Before Fang had even finished her explanation, Stearn had opened the utility locker to start suiting up. The clock was ticking down, and he was the "go to" man, the one who would put up the ball before the final buzzer. The one to take the penalty kick. The anchor leg of the relay. The outcome of the game rested on his shoulders. Heck, what had he been practicing for all those years if not for this? He'd earned his spot on the team, and he was not about to let his mates down, even if that surprised them. Failing now would be as bad as cheating.



He just wished that his head didn't hurt so much.



In a businesslike fashion Fisher assisted him donning the emergency suit, carefully checking all the diagnostic panels. "There should have been an albedo skin for you Stearn, but it looks like Papa reabsorbed all the biologicals stored here. We'll spray on a shield, but it's not as effective."



"It's okay," Stearn said. "Neither will help much."



"Open your mouth," Henderson said. The metal giant started sticking pills into his mouth like a stim addict punching his pleasure center. He was too helpful, too obviously relieved that he was not the one putting his life on line. "Against the radiation. These will do the job, you'll see."



Stearn barely kept from gagging as he dry swallowed the slimy capsules. The giant's fingers smelled like ancient coins, bitter copper, and kept clinking against his teeth.



Then Sylvia showed up and it was nearly too much for his pounding head.



"Phil!" she cried, pushing by Fisher and Henderson to throw her arms around Stearn's neck.



He tried to shrug her off. He couldn't afford the distraction now, and she was a overwhelming distraction. His clever, assured jungle goddess had been transformed as if by magic into a blithering idiot. "Lay off," he said more sharply than he intended. His head throbbed and he didn't need any more headache. His vision blurred. Tears, he figured, and tried to intercept them. "Just put me in, Coach."



She sniffed and blinked at him. "Phil?"



"Stand back and let me take the shot," he said patiently.



"Phil?" she said again, her confused blinking morphing into a penetrating squint. "Why are your eyes funny? Your eyes aren't tracking together."



Now it was his turn to blink slowly, exerting every iota of his will into straitening his vision. Maybe he wasn't tearing up. No matter, his system was healing everything. The analgesic glands had already taken the edge off his headache -- it was no longer the worst he'd ever had in his life. Closing his eyes, taking a deep breath, he said, "I'm…fline."



He opened his eyes, even though it hurt to do so. Devereaux frowned back at him, then raised her hands to his head. He winced as she touched the tender spot where he had banged it earlier.



"You hit your head," she accused. "Does your head hurt now? The truth."



"Yeah, but not too much. Pain killers are kicking in." Adrenaline, too, which was good because his eye lids felt pretty heavy. There was no choice, however. He knew the system better than anyone else. He wouldn't have to spend precious moments getting instructions from Papa on the repair. Those moments could make the difference. "Let's hurry it up. I'll be fine once I'm in the game."



"It's not up to you to judge," Fisher said. "Concussions can be tricky. Papa?"



"Hold still Mister Stearn," Papa said, "while we run an HHG."



Stearn held still as asked, all except for his jaw which he worked like a goat chewing gum. He wished he had some gum. This whole waiting game was icing him. If they'd only let him go out, concentrate on his job, then he wouldn't have to consider the consequences...they would realize there was no other choice. No one but him and Papa knew what needed to be done, and Papa didn't have a mobile ready to go. Ergo, time to stop warming the bench, Mister Stearn.



He stared blankly at the wall, keeping his eyes open. A drop of sweat slid down the side of his face and coolly under the collar of his undersuit.



"He shouldn't go," Papa finally said.



"What?" Stearn asked. He was being denied the chance to win the game? "You nuts, Papa? I don't go, we die. So let's go already."



"You can't go!" Sylvia burst out in tears and she pressed her cheek against his. It was so unlike her to not understand exactly what the situation was. But he knew the score.



Stearn calmed down, pushed Sylvia away, and said, "I have to go anyway, see?"



 "No," Fisher said, reaching for a second suit from the utility locker. "I'll go. Henderson, take Stearn to the biolab. Sylvia, help me on with this."



"Are you telling us," Stearn jerked his thumb toward himself, "that you think you can do the job as good as me?"



"In your current state, better." Fisher tapped the studs and his duradenim slid from his body like silk.



"Come on, Phil. Go with Henderson," Sylvia said.



Fisher had already dismissed him and was stepping into the suit legs.



"Hey Fish," Stearn said. "I'm not going. When did you learn to do my job? Papa, does he really know how to do this?"



Fisher answered, cutting in before Papa spoke, all the while continuing to dress. "In the months you were playing games with Devereaux and I was hanging in the captain's ill wind, I wasn't just building models of star dragons and brooding. I studied this ship for hours every day, learning everything I could to help eliminate bad luck from our mission. Exploit the tiniest thing to get my way, if I had to. It seems that I took a prudent course of action."



"Papa, patch Captain through," Stearn demanded. He was sure the twin images of Fisher came from his anger, not his crossed eyes. It hurt less to not force them back into one. "Tell her what's going on."



"I've heard everything." Captain Fang's voice was low and even. "I concur with Doctor Fisher's assessment, and his course of action."



Fisher cursed under his breath as he popped a wrist seal, but quickly had things set aright.



Stearn stood watching, dumbly, for a long moment as the exobiologist donned the suit. Finally his shoulders slumped in defeat. "All right then," Stearn said, letting his aching head rock back to rest against the neck seal. "Lead on, Axelrod."



Sylvia kissed him on his cheek and gave his hand a squeeze. He tried to squeeze back, but he had no strength in his hand. He let go, and nearly stumbled with his first step his legs were now trembling so badly.



He should have felt elated to escape certain death, but he did not. He felt…benched.



"You better do a good job, Fish," Stearn said over his shoulder, concentrating on the challenging tasks of keeping his eyes open and walking straight. "Or I'll kick your ass."

Chapter 17

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life. -- Jean Giraudoux







Fisher stepped into the suit, one leg then the other. Just like getting dressed on every other occasion in his entire life.



Unlike any other occasion in his entire life.



The suits' biosystems had been salvaged earlier and not yet replaced. That meant using the mechanical back-ups: urine collection bags, liquid-cooled underwear, passive atmosphere filters. As good as the biological systems and as poor as the mechanical systems, Biolathe still relied too heavily on its strengths. One good diamond-based robot or Waldo would have been a lifesaver. They had the plans to build an army of such devices in the nano-vats, but not any faster than a biological mobile. They had run out of time.



Fisher, rather, had run out of time.



"Thank you," Devereaux said, smiling nervously. "Thank you for saving Phil, and all of us. You're a hero, you know? I wouldn't have thought it of you." She slipped behind him to check the atmosphere recycler.



"I'm not a hero. I haven't done anything yet," Fisher shot back, at the same time hoping that Lena might see him as a hero, at least to a small degree. "I'm just maximizing the mission's chance for success. It's the only logical course of action. But I'd rather not talk about that. What I'd really like is for you to tell me what the star dragons are doing."



She obliged readily, her words coming fast, as if she were grateful to have something else to talk about than this oh-so-embarrassing thing he was doing. She told him about the dragon trajectories making effective beelines for the secondary, even when the shortest time path was not intuitive: surfing the disk in the forward direction, blasting over the accretion stream impact, and looping around the field lines into decaying spirals ending in the nearby star.



"Amazing things, the dragons," he mused. "I don't see how their behavior can be instinctual, or learned either for that matter. The choice of route in this complex environment requires intelligence. There is no record of such a super outburst as we're about to see from any dwarf novae going back more than six hundred years, so this is a rare occurrence. The a priori chances of such a thing happening at the same time we're here is minuscule. Therefore we are the trigger. This is a defense mechanism against us."



"Well, it's working." Devereaux rapped on his backpack unit. "Ship-shape back here."



And ship-shape in front too, he realized. He'd automatically finished his dressing and checks, barely aware of himself going through the motions. He dogged down his helmet. Air hissed, stale, cycling through his suit.

He knew he should begin reviewing the damage to the Higgs generator that he'd have to fix, but he didn't anticipate it being difficult. It was an engineering problem, inherently solvable. As long as they had the pseudo-gravity of the high-speed rail, "high" being a relative term as they limped along, he could get a grip on things. Freefall repair would have been a more difficult chore. No, he had no doubts at all that he was capable of aligning the beam if everything was as Papa had determined. He felt a certainty that he could do the job, and he wished he could ignore thinking about it altogether.

What he desperately wanted to do was to follow his new train of thought about the dragons to its logical conclusion. He smelled a whiff of truth down this path. If these were to be his final moments in the Universe, this was how he would prefer to spend them. But he couldn't give less than he was to Lena, to the others. The job had to come first, and it would not be a shame to focus on it. "Okay Papa, flash me the schematics."



Devereaux finished spraying on the white radiation coat and gave him a pat on his insulated shoulder, her touch little more than distant pressure and faint rasp.

Lasers sketched the blueprint vectors onto Fisher's head's up display as he entered the airlock. Papa overlaid the damaged housing, showing where it had crimped. The alignment of the housing itself didn't matter, but its shift had jarred the collimator. The Higgs generators depended on their alignment. The highly energetic beams of gamma rays had to collide at the right place at the right time in just the right way, or all you got was a mess of hard radiation and some orphaned cosmic rays. To build the mass pair required precision.

As the atmosphere cycled out, Papa described the repair procedure involving the replacement of a piece of molding, adjustment of a Fabry-Perot tuning etalon, and a system diagnostic to confirm the fix. Easy. A mobile could do it.

If one was available.

The disk of the airlock door irised open. Fisher watched the Forget-Me-Not-preserved dragon roll in his mind's eye for the last time.

He climbed down into the inner space of the Karamojo. The rails flashed and the low gravity tugged at his feet as he descended the rungs that followed the curved hull. Beneath him, already appearing more distant than he would have thought, the disk of SS Cygni glowed and sputtered like a pregnant volcano. The hard radiation traversed the distance nearly instantaneously. The only protection was one over r-squared, distance, to get the flux down. They had to go faster to increase the distance before the big splash.

Both the raildrive and the wormdrive were aligned along the ship's central axis, and heading out of the system as fast as possible under constant acceleration their orientation had to be essentially radial to SS Cygni. The Karamojo's hollow tube sighted the ticking bomb and provided little shielding for Fisher. He imagined he could feel the X-rays and charged particles slicing up through his boots, along his bone and sinew, ionizing and killing his tissue, overwhelming the meager antioxidants, cysteine, and other drugs he'd been given, a valiant last line of defense as gallant and effective as Davey Crockett at the Alamo. Of course there was no sensation, not yet. That would come later.

A mild radiation dose would do nothing more than lower his white blood cell counts, destroy his platelets. Inconsequential damage given his current body, cleared as it was for extended space travel. A little more radiation would bring on fever, nausea, weakness, cramps, and vomiting (a great danger in a suit without its biological systems -- but Henderson had included the appropriate drugs to prevent this in his anti-radiation cocktail). Furthermore, his body was proof against the slower effects, such as Hematopoietic syndrome, which would occur in H. sapiens sapiens, version 1.0, but not in Fisher, whose bone marrow was better protected. No, mild radiation would not hurt him, and any serious damage to his circulatory system or digestive system would be healed before it became life threatening. He only feared a heavy dose, which would damage his brain, inciting headache, apathy, tremors, convulsions, then coma and death.

He was going to get a heavy dose. He had to finish the job before his hands started to shake.

Papa droned on about techniques for the repair, how the tools he would need were arrayed in the unit maintenance kit, how he could tell when he had succeeded with each subtask.

Fisher concentrated on every movement as he forced his body down the rungs. No sense losing vital seconds on a slip (he had tethered himself, automatically, and could not fall away). It wasn't fair he wouldn't even get a chance to think things through, inserting the latest turn of events into his understanding of the star dragons. Not fair at all.

A double tap of the release opened the generator casing. That was not crimped, at least. Fisher worked meticulously, giving a status report out loud whenever he reached some minor milestone. He assumed that Papa was relaying everything to Lena. Why wasn't she talking to him? Didn't she care? Of course she did, which was exactly why she wasn't saying anything, he realized. Fisher blinked, and refocused his attention on his work. If he failed, they all died.

Every once in a while, he would experience a blue flash in one eye or the other. This, he knew, was Cerenkov radiation created when some high-energy particle from the disk traveled through the aqueous humor of his eye faster than the speed of light in that medium. This was the same principle some of the early neutrino telescopes had used to detect their quarry. He refrained from using these events to estimate his dose.

Finally he reached the point of adjusting the etalon, meticulous work wherein the plates had to be aligned just right to select the frequencies required. The actuators were not very smart, and he had to find the fringes and hold them by hand. He licked his dry lips. The unit was freestanding, the control electronics specially shielded, and Papa couldn't help much with it.

He could afford to disengage his conscious mind now and let the rest go through the mechanical tediousness of the repair. No way to go faster without risking a complete restart. He had only been working for fifteen minutes or so, but already he was hot and exhausted. A few times his stomach twisted, wanting to heave. He swallowed and fought down the sensation, trying not to think about the damage his body was taking.

The disk had grown noticeably brighter despite the distance the Karamojo had placed between them. The outburst was coming fast and would hit them like dragon breath.

Fisher decided that his actions had to speak for him with Lena; there was nothing he could say to her at this point that would matter. Their relationship was done. He would strive for closure with his obsession. "Papa, tell me a story."

"All right, son. How about something about Michigan? Or Africa? We remember liking Africa quite a damn lot. "

"Stop," Fisher said with exasperation, feeling the inevitable headache igniting. "Not one of your namesake's historical romances. Tell me a story about the dragons. Given my notes, research, models, observations of the dragons in action, the egg, and the events of the last few hours, construct a maximum likelihood story. Can you do that for me?"

"Of course we can. We've already been working on one and was just waiting for one of you single-brained bipeds to ask. The title of the piece is 'Work in Progress.'"

"Original," muttered Fisher, keeping an eye on his etalon.

"About a billion years ago on a world of ocean paradise thrived a fishy society. An intelligent people, these fish folk, exploiting the properties of water to converse in world-spanning song, on-going conversations of all things simultaneously between all citizens."

"They were cetacean then, their ecological niche anyway."

"No," Papa said with a hint of impatience. "But we knew you would want to make the ill-conceived connection. Now, permit us tell the story my way. This was a world without land and these people developed in the seas. They didn't develop on land and return to the sea, subject to the limitations of breathing air. Think of them as clever eels."

"Eels. Uh huh," Fisher said as he loosened a bolt to turn a dial. He did see. The dragons were accustomed to swimming in fluid and not surfacing, if he understood where Papa was taking his story. But water to fire? And a billion years? That wasn't a likely evolutionary time for SS Cygni. But he sucked his tongue back into his mouth, continued with his work, and let Papa continue.

"These people talked with each other. Cooperated. Thrived, and multiplied, laying their eggs thickly just under the waves. They fed on small creatures, alien plankton, if you will. They had predators as well, who preyed on the eggs and even these folks themselves. The songs of the murdered people echoed for days in the worldsea, giving much distress, but ensuring that no one would forget. These predators they eventually eliminated."

"Eliminated?" Fisher broke in. "That can't be healthy for an ecosystem. What about the disasters of unchecked population growth followed by starvation and extinctions on down the food chain?"

"As if humans didn't do the same? The lions, for instance, before they were resurrected? The fish folk did as your people, Dr. Fisher. They filled the niches themselves, controlling their world. Probably they did a better job of it, too, in most regards."

"Why?" Fisher asked, trying to blink the piercing headache away. The repair was proceeding according to plan, according to schedule. He assumed that the radiation was doing the same, with the flux growing faster than the r-squared their acceleration was putting between themselves at the disk. "Why?" he repeated again, abruptly, to derail the frightening thought train.

"No high technology on a water-world, at least as we would understand it. Philosophy, ethics, music. This is what these people focused upon."

"You guess."

"We guess. But let's continue. They built a complex society on this world, a perfectly balanced system able to persist for millions of years. A peaceful, robust world able to withstand all sorts of catastrophes. All but those overwhelming catastrophes of astronomical origin."

Fisher had a whole load of burdensome doubts. These he tried to suppress in the same way the mind of a dying man crawling through the desert will suppress thoughts of mirages when he catches a glimpse of an oasis on the horizon. More than repairing the Karamojo, more than regaining Lena Fang's favor, what meant life to Samuel Fisher was unraveling the nature of the star dragons of SS Cygni. He remained silent now and let Papa paint the picture.

"At some time in their long and harmonious history, the fish folk came under the scrutiny of some other worldly intelligence that saw the value of their society and wished to preserve this wonder. This was an ecosystem stripped bare and lovingly maintained by a society of vast ideals and organization. It had to have been a marvel of this galaxy."

"A marvel? But they'd destroyed everything."

"Depends on your point of view, and we're telling their story. There is beauty in the darkest, starkest things in the universe we assure you. In any event, it was after reaching this pinnacle that the fish folk were transformed into dragon folk."

The final adjustment of the etalon resisted Fisher, the interference fringes drifting from their operational points before he could lock down the system. His hands had to be shaking from the careful, prolonged work in the unsteady gravity, didn't they? That had to be all. This was normal, was it not? He nevertheless could not resist stealing some extra degree of attention from this vital task to object to Papa's assertions. "Transformed by an alien intelligence? That doesn't make any sense. Why not guard their world, or aquaform another for them?"

Papa gave Fisher an impatient hrumph. "That is a temporary solution, requiring long-term maintenance. Humanity, both as a group and as individuals, must overcome such thinking now that some level of longevity has been achieved, but that is another lecture. Transforming this society into that of the star dragons gives it the ability to spread itself across the galaxy as their home stars evolved and died. That is the long-term solution. Some immortal you are."

Fisher didn't appreciate the irony -- he was a living oxymoron, a dying immortal barely a century old -- but he was intrigued by the new idea Papa had given him. "Spread themselves across the galaxy? How?" But even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. It was staring him in the face, at least if he twisted his head a bit to the left. "Eggs?"

"You bet, boy. Shrapnel in a nova grenade will spread just dandy. Or in a self-induced explosion like this one, which is big enough to spray the disk halfway from here to Earth given a few million years. The eggs will keep in stars, in interstellar space, waiting until they find a nice blood-warm disk to hatch into. Then the perfect society starts all over."

Fisher had a hundred questions, a hundred objections. Parts of Papa's story satisfied him immeasurably, and for this reason alone he doubted much of what Papa had told him. He was a dead man that Papa had to keep happy and keep working. What better way to do that than to tell him about how the dragons he loved constituted a perfect society that had been the beneficiary of an intelligence whose discovery would be monumental? But the dragons had to have some method of surviving novae, and some method of arriving at SS Cygni in the first place. With no ecosystem to speak of. Someone made them, or they made themselves. That much had to be true.

Exhausted, Fisher could only launch one small volley of questions. "How much of this story is true? How much did you make up?"

"Not enough time now. Are you finished with the repair?" Papa asked.

He realized his aching hands had stopped moving. Fisher tried to talk but found his mouth dry. When had it gotten so hot? He sipped some water from the tube and nearly couldn't swallow it. He looked at his work and judged it good. Green indicators signaled 'go.' Beyond the reconstructed Higgs generator the disk cast ultra-sharp rainbow shadows throughout the Karamojo's cavernous interior. It reminded Fisher of being in that cathedral in Europe, he forgot the name of it, that Atsuko had dragged him to once -- he had thought he'd only agreed to a virtual visit. All the light, all the colors…mass transfer runaway through the disk was happening now. "Yeah," he answered. "I'm finished. You better go ahead and initiate wormdrive."

And that would be it for Fisher; the tidal forces would tug him into the inner chamber and he would be lost to space, cooked, or both. But any delay would put the Karamojo at risk. Why didn't they just activate it already? He would have.

And besides, he was way too tired to climb back to the lock a hundred kilometers away.

"No," said Papa. "Captain Fang appears most resolute on that point."

"Lena?" Fisher said, looping one arm around the generator and lifting his head. "I'm dead. Get the hell out of here."

"Maybe, maybe not," Lena's stone-sweet voice answered. "Papa and Henderson tell me that your dose may be survivable given your altered physiology. You're a pretty clever guy, more thorough than necessary on that body design. So get your butt back in here, pronto."

They were being stupid now. He chewed at his lip -- the skin broke easily and bled profusely, tasting metallic and sour -- proof enough for him. The radiation was doing its job on the tissues of his body. How could they take his sacrifice and throw it back at him like this? They were spurning his action, and risking their lives and the loss of their discoveries.

There was one way to put everything aright.

Their acceleration was high enough, a sputtering two gee or thereabouts, and the curve of the hull shallow enough, that with a single leap Fisher would bounce out of the ship in seconds. There the rail drive would puncture him like an industrial laser through tissue. That would be easier, quicker, and more inevitable than decompressing his suit.

"Sam!" Fang called. "Come in now!"

Fisher ignored her entreaty. It was the right thing to do. It would make sure the mission was a success, that their specimen got back to Earth. He had told himself he could do anything. Could he really? He was about to find out. He took a deep breath, tensed his muscles to leap...

"Aren't you curious Dr. Fisher," Papa said, "about the unexpected information we obtained from analyzing the egg that let us construct the story?"

"What?" Fisher asked. "What information?"

"We'll tell you when you reach the airlock," Papa bargained.

Fisher squeezed his eyes shut, suddenly light-headed, the pain a little more distant behind the exhaustion. So that was the nature of things, even at the end: a fight. All of life was fighting. In this case, fighting for a precious scrap of information to feed the overwhelming urge to know. So be it. He had been fighting his whole life. He might as well fight a few more minutes.

He hadn't been certain he could jump anyway.

Fisher twisted his body away from the generator and reached for a rung of the ladder. His hand missed, pushing through the empty space to the silvered diamond hull beyond, and he caught the rung in the crook of his elbow. He had no strength in his body.

The airlock a scant dozen meters above might as well have been a star away.

But he could do anything for the dragon, couldn't he? That had been his mantra. Anything for the dragon.

Fisher pushed down, lifted his right leg, and found purchase. He took a step, slow motion. It was only seconds, but it seemed an eternity. SS Cygni, so many thousands of kilometers away, was breathing hotly on the back of his neck. "Tell me, Papa," he gasped, taking another step.

"When you reach the airlock, son. Not before then."

Fisher would have cursed him, had he the energy to spare. He didn't. He took another step instead, moving half a head higher. His knees wobbled, his arms shook, but he kept moving. No longer trusting his grip, he hugged the ladder with his whole body.

Then he rested. The gravity had increased certainly, felt like four gees at least. The disk's radiation continued to slice through the fiber of his muscles. Occasional blue flashes. Through his eyes, and his heavy brain. Those few pounds were too much now. "I'm done," he said, sagging.

"Keep your wits about you, son," Papa warned. "We're going to kill the thrust. A few tiny pushes are all you need."

"Don't slow down."

"We're killing the thrust."

"What's the point?" Fisher asked.

"What's the point?" Papa bellowed, his voice resounding in Fisher's helmet like an echo. "The point is choosing to live, choosing the struggle, or you're dead. You've got the rest of your life ahead of you, just like everyone else. Quit and you might as well be a chairbeast. Now, keep your wits!"

Then the steady thrum of the rails, which came through the ladder and into Fisher's hands, died. Fisher would have sworn a few moments earlier that nothing would be better than freefall, but he was wrong. The absence of gravity made him aware that the weary ache suffusing his body was intrinsic now, no artifact of anything natural.

Fisher gritted his teeth together, tasted blood, and reached for the next rung. His hand flew high. Watch it, he told himself. Reflexes trained by a lifetime of gravity didn't know any better, unless he watched everything. Watched his hand go where he wanted it. Even though he really wanted to close his eyes.

What was the point again? He shook off the thought. Apathy was a symptom of the radiation, he remembered. He had to act as if there was a point even if he didn't believe it.

He watched his hand reach for the next rung, and pulled when it seemed close. His body followed the motion and it was all he could do to follow the ladder.

He was so hot, tired, and achy....

Anything for the dragon.

His helmet banged with a dull thud as he careened into the back of the airlock. Hands grasped his shoulders, spun him around. He opened his eyes and looked into the gold-mirrored surface of another helmet.

As the outer lock door rolled shut and the harsh shadows softened, a face materialized inside the other helmet. On the surface an impassive face, with fluted bow-lips, but the intense gray eyes penetrated his fog.

Lena held him.

"What did Papa find out from the egg?" he asked before losing consciousness.