Fisher left Fang's cabin with his clothes draped over his right shoulder, moving quickly with a small skip despite the extra gees. His stretched out his hands, flexing away the cramps from the extended massages he had given Fang; the flowing air chilled the damp places in the webs between his fingers.



Instead of heading toward his own quarters, he decided it would be a good idea to see Henderson. Things had changed, and he wanted that to show.



Instead of ringing the chime, he rapped on the door itself. The glow from his hot hands reflected off the door's burnished surface, a ghost of himself.



The door irised open after a moment, releasing moist, cloying air that made Fisher think of a womb. Inside the light was dim, some kind of low mournful classical music playing. As he entered, the darkness and music retreated before him.



Henderson sat on a chairbeast, spinning slowly in half circles back and forth, an empty wine glass cradled between his splayed legs. His slick red smoking jacket swished with his circles. "What can I do for you, Dr. Fisher? Some clothes, perchance?"



Henderson's hypnotic, serpentine movement, cyclic, like electrons at the end of a magnetic bottle...no, he needed to suppress that for the time being. "Clothes? Yes, in a manner of speaking."



Henderson sighed, an exaggerated movement. "A tailor I'm not. At least this crew isn't as bad as I've seen. Did I ever tell you about the summer I worked at a Venice Beach shock shop? Fads there come and go by the hour, and today's youth are a pretty sick bunch. Great experience though for landing interstellar work. If you can make a beach-combing fan boy into a oceangoing transparent-shelled brain with penises for paddles in the morning, and back to his assholish self in time for dinner, they'll trust you to oversee the regrowth of a ship's organics."



Fisher let his clothes slide to the floor. Ruglings gathered and began conveying the misplaced duradenim along the floor. Eventually, an hour perhaps, his clothes would be back in his own room, clean and ready to wear.



Fisher said, "I want human flesh."



"Of course you do!" Henderson cawed, his bloodshot eyes puffy but wide open. "You all do, sooner or later. We're conditioned for the body we grew up in -- not necessarily quite the same one, but primate, Homo sapiens sapiens. Our minds reject anything else, even if we have the technology to trick the body. Our minds are still body bound, and will be forever. Unless we change them, which would change ourselves, killing us. So we're eternally bound. Until we die."



"No," said Fisher. "You don't understand. I don't want a complete makeover like before. I don't want everything back. I just want a skin to cover me, make me appear the way I did before."



Another sigh. "I can do that. But we're short on stem cells and expendable biomass." Henderson glanced away toward a dark corner of the biolab, at what Fisher could not tell, maybe some broken equipment. Before he could argue further, Henderson said, "Fine. I can do it."



"Excellent," Fisher said.



In a few minutes he sat in a slowly bubbling nutrient vat that smelled of honeysuckle. The warm fluid surrounded him, buoying him upwards, letting him bob through the surface. Itching crawled up his skin, starting with his toes, and pulled him down. He exhaled, slipped under, and inhaled.



In his mind's eye, Fisher watched the star dragon vanish beneath the disk's photosphere. She was glorious.

Part Three: Cornered Animals

Chapter 11

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau

Phil Stearn wiggled his elbows from side to side, inching down the shuttle ramscoop arm as fast as he could. Really should have redesigned for this one, he thought. Long, skinny tentacles. Yeah, that would have been a lot better. More fun than redesigning the shuttles anyway. Hmm, and he might find an interesting use for those with Sylvia as well.



Reaching his objective, Stearn slid his Swiss space tool along the superconducting coil sheath, smiling at the rasping notes that issued forth and echoed within the confines of the arm. A gentle touch raised a pure tone, like a wet finger on the rim of a wine glass. The next coil out was smaller in circumference and hit a higher note when he tapped it. He checked the sonic analysis program hastily thrown together and onto his fingertip machine -- Papa's ears would not hear so well in here. If this went well, he would execute some low current tests next. The fingertip flashed green.

"Are the coils in spec?" Fisher asked, his insistent voice pleasantly distant and twisted by the tube.

Stearn stretched himself out further to hit an even smaller coil, the last on the arm. Da-ding. Da-ding. He could make the dings and the raspy notes. He ought to get Papa's help to compose a superconducting sonata, or a pop tune of some kind. B field blues, maybe. Da-ding.



"Are you working in there, or just playing?" Fisher asked.

Tight ass. Stearn sighed, turned down the light from his tool, and wiggled his shoulders to ease himself back out of the tube. Even though he'd adapted himself to the high gravity, it was still a special pain in this situation.

The arms of the ramscoop shuttles hadn't been designed for this new use, generating the intense, controlled magnetic fields to bottle star dragons, and the necessary coil placement was not at all optimal for human access. There wasn't time, or trust, to train micromachines for this job. Papa said he was fine, but who knew for sure? Much needed to be done by hand, or at least checked by hand. That was the job of the Jack, and he took it as seriously as he took anything. And that was plenty serious, more serious than his crewmates gave him credit for. But he didn't resent that. That was their problem, not his. He was comfortable with his abilities.



Stearn slid out and dropped a fast meter to the deck, trailing a monitoring line, a spider down a wire. The arms of the scoop, splayed as they were for access, did indeed resemble the unfinished frame of a web. Apropos.

Fisher, the true web-builder, paced nearby.

Stearn technically was the spider who'd built this web, as he'd done most of the actual crawling and checking and fixing, but it was Fisher's creation. Fisher had designed the magnetic net to catch a dragon and the specs for the shuttle fleet. The Jack said, "They're in spec. If you got your designs right, this will work."



Fisher sniffed, and scratched at the side of his nose. "The designs are right. What worries me is what the dragons haven't shown us yet. The fields these shuttles will form will cage my current model dragon. If I've understood their field generation dynamo, if their nuclear fuel is sufficiently depleted, if they don't surprise us. A second time, that is. Still, we may have to move in close, bluff a crash with the shuttles, to close the cage tight."



"Right, bluff," Stearn replied. Fisher wore human skin once more, his traditional pale pink. Too bad, Stearn thought. The green glow had been pretty hip, and he'd had high hopes Fisher would outdo it when he changed again. But Fisher had resumed his old appearance, with the short shock of dark curly hair, angular pale body, and the rest strictly Homo sapiens. Well, almost. When he caught Fisher in just the right light, the skin appeared bloated, less like real skin and more like a vacuum suit thrown on. And once since they'd started their work in the shuttle hold, Stearn had spied a green-tinged glint from the corner of Fisher's eye when he'd rubbed it.



As they walked to the last arm, Stearn decided to satisfy his curiosity. He knew that something had precipitated Fisher's sea change, and he had already checked where everyone had spent the breaktime. "You're lucky to have her."



"I don't have the dragon just yet," Fisher said. "And luck will have little to do with it."



Hmm. His mind sure wasn't on Captain. Still, Stearn would feel better if he knew how the social forces on board were now arrayed. Just as the magnetic fields might hold a dragon, the social forces might hold the crew together. Blunt or oblique, which approach? In the past he had always been blunt, but his time with Devereaux had led him to appreciate more subtle strategies. That was the only way to beat her at board games, which he managed once in a while. He knew he had to keep her interested.

He asked, "Now that you've seen them, any more ideas about the dragon origins? I mean, are they machines made by someone, or do they mate, give birth, piss and shit, all the stuff that life does?"

Fisher snorted. "Technology blurs the distinction between living and machine. I prefer to think of this as a problem of artificial, or natural. There are several points in favor of an artificial origin. First, we still see no evidence for an ecosystem."



"Not all of Papa's sensory apparatuses are back on-line."



"Granted, but I don't think we're going to see an ecosystem even when they are back up. The second point is that SS Cygni has not had an accretion disk very long, astronomically speaking. The current disk isn't even that old. These stars accumulate matter, hit critical temperature and go nova every few hundred thousand years, and this destroys the disk. No way something like this evolves over that kind of timescale. Not in the disk anyway."



"You sure? There's enough energy here to drive things at a wicked pace."



"Unlikely. You see, how do you even start? I have no idea what sort of matter constitutes the dragons, but it's either non-conventional -- not a naturally occurring substance, a nano-buttressed alloy for instance, or not even baryonic. The implications of either are significant. This is probably why the Biolathe brain really assembled this mission. Our ability to manipulate space-time provides us with cheap energy for massive engineering projects. Earth doesn't really need fusion-powered dragons for space construction."



That was an interesting notion, but Fisher was revved up pretty good and it was time to nudge him back onto the oblique orbit Stearn had in mind. Devereaux had reminded him that some of the best games were social. "So why do you need dragons?"



Fisher started to speak, stalled, and blinked. He raised a long finger to his temple. He tapped his head and started to smile. "Because it feeds this," he said. "Without this, I'm nothing but an animal, eating and breathing and defecating, just as the blind watchmaker of evolution pieced together over billions of years. But through my curiosity, I can transcend my own origins, become something more. If not now, then someday. The things I discover change me into something more."



Stearn laughed. He tried to hold it in, but he just could not help himself.

"What? What is it?" Fisher's finger crawled down from his forehead, and his smile faltered. It flashed back with the infection of a laugh as he asked again, "What?"

Stearn laughed harder. He was so earnest, so blind himself. Fisher...Fisher was so...full of it!

Fisher shrugged and turned away to another arm of the shuttle.



"No, wait. I'm sorry," Stearn said, taking a deep breath. "I'll tell you."



Fisher spun back, green glinting from his left eye. "Yes, what is it?"



"You're shitting yourself, because you're just like me."



Fisher's head reared back, reminding Stearn of the surprised snakes he'd seen once at a party when a dancing Medusa chick had lifted her arms suddenly. "I'm not like you at all. What do you mean?"



"You're always looking down at me because I play a lot. Sure I play. I have more fun because I know exactly who I am and what I'm about, and my quest is one of amusement. You're the same, but you cloak your motives in transcendent language. But it is simple. You need dragons because you need toys to play with."



Fisher's smile faltered at once. "That's not it at all! It's so much more. It's of fundamental importance to our understanding of our place in the universe."



"I'll give you at least long odds on that, but that's not your real motivation. If the dragons were a fluke of nature, doomed to destruction in a cosmological blink of the eye, and of no relevance to the human race or any carbon-based biology, you wouldn't walk away, would you?"



Fisher broke the stare he'd fixed on Stearn to pace around the shuttle arms, making him appear a busy little webmaker. "There's no way the dragons could be a fluke. I cannot believe that. The reasons are myriad." Fisher's fingers flew into the air as if pulled by strings. "I can count off sixteen without trying. Shall I?"



Stearn squinted, but still counted only ten fingers on Fisher's splayed hands. Disappointed he said, "No need. Let me ask you another question. You're back with Captain again, I gather. Tell me, why do you need her?"



"Lena?" Fisher's web-building course stopped and his fingers fell to scratch his cheek. His eyes darted among the spokes of the shuttle arms.



"Are the reasons myriad?"



Fisher nodded. "Yes, of course they are." His hands went up. "I can count them, too. Shall I?"



"Yeah," said Stearn. "These you can count."



"Fine. I will." Fisher waved an extended finger like a conductor leading an orchestra. "She makes me exercise. She challenges me to be my best. She knows how to run this ship. She has the same goals on this mission that I do, even if she doesn't appear to at first glance. She -- look, this is moronic. Is that enough? We have work to do."



"Yeah, that's enough. But let me tell you a few of the reasons why I love Sylvia: the little sound she makes in her sleep just before she rolls over, the glances she sends my way when she's in the middle of something else that lets me know I am in her thoughts, the way she lets me be myself without trying to change me, the smell of her hair, the heat that rises to my cheeks when she is in the same room as I am, the way her brow knits when she loses herself in something, and the fact that sometimes that something is me."



Fisher stared back, unblinking, and worked his jaw before he spoke. "Such things don't make for a lasting relationship. They'll just interfere with our work here. I won't have that. I suggest you get some distance, Jack, or you'll jeopardize us all."



Right. Stearn was a whole lot more afraid of Fisher's yo-yo relationship with Captain jeopardizing things than his own handyman duties. He said, "I'll do my job just fine, Dr. Fisher. I work as hard as I play. But I want you to think about something, a piece of advice from an expert game player. A bluff will fail unless you're willing to carry through. Are you?"



"I'm willing to do anything," Fisher said easily in response. He paused for a moment, as if considering, then nodded to himself abruptly. "Yes, anything. Now, let's get back to work."