Star Dragon | Page 4

He had to
learn more. "I agree to the terms."
"If you accept our proposal, the voyage will require about three years of your subjective
time. Assuming no catastrophes or other changes that might derail human civilization too
extensively in the next half millennium, you will be quite wealthy when you return to --
and we anticipate playing a significant role in this -- Earth's glorious future."
Fisher ignored the corporate hyperbole. The dragon mesmerized him. Tell me your
secrets, Fisher thought. How can you be?
He was going to go. He knew it. He could do it. His primary thread of research concerned
Cetan mollusk shell structures and was not exactly hot stuff. The previous interstellar
trips had made him accustomed to an unsettled social life without long-term permanence,
losing track of more family and friends each time. Nothing held him here. He was going
to meet this creature on its home turf and look it in the eye, and then return to a new
world. Maybe it would even be a glorious world. His stale tired universe shattered further
with each passing second, and this magnificent dragon building a new celestial edifice
from its shards. Gods, a real dragon . . .
Someone blocked his view. The captain, Fang.
Irritated, Fisher looked up at her, but said nothing in the face of her imposing glare.
After a moment of silence, Fang said, "Biolathe may think you're up to snuff, Dr. Fisher,
but I like to take the measure of a man before welcoming him on board and trusting him
on my ship."

"Call me Sam," Fisher replied, suddenly realizing he found her more than a little
attractive. That was good. Not necessary, but good. "I can do anything I have to," Fisher
replied.
"Anything, hmm?" A tiny smile lifted one corner of Fang's mouth. "But can you box?"
#
The taxi's bubble parted for Captain Lena Fang, flooding the vehicle's interior with warm
air and cirrus-filtered sunlight. Her skin automatically darkened as she stepped outside,
took a deep breath, and allowed the environment to seep into her pores. The beach
awaited.
Hapuna was not the best beach in the Hawaiian Islands, nor the least crowded, but she
liked its soft white sands just fine, and the ocean waves granted all beaches timelessness,
which was what she truly craved. Time moved more slowly on Hawaii's Big Island than
many places elsewhere on this old, overly civilized world. Pushing light speed the way
she did, time moved more slowly for her, too. She sometimes felt like an island in a sea
of time.
Hapuna Beach was a good place, and she always visited it when on Earth.
She slipped her flip-flops off when she hit the foamy waterline. She bent slowly to pick
them up, stretching the backs of her calves and thighs, then turned right to walk north
along the beach. Although she now wore a swimsuit as her uniform, she didn't care to
swim. She hadn't for a long time.
Fang altered her leisurely pace to dodge jet-black children who flexed their bodies flat
and surfed the low waves onto shore. One girl had large, saucer-shaped feet and wriggled
her hips as she danced in, giggling; her hair stuck out in two very long spikes, probably
helping her balance on the ungainly bodmod.
Finally, away from the noisier families, Fang tossed down her towel, then herself. When
relaxing, she believed in keeping things simple. She lay back, her arms thrown out and
palms down. She shivered as the sun pushed her into the sand. Communing with the
mother planet she would leave again soon, she slept.
She dreamt of the tall, intense exobiologist who dressed in black and had told her he
could box the ears off the stars themselves if only they had ears to box, and then there
were antenna dishes on all the stars listening to the noisy children playing giddily on the
shores of the Milky Way, and the stars sent a nasty, scolding beep beep beep to grab their
attention . . .
"Daughter, are you there?"
Fang blinked awake in the late afternoon sun, grimaced, and tossed an arm over her eyes
to block the glare. No second-lid lizard-eye mods on her body, just the standard retinal
cell clock/phone. The purple after-image shrank, brightened, and resolved into a familiar

face, with twinkling brown eyes set in a ruddy complexion chiseled with old-fashioned
wrinkles, a bristling white beard, and thin hair over a weathered scalp. Fang had kept the
personality overlay of the ship's brain from her first captaincy, a cantankerous piece of
work modeled after the twentieth-century writer Hemingway, and had already installed
him on the Karamojo. She would have preferred a wise Confucius, but that hadn't been
available when she'd first gotten him,