst. Winning. She finished drinking and offered the bottle to Fisher. After a moment, he said, "In a minute." She said, "You're doing wonderfully, Sam. Really. How about two more rounds?" "I can do two more rounds," he said without looking up. "Good. I like a man with endurance." Fisher looked up at her, small curls plastered to his forehead, sweat staining his underarms. He smelled musky, and not at all bad. "What are you doing with me here?" "Boxing," she said. "I mean," and one eyebrow rose, "you’re flirting with me, right?" Of course she was, but he shouldn't come right out and say it. Then it stopped being flirting and became negotiation. Fisher lacked subtlety. But Papa never shirked the direct approach, and encouraged directness in her, so she nodded. "Its been a long time since my last lover. You are my only romantic prospect for this very long trip, Sam, and I prefer human flesh in bed. I figure no point waiting. Anything wrong with that?" "No. It’s just, this feels rather forced to me." He bent his neck back as far as his headgear would allow, not looking at her. "Look, Lena, in the past I've had problems with -- I mean -- we might not...Mmm." She let him sweat. He was cute. "Let’s box," he finally said, "And you’ll see what kind of endurance I have." They boxed. Fang carried Fisher. Clearly he had gone to the trouble of locating and downloading some boxing pointers; Fisher was a quick study and was trying to please her despite his reluctance to leave his cabin. He was getting tired, but better as well. At the start, when he had energy, he had spent it unwisely. Now, without that energy and gaining practical familiarity with the skills, he started thinking. A smart boxer was a good boxer. All the great champions had been smart, extending their careers over their younger, faster competitors by thinking. The stupid boxers just didn't win, even with superior bodmods in divisions that allowed them. Fang bit down hard on her mouthpiece when she had the thought that boxing, which had gone through its dry spells, might not even exist when they returned to Earth. It could become another forgotten sport destroyed by the culture's short attention span. She blinked the thought away. Somewhere in the human colonies it would survive, if not on Earth in a retrospective movement. Diaspora not only protected the human species from extinction, it helped protect their cultures as well. Somewhere boxing would survive. Suddenly Fang realized something was wrong. She had gone on autopilot, letting her body move without her brain. She was being a stupid boxer, and Fisher was not stupid. She jerked back, ducking simultaneously, backpedaling furiously to keep her feet under herself to avoid an ignominious dump onto her butt. Fisher’s roundhouse missed her face by scant centimeters. Her cheek cooled with the wind from his punch evaporating her sweat. Fisher barked with the effort in the swing as he tumbled over his right shoulder and down to the canvas in a tangle at her boots. He lay there like washed-up seaweed. "Sam?" she mumbled around her mouthpiece. She spit it out. "Sam? You okay?" Fisher wheezed, and didn't move. "Is that two rounds yet?" Fang laughed. A long, low belly laugh that sprang up honestly from deep inside. A knot loosened that she had held within her since the beginning of the voyage. This trip was going to be fine. Throwing away the present for the far future hadn't been a total mistake. She had been right to give up the colony hops delivering swamp cattle for the chance of a real challenge. With that laugh she fully accepted and engaged her current course. Fisher pushed up to his elbows, but just turned himself over. From his back he looked up at her, with the smile of someone being infected by a laugh. He pursed his lips and his mouthpiece rose halfway out, then slipped to the side of his face, trailing saliva, as if were crawling out of his mouth. Fang laughed harder, tears streaming down her face. Fisher started laughing as well, weakly at first, then with some enthusiasm. It pleased her. He had been so, well, serious so far. She said finally, "No, only one round." "Damn," he said, smiling. Now that he had that warm sparkle in his eyes, he was just so cute. Be bold, she thought. Show no fear. Before Fang could stop herself, she said, "Come back to my cabin and shower. Then we will begin the last round." # Fisher followed Fang back to her cabin. Sweat plastered her pants against her tight butt. He tried to ignore the instincts evolution had placed within him, keep some measure of control, but he realized that he was still mesmerized. Too tired, he supposed. What he liked best about her, he decided, was the way she strode so confidently, not looking back, knowing that he would follow. She was certain. He had seen that certainty in her while she boxed. Competent grace. It pleased him, intellectually at first; she was going to be a great aid in the upcoming dragon hunt. She would be a diamond under pressure. She would do the right thing at the right time. Then, when he had been on the floor and she had been laughing, there had been no malice there. Just a simple joy, the emotional reason for living he sometimes forgot. Stearn came walking down the corridor. "Captain," he said as he approached. Fang nodded curtly, but didn't break stride. "Hey, Fish," Stearn said, and winked at Fisher as soon as he had passed Fang. Fisher didn't care, and the not caring pleased him, too. The Jack and what he thought were simply not important. They drew near Fang's cabin. Fisher surreptitiously sniffed his armpits. As bad as he thought -- there was another bodmod he should find the time for. He hoped that she had been serious about showering first. Fang stopped abruptly at her cabin door, but didn't open it. She turned to face him instead, hands clasped in front of her waist, head down, looking at his chest. Shyness now replaced confidence. "Sam, I hadn't planned to do this so quickly." He nodded, took her hands lightly in his. "My cabin," she said, "It is a retreat from all my responsibility on the ship. It reflects a side of me I don't show often and am not completely comfortable showing others. I am being very serious now. Can I trust you?" "Yes," he said, squeezing her hands. He was a little worried that he was committing to something he didn't understand but caught up in the moment and, like a man in the last stages of the chase, capable of saying anything. And worse, believing it. Even knowing this, he could not help himself from again saying, "Yes." She smiled, licked her lips coyly, and squeezed his hands back. "Then welcome to my parlor, said the spider to the fly." She dropped his hands, opened the door, and went in. He remembered what she had said about decorating quarters, and a whole new crop of worries sprang up, fertilized by her spider comment. If her room were another living spider web like the freefall gym, only maybe filled with billions of real spiders, or giant spiders, or something else, something worse that Biolathe had patented.... Fisher shook away the images, took a deep breath, and followed. Inside, he tried not to laugh. She had been so serious outside, and he had been more afraid than he realized. Relief made him grin, and he hoped she would interpret the expression as anticipation of what was to come. Fang's cabin was soft and pink, timelessly girlish. Pretty. A king-size bed filled one side of the large chamber, a real waterbed not at all alive, covered in pink satin sheets and littered with stuffed animals, all sea life: plush sharks, crabs, dolphins, sea horses, starfish, and the like. French doors opening on a placid ocean, presumably virtual, dominated the opposite side of the room. The doors were open and a warm breeze carried a beach smell. A vanity with an half-shell mirror sat against the far wall, with jewelry, brushes, and a conch shell sitting on the mahogany top. Plush carpeting -- no ruglings -- swathed the floor with pastel swirls of coral pink and eggshell blue. The only incongruous element was a pale wooden desk in the corner, faced by a simple chair of the same wood, that was covered with scrolls -- charts, perhaps -- but no computer console or picture tank; an oasis of old-fashioned work amidst old-fashioned luxury. The pink waterbed, warmth, and the gentle susurration of waves spelled 'womb' to Fisher. "I fear the bathroom is similar," Fang said nervously, her arms twisting down and then stripping off her soaked T-shirt in a single fluid motion. "I can hardly wait," Fisher said honestly, stripping off his own smelly shirt. Fang smiled. Fisher smiled back. Fang stripped in an instant and climbed onto the bed. Bobbing up and down, she said, "I am afraid I chose the bed with sleeping in mind. It may be difficult to --" "The problem isn't insurmountable." # Devereaux inspected the observatory packages one last time. The high-resolution STJ cameras, which recorded photon arrivals and energies from X-rays through the infrared, showed intermittent sawtooth bias patterns. They seemed fine now, but would they go bad again once in the fields along the ship's axis? Only one way to find out. Devereaux stepped away from the observatory module and said, "Let’s do it, Stearn." "You can call me Phil, if you want." Stearn grabbed the module with a magnetic lift and manhandled it into the airlock, bumping the edge. "Careful," called Devereaux. "Okay, I'll be careful, but isn't this thing redundant? We know what’s there, right?" "Sort of, but the details could matter to us. Quite a lot." "It’s just one star, eating another star. Every few weeks its mouth gets full and it swallows a little fast, right? When it swallows fast, it burns hot. When it swallows slowly, it isn’t so hot. I read the encyclopedia articles. You don’t have to be a genius." Stearn was going make himself an annoying boy on this trip, Devereaux thought. "The behavior of a dwarf nova isn't predictable very long in advance. The thermal disk instability that brings on the outbursts is tied to the accretion rate, which depends on the secondary donating the mass. That secondary has a magnetic field that interacts with the disk, and the whole thing is a mess of feedback loops, some of which behave chaotically. The outburst -- " He cut her off. "Right. How fast it swallows. Like I said. You don’t need a genius vocabulary either. And those are cheap to buy anyway." Stearn finished getting the observatory inside and sealed the airlock. "We get caught in a dwarf nova outburst close to the disk photosphere, and our nano-skin cannot process the energy fast enough well, we'll cook. That’s bad. Got it?" "Bad. Got it. But can’t we just monitor the transfer rate while we’re there?" "Of course we will, but these data won’t hurt, will they?" Stearn flapped his wings at her and turned his attention to the magnetic grapple that would insert the observatory into the central axis between the singularities. "Don’t these systems go nova and super nova, too?" "Not dwarf novae, at least not in general. Their mass transfer rate isn’t high enough. Eventually other types of novae may occur. A classical nova will occur if a non-burning hydrogen mass builds on the white dwarf and fusion ignites all at once when it reaches its critical temperature, but that's a hundred thousand year timescale for SS Cygni. A supernova will occur if the white dwarf mass hits 1.44 solar masses, Chandrasekhar’s limit, when degenerate electron pressure can’t resist the self-gravity, and a runaway collapse follows. If that happens, the disk and everything in it will get smeared all over this part of the galaxy. But don't worry about it. The SS Cygni primary is far from 1.44 solar masses, and the accretion is usually matched by the winds and novae mass loss. No supernova for you this trip." "It would be a fantastic thing to see though," Stearn said, chewing on his long forked tongue as he watched the insertion. "But I know another supernova I prefer. Ever cross wire your pleasure center to a popcorn bag? That’s a real blast!" "You’re hopeless, Stearn." "Not at all. I know the ship well. I'm good at my job. And I enjoy myself more than anyone else on this crazy trip. Anything wrong with that?" "No. I suppose not." She started thinking about Phil Stearn. He came across as a complete screw-up, but Biolathe was a smart company, and its brain would never put an incompetent on a ship like this, let alone hire one in the first place. So what was with Stearn? There had to be something deeper below his shallow surface. Didn't there? "So what tweaks you? Why you throw away the present? Lover toss you aside for a better drug? Lose a bet with another stuck-up scientist?" "Nothing like that." She might as well tell him. It was not a secret. "I liked the puzzle." "You liked the puzzle? You’re more flighty than me." He tilted his head and flapped to emphasize his point. "I mean, we've discovered a plethora of alien species in all sorts of environments, but no sentient races like ours. These star dragons could be it, or at least evidence for one. I mean, it's such an odd place to find anything alive. Maybe it didn't happen all by itself." "So?" "Well I think that’s a puzzle of our age, whether or not anything else is thinking out there. Not working on it and just enjoying the fruits of our technology, sponging off Earth, that’s the mental equivalent of masturbation." "And what’s wrong with that? I’m rather fond of it myself." Why was she even arguing with him? He was just as shallow as he seemed. "Nothing is wrong with it, I suppose, in moderation. But don't you believe there are still important things for humans to do? Things that could matter, someday?" Stearn shrugged. "I do have another motive for taking fast, high-gamma voyages. I intend to be there, at the end." "The end?" "Or at least as long as I can go riding these relativistic time machines into the future. See what happens in the end. See who is still around, what they’re doing, and what they’ve figured out about the nature of existence." Stearn hit pause on the observatory insertion and stared at her. She continued. "These long, fast trips help. I’d go to another galaxy if I could. Someday I probably will. But I’ll find a way to be there, at the end, this body or another, until my protons decay -- if I’m still even made of baryonic matter at that point -- and I’ll understand the big why." "That," he said, "is the biggest fucking masturbation fantasy I’ve ever heard. And I’ve heard some big ones. Heck, I’ve carried out some big ones." "Fine. You don’t understand. Just do your job, and help me do mine." Stearn turned back to the observatory and finished overseeing its insertion and alignment. "I understand better than you think. We have a lot in common." "Unlikely." "I can prove it." "How?" "In my hedonistic searches, scouring Earth and its colonies, I have experienced things you cannot dream of, mental states most profoundly satisfying, physical states most exhilarating. Rest assured that I pursue my goals with passion." Devereaux smirked at him, bragging like a boy. She lowered her gaze into what she thought would convey skepticism, but didn't tell him to stop. Stearn held up a finger before his face and with wide eyes said, "In my cabin, I have the means of achieving the most engaging intellectual pleasure in the known universe." "What is it?" Stearn lowered his finger and turned and walked away from her. "I suppose you’ll have to drop by sometime if you want to find out." "Unlikely," she said, but already as he walked away the puzzle of Stearn was working in her mind and she was afraid that she would wind up accepting his invitation/dare. She could not stand to let a puzzle go unsolved, even one so trivial as Stearn. # The sound of ruffling paper and tiny scratches woke Fisher. Lying on Lena Fang's bed, he propped his head up with his arm so he could better watch her at work. She bent over the desk in a position that would cause his lower back to throb if he were to assume it regularly. Her face hovered centimeters from the surface of an unrolled paper, and her arms and legs extruded from her red silk robe like the multiply-articulated legs of a graceful arthropod. Waves of concentration emanated from her with a palpable force and he became exhausted watching her. He rolled onto his back. He studied the aquamarine and turquoise sea mosaic on her ceiling -- an octopus's tentacle reminded him of the dragon's twisted body -- while he listened to the scratching of her pencil. His unceasing internal voice that urged him to rise and resume his own work was present, but nearly as quiet as the pencil. He smiled. His first weeks aboard the Karamojo had smeared into a pleasant blur. He was working as hard as ever, but for the first time in many years, hints of contentment emerged in quiet moments while not at work. He continued to work every day on developing his hypotheses about the star dragon, on reliable theories of its energy budget and metabolism, locomotion and its limits, reproduction and selection pressures, and other areas. He also worked out every day. He skipped rope to help his footwork and coordination, punched the bagbeasts, and sparred with Fang. He managed to keep up with her, mostly, and the residual muscle aches his system failed to purge pleased him, a memento of his advancement in this strange new phase of his life. And then there were moments of no work, like this one. He had even permitted his hormonal levels, normally suppressed while on a big project, to creep back up to those of a seventeen-year-old boy. "Why are you smiling?" Fang suddenly asked. He remained on his back, turning only his head to regard her. Why was he smiling? Why not? But that was trite, and he applied some of his much promoted brain power to the question, trying to peer past the shimmering veil of contentment she had engendered in him. Why was he content? Because Fang was beautiful and tough and a captain he could count on. Because he had a quest to occupy his mind and love (maybe!) to fill his heart. Because of the way she bent over the table and the way the dragon swirled around a magnetic field line. Because the equation of his life balanced. Because a hundred 'becauses' filtered into his consciousness with her single question of why. Because there were a hundred more 'whys' to be asked, and he was filled with the certainty that the answers would fall to him as easily given an infinite future. Because everything was perfect for once. "Why not?" he finally answered, resisting the urge to name his happiness, to over explain it, and thus in capturing the elusive thing to kill it. Fang smiled back at him before resuming her work. Everything was so perfect that Fisher finally asked himself a question better left unasked: what was going to ruin it? # On the twenty-third day since launch, ship's time, Henderson was watching the micromachines construct the tiny dormitory inside the terrarium when his signal chimed through his music. He waved down Beetleburt 2.1.6's Theme for the Common Machine and said, "Yes, Papa?" "It's time for Fisher's first show, the 'dragon meeting' as he's calling it. He wants everyone there." "Oh, right," Henderson replied, rising from his chairbeast. This promised to be a dreary, tiresome affair, but he supposed there'd be some duties on this little jaunt. It seemed unfair to him to have to work hard in addition to the sacrifice this trip already represented. Still, he supposed the time requested was not burdensome, and he might even contribute some ideas if it wasn't too boring. He would have felt better about it Fisher had come around to consult him more, but after their initial discussion they had not talked of the star dragon again. Well, this was the time for more discussion, was it not? The construction of his pet project was fully automated at this stage and would proceed well without his supervision. Hmm, he thought, Sylvia would be there. He paused in the yawning orifice leading to the biological laboratory, turned, and went back inside. He checked his face in a mirror, slicking down his eyebrows with a wetted fingertip, donned his scaled jacket, and poured himself a glass of wine. No telling how long Fisher might drone on. Henderson was the last to arrive at the conference room, fashionably late. Everyone else, arrayed haphazardly around the polished cherrywood tabletree, glanced at him. He paused in the entryway to flash them a perfect smile. The remaining empty chairbeast unfortunately was not next to Sylvia, but at least it was across from her. Too bad she looked as if she'd just rushed in from a nap without freshening up. "Now that we're finally all here," Fisher began. "The Biolathe corporate brain provided us with a mission prospectus, with prioritized goals and guidelines for reaching those goals. Given the scanty information available, it was understood that much additional planning would have to be done en route and at SS Cygni as data became available. I trust that everyone has downloaded the Biolathe document." Henderson had, although he hadn't done more than skim the abstract. Aside from the section on biological speculation, it had been utterly boring. At least he was paying attention now, however, which was the polite thing to do. He sipped his wine. The heathen Stearn was building a pyramid from drug ampoules filled with some sparkly amber liquid. Fisher and Fang were letting it slide, and Henderson would not permit himself to notice such behavior. "I consider some of the ideas very good," Fisher continued, "I don’t consider all the ideas so good. It isn't surprising given the relatively short time the brain had to assemble the document, coupled with our great ignorance. First, we should see if we can agree on our prioritized goals." Fisher stood up and activated his right hand’s computer interface. Words appeared on the pads on the tabletree in front of everyone: PHYSICAL GOALS 1. Return Living Specimen to Earth. 2. Return Dead Specimen to Earth. 3. Return Specimen Samples to Earth. 4. Return Specimen Data to Earth. "This appears self-evident," Fang said. "Of course it does, but there are underlying assumptions regarding the prioritization that I’d like to question. But these are all questions of 'what,' rather than the more important goals of 'why.' Let me address this by writing down some the scientific goals." Henderson swirled his wine around in its glass before looking at the next set: SCIENTIFIC GOALS 1. Physics of Specimen -- Biological fusion? How does it survive in the hot disk? 2. Origin of Specimen -- natural or artificial? 3. Purpose of Specimen -- natural or ??? "That last one was not in the prospectus, but I think it is important," Fisher said. "What do you mean by ‘Purpose?’" Devereaux asked. "Based on the previous goal, it’s obvious," said Henderson, trying to catch her eye. He had given his brief conversation with Fisher some idle thought and didn't mind showing off for the available female. "If the dragon isn't of a natural origin, but of artificial, it was created. Created for a purpose." Fang said, "I will agree that determining the dragon origin is important. This must be a question of how to achieve self-organization in an extreme high-energy environment. Does anyone here truly think that someone, perhaps the infamous little gray men, made star dragons and put them in SS Cygni?" "It is hard to believe that we would not have already discovered physical artifacts of alien intelligence before these star dragons if such exists locally in the Milky Way," Devereaux said. "Not at all," Henderson said, engaging her. "Biological systems are self-renewing, and can evolve in response to cataclysm -- and this is a cataclysmic variable, after all. A biological remnant is more durable than a physical remnant." "What I’m getting at," said Fisher, thumping a fist into his palm several times, "is that if someone showed up and kidnapped one of our drone ships, just out of curiosity mind you, we would probably consider it an act of aggression, if not outright war." "You make an interesting point," said Devereaux, squinting at Fisher and wrinkling her face in a disagreeable way. "After all, the official Biolathe agenda is to use these dragons, or at least biology based on the dragons, to design machines for stellar engineering. If they are an alien construction team, and we show up and disrupt their production schedule, then someone might get upset." "Someone," chimed in Stearn, grinning, "Or something." "I cannot believe we are starting with this remote possibility," Fang said. "This dragon is an animal that happens to live in an exotic environment. An animal for us to hunt and use, if we can catch it. That's a fundamental rule of nature." Her face remained passive, but Fang's knuckles whitened where she gripped the edge of the tabletree. "You're probably correct, Captain," Henderson said, trying to ingratiate himself with Fang. She would evaluate him, after all, for bonuses. "We can test the notion that it is simply, as you put it, an animal that lives in an exotic environment. As I was telling Dr. Fisher earlier, evidence for an ecosystem would support a natural origin for the star dragon. Certainly transitional forms are necessary in an evolutionary scenario and would lead to the exploitation of a variety of niches." "I agree," Fisher said, holding his palm out toward Henderson. "But only to a point. I know of two places where that does not hold strictly true, but only in a locality. One is an island on Terenga where there is a creature called Grizzle's Omnivore, sort of a superpredator, which has eaten everything else, and I mean everything. Got poor old Grizzle, too, before they'd figured out he wasn't digestible and gave them all the runs. The current breed on the island soak up the sun during the day in perfect harmony. By night they prey on each other in loose packs." "Yes, I've heard of those," Henderson said, "but surely they’re dying out. Solar energy would not be a sufficient input to keep them going, would it?" "You’d think that, but they have a truly ingenious -- " "Back to the subject at hand," Fang said, sitting back on her chairbeast and crossing her arms. She looked cool, perfect, and dangerous in her crisp white uniform. Henderson had kept tabs on Fisher and Fang, and knew they were already sleeping together. He considered Fisher a brave man to bed the captain. She continued, "If you think this is such an issue, Sam, how do you propose to modify our approach?" "As I said at the outset, there are some very good ideas in the prospectus. I agree that the dragon appears to use electromagnetic fields to move through the disk, and I expect to have a working model of those fields before we arrive. That gives us an advantage. Just as a pinched magnetic field like Earth’s magnetosphere can trap an electron, forcing it to spiral back and forth until dumped down into the aurora, we can use the Karamojo’s field to trap a dragon. Stearn, what do you think about the plasma pen Biolathe proposed?" Stearn’s wings perked up as he looked up from transforming his amber pyramid into some kind of fractal pattern to which Devereaux, sitting next to him, was paying too much attention. The Jack said, "Geometry is a little problematic, but I think we can do it. Can’t we Papa?" "We can rig a good strong cage," said Papa. "But what of the reprioritization you spoke of," Fang persisted. "Right," Fisher said, holding up a finger. "Let’s make data gathering first priority, and let’s get it gathered before we move on to any other goals. It can make a difference." Henderson said, "Yes, we do a detailed analysis of the system, look for evidence for an ecosystem. Upon finding it, we proceed to procure specimens of all the niches. If there is no ecosystem, we should have a fall-back plan, and not the one currently outlined." "And what is wrong with the Biolathe plan?" Fang wanted to know. "You don’t know what’s wrong with nuclear 'depth charges'?" Sylvia asked, an attractive throaty indignation in her voice. "If we cannot coerce a dragon into Papa’s cage voluntarily, such a shock wave will likely be the safest course to neutralize one from a distance," Fang said. "We cannot fly into the disk. We will be fishermen with no knowledge of lures in a very big sea." Stearn asked, "Those bomb buggers really affect the disk? I mean, it's a giant disk of fire! Hmm, okay, I can figure it out. Plasma temperature in outer disk is like the solar photosphere right?" "Yes, the plasma in the outer disk in quiescence is like that in the sun's photosphere, several thousand degrees Kelvin, not all that hot and not all that dense," Devereaux offered. "For the nuclears we get temperatures of tens of millions of Kelvins and an energy density many orders of magnitude higher. They'll make a splash all right. Hundreds of kilometers at least." "Still seems to me like a star or an accretion disk ought to swallow man-made bombs without a burp," Stearn said, ruffling his feathers. "Globally yes, locally, no," said Devereaux. "Yes, well," Fisher said, "I suggest we employ heroic measures to secure a live specimen before resorting to such a thing." "Yes, heroic measures," Fang said, apparently mollified. "In my opinion, bombing is the practical approach. A few dead dragons are worth a live one, are they not? A live one will probably be a hundred times more difficult to capture, and would perhaps require additional heroic measures to keep alive for the trip home. We should maximize our chances for success, and minimize our risks. Yes?" Opposite Fang, Fisher frowned back. Trouble in paradise? "Kill one of those magnificent creatures, just because it would be easier? We're not doing this, traveling two hundred and fifty light years, because it is practical. We're going to do this right. We should invest some effort in developing methods of luring a dragon to us. Agreed?" Fang stared at Fisher, finally saying, "Agreed." The word came out quickly, like a fencing thrust. Then Fisher let the discussion devolve into the details. Apparently this first meeting was supposed to be more of a free-form brainstorming, a chance to see where everyone stood in terms of their philosophical approach to what Biolathe had suggested. Henderson didn't really see the point. Fisher and Fang were the players here, and before this meeting he had thought they were getting along famously. As Henderson watched the dichotomy of Fisher's animated hands versus Fang's unreadable glare, he became concerned about the fortunes of the mission. But then there came an even worse omen as the meeting broke up and Devereaux left with Stearn. What could she possibly see in him? Chapter 4 The ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. -- Joseph Conrad He peers into every part of the Karamojo, listens to the breath of the air scrubbers along every corridor, feels the weight and temperature of every creature on the ship. It is more than this as well. He sings the harmony produced by the electromagnetic field, the flywheels, and the singularity pair when all are in alignment and pointed like an arrow toward the dwarf nova system SS Cygni. The metallorganics that fuse DNA with semiconductor and comprise his brain have few nerves of their own. This harmonic tone is his good, for he is the mission. He is the ship. He is a world. He is Papa. Or rather Papa is the self-aware personality of the ship’s brain, designed to interact more effectively with the human crew. Papa’s hind brain records all that transpires aboard, adjusts the song that is flight under wormdrive, and for it there is no time except in the derivatives in the differential equations governing its feedback control systems. Papa himself thinks in the fuzzy, linear way of humans, with a specific location and point of view, and in terms of personal relationships. He has memory, both ones false, he knows, of a shadowy lifetime in the Twentieth century, more facts than sensory detail, such as running with the bulls at Pamplona and the plane crashes in Africa; and ones real, as a starship captained by Fang, of hauling faux-bulls and more to a tiny world nestled next to the dim ember of Barnard’s star. He has a sense of movement into the future that the hind brain lacks. To the ship he provides the purpose of the mission, the creativity to enhance self-preservation. In these first weeks of his new life, the SS Cygni mission, Papa walks the corridors of himself, a ghost capable of movement through walls and transportation anywhere shipboard at lightspeed. He learns the secrets of the people on board, and fights between his Hemingway-derived personality which ever judges those around himself and finds them wanting, and the programmed overrides preventing him from actions suggested by his judgment that make him a good tool. Papa lurks in the console of Axelrod Henderson. Henderson is more than competent and the biosystems operate at near optimum levels, guided by a trained human eye that notices subtle discoloration and patterns before reaching the conservative sigma levels required for action by his own algorithms. Henderson spends long hours subtly redesigning his own body and face, led by statistics governing mate selection. He runs additional models to determine the fraction of the human population carrying his genes upon his return; apparently Henderson has banked his sperm and licensed extensive cloning rights. What makes the faux-human part of Papa fume is the elaborate plan that Henderson will finance with the windfall from this very mission. Henderson develops his plan with all the attention to detail of any gourmet pornographic implant: the delivery of a virus carrying his own genes that will simultaneously impregnate every woman on Earth -- or at least some suitable and less-policed starter planet in the colonies. Henderson polishes computer-generated models of this scenario every night. He writes: It is pretentious to rise above what flesh this universe has wrought. What folly it is to think of a higher purpose, and to think that purpose any more than what we have instilled in every fiber of our being already. I recognize what I am, and I will fulfill my purpose.... Papa wants to grow a muscle-bound mobile, shout, "Lousy jerk, we'll knock your mucking block off!" and pugilistically educate the snooty underhanded biosystems technician into proper citizenship. He isn't permitted. But it would be a fine thing to end a bad business before it has begun. He is also not permitted to tell anyone else of this discovery, even if it ever appears that Henderson has formulated a way to carry out his plan. Damn privacy rights are coded right into him. Papa takes some consolation in the fact that the women on board the Karamojo don't share Henderson’s bed, although he does worry that despite their hormonal implants they will, impossibly, become pregnant. Almost as shocking to Papa is the liaison Stearn and Devereaux have formed. This lush, chocolate-brown beauty -- not his type, but rich and womanly nonetheless -- has shacked up with the Jack who is more boy than man. Many times over these weeks as the ghost slips through the door into Stearn’s quarters, which now wears the appearance of a traditional English library, he discovers the pair of them embroiled in ancient board games. First chess, clothes vanishing with each capture, later go, and more clothes removed as stones are surrounded. From Stearn’s downloads from the ship’s library, Papa knows that Shogi and Chun Chi will follow. Devereaux must know what Stearn is doing, but they play until Devereaux is winning most of the games and both appear to desire new challenges: Devereaux wants new games to conquer, while Stearn wants to see how far he can push Devereaux. Papa turns around and leaves when he sees the perversity develop. Some things are better left unwatched, and not spoken of. He suspects it is merely the morals of his age programmed into his psyche, but sexuality really has evolved past his limits. Otherwise the Jack does his job competently, monitoring the ship, and Devereaux spends admirable hours reducing data as the Karamojo approaches the extreme gammas that will boost the SS Cygni flux and permit the acquisition of superior data. Devereaux hopes to identify spectroscopic signatures of star dragon -- their emerald hue is a shifting laser transition of unknown origin and unknown purpose -- that may allow their numbers and locations to be determined, at least statistically. The exobiologist Fisher works even harder than Devereaux, devoting more hours to his dragon models. Papa has mixed feelings about his effort. Fisher spends every waking moment with his magnetohydrodynamic dragon circulation code, touring the ship and asking endless questions about every minute operational detail...or with Fang. He asks Henderson to grow him an electrostim unit to aid his muscle development so as to better his boxing performance and minimize the thrashings Fang administers. He designs stimulated boxing routines to practice, but his opponent isn't Fang, but a strange female human/dragon amalgamation, with sinuous motions reminiscent of an electron spiraling about a magnetic field line. Like Henderson, Fisher keeps a journal. In it he writes: Never have I been happier. The liberation of knowing the world is gone, and only love and discovery remain, is addictive. Fang is demanding of my time and takes as much as I permit, yet within her exists a hidden vulnerability, almost an alien lifeform, that has been a joy to discover. In some sense I have only months here on the ship, feeding on anticipation as the SS Cygni primary feeds on its disk, but it feels as if eternity vanishes before me, and now is forever. I can obsess over this amazing woman and our mission, and for once in my life my obsession will not drive away a lover, but, in fact, draw us closer and make of her a confidant. I can be myself, and only strengthen our bond. It is love, finally. Now if only she would bend a little my way on strategy, it would be perfect love. I am sure I can convince her my approach is best. I know I'm right. I've thought of a way to hook it, using grappling fields on our remote tugs. The dragon's flight pattern suggests an azimuthal field variation that.... Papa usually does no more than skim the long technical passages -- most, like this one that follows, over five thousand words long and annotated with figures and models -- in search of those about the captain. Papa has loved Biolathe Captain Lena Fang across the centuries. She is his daughter, and more. Just as he cannot grow a mobile and pummel Henderson, he cannot grow a mobile and love Fang as he would. More code. He is the half-man Jake Barnes to her Brett, ironically repeating the half-relationship from his first novel. All he can do is rage, worry, rail, suffer, and, at her request, counsel. The biggest plus to his current incarnation is that he does not have to watch his weight, a task that haunts his faux-human memories. He now accompanies Lena Fang through the ages, and they seem as Fisher’s eternity, even though all the computer scientists assure him that his personality perceives time at the same rate as a real human mind. Still, all that transpires shipboard is his to visit, all time stopped everywhere, all places available for him to toy with, to travel among, but he follows a linear track in space and time as best as he is able to not jar his human personality. It is only through the greatest effort of will (and that is also false for it is algorithm and not will at all) that he is able to perceive all events not simultaneously in the present. Thankfully, he does not dwell overmuch on the facts of his own existence because he isn't permitted to. He cannot become chronically depressed or suicidal. He is not Hemingway. He is a human-pattern program with a limited degree of self-awareness. When Papa, invisible, walks into Fang's cabin, and she and Fisher have been making love after a sweaty bout in the ring, he does not leave. He staggers, as if he had legs that could be weakened by jealousy, then flares, as if he had a real personality that could be incited to active rage and the deep depression of the abyss that could pull the trigger of a shotgun pointed at his brains. He can do nothing but watch until the physical act denied to him runs to completion. What he usually thinks is this: why did they not provide me with the capability to smell? He has olfactory sensors throughout the ship, but they are keyed to certain hazardous materials only, and he believes he misses terribly that sweet, musky odor of a delicious woman in heat. So he listens to Fang's cry and watches her lean muscles clench around Fisher’s head and longs for something he is not permitted. Later, after Fisher has left and before Fang has donned her uniform and joined her fighting chair on the bridge of the Karamojo, Papa gives Fang his ear as he has done so many times. "I’ve let him in here," she says, tapping her chest, "let him see me not as a captain, but as a woman." "You need a human presence, daughter, a human touch, to remind you of your soul," he assures her. He wants to say that all she needs is her Papa. He never does. "I want more," she says. "I want someone to understand, someone not guaranteed to accept." Her words sting. He says nothing, granting supportive listening, obeying his restrictions. "I want to tell him secrets that only you and I know." "What are you afraid of, daughter?" he says, hating the program she has unwittingly engaged, forcing him into playing the role of intuition, of conscience, of psychiatrist. "Rejection, of course. The worst would be dismissal, to be ignored because I was not important. What have I done but haul cattle? He’s been on the edge, daring the unknown, swallowed by inhuman monsters floating in the deep, deep seas of gas giants. He's looked into the abyss." "You, too, have faced the abyss," he reminds her. She has shared the pivotal events of her life with Papa, and his programming exploits this knowledge. "I was only eight." Fang licks her lips unconsciously. The same lips, with their funny shape that her grandfather ironically had described as bat-shaped, and hence lucky. "I would rather not talk of it now." Fang nibbles at her lower lip. Stymied, Papa must change tactics. "Was that when you decided to leave your home world for the stars?" Papa curses inwardly at his banal, leading question. He would show empathy rather than continue probing, but the program is triggered. "Is that when you decided such a thing would never happen to you again?" "It will not," Fang says, lips pressed into a thin, sharp line, the lucky bat-shaped curves flattened. "I am a starship captain, and that means something. I am responsible. Now and forever." There is truth in what she says. He is Papa and he is the ship, now the Karamojo. He is the ship’s breath, the ship’s power, the ship’s mind. But Fang can overrule him at him any time on all except for issues of immediate safety. Papa tells Fang, on this occasion as he has many times, "Now and forever, you are in control. You are responsible. You will not fail." After she has fallen asleep, another state denied him, the ghost that is Papa leaves to stalk the same endless corridors again. A mind does not need to sleep to dream. # Fisher awakened early, too hot to sleep comfortably in Lena's quarters, as usual, despite the fact that he had altered his metabolism to more closely match hers. Fisher lay awake spread-eagled in the darkness staring at the invisible mosaic on the ceiling, thinking about new approaches to take to study the star dragon. Unstructured time, he had come to appreciate recently, was a good way to solve problems. He didn't resent his sleeplessness. So he was awake when Lena started gasping, then moaning. He was reaching out to her when she said, "No, Grandfather, no!" She jerked away at his touch and kicked the covers at him, breathing fast and shallow. Her big black eyes glinted faintly in the dim light. "It's all right," he said soothingly, "Just a nightmare. That's all." She gulped, swallowed, in the dark. "Yes," she said finally. "A nightmare." "Want to talk about it?" "No," she said too quickly. "But you can hold me." "Come here," he said, pulling her into the crook of his arm. She was warm, stifling even, against his sweaty skin. He held her close. He thought she would say something after a time, but she seemed content to huddle with him. He lifted his arm to cradle Lena's head, letting his fingers idly twist locks of her hair. Her hair was short and fine, and unwound nearly as swiftly as he wound it up. "Why don't you let your hair grow out?" he mused. "No," she said. "I mean, I like it short." Short, fair, all on the surface. In control. Nothing hidden or mysterious. Not very dragon-like at all. "I think it might be a good look for you. Why not try it?" "No!" She sat up from him. "I don't want to." "Look, I'm sorry. I didn't realize you were touchy about it." But he was irritated. Hair was such a small thing, a triviality, and she would not indulge him one iota. This made him begin to worry about the course developing in the dragon meetings. If Lena would not compromise with her hair, what were the chances she would compromise on more important issues? He shook the thought away. She was probably just being contrary because of her bad dream. Maybe he should find out about that. "Tell me about your nightmare, Lena." "The deep," she whispered. "Something coming up for me, a monster of some kind. It was a child's dream. It was nothing." "You mentioned your grandfather," he gently prodded. She was silent so long he wondered if she had heard him. Just before he was about to repeat his statement she said, "I don't remember. I'm awake now. Make it morning, Papa." And beyond the doors the sun began to rise over the ocean. Lena rose faster and was into the bathroom at once. Fisher lay back onto the soft bed and stared at the now blue mosaic. The octopus's tentacles twisted around the water, grasping nothing despite the visibility. He had tried. But they just weren't going to be that way it seemed. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Because he had hoped so, he hurt. # Fisher wished that the tabletree were not rooted to the floor so he could push it into Fang and perhaps shut her up, but she just went on and on. "...and maintaining our altitude above the disk without wormdrive, we’ll be expending our fuel supply. It isn't unlimited. We can replenish it only very slowly with the high temperatures and low densities above the disk. Adding to that, the time to next outburst will limit our visit duration. We simply must make all haste to secure a dragon once we reach SS Cygni." "And so?" Fisher prompted. "It is clear that using our missiles as soon as possible is the most effective means to secure a dragon, dead or alive," Fang stated unequivocally. "It is the best course." She was outrageous! Every week the dragon meeting had eventually worked around to Fang's persistent desire to fire her weapons. She was nothing more than a livestock hauler, a modern cowboy at best, a glorified button pusher at worst. She sat there, so smug in her perfect white uniform playing as if she were a military commander. This was science, not war. Give her a weapon arsenal that would be the envy of a small colony, and suddenly she was power mad: Fire the missiles! Fire the missiles! Why couldn't she be more like she was in her cabin? "That may not be necessary," Devereaux interjected. "Certainly we can spend a few days investigating, gathering data, before making that decision. I’ve been making progress determining dragon numbers and location, but the uncertainties are still large. The outburst timescale does vary, and we can adjust our arrival time to give us a long visit between outbursts." "We fire at a dragon as a last resort," Fisher said. "To fire immediately would be like...like a premature ejaculation!" "Please, can we keep the discussion out of the gutter?" Stearn asked. Everyone stopped and looked at the Jack. Devereaux smiled knowingly and Henderson scowled. Fisher, also unsmiling, turned back to Fang and met her icy gaze. "I apologize." "Sylvia," Fang asked. "Is it true that the SS Cygni disk is experiencing an increased mass transfer rate compared to historical norms?" "Yes, but we really need more data. The time dilation works both ways and -- " Fang continued. "The dwarf novae outbursts are more powerful and more frequent, aren’t they?" "It seems so, but -- " "So our timetable should be accelerated. I am merely proposing the most logical way of doing that. This is quite reasonable." Fang smiled and spread her hands apart, palms upturned. "We can always try to capture a live specimen afterwards, if it seems appropriate." Fisher shook his head. "I’ve almost got the beast's bioelectric field nailed. With modifications to the shuttles we ought to be able to herd a dragon right into the Karamojo. Surely we should go for that first." "You still have time to convince me," Fang said, eyebrows arched high, "I am the captain, and I will make the final decision. I am responsible for this ship, this mission, and I won’t take unnecessary risks." "How about this," Devereaux offered. "We send a prospector ahead. We have several on our manifest, and we can get some advance data, a few days worth at least. Then we can make an informed decision without spending the extra resources." Fang considered it and finally said, "That would be agreeable." Fisher nodded and said nothing. What he thought was this: Why must you be like this when you're playing Captain? Why must you have a trophy? I won’t have you killing my dragon. # Devereaux walked into the observation blister. There were no artificial lights, but her robed form cast a shadow up from the transparent diamond floor as she cleared the entranceway. The light came from the Doppler-boosted and blueshifted long-wavelength radiation in the Galactic plane toward SS Cygni, including blueshifted cosmic microwave background: a tight knot of points amidst a diffuse glow. Elsewhere through the diamond the sky showed pure jet black, the stars erased by their velocity, except for directly aft, above her head, where the sun was still visible, its X-ray corona redshifted to optical wavelengths and amplified by the shape and gain of the blister. Only their origin and their destination remained part of the visible universe. A few more weeks and they would collapse the singularity pair, then reignite them in reverse, and begin to decelerate. Earth was mere months in the past now, but already irreversibly half a millennia gone. This step felt right to her. It was time to start her march toward the end of time and see the marvels along the way. Devereaux loosened her robe, discarded it, and stretched out on the floor, her head in a bubble in the blister designed for just such viewing. The diamond felt cool against her smooth tummy and breasts. The universe rushed at her at essentially lightspeed, but it really didn't appear much more interesting than a tight knot of lights, a very bright star cluster. There was no sensation of speed. Finally bored, Devereaux asked Papa to project a console off the bubble so she could work on the data and maybe get some more reliable estimates on the dragon density. The disk was big, and finding a dragon would not be easy. If they flew close enough for the best resolution, still limited by diffraction to a few tenths of an arcsecond at optical wavelengths, they would only be able to see a small part of the disk. Flying higher with a larger field of view, dragons would blend into the turbulent plasma. She had to admit that given only a week to work with, assuming a single visit between outbursts, Fang's violent ideas made some sense. The shockwave from a nuclear explosion would not only stun dragons at some distance (she had to believe they were stunnable), but it would also clear away swaths from the rarefied disk leaving holes like pepperoni on pizza. She smiled and got down to work. With red and green vectors spiraling before her, models of dragon distributions through the disk based on spectral analyses of the green -- now blueshifted into the X-ray -- emission-line profile, she heard someone’s slippered feet padding along the hallway behind her. She dimmed her console. "Phil?" The footsteps stopped. After a minute came a voice. "Henderson." Devereaux considered grabbing her robe, but she was too relaxed where she was. "Mind if I join you, madam?" he asked. She said, "Not at all. The universe is big enough to share, but just barely at the moment." He kneeled onto the diamond and laid at her side. "Yes, I see. I’ve never b