Miraculous, Fisher thought.

Lena had a way of making him feel good (or, if she wished, bad!) no matter what the circumstances. He would make more of an effort this time with her, he promised himself. And Fisher was proud of himself for focusing on her so long when so many other questions burned. She deserved that much. The mission was a success; she had been a good captain, in the final analysis. It boded well for their future together, at least for the return voyage.

Still, the moment the portal closed Fisher said, "Confess, Papa. You weren't just spinning a yarn to keep me alive while I was working on the alignment, were you? You really found something. Your fictional stories aren't usually as interesting as the whopper you told me."

Please, he thought.

"We found something." Images blossomed into existence on the ceiling above Fisher, the egg rotating in the magnetized plasma of its cage. "Watch."

The point of view spiraled in as the egg grew to fill the ceiling and then spilled onto the walls, dizzily spinning like the flashing lights of a trendy club that Stearn might frequent. The shiny silver surface of the egg was not smooth. As the view continued to close and match the spin, topography manifested: regularly raised and depressed regions congregating in loops and whorls, like fingerprints.

"This is visible light?" Fisher asked.

"Effectively," said Papa, "Although we've enhanced the images you're seeing with some artificial shadows to bring out the relief."

Fisher grunted. He wished he could pace.

Closer and closer came the egg. The whorls spilled onto the walls, and the subfeatures grew into focus. Fisher blinked. Tiny pictures hung along the pattern like pearls on a necklace. Dragons alone, in packs, swimming with other creatures that were not dragons. And the dragons he saw differed in several respects from the disk dragons. These had what must be fins, which implied they were in a proper liquid rather than a rarefied plasma. Dragons mating like whales, a female with a male, and a second male to hold her in place in the neutral buoyancy. All sorts of dragon scenes. It reminded Fisher of an ancient Roman urn with images of daily life painted all around. More images followed, and he saw the things that had led Papa to his fantastic story: images of cylindrical visitors in bubbles, a map of a stellar system, maps of stars. Other images flashed by, and Fisher understood that the egg was more than a future life; it represented everything that had gone before as well.

"The dragons are smart, but the form they hold now is completely constructed. And they didn't do it themselves," said Papa. "There's more."

"More?" asked Fisher, afraid to blink lest he miss something.

"This is just the surface relief. The egg holds coded information when viewed in at least four other ways. We're continuing to search every way we can imagine."

"Why would they have done such a thing? It's too easy."

"We can't say for sure, of course, unless that information is coded within the egg also. But we can guess, and we have a pretty good guess. They were proud of what they had done."

"Proud?" Fisher let that notion roll around in his head, testing to see if it fit. "I don't know, Papa. That seems rather, well, human, doesn't it?"

"Perhaps. But if we're right, they were like us, at least in some ways."

Fisher felt as if he'd been struck between the eyes. Aliens, proud like humans would be. There was no reason there had to be any similarities. Well, he would have time to consider the ramifications later. He had other immediate concerns. "The dragon within...is it viable? Can we hatch it?"

"Probably. We've found some sequences, instructions if you will, that appear to address that question. Makes sense, if you think about it. Gives the eggs a chance to hatch if they're intercepted by intelligent minds."

Wave after wave of implication washed over Fisher then, setting his imagination adrift. But he had vowed that he would be in control of his obsessions, rather than the other way around. He reigned in his thoughts. Start from the ground up. The ground, in this case, was SS Cygni.

There had been no dragonburst seen in SS Cygni in the seven hundred years that Earth astronomers had been watching, nor the extra two hundred and fifty years of their outbound journey. There had been no dragonbursts seen from any cataclysmic variables in that period, not just the known dwarf novae systems, in the semi-local galaxy. He would have to review the system archives concerning the ejecta from SS Cygni that they had ionized and shunted around them during their passage. There should be some way of identifying the remnants of a dragonburst from the debris of other events, and constructing a historical record of when the dragons had acted in their own defense. The nuclear beaters had surely set them off. Identifying historical dragonburst signatures would have immediate implications about how dense the galaxy was with overly curious technological species.

At least the intrusive rabbit-grabbing ones like humans.

They were not alone, but for some reason high-technology races hadn't already saturated this part of the Milky Way. Or if they had, now they were gone. Why was that?

There were always more whys, and the current string was growing exponentially in his mind.

Fisher took a deep breath and stretched his muscles against the restraining umbilicals. They would be hands again soon enough, and feet for pacing, and he would be able work properly. He said, "Okay, Papa. Have Henderson bring me some Forget-Me-Not, and then show me everything."

"Are you sure that would be prudent?" Papa asked.

Damn him, Fisher thought. But Papa's intervention gave him pause enough, and he recalled how Lena's lips had felt against his own, how that fleeting touch had unexpectedly thrilled him. How she deserved better. He had climbed a mountain. Was he ready to leave the summit already?

"Belay that request," he amended. "There's time enough later, after I've rested. There's time enough for everything."

Time enough to answer all the whys, and maybe even for love as well.

Fisher smiled as he drifted off to dream of dragons and much, much more.

Epilogue

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory, do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

-- William Wordsworth

The Karamojo blazed like a comet, its tail pointing at SS Cygni, headed back toward a distant rendezvous with where Earth would be some two hundred and fifty hundred years hence. Incubating inside nestled the dragon egg, for the moment warmed by the filtered radiation of the fore singularity's accretion. The seeds of many arguments were immediately planted with its presence and how it would be accomodated on the voyage home, a Pandora's box like that of every as-yet-unlived life -- only perhaps a little more so in this case. The information cascade began from Biolathe's piled-up tightbeam, a half-millennium of updated mission directives, a millennium of data about the new old world that would be theirs again within a year, in fact a half-millennium of the history of an entire galactic civilization that was being born.

Every moment of the return flight would be an adventure on the Karamojo.

For the star dragons of SS Cygni, there also existed myriad adventures.

Not all the dragons had ended their existence to drive the mass loss from the secondary. First there were the eggs. Not the same as the dragons that had spawned them, not exactly, but carrying their stories into the future. That future was short for half of them: lost at once in the fury of the dragonfire birth, incinerated despite their strong shell or propelled into the secondary with too high a velocity to survive. Of the remainder, half again would have an infinite but dark future, launched into trajectories out of the Galactic plane and into a halo too rarified to host enough suitable homes. Half again of the remainder would survive their fiery birth, fly into the dense spiral arms of the Milky Way, instinctually alter their courses using varying albedos and magnetic fields, and still slingshot past the only suitable star they would ever approach -- or smack into it too sharply and vanish forever in a puff of plasma. A tiny fraction would survive, somehow, incubating in a new star's convective womb, awaiting the inexorable evolution that would spawn a new disk to inhabit. From that tiny fraction, somewhere, somewhen, disks would live again and host a civilization onward into the infinite future.

An even tinier fraction of the dragon eggs was intercepted, kidnapped, studied, and probed by prying alien minds. The messages the redesigners had left revealed that they looked upon this as another course for survival for the dragon species, and a chance to show off their solution.

The adventure of the surviving adults would continue, a culture of fire that still thrilled those born of water. Thousands of adult dragons remained in the atmosphere of the star, for some indeterminable time gasping like spent salmon at their spawning point. These had failed to detonate in the rhythm of the dragonburst but would not die like the upstream salmon; drifting with the sputter of the resumed mass transfer they would restart their society as the new accretion disk assembled itself. These dragons would remember the songs called out when the sacrifices had been made, and would remember the disruptive visit of this great white visitor. This threatening annoyance, and the annoyances before it, and the annoyances that would follow. And they would remember in new songs they would sing. And sing them they would now and forever, in some form, some place, some time.

SS Cygni Vital Statistics

Classification: Dwarf Nova Cataclysmic Variable Binary System

Distance from Earth: 245 light years1

Primary: White Dwarf, 1.19 solar masses

Secondary: K5V (main sequence), 0.70 solar masses

Orbital Period: 6.60 hours

Outburst Frequency: 50 days (variable)

Outburst Duration: 15 days (variable)

Orbital Inclination Relative to Earth: 40 degrees

Disk Luminosity (Quiescence): 0.07 x solar

Disk Luminosity (Outburst): 70 x solar

Radius of Primary: 4000 km, or 0.6 Earth radii

Radius of Secondary: 500,000 km, or 0.7 solar radii

Primary/Secondary separation: 1.5 million km

Outer disk radius: 500,000 km

Disk Surface Area (two-sided): 1500 x Earth surface

Discovered in 1896, SS Cygni is a cataclysmic variable star, the brightest of the dwarf nova class as seen from the Earth. Dwarf novae are close binaries consisting of a white dwarf primary (an evolved stellar remnant) accreting material via a thin disk fuelled from the secondary red dwarf star. Dwarf novae outbursts are thought to occur when the disk undergoes a thermal instability leading to higher temperatures, higher luminosity, and enhanced mass transfer. Such outbursts are not strictly periodic in either frequency or duration. SS Cygni was the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) "Variable Star of the Month" in June of 20002.

1 The distance to SS Cygni is uncertain by as much as a factor of 2 -- as with many other quantities in astronomy. A recent parallax measurement made with the Hubble Space Telescope suggests a distance of some 550 light years. I have elected to use a smaller measurement in this novel.

2 www.aavso.org/vstar/vsotm/0600.stm#dn

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