FALLEN DRAGON (103 page)

Lawrence checked her pack. She'd chosen Chateaubriand steak with bearnaise sauce. The hydration valve was preset, so she couldn't have used the wrong amount of water to saturate it before she put it in the microwave slot. "It'll just be freefall pooling," he told her. "Fluid buildup in your head plays hell with your taste receptors. Try squirting some more salt solution into it."

"It's not just the taste, it's the texture, too." She pulled an array of mealpacks out of a box, sending them whirling across the little cabin to bounce off the walls. "Look at these. Each one a different food, and all with exactly the same consistency. It's like lukewarm mashed potato in twenty colors."

"Right. Sorry about that."
Only another 103 days of this to go. When
the wheel section was finally repressurized, Lawrence stood in the bridge compartment and cautiously unsealed his Skin. He sniffed at the cool air. "Sweet Fate, no problem with freefall pooling here."

Denise took her face mask off and grimaced. "What did that?"

"Let's go find out."

They never did track the stench down to a single source. Coolant fluid that had frozen was now sloshing about, slowly evaporating. The waste recycler was a big culprit, which they solved by closing the valves and having the robots spray the whole mechanism in foam sealant. Food scraps that the crew were eating had partially boiled in the vacuum before freezing; now they were truly rotten. Lawrence also suspected rodents and insects, decomposing away behind the wall and ceiling paneling.

All of it had to be cleared away: the fluids mopped up, biodegradable items taken through an airlock and dumped in nearby compartments that were still in a vacuum. It kept them busy for a while.

Lawrence claimed the captain's small suite of rooms. He took out every article of Marquis Krojen's clothes, all the personal items, erasing his identity. Then he went through the other cabins in search of clothes that fit. A lot had been sucked out into space, but there were enough to last a couple of months before he had to start thinking about washing them. Denise moved into a cabin on the other side of the bridge.

After the first week Lawrence began reviewing the multimedia library. He didn't have much else to do. Prime and the robots were perfectly capable of maintaining the few pieces of environmental equipment necessary to keep their section of the wheel functional. He had reactivated a sustainer cabinet for his Skin. Not that he expected to wear it again. That kept chugging along quietly without his intervention. The compression drive was operating efficiently, as were its tokamaks. There was no navigation required. No daily inspection of the ship. And no view.

At first he started choosing music to play, racking the volume up loud. It was kind of eerie, two people alone in a ship built for over twenty thousand. The music went partway to filling the emptiness for him while he exercised away in the gym to keep his body in trim. Then he and Denise started arguing about the tracks he played. He refused to let it get out of hand. He'd acquired plenty of experience with grudges building amid small groups in confined quarters; she with her rustic upbringing had no idea about the compromises that had to be made. So after that she chose half of them, and he kept quiet about her taste.

Even spending three or four hours a day working out left him with a lot of time to kill. He went back to the library and began accessing the i's. It was something he hadn't really done since leaving Amethi. At first he went for the comedies, new and classic, but there's only so long you can keep laughing at situations that have no real bearing on your own life. After that he immersed himself in action adventures, finally giving up on them when they became idiotic and repetitive. Dramas were generally too harrowing. He guessed that his current circumstances must have heightened his emotional state, leaving him too susceptible to the melodramatic traumas that characters involved him in. Science fiction he refused point-blank. Despite the huge temptation, that really would be premature. He would see
Flight: Horizon
again. But not here, and not alone. So he butterflied between classic plays and travelogue documentaries and historical event reenactments. Though more often than not he'd delve into the dragon's scattered memories of the Ring Empire and other strands of galactic history, already old when Earth's dinosaurs were young.

Even though they kept to themselves during the day, he and Denise made a point of spending mealtimes together. They varied the food as much as possible, although Denise never let up bitching about its blandness.

"You really do love her, don't you?" she asked during one dinner, about five weeks into the voyage.

Lawrence gave her a slightly guilty glance. As usual he'd tuned out her moaning about the state of the duck a la orange. When he followed her gaze, he saw he was rubbing the pendant between his thumb and forefinger. The little hologram smiled at him below her foggy age-worn surface.

"Yeah," he said. It didn't hurt to say it to her, not now that there was no turning back. "I do."

"Lucky girl. How long ago was it, twenty years?"

"Just about." He gave the pendant another look, then dropped it back inside his sweatshirt "You know, I only kept it at first to remind me why I left home, so my anger wouldn't fade. That's sort of shifted over the years. I keep it now because of what she represented. The happiest days of my life. It took a long time to realize that nobody can have that effect on your life without meaning something to you. And nobody else has ever meant that much to me, not even close."

Denise gave him a fond smile, slightly surprised by the admission. "I hope you manage to patch things up."

"I was so angry when I found out. Angry with everybody else for being part of a universe where such things were allowed to happen. Which was the only way I had of expressing myself. It was such a shock to discover that someone you love has been used like that. But then we were both young and stupid, me and her. She was desperate to emigrate, and that was the only way she could make it happen. And you know what? There's no difference between what she did and what I did. Zantiu-Braun had my body for twenty years because that's the only way I could ever hope to realize my dream."

"You really are hung up on starflight, aren't you?"

"Absolutely. I was born on a colony. I owe my existence to wanderlust."

"That's so old-human. Just pressing onward for your own satisfaction and never seeing the consequences. I think Simon Roderick may have had a point."

"You are kidding." Jacintha had transmitted her entire conversation with Roderick up to the
Koribu
before they went FTL. Hearing Z-B's policy hadn't shocked him quite as much as it should have, or at least as much as it would have a month previously. After all, he had been extensively v-written himself, and if he had kids, he would want the best for them, just as Roderick said. Being born a part of a movement like this made you more sympathetic to its aims. It would probably look a lot different from the outside. Terrifying, probably. Smarter, richer, more powerful people wanted to alter your children so that they could take part in their level of society, not yours. Lawrence wasn't sure if that was evolution or eugenics.

"No," Denise said. "He was right to say that all we've been doing with colonization is re-creating new Earths for no reason other than personal aggrandizement. They are established as fresh territories for the wealthy so that they're not hemmed in by old problems and restrictions. But those problems and restrictions don't cease to exist back on Earth just because they've left. If anything, they've been exacerbated. Because the type of people who leave are the ones whose energy and determination are exactly what's necessary to solve those problems. It's a political statement; you've given up on the rest of the human race."

"People have always migrated in search of something better. It's a fundamental of human nature. It's even why Roderick's project could ultimately succeed, because we do want the best for our kids. People will always choose improvement for themselves if they ever get that choice; they just disagree with the definition of improvement. That's your politics. Colonization is a form of evolution. Minorities can emigrate to live the way they want without persecution. New ideas can flourish once they've escaped the dead hand of inertia, which is what the unchanging, comfortable masses are. New beginnings allow human culture to move forward."

"Forward to what? Higher levels of consumerism?"

"It doesn't matter that some planets are just repeats of Earth. A few of them aren't, and that's what counts. I've been to Santa Chico. It's not a way of life I would ever choose. But they have. And it's incredibly different, and I respect them for that. The portal colonies, who knows what they're building for themselves. You've found something that could help us flourish to an astonishing degree. And it was found out here among the stars, beyond Earth's shriveled horizon. Finding the dragon was an accident. But coming out here to the unknown where we can find the dragons isn't chance. It's where we want to be, it's where we belong."

"We might flourish with dragon nanonics. On the other hand we could just destroy ourselves. It's such a powerful technology."

"That's been said of many new things we've built. The generation alive when it happens is terrified; then two generations on, nobody can even understand what the fuss was about. I don't have religion to fall back on, I don't even believe much in fate, but when it comes down to the bottom line, I do have confidence in us as a species. We'll absorb this as we've absorbed everything else, and we'll move on to something wonderful. History's on our side."

"Not by much. Don't you see? This will give us the ability to change, not just once, but continually. We won't necessarily even be the species you have all this confidence in."

"I'm not talking solely about human history. I'm talking about the Ring Empire as well. They had this, and look what they achieved. Its cultural beauty is something we should aspire to. That so much diversity existed is a wonderful incentive to what we could reach. The most magnificent society possible covering a quarter of the galaxy and lasting for over a million years."

"And where are they now?" Denise said brokenly.

"All around us. They are the dragons, remember. The greatest example of surviving change there could be. They have grown in harmony with their milieu, the space around red giants, and we'll grow into ours, the Earth-like planet. Maybe one day we'll move on from that and join them. We could even be smart enough to learn from the history of the Ring Empire and see that life can never be static."

"You're a dreamer, Lawrence. You don't deal in practicalities. We have a Roderick chasing us who will warp your ideals, and mine, into something wicked."

"Perhaps that is fate. Perhaps he will enslave half of the human race. He'll never get everyone. He won't get you, will he? You and your genetic package will be free to build another new world clean away on the other side of the galaxy."

She stared at him as if he were the real alien. "And that doesn't bother you?"

"It troubles my inherited sense of morality. But then, who are we to judge what will emerge out of that kind of forced evolution? Why assume it will be evil? You could just wait and see rather than prejudge. After all, he believes he's doing the right thing. And even if he creates the most hideous evil, it'll never last. Evolution will turn again."

"I care because of the suffering it will inflict while it exists."

"Suffering from your point of view. I told you I went to Santa Chico. Someone I met there believes I suffer because I live more than thirty years. Is she right, Denise?"

"We cannot allow him to obtain dragon technology."

"You can't. Oh, don't worry, when the time comes I'll help you man the battle stations and disable the
Norvelle
if I can. But the outcome, that doesn't bother me. I've spent the last twenty years fighting for someone or other, for a reason that I never knew about nor understood. It hasn't made the slightest difference to the human race. Individuals don't control events; we just like to think we do."

"This is different."

"To you and to him, but not to me. I've fought the only battle that mattered to me, and I won, because I'm here on this starship at this time. And it's taking me to the only place I want to go: home."

A fortnight before they were due to reach Aldebaran, Lawrence started checking over one of the engineering shuttles. If all went well, and the dragons took back their lost, damaged kindred, it would have to be taken out of the Xianti's payload bay and delivered to them. So he maneuvered himself into the tiny cabin and ran through the systems and procedures. Prime and the dragon could probably handle the short flight, but including a human pilot would be helpful in such an unknown and hostile environment. Tanks of hypergolic fuel were purged and refilled. Power cells charged to full capacity. Robot arms tested. When everything was online, they flew a few simulations to familiarize him with the handling characteristics.

"I think I'm as good as I'm going to get," Lawrence said after the third day. They'd already notched up eight hours of simulated flying time. "It can't be that hazardous."

"Our proximity to the photosphere will challenge the shuttle's thermal control systems," the dragon said. "But they will be sufficient for a short flight."

"Are you looking forward to this?"

"I'm not sure I have emotional states that equate to yours."