"How can she? She does not know you. Earth and its colonies are as alien to her as the dragons."
"I used to be like that once. I never gave anybody a second chance. It's a very sad way to live your life."
"Do you believe the dragons should provide patternform technology to humans?"
"Yes, I do. Denise is convinced that because we didn't create it for ourselves we won't be able to handle it properly, that it will be constantly misused. To me it's completely irrelevant that we didn't work out every little detail for ourselves."
"Why?"
"Other than pride? We know the scientific principles behind technology. If we don't understand this particular theory, I trust in us to learn it soon enough. There's very little we can't grasp once it's fully explained and broken down into its basic equations. But that's just the clinical analysis. From a moral point of view, consider this: when the Americans first sent a man to the Moon, there were people living in Africa and South America and Asia who had never seen a lightbulb, or known of electricity or antibiotics. There were even Americans who didn't have running water to their houses, or an indoor toilet. Does that mean they shouldn't have been given access to electricity or modem medicine, because they personally didn't invent it? It might not have been their local community's knowledge, but it was human knowledge. We don't have a clue how to build the nullvoid drive that the Ring Empire's Outbounds employed in their intergalactic ships, but the knowledge is there, developed by sentient entities. Why shouldn't we have access to that? Because it's a shortcut? Because we don't have to spend centuries of time developing it for ourselves? In what way will using ideas other than our own demean and diminish us? All knowledge should be cherished, not denied."
"I believe you would make an excellent dragon, Lawrence."
A week away from Aldebaran they began to review tactics. Prime had been tracking the Norvelle from the moment it went FTL, twenty-five minutes after they had. There was a second starship, presumably with the other Roderick onboard, following another forty minutes behind that.
"He's persistent," Denise acknowledged at breakfast. Both of them were aware of the tracking data lurking in their minds. Prime supplied it to them along with a host of other readings from the ship's principal systems.
"We know that. What we don't know is what kind of action he'll take."
"Not much to start with," she said. "He will have to assess what's out there, the same as us. Which gives us a window."
"For what?"
"We use our weapons to mine his exodus point If they lock on and fire immediately when the Norvelle comes out of FTL, he'll never know what hit him."
"They, okay? They will never know what hit them. There are over three hundred crew onboard. We are not exterminating them just because you have a problem with other people's ideology. This is a first-contact situation, and if you play it this way the first thing the dragons will ever see us do is blow up one of our own ships. They also might not like the way we scatter and detonate nukes across their space. So just drop that idea. And don't forget as well that Captain Manet has a hell of a lot more deep-space combat experience than we do. He knows the Norvelle's vulnerabilities, he'll be on his guard. They don't have to exodus where we expect They could well be launching a nuclear defense salvo as they exodus. We can't afford to take him on in this arena."
"Nor can we just roll over and give in. Not now that we're finally here at Aldebaran."
"Yes, at Aldebaran, where you came to return the dragon to its own kind. Don't let that goal slip from you now. Leave the Rodericks to sort out their own dispute."
"You'd sell your soul for a ticket home, wouldn't you?"
"I left my soul at home."
They stared at each other for a long time.
"All right," Denise said. "How do you suggest we handle this?"
"Talk to the dragons. Explain to them how vulnerable our society is to sudden changes of this magnitude, and ask them to take that into account. All they have to do is wait another three hours and give the same information to the other starship."
"Suppose the Norvelle Roderick starts shooting?"
"Then we defend ourselves. But I don't expect he will. We're going to be in the dragons' home system, and we have one of their own kind onboard. In my book, that doesn't make us a likely target of opportunity."
"Fine, but I'm going to keep our weapons suite at level-one readiness status. If that bastard tries anything tricky I won't hesitate to use it"
"I know. But let's try not to forget what is going to happen after exodus. One way or another the human race will alter and diverge. It's important to me at least that those fresh starts aren't built on bloodshed."
* * *
On the last day inside the compression drive wormhole Denise woke early. She hadn't been this wired since the day the invasion fleet arrived over Thallspring. Today was what she'd dedicated almost all of her life to, and it wasn't happening the way they'd expected. So much time and preparation had been spent planning how to get the Arnoon dragon back here. Problems were supposed to be eliminated on Thallspring, giving her a clean run, not follow her here.
She was still tempted to scatter the weapons after exodus. But Lawrence was right, damn him. Killing people without warning wasn't the right way to go about this. Such a thing went against every dream she cherished for her own fresh start.
The whole notion was such a wonderful coda to the whole project of returning the dragon. Another human colony at some unimaginably vast distance across the galaxy. One that had full patternform technology to sustain it. She was going to bring the children up in a world where the old human ills of competition and jealousy had no part. A star where there would never be any danger of cultural contamination from Earth and its colonies, old and new. Just in case. Just in case the rest of the human race erased itself from galactic history. Just in case the people of Thallspring didn't blithely accept Arnoon's gift of knowledge, and turned it to less than benevolent ends. Just in case Earth obtained dragon knowledge to misuse. Which was now going to happen.
The concept of a New Arnoon depended on the dragons. She needed their patternform technology. Their starship drive. Their information about stars and habitable planets across the galaxy. She had expected to spend months, if not years, at Aldebaran, learning new wonders, helping the Arnoon dragon grow and develop into its adult form. Now she might have only ninety minutes.
Yes, scattering the weapons in an attack formation was extremely tempting.
Instead she had a shower and dressed in clean clothes, a Z-B-issue sweatshirt and trousers belonging to some small crewman. With sleeves and trouser legs rolled up, she went through the bridge into the small senior officer lounge that she and Lawrence used as their canteen. He'd had his late-night snack again. As usual there were a couple of plastic cups on the central table, rings of tacky tea on the surface. Doughnuts and remnants of doughnuts on and around a plate—he only ever seemed to eat the bits with jam on them. A media card was showing the end of some play on a bare stage, the actors frozen as they took the curtain call.
If nothing else, the voyage reminded her of the time in the bungalow with Josep and Raymond. She told Prime to clear the mess and started rummaging through mealpacks as the lounge's domestic robot trundled over.
Lawrence came through a couple of minutes later, his hair damp from the shower. "Couldn't sleep," he confessed.
"Me too." She gave him his breakfast—bagels with scrambled egg and smoked salmon.
He tucked in appreciatively. "Thanks."
Denise sat opposite him, sipping her tea. "Any last-minute flashes of genius how to avoid a confrontation?"
"'Fraid not. Sorry."
"Me neither."
"It all boils down to the dragons themselves. We just don't know enough about them. I've been reviewing the memories our dragon has of past dragon star civilizations. There aren't many. We're limited to generalizations, and not too many of them. They just seem to passively suck up information a
nd filter out the useful chunks for their descendants to inherit. That does seem to imply they're relatively benign."
"I hope so." She watched him shoveling down his food. "Aren't you even nervous?"
"No point. It won't do us any good."
"I was never nervous in Memu Bay."
"That's because you knew what you were doing. You were in control. Welcome to being on the receiving end."
"Do you really think they're benign?"
"Yes. But don't equate that to being on our side. If we ask for their help against others of our race, that will mean them getting involved in human affairs and politics. We would have to justify our appeal. That could well mean they judge us."
"Where do you come up with all this philosophy from? Are you some kind of secret xenopsychologist?"
He drank down the last of his orange juice and produced his broad, annoying grin. "One day, remind me to tell you how I used to waste away my childhood. You don't spend three years traveling with the Ultema without learning something about the alien perspective."
They went into the bridge for exodus. Prime spent two hours readying the fusion drive for ignition as soon as they were out of the wormhole. Console screens came on as Lawrence and Denise prioritized external sensor imagery.
"Are you receiving all this?" Lawrence asked the dragon. During the voyage they'd increased the bandwidth to the Xianti with several hundred fiberoptic cables, linking it directly to the Koribu's network.
"Yes, thank you," the dragon replied.
"Thirty seconds," Denise said.
Lawrence watched the displays as the energy inverter powered down. Half of the camera images lost the vague nothingness of the wormhole interior to a blank carmine glare. The other half showed stars gleaming bright against ordinary space. Radar found no solid object within five hundred kilometers. Prime brought more sensors online. Lawrence used his optronic membranes to receive the imagery, with Prime giving him a perspective from the front of the compression drive section.
Koribu had emerged forty million kilometers above Aldebaran's nebulous photosphere. To Lawrence it looked as though the starship were soaring across an ocean of featureless luminous red mist. The horizon was so distant it appeared to be above them. There was no discernible curvature. Star and space were two-dimensional absolutes.
Indigo symbols flowed across the image. Most of them concerned the Koribu's thermal profile. Infrared radiation from the star was soaking into the fuselage. Prime fired the secondary rocket engines, initiating a slow barbecue roll maneuver so that the heat was distributed evenly around the structure.
"Heat exchangers are coping for now," Denise said. "It's warmer than we were expecting, though. We might need to raise our orbit at some point."
"Radiation is strong, as well. Solar wind density is high. There's a lot of particle activity out there. That's going to do us more damage than the heat."
When he shifted his perspective to look back down along the fuselage he saw lines of pale violet light flicker and dance across struts and foil insulation. Metal components gleamed the brightest as the phosphorescent shimmer writhed across them. "Hey, we're picking up some version of Saint Elmo's fire."
"I hope our insulation's up to it"
"Me too. Okay, long-range radar is powering up." Six multiphase antennae were unfolding from their sheaths around the middle of the cargo section, flat ash-gray rectangles measuring twenty meters down their long edge. They flipped back parallel to the fuselage and began probing the chaotic climate boiling around the Koribu.
Prime overlaid their sweep across the visual imagery. A point of solid matter appeared forty-three thousand kilometers away, in an orbit two thousand kilometers lower than the Koribu's. Another one was detected fifty thousand kilometers away. A third was over seventy-two thousand kilometers distant. The radar's focus shifted to produce a higher resolution return of the first. It was twenty kilometers across, roughly circular, although the edges had broad, curving serrations, and it thickened considerably toward the center.
"More like a flower than a dragon," Lawrence murmured.
The radar had detected another seven points of mass out to 115,000 kilometers, all the same size as the first.
"Are they the dragons?" Denise asked breathlessly.
"I believe so," the dragon said.
"There must be thousands of them."
"Millions," Lawrence said. The idea was exhilarating. Until now they hadn't known for certain that the dragons existed. They could only assume that Aldebaran's gravity had attracted the eggs when the star was bright and adolescent, and that its expansion had hatched them. Now, here was the final proof. Humans were no longer alone in the universe, and the Ring Empire really had flourished when the galaxy was younger.
All his earlier daydreams and beliefs had been justified.
I CAN go home.
The Koribu's main telescope was swinging around to point at the first dragon. Against the uniform red glare it showed as a simple, dark speck. When the communication dish locked on it detected low emissions in several electromagnetic bands.
"Are you ready?" Denise asked. She sounded as if she were prompting a small child.
"I am," the dragon said.
"Then say hello."
The Arnoon dragon transmitted a pulse of data from the communications dish and began repeating at half-second intervals. It was a simple sequence of mathematical symbols in the language stored within its own memory.
The Aldebaran dragon answered with a much longer pulse, little of which could be translated. Lawrence and Denise yelled in delight, clapping their hands. He gave her a quick kiss and a hug, overtaken by the moment; then they settled back to observe the exchange.
The Arnoon dragon began sending the information they'd prepared. A translation dictionary for what little it had of its own language and the datapool English equivalent. After that there came a more complete English dictionary, with interconnected entries so that meanings and concepts would build into a cohesive whole. Syntax and communication protocols followed. Finally it sent a short, encyclopedic file on humans.
Less than three seconds after the last pulse was sent, the Aldebaran dragon said: "Welcome to our star. It is always pleasing to accept new information in any form."
Lawrence grinned. "Turing test," he said quietly to Denise. "Even if it isn't pleased, it understands the principle; it's trying to be polite."
Denise nodded and took a breath. "Thank you. We are happy to be here. My name is Denise Ebourn. Do you have a designation?"
"I am One."
She flashed Lawrence a perplexed glance. "Does that have any significance?"
"I am the first dragon you contacted. One."
"Ah, I see." Denise reddened slightly as Lawrence gave her a malicious sneer. "One, we have brought one of your own kind that has been damaged."
The Koribu's sensors suddenly reported a bombardment of radar-style pulses. The whole magnetic environment around the starship altered, oscillating rapidly. Their one neutrino scanner recorded emissions off the end of its scale.
"In what form are you carrying one of us?" One asked.
"Go ahead," Denise told the Arnoon dragon. It began transmitting a pulse containing a summary of its own history.
"I understand," One said. "You brought this fragment to us believing we would want you to. I thank you for your concern. Unfortunately, in this respect your voyage here has been fruitless." '
"What do you mean?"
"We have no interest in the fragment."
Denise couldn't believe what One had said. The translation dictionary must have glitched. "Do you mean you can't repair it?"
"No. We have no interest in repairing or re-forming it. Did you not comprehend what it was?"
"Yes. It's one of your eggs."
"It is. As such it is irrelevant. We release millions of eggs every year. Only a fraction of them are ever captured by a star's gravity. The others are simply lost. Or they crash as your fragment did. Some are
even intercepted by biological species such as yourselves and mined for information. We do not concern ourselves with them. I would suggest the analogy that they mean as much to us as a single human sperm does to you."
"But... It's alive now. It thinks. It's a rational, sentient being."
"It was not. It was a fragment that was slowly decaying until you discovered it and implanted this awareness."
"Are you saying we shouldn't have done that?"
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