Star Dragon | Page 8

the freefall. Stearn tried to start some
sideways rotation, but his wings were too synchronized. It was like trying to wiggle just
one ear. Exactly like that. He stopped trying so he could answer Fisher as he glided past.
"Imagination is limited by the time and culture you're born into and raised in. Can't help
it, see? For instance, we can imagine things the ancient Americans couldn't, like going for
brunch on Mars just because rain is scheduled for Tucson. You follow? In five-hundred
years, people will imagine things we can't. I mean, I think we have it pretty good now,
but once we got diseases and aging licked, everyone's thought they've had it pretty good.
But really it's just gotten better and better. The games, the stims, the sex, the bodmods.
And it'll be better still in the future. I want to check it out and I don't want to wait."
"I see," said Fisher.
"Okay," Stearn said, winging himself a bit closer to the port. "Why you going?"

"To look a star dragon eye to eye. To find out if it even has an eye, for that matter,"
Fisher answered evenly and without hesitation.
Boring. "It's just another weird alien critter, in a universe of weird alien critters. It isn't
going to be smart like us. No aliens have been so far. So what's the point?"
Fisher shrugged. "Look there. I see the ship."
Outside the port the ship hung in space, a silvery-white whale of a ship. Blazing silvery
white, with an almost perfect albedo that reflected all incoming radiation. Stearn thought
it looked big, even though sizes were difficult to judge in orbit. He'd done plenty of
training for his position as ship's Jack of All Trades, human back-up for the occasions
when the ship's automatic systems couldn't get at something, but all his shipboard time
had been on tiny scooters on in-system runs, and a few tours on short-haul freighters.
Nothing at all like this ship and its state-of-the-art biosystems.
Stearn always made a point of having fun, and although he rarely admitted it to his
club-hopping buddies, high-tech spaceships were a lot of fun. He had fun studying them,
working on them, and he hadn't gotten this berth by chance. This ship was just plain cool.
The front section of the Karamojo was an enormous torus, five kilometers in diameter,
which would house the normal matter singularity, a black hole with more than a billionth
the mass of Earth. Wasn't that just huge? The aft singularity, the white hole, would be
housed in the tapered end, a smaller torus, some five kilometers behind. The net creation
energy of the pair was barely above zero. Once created, separated, and aligned in the
"Push Me Pull You" configuration, off they would shoot at 10g, starting a
galaxy-spanning chase. The ship would fall after the holes, oscillate actually, bouncing
along with the pair in smooth freefall. Almost. Electric charges placed on the singularities
gave the ship something to hold onto -- electromagnetic friction balanced against the
freefall to provide some gravity near one g on most of the toroidal decks. And they could
spin the whole thing, too, for stability and gravity when not under the wormdrive.
Bouncing along like it did ahead of the hole pair made Stearn think of sex, the big white
ship sliding back and forth along the holes' axis. But he liked its cleverness as well: the
charges also produced an electric field allowing active shielding from charged particles
while in transit. Funneled into the bowl of the fore bulb, the maw as it was called, the
black hole would then feed, providing power through a miniature accretion disk similar to
the one in SS Cygni.
"Pretty awesome, isn't it?" Stearn asked.
"I guess so," said Fisher. "Where does the name 'Karamojo' come from?"
"I don't know. Didn't give it much thought. I mean, we're not called the U.S.S.
Constipation, so I didn't worry about it. Ask Captain."
Silence ensued, with no laugh to his joke, and dragged on. This Fisher guy wasn't much
fun. Stearn decided to mess with him. "So this is going to be a long trip, you know?"

"I know."
"I mean, bit more than a year out and more than a year back. A person won't want to stick
to stims, you know? Sometimes a person wants that human contact, skin on skin. Like
that. Now me, I'm pretty easy to get along with. It's all just skin. No big deal. If it feels
good, do it. That's what I say."
Fisher stared coldly at Stearn. "I'm here to study the dragon, and that's what I'll worry
about first."
Stearn smiled. "Sure thing, Fish. I respect that. But I bet Captain Fang will probably want
you to entertain her.