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.