Papa splits his awareness. Programmed by humans to simulate human perspective, splitting isn't something that Papa does well or enjoys (another attitude programmed into him since the state was not favored by the computer scientists responsible for his original architectural template). The state is absolutely necessary now; he has many high priority tasks to accomplish and his personality may facilitate them.



Foremost is activation of the wormdrive. A small pair of singularities can be coaxed into existence more quickly than a more massive pair, but the acceleration would be less. He solves the linear programming problem (preferring a fast 'good' solution over the optimal solution) involving the thirty-two related differential equations describing their situation, and implements it. The repaired Higgs generator is quite well aligned, he is proud to note, simplifying his task minutely.



His second highest priority isn't the human crew -- they are expected to be responsible for themselves to some degree -- it is collecting data on the event occurring in the disk of SS Cygni: dragonburst. This is the term Papa chooses for the new phenomenon. The instrument suite of the Karamojo isn't well designed for the current observations and he must perform scientific triage -- something his personality is better suited to do than the automatic routines. The data are of use estimating their own best course of action for survival. The dragonburst, in its power, speed, and other key properties falls within his preliminary estimates, calling for little revision in the wormdrive solution. He will not need to augment his magneto-hydrodynamic grid.



Only then, third, comes the crew. Daughter tends to Fisher, the poor boy. He did good, though, Papa must admit. He deserves such a beautiful nurse, although there's really not much she can do other than strip him out of his contaminated suit and drag him down to the biolab. When there's an opportunity, that is. He's warning them of the dragonburst and the immanence of wormdrive, and she wedges herself solidly in a suit locker, holding Fisher's bleeding head in her lap. She is quietly calling him a bastard, and proceeds to invent more original ways to curse him. She's a sailor who believes in tradition.



Blinking frees tears from her face, which float off to mix with the bubbles of Fisher's blood.



The Jack, Philip Stearn, lays wrapped in a couchbeast in the biolab wired in a neurostimulator. He's tweaked the pleasure nodes outside their nominal range, feeling no pain, experiencing no fear, grinning widely. Sylvia Devereaux is similarly grasped, nearby, her hands clasped before her. She speaks softly, and Papa listens: "...though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..." Papa announces the impending wormdrive activation and does not eavesdrop further with his consciousness, leaving his automatic systems to listen for any instructions Sylvia might issue.



Axelrod Henderson floats inside a shielded cage of his own construction, a hardened individual life support unit selected from the Karamojo's library and recently grown in a nanovat. The unit is protected both by mass, as a meter-thick skin contains circulating chemically enriched water, and by its own conductance in a plasma shell. In its own way, it is an egg. Accompanying Henderson are several dozen lemon-yellow airfish, no doubt to keep things tidy, to provide additional shielding, and to give up their lives as sustenance in the event of a long vigil. Henderson may be repulsive, but he is admirably practical.

Papa splits off one final point of view for himself. Purely, selfishly, for himself, a conceit he seldom indulges for it only breeds false pride within himself. True pride is a good thing, when based on skill and experience, which serves to place realistic limits at the high end of his capabilities. False pride merely gets Fang pissed off at him.

This final Papa is the Karamojo in body as well as mind. He is a giant white naked man, a kilometer tall who can blast through space like a superhero or god of ancient myth. The instrument readings are transformed into human sensations; electromagnetic radiation from three thousand to ten thousand Angstroms in wavelength, only a little outside the range of human vision, becomes visible light to be seen with his two giant-sized eyes; longer wavelength radiation, in the infrared, becomes heat seeping into broad white expanses; shorter wavelengths, the ultraviolet and the X-ray, he permits only to darken his skin slowly with time, as if tanning; sounds are trickier in the low-density medium of spaces, but there are sounds that can be reconstructed especially with the particle wind driven off SS Cygni, sounds of relentless power, like the echoes of distant tsunami in ocean waves; smell is easier than sound, as the elemental abundances and ionization states of the wind particles are sampled, but it is no familiar brine these are transformed into, but rather acrid ozone and burning metals.

Wormdrive kicks in giving Papa renewed weight. Because the Karamojo is in freefall along the worm axis, the gravity felt on board is set by whatever degree of electromagnetic friction established between the charge on the holes and the raildrive. The default is one gee, Earth standard, and this is the value for which the system is optimally configured. But this isn't what Papa feels. Papa judges his acceleration against SS Cygni and revels in the rocketing of a full ten gees, modulated by the oscillation about the singularities, as he blasts away.

He is a giant who can rocket away from hell. It is a very good thing to be at this time, in this place.

The dragonburst blossoms, a blood-red bubble of fire. Magnificent and terrible: the moment a big fish takes the bait and bites deep; the matador's killing thrust; the wrong step onto a land mine; the entry into a beautiful woman; the cry of a newborn son; the pull of the trigger of a shotgun pointed at his head.

No, not this time.

The ejecta of SS Cygni, ionized plasma accelerated by radiation pressure to thousands of kilometers per second, is still not moving fast enough to catch him. And the radiation alone cannot penetrate Papa's tanned but tough skin, not enough to matter.

But still, a dangerous thing, a glorious thing.

And now, flung into the galaxy, or nestled close by in the secondary star's atmosphere, the eggs are the only legacy of the dragons of SS Cygni. The destiny of some to hatch when the Roche lobe spills over and reforms the incubating disk. The destiny of others to hurl through the Milky Way for millions of years until finding a new system to inhabit. The destiny of the remainder to become part of the dark halo, tragically missing Galactic homes, detritus of lost potential.

Thus it is for dragons, humans, and giant rocketing gods created by the mind of man.

#

A blinding light bored through Fisher's skull. Squeezing his eyes shut provided no respite. A rushing roar, like a white-water river of blood in ears, wrapped around him like a smothering pillow. His naked body was aflame with a thousand pin pricks.

Somehow, all these faded into a muted yet still irritating canvas. Figures materialized from the light, serpentine shadows shaped like shepherd's crooks milling about at the edge of his awareness.

The familiar shape of the star dragon from the drug-memorized Prospector movie corkscrewed out of a red welt. Given his disorientation he could not tell whether the dragon was growing in size or traversing a vast distance, but the end result was the same: the creature loomed over Fisher and made him feel like an earthworm before the early bird. Shimmering waves of plasma periodically surged forth from the creature's maw, dragon breath indeed, that made the creature difficult to focus upon.

The dragon spoke with a booming thunderous voice that sounded much like Papa's. "Samuel Fisher! You are guilty for you have murdered us."

Had he? Despite the immediate threat, the present slipped away from him. He had a sudden, vivid flashback to his childhood, centuries and light years transcended in an instant by his mind. He had wandered from the picnic into a nearby pasture, still within view of his parents. The day was pleasant and pregnant with possibility, a universe for a six-year-old prodigy. There, hiding in a wavelike roll of dried grass huddled a tiny brown shape. Sammy pounced, flushing out the baby rabbit, which bolted like all the demons of hell were hot on its tail. The boy was not dexterous enough to catch it right away, zigging when it zagged, but even then he had been overly persistent, insistent on reaching his goals. He fell into the grass, the warm brown body caught between his small fingers. It kicked and squirmed as he carefully rose to his scraped knees and stood up. Panicked beyond all its capabilities, the young rabbit twitched and died in Sammy's hands. A heartburst. The very still form was warm and soft. "I only wanted to know what you were like."

"Then know!"

The smaller shepherd-crook shapes surged forward. They weren't large at all, not even as large as himself, he realized as they closed. Their solid dark hue and their movements reminded him of eels.

Fisher tried to run away, but he was unable even to cover himself with his hands let alone run. And then they were upon him, swarming and chewing, and the pain erupted again, a thousandfold worse.

Another flash in time. Fisher remembered then Fang telling him about how her grandfather had caught eels in the old way: tie a cow head to a line, throw it in the water, and after a spell pull it up. The feeding eels would hang from the head like ingrown medusa hair, the tails sticking out and the heads buried making the roots. There hadn't been real eels nor real cows on Fang's world, but alien analogues filling the same niches. Some patterns seemed to be universal.

His extremities went first, his fingers and hands, his toes and feet. The miniature dragons burrowed up the marrow of his bones, taking his forearms, his calves. The pain was terrible, but it was just pain, and could be endured.

Anything for the dragon.

And they took anything they pleased. One industrious fellow found Fisher's left eye. No pain there compared to everything else, just a popping sensation followed by viscous wetness. They were everywhere, a feeding frenzy thrashing to get to the good parts, rending his not completely human body. Gurgling, bubbling smacking joined the rich mixture of sour coppery smells emanating from his shredded flesh.

Was this fair? Was this justice? The human presence had brought on the dragons' own sacrifice to fuel the dragonburst. They owed them at least one life, didn't they?

"He's less of a man every second, isn't he daughter?" came Papa's voice from nearby. "Not man enough for you."

Blinking the stinging blood and sweat away from his remaining eye, Fisher made out Lena in her blinding white uniform with her hair forming a halo of gold. She resembled a perfect china doll, especially with Papa looming behind her; he was a ruddy-faced, white-whiskered giant at least twice her height, in leather hunting vest, khaki pants, and worn boots.

"Not man enough for me?" she mused. It was her voice, but without the harsh edge and confidence he usually found in it. This voice now was that of a lilting girl's.

Fisher rolled his head to see the devouring creatures ravaging his body.

"I suppose not," she said, turning with tiny steps to walk away.

"No!" he yelled, deciding. "I won't let my obsessions consume me!"

He fought back, even though he believed it a fair trade off -- his life for theirs. Then the churning pain was too much, and he screamed until a dragon dove into his mouth and slid down his throat to feed.

Too late it seemed...too late...

Chapter 18

After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box. -- Italian Proverb

Henderson leaned heavily forward against the nanovat and didn't worry about his mighty fingers cracking the brittle diamond. It was not because he knew about the invisible spider-web nanomesh that reinforced the structure, nor was it because he cared deeply for Fisher whose barely living remains floated therein.

He was having his deep thoughts.

Henderson had always amused himself with these philosophical thoughts, sure that the vast majority of humanity was too caught up in the mundane tangles of their own minutia to take advantage of such meditations. He pondered the imponderables in an attempt to find the shape his life should take. They were religious thoughts without a structured religion, with the natural world providing his scripture.

Physical strength meant nothing in the new universe he glimpsed. Muscles, beauty, height, durability, symmetry, all the other traditional indicators of fitness had no place. He had cultivated attributes of fitness because human minds still respected these attributes in each other. Man had altered his body, but refrained -- so far -- from direct brain structure alterations with more dangerous consequences. Biochips and drugs were safe and understood, for the most part, and didn't count. At its essence, his mind was practically ancient. He had told himself a hundred times that the answers to his deep questions still lay within himself where natural selection had placed them.

The Earth they would return to would be five-hundred years more advanced.

Metal screeched on metal as he lifted a hand to tug on his lip, then quickly placing it back on the medivat, unsure of himself in a way that left him barely able to stand.

Evolution worked on groups, not individuals.

The man within the unit was nothing physically. Oh, he had his mind and brainstem, most of his torso minus a few easily replaced organs, but he would die in short order if removed from care. He had almost died saving them, putting his frail body between them and the cruelty of the universe.

Henderson realized with a desperation, the depth of which surprised him, that he wanted to be like Fisher. Well, not like him, exactly -- Fisher was too much of an asshole with his elitist intellectual snobbery and such, always looking down on everything and everyone not part of his little obsessions. But Henderson nurtured a growing respect for his seemingly selfless act, and it frightened him.

Men like Fisher, if they had children, protected their offspring and passed on their genes even if it meant their own lives.

Henderson abruptly stood upright. "Please play a Gregorian chant, Papa." Working music for serious undertakings.

He walked across the biolab, his giant metal feet flattening the again plush ruglings, fish belly-crawling behind to remove the remains. He would have to engineer a sturdier variety of rugling to survive his bronze heel, but there were more important things to do first. He only had little over a year, and who knew how different and dangerous Earth might be upon return?

His Henderson Colony lay deserted, even the tiny bones stripped for their elements, his lesson that an entire population could be wiped out by a stroke of fate. He opened the environmental hood. He let fall his fists with the chant, smashing the campus buildings into gravel. His colony fantasy was no longer the course for him, and he pulverized every bit of it with his own hands. Symbolic acts, he knew, were important to the human psyche.

Then he sat down at his console. His chairbeast groaned in protest at his weight, the furniture not yet having the time or food to bulk up to the size required to accommodate his current form. Henderson accessed the archival codes for mobiles, female gender, bodyguard class.

He would be as ready as possible for whatever the future held, and he would have someone available to make a sacrifice in his place. He was deathly afraid that the selflessness he admired in Fisher at this time might emerge one day in himself, and that would be a disaster he preferred not to risk.

Yes, he would be ready.