Star Dragon | Page 5

to actually talk about real fish, although Papa would have reminisced fondly about all the whoppers he'd been programmed to remember. She'd grown up fishing on Fathom with her Chinese grandfather who had told her that her bat-shaped lips brought him luck. While she no longer cared for swimming, she still enjoyed fishing. "I'm sure we've hooked the exobiologist we wanted, Samuel Fisher."
"Ah, Fisher, good name. So, is he rugged enough for the job?"
Fang grinned and bent her head back. "I wouldn't call him rugged exactly, but he's got the credentials, and he's one confident son of a bitch."
"Good! Like him already. Do you like him, daughter?"
"He's cute. I --" she began, thinking of the short curls on top of his head and the way he focused so entirely on a thing he became lost in it. On the other hand, he was too skinny, and he gesticulated too much. But his hands were big, with nimble fingers, the kind that could hold a woman and make her feel sexy and safe at the same time. "I think I like him."
"Will you grow out your hair for him?"
"Papa!" He was always going on about her hair or some such nonsense, and every once in while, like now when she was on vacation with her guard down, he almost sucked her into his games. There would be no time for games when they reached SS Cygni. She'd have to be hard, not soft like the warm sand between her toes now, sand that got walked all over. They had a dragon to bag. "Now, if you've got time to irritate me on my vacation, it sounds like you're ready for an inspection." She checked her eye clock. "I'll be boarding in three hours."
"Damn it then, got to start chewing out these fellows up here. Papa out."
Fang rose and stretched in the low sun. That nearby star, reflecting off the water to the west, was threatening the beach with a toasty, golden sunset. She started back down the beach, and called for a taxi to the airport. Her biochip acknowledged the cab's response and fed her an itinerary for her return. A suborbital would get her to Tanzania on time to make a convenient connection to low Earth orbit.
Just as she finished leaving her request with the dispatch program, a Frisbee landed at her feet. Fang smiled. So much had changed about the external trappings of humanity since she'd been born -- she tried to remember her personal age rather than her Earth-frame age -- but the internal was much the same: the desire for children to play, for instance.
Fang squatted to recover the Frisbee, thinking she'd throw it back. As her hand neared the disk, it leapt away, kicking up sand. She heard a boy snickering. Looking up, she spotted him, reeling in the toy. But something wasn't right. Fang squinted, increasing her visual magnification.
A thin filament connected the disk to the boy's arm. It was part of his body. A woman, the boy's mother she guessed, told him to stop bothering people and resumed fanning herself with her giant pink feathery fingers.
A cloud crossed in front of the sun, dulling the late golden afternoon, and Fang suddenly felt chilled. This wasn't her world, and these weren't her people. Maybe they could have been a long time ago -- she wanted to believe that she was capable of belonging, at least at some point in Earth's history. She wanted to tackle something more tangible, more conquerable, than time.
Fang jogged to meet her taxi.
#
Fisher stood at an observation window of the Ngorongoro space port, gazing along the rail launcher that punched under the Serengeti, toward the low eastern sky where only the upper part of Kilimanjaro was visible, floating like an island above the sea of atmospheric haze that hid its roots. Every minute a rider blasted under the fat black-maned lions sleeping on the surface, erupting from the tube off the mountain. A nearly invisible laser array completed sending the vehicles into low Earth orbit, providing the energy to release the propellants and making final trajectory adjustments. But he was not looking at Kilimanjaro or the flashes of exploding fuel. Riding the Forget-Me-Not he was looking in his mind's eye at the star dragon, 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