Lawrence just smiled.
The Clichane's compression drive powered up, and the immense starship flashed out of space-time with a dizzying twist. The Koribu was left floating alone in the dragon's umbra. It was never going to fly again. Instead it was giving birth. Patternform had plaited the fuselage in a gridiron of crystalline stems that suckled at the minerals and compounds of the structure. From a distance it looked as though the starship was covered in a harlequin patchwork of gem frost; millions of slender amber, ruby and emerald facets flashed and glinted in the haze of warm light that spilled around the edge of the alien. Wider sapphire proboscises had penetrated tanks, siphoning out the liquids to contribute to the semiorganic growths sprouting on opposite sides of the cargo section. As the weeks progressed, they swelled out into chrysalids wrapped in a tight skin of diamond strand silk.
The Arnoon dragon, too, was metamorphosing. The Xianti's payload bay doors had been opened to space. Inside the bay, the cargo pod had split apart, exposing the dragon. Crystals threaded their way across the floor of the maintenance bay and encrusted the spaceplane. Their tips meshed with the particle structure of the dragon and began feeding it molecules and information.
Denise spent hours every day thinking with it. As there was no place for it within the Aldebaran dragon civilization, it had decided to go with her, to become a part of whatever society flowered from the genetic package. Dragon memories were reviewed and analyzed for templates of the abilities they sought. They began to incorporate functions that would allow it to be free-flying, to sense in every spectrum, to power itself with sunlight, to absorb solid cold matter, to retain its original personality. Dozens of notions taking on solid form.
After the Clichane left, Lawrence spent ten days undergoing extensive patternform treatment, transforming his body and resetting his DNA. He emerged as his teenage self, without Skin valves.
Denise looked him up and down and pursed her lips. "Very cute," she observed coyly.
The chrysalid cases split open and peeled back, revealing the Ring Empire-era starships that patternform had gestated—streamlined silver and magenta ellipsoids, with a necklace of drive fins and forward-swept power shields rising smoothly from the rear quarter. Lawrence gazed at his with a reckless enthusiasm that matched his new adolescence.
"I guess this is good-bye," Denise said.
He gave her an awkward grimace. "Yeah." Then his smile returned. "No, it's bon voyage. The way things are shaping up, it's not impossible that we'll meet again."
"All right, Lawrence, bon voyage it is." She gave him a soft kiss. "What are you going to name yours?"
"That's easy. Fool's Errand."
Denise laughed. "Mine's the Starflower."
"Sounds good."
The interior of the Fool's Errand comprised three circular lounges with concave walls. In their neutral state the cream-colored surfaces had the same texture as soft leather. Human-styled fittings could distend out of it as required. The lounges also made perfect auditoriums, capable of providing a 360-degree image that could show either sensor images or any of the i's that he'd loaded from the Koribu's multimedia library.
Lawrence walked into the forward lounge, enjoying the novelty of a standard gravity field. A single luxurious chair rose up out of the center of the floor. He settled himself in it and called up a visual sensor image. The front of the lounge melted away, showing him the Koribu's crystal gilded fuselage dead ahead.
In his mind, a broad crown of the starship's system icons burned a willing gold. He selected several, and the Fool's Errand slowly backed out of the inert chrysalis. An idiot's grin spread over his face as the ship's elegance and power became apparent. And he alone commanded it. The Starflower rose into view from the other side of the Koribu. He watched as Denise flew around to the drastically mutated maintenance bay. The Arnoon dragon waited at the center, elegant semi-organic segments closed against the main body, solar wing-sheets furled tight. Watching the Starflower touch it was like seeing two drops of water merging; the dragon was absorbed through the shimmering hull, leaving only a slight bulge to betray its presence. Then the Starflower moved out into clear space beyond One's umbra. Lawrence could see the strange forces gathering around the drive section as the power shields and fins shone like fragments of a blue-white star. It flung itself into the nullvoid.
"Thank you for your help," Lawrence told One.
"We will learn what you become," the dragon replied. "And we will remember you. This is what we are."
Lawrence selected his course, delving deep into some of the oldest memories the dragons possessed for the information. The engines gathered up their colossal strength and impelled the Fool's Errand into the nullvoid.
Nebulas are among the most beautiful objects in the sky, revered by astronomers across the galaxy. Fluoresced by stars hidden deep inside, they shade parsecs with the most magical patterns of shifting primordial light. Yet for all their grandeur they are transient. The stars that provide their ethereal beauty also blow out a hard wind of ions that slowly disperses the gas and dust. Gravity, too, plays its part, inexorably thinning out the streamers and clouds. Protostars perform the opposite function, their great glowing whorls sucking in the spectral tides, compressing them down to a central spark.
Their lifetimes are measured in millions of years only—negligible in galactic timescales.
Even the Ulodan Nebula, one of the thickest and darkest ever to form in the galaxy, was waning when the Ring Empire archaeologists came across the planet of the Mordiff. By the time of the Decadence War it was just a zone of interstellar space with a slightly higher than average gas density. Even then the Mordiff sun was cold and shrunken, no more than a glimmering red ember. Just a memory within the newborn dragon civilizations.
It took Lawrence Newton and the Fool's Errand a long time to find the cool star-husk with its single lonely planet. But eventually the beautiful starship fell from the sky and landed beside the one remaining relic of the Mordiff.
Lawrence put on a spacesuit and stepped down onto the planet's surface. There was no air left: it had bled away millions of years ago. The sand under his boots had frozen to a crust harder than iron. But there was still light. High above the horizon, the galactic core formed a lambent white swirl that occupied nearly a tenth of the sky. It cast a sharp shadow behind him as he walked.
This was a landscape bleaker than any he had ever known. Rock outcrops were sharp and fractured: even the stones that littered the ground were jagged. Over millions of years, cold had drawn the very color from the land. He knew this planet had no future left. That knowledge didn't bother him; he had come for its past.
He paused on a low ridge and looked up at the terminus. It was strange, he thought, that a race so warlike and terrible could build a machine so much greater than themselves.
The terminus was a broad toroid, snow-white in color, its inner aperture measuring three kilometers in diameter. Five giant buttress towers supported it a kilometer off the ground. Outcrops of rock rested against the base of each one, as if they were waves breaking against a cliff. Neither cold nor entropy had affected the titanic artifact; even geology had been defeated by it. The Ring Empire archaeologists weren't even sure it was made from matter in the normal sense. Nothing else of the Mordiff remained, no ruins, no monuments. Only the terminus, their failed bid for immortality.
Harsh turquoise light shone down out of the center, illuminating the frozen sand underneath. Lawrence was vaguely disappointed he couldn't actually see the wormhole, but the blue light acted like a veil across the aperture.
After a while Lawrence walked back to the Fool's Errand.
He sat on his seat in the forward lounge and guided the star-ship under the toroid. It rose slowly into the blue haze. For a second the sensors could see nothing; then they were inside the wormhole. A tube of pale violet light stretched away from the starship. Ahead lay the future, billions of years stretching out to the end of the galaxy, when even the terminus fell into the
black hole. In the other direction lay the past. Fool's Errand flew back into history.
The three sister planets were moving into their major conjunction. It was a spectacular sight as the bright crescents lined up above the gentle rolling hills of New Arnoon. Denise was sitting in the shade of a big cigni tree as they slid together, its ginger leaves casting a broad dapple over the grass around her. The cluster of seven-year-olds sitting on the ground sighed and cooed at the astral exhibition. If they squinted really hard, they could just make out hair-thin lines cutting across the distant planets. The silver threads of the world web spun out by the dragon in geostationary orbit were becoming more complex as the englobing progressed. Soon the whole world would be caged. These were exciting times for the children.
"Finish it," Jones Johnson whined plaintively. "Please, Denise!"
But not as exciting as other people used to have, she thought in amusement. Little Jones was getting agitated, his face screwed up with urgency.
"Finish! Finish!" the rest of them chanted.
"All right," she said.
Lawrence Newton tried not to show any nerves as he presented his ticket to the departures desk in the center of the terminal building. Templeton Spaceport was a small affair to the north of the domed city, a couple of runways and five hangars. It was built with arrivals in mind, twenty thousand at a time when one of McArthur's starships decelerated into orbit. Traffic in the other direction was small and open to scrutiny.
The receptionist scanned his ticket in and smiled as her sheet screen scrolled confirmation. "Do you have any baggage?" she asked.
"Er, one," Lawrence said. He was so relieved the Prime had guarded him from his father's askpings he made a hash of lifting the case onto her scales. She leaned over and helped him.
"Why are you going?" she asked.
"I, er, my family is sending me to university on Earth," he stammered.
"Lucky you," she said brightly. "You can go through to the lounge now, Mr. Newton. Your flight leaves in forty minutes. If the snowplows can keep the runway clear."
"Thanks." His stomach felt curiously light.
Starflight! I'm going to have a starflight. I really am.
And that made up for absolutely everything.
He straightened his back and walked toward the lounge door. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Vinnie Carlton hanging around by the main entrance. Lawrence gave him a surreptitious thumbs-up. Vinnie winked back.
The lounge doors closed behind him. Ahead of him, the picture window gave him a view out over the long arrowhead-shaped spaceplane that was due to take him up to the Eilean. Lawrence hurried forward for a better look.
Vinnie Carlton watched the lounge doors shut He went out to the taxi rank and climbed into the first of the little white bubbles. "Leith dome," he told the vehicle's AS.
A thin hail of ice twisted about them on the road. Vinnie settled back in the seat, closed his eyes and concentrated. The flesh on his face rippled; characteristics began to shift, his nose flattening slightly, chin protruding, eyebrows straightening. He opened his eyes, now shaded halfway between gray and green. When he looked in the taxi's mirror to check, Lawrence Newton's young features looked back at him. It had been so many months he barely recognized himself.
Sadly he acknowledged that for all the perfect physical regeneration patternform had given him, he could never project the naivetй that his younger self had always possessed. An inevitable consequence, he thought—not just from the twenty years of experience he owned, but also the result of living beside his earlier self for so long. That proximity had been so much harder than he'd ever imagined. There had been so many times when, as Vinnie, he'd wanted to give that love-stricken, horrifyingly ignorant teenage Lawrence a damn good kicking.
But he hadn't For all those months he'd been a good friend on every level, gritting his teeth as he watched the doomed love affair play out from a vantage point that was far too close. Time and again, when they'd been out in a group, he'd seen the fear hidden in Roselyn's eyes when Lawrence was looking the other way. She must have known he'd find out eventually. Still she carried on, just as besotted and tragic as that desperate teenage boy, clinging to her fragile happiness. He'd lost count of the times he'd almost surrendered to his stormy emotions and whispered to her: "It'll be all right." Ultimately, he didn't have that right. For he didn't truly know yet if it would be.
The features on the fresh young face in the taxi's mirror had sunk into a drawn, nervous expression as the weight of twenty years and two broken lives emerged as part of its genuine identity. "Now you've really come home," he said to it.
The elevator took an age to get up to the right floor. Lawrence remembered the anxiety he'd felt as he left Amethi for Earth. This was worse. He took the memory chip from his pocket and studied it curiously. The very last episode of Flight: Horizon. And he still hadn't accessed the damn thing. It just wouldn't have been right by himself. He flipped it like a coin and tucked it away again, smiling to himself. The elevator doors opened, and his smile faded.
His legs were very unsteady as he walked down the corridor. He stood outside the apartment door, too scared to move.
I've invaded planets. I've been charged by a herd of macrorexes. I've seen dragons in their natural habitat. I've walked on the planet of the Mordiff. Now knock, you coward.
His fingers rapped lightly on the door.
Roselyn opened it. She'd been crying.
"I'm an idiot," Lawrence blurted. "But I had a lot of time to think. A lot of time. And the one thing I want to do more than anything else in the universe is tell you that I love you."
Several of the children had clasped their hands together as they gazed up at Denise. All of them had fallen silent. They were smiling contentedly.
Denise had about five seconds of peace while the story sank in.
"But what did she say to him?"
"Did they get married?"
"Will they live happily ever after?'
She held up her hands in a plea for quiet "I don't know exactly what happened next Not there, or on Earth. But I'm sure Lawrence and Roselyn must have spent a long and happy time together. At least..."
"What?" Jones demanded, eyes bugging.
"It's just that Lawrence never wanted to get involved. But simply knowing makes you involved. That's what the dragons taught us: knowledge is the only true immortal. And he knew that in twenty years' time the Clichane was going to arrive back on Earth with patternform and the dragons' memories. The human race would change. So there he was on the planet that was his true home, with the girl he loved. And he had the Fool's Errand with him. He had the knowledge to turn Amethi into a paradise and populate it with angels long before Earth had the ability. Poor, dear old Lawrence. I wonder if he could resist the temptation."
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