"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?"