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.