Star Dragon | Page 6

spiraling along magnetic flux tubes, over
and over again.
"Sam!" A female voice knocked him out of his meditation.
Fisher blinked, turned, and bit back a curse. Through the crowd charged a petite woman
of Japanese ancestry, with high cheek bones and shiny, jet hair that reflected the sun
streaming through the port's skylights. Atsuko Suga, his ex-wife. There would be no
clean escape.
"How did you --?" Fisher began.
Atsuko reached him and immediately pounded his chest with her tiny fists. "How could
you? Oh Sam, how could you?" And just like that she stopped hitting him and fell against

him, her thin arms wrapping around him in a stifling grip.
Then he had it. "You must have tried to call me, and gotten my disconnect message. Yes,
of course."
"You were going to leave for five hundred years," she said into his armpit, "and not even
say good-bye?"
He gave in and returned the hug. "I was busy. There are a lot of things to set in order
before a long trip, you know?" Mostly he had left those for the last second; instead he'd
spent his time thinking about the dragon, making sure he had all the software and data for
his modeling installed on the Karamojo. But he had learned not to tell her everything long
ago.
Atsuko pushed back from him and looked up into his eyes. "One of those things you 'set
in order' is seeing me, Samuel Stanley Fisher."
He started to shrug and nod his head, but recalled how she hated that. He said, "I'm sorry.
I should have let you know right away." That would be the right thing to say to her, but
he needed to do a little more. He lifted his hand to her head, twisting a lock of her hair
around his finger. Fine and straight, the coil unraveled almost immediately. Not at all
dragonlike.
"Damn straight," she said. "That was always the problem with you. No matter how well I
thought I had trained you, you always wandered off and forgot everything every time you
found a new toy. Is that what this is? Another new toy?"
Irritated at her comment about training him, he said, "I wish you wouldn't refer to my
projects in such a childish manner. My work is important, it's -- But I'm really not
supposed to say."
"I understand. It doesn't matter. I'm sure it's something absolutely fascinating."
Fisher ground his teeth together. He almost told her that the problem with her was how
she always trivialized his work, but he'd acquired some tact from the years they'd spent
together. No reason to make this parting a bad one. He could play politics when he had to
-- an effective scientist had to learn that to acquire the necessary resources. His former
employer, Whimsey World, was an entertainment company that had paid him for
consultation on their 'Alien Vistas' exhibit. He had managed to plow their money into not
only the attractions they desired, but real research as well. He could play relationship
politics, too. "It is fascinating," he said simply.
Atsuko sighed. "Try not to forget about people this time."
He wasn't really sure what she was getting at. This trip was about dragons, not people.
But he couldn't tell her that, and she seemed to expect some kind of response. "Look,
there's no reason you won't still be around when I get back. . . ."

There wasn't, in principle, although no one had yet made past their five hundreth birthday.
It was just a matter of time -- state-of-the-art biotech was good. But he sensed that this
was not what Atsuko wanted to hear right now. What would extricate him from this bit of
awkwardness? He let the problem steal some precious attention, and dug for an answer
honest enough to satisfy her. After a moment he said, "I'll miss you."
"And I, you. You are not the easiest man to love, but I have loved you. Good-bye, Sam."
He held her until his launch was called, thinking of the dragon swimming in its disk of
fire.


Chapter 2
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans
any more than black people were made for whites or women for men. -- Alice Walker
Nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created solely and exclusively
for the use of man. -- Thomas Love Peacock
The exchange between the two artificial brains took a few seconds of modulated,
encrypted laser light. Papa recast the data stream into a form more palatable to the
organic portions of his brain and his human template personality:
Papa strides into the Floridita, his public headquarters on Earth, stopping to embrace a
favorite waiter