Metaphase

BY

VONDA N. MCINTYRE

TRANSITION

METAPHASE

A Bantam Spectra Book / September 1992

SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed 's " are trademarks of Bantam Books

a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

All rights reserved Copyright (C) 1992 by Vonda N McIntyre Cover art copyright @ 1992 by Dorian Vallejo. No part qJ this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address. Bantam Books.

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book i.~ stolen propen)v. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book. "

ISBN 0-553-29223-4

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

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OPM09 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the folks in the Wallingford-Wilmot Library and the Fremont Library who let me move in on them, laptop computer and all, fleeing the marsians who decided that right next to my office was a good place to build ufo hangars.

For ten months.

MANY THANKS,

To the people who helped me get Starfarer right: Kristi N. Austin, John H. Chalmers, John Cramer, Howard L. Davidson, Jane E. Hawkins, Marilyn J. Holt, Nancy Horn, Ursula K. Le Guin, Debbie Notkin, Paul Preuss, Kate Schaefer, Carol Severance, and Jon Singer;

To Gerard K. O'Neill and the Space Studies Institute for the work on which the campus is based;

AND, OF COURSE,

To the Starfarers Fan Club.

PARTICUL\R THANKS,

To Teresa Meikle and Charles E. Griswold, whose Natural History article on Stegodyphus spawned (as it were) the squidmoths.

-VNM

METAPHASE

J.D. SAUVAGE, THE ALIEN CONTAC-r SPECIAList, picked her way across the rough surface of a rocky planetoid.

A gossamer thread, shining bluewhite in the actinic glare of the star Sirius, stretched across the stone beneath her feet. She followed it. A coarser line, her lifeline, unreeled behind her.

The planetoid was more or less

JVI

spherical, so small that its pitted and scarred surface curved sharply away to nearby horizons. At first glance, it looked like a barren, airless asteroid, weathered by primordial meteors; after a first glance, it would be easily over-iwl,

,F

looked. J.D. and her colleagues in the alien contact department almost had overlooked it.

The silken strand thickened, branched, and intertwined, gradually forming a lacy gauze. Not wanting to damage the fabric, J.D. followed it without stepping on it, as if she were walking beside a stream. This stream flowed upward, climbing a steep escarpment. J.D. climbed with it, moving easily.

The low gravity was far higher than a natural rock this size would create. The least of the small world's anomalies, the gravity hinted at a complex interior, perhaps even a core of matter collapsed to neutronium.

The planetoid repaid a second glance. Great masses of webbing filled a dozen of its largest craters. J.D. was walking on an extraordinary asteroid. The worldlet was the starship of alien beings.

Iridescent fibers wove together, forming a solid ribbon that led through a cleft in the escarpment. J.D. stepped cautiously onto the fabric. It gave slightly, a springy carpet over solid rock.

The band of silk guided her to the edge of one of the web-filled craters. Somewhere within it, the alien beings waited.

The message from the squidmoths had been brief and direct.

"You will be welcomed."

J.D. scrambled up the last steep slope to the edge of the crater. Her destination lay below.

The silken pathway blended into a convoluted surface, filling the wide, deep crater. Valleys and ridges rumpled the webbing, and half a dozen trails twisted into it from where she stood. To proceed, she would have to walk off the edge of the crater and let the web alone support her weight.

She hesitated, listening and hoping for another message from the squidmoths.

"I'm here," she said softly. Her spacesuit radio transmitted her voice.

In the silence, waiting for a reply, she knelt down and slid her hand across the smooth webbing. The faint shussh of her touch transmitted itself through her glove. She wished she could feel the silk with bare fingers, but the atmosphere was far too thin for her to remove her suit.

A single filament, darker silver than the rest, crossed the surface and disappeared along one of the trails.

J.D. rose, lifting the thread, holding it carefully across her palm. Starlight spun along its length.

She slid one foot gingerly forward. The floor yielded, then tightened, bouncing gently in the low gravity. She felt like a skater crossing ice so thin it flexed beneath her. She feared her touch would rip the silk; she feared a dark tear would open beneath her, and she would fall fifty meters to the bottom.

Most of all, she feared that her presence would cause the structure to self-destruct. She had watched Tau Ceti's alien museum destroy itself rather than admit human beings. Rather than admit her.

But the squidmoths had invited her. The thread in her hand acknowledged her existence.

J.D. moved farther onto the silk, following the thread into the labyrinth. Her boots left no marks.

The path dipped into a meandering valley. J.D. descended through a cleft of delicate cascades. The fluttery fabric responded to her footsteps, trembling, vibrating. The cascades closed together overhead, and she found herself walking upon one horizontal sheet, and beneath another, past and through translucent tissue-thin layers like huge fallen parachutes that filtered harsh starlight. The membranes formed tunnels and chambers; cables and strands connected the membranes. The sheets rippled silently as she passed.

If a suspension bridge and a Gothic cathedral had interbred, this construction might be their offspring.

Without the filament, she would have no idea which way to go. If it broke, only her lifeline would lead her out.

Silvery-gray illumination surrounded her, suffusing the space with a luminous glow. The spun silk carried the light within its strands.

Deep within the crater, she paused at the top of a slope that plunged into light. Afraid she would slip, fall, and slide sprawling to-wherever the hillside led-she wrapped her fingers around a supporting strand and tested its strength. It gave, then contracted, as if to embrace her hand. Like the floor, the fiber was elastic and strong. She reached for another strand, an arm's length farther on, and ventured deeper into the web.

"No more communication yet," J.D. said, though her colleagues in the alien contact department and everyone back on board Starfarer could see and hear all that she was witness to.

Don't say things just because you're nervous, she told herself firmly. You're supposed to be the professional, bravely facing the unknown.

Some professional: you've only been certain for a week that your profession really exists.

She did not feel brave. Being watched and recorded only made it worse. J.D. concentrated on climbing down the smooth silken slope. Even in the low gravity, it was painstaking work. Her metabolic enhancer kicked in, flooding her body with extra adrenaline and inducing extra adenosine triphosphate. Not for the first time since the expedition started, she was glad she had decided to maintain the artificial gland. When she left the divers and the orcas, the long days of swimming naked in cold salt water, she had assumed she would not need to enhance her metabolism anymore.

Thirty meters down, the slope curved to a nearly horizontal level and she could again walk upright on its springy inner surface. Sweat beaded on her forehead. The spacesuit's systems evaporated the sweat away.

Within the webbing, thick silk strands glowed brightly, filling the corridor with a soft pink light that imitated some other star than Sirius. J.D. knew, by inference, that the squidmoths had.not evolved beneath this star. Other than that, she knew very little about them. They were intelligent beings, reticent. They drifted through the galaxy in their small massive star-

ships, ignored and apparently despised by the interstellar civilization. Maybe they're outcasts, just like us, J.D. thought.

The squidmoths had, at least, invited humans to visit them. The rest of interstellar civilization had ordered Starfarer to return to Earth, so human beings could spend the next five hundred years growing up.

This they had declined to do. In response, in retaliation, the cosmic string by which Starfarer traveled had begun to withdraw. If Starfarer stayed in any one place too long, it would be stranded there forever.

The passage curved and branched. The guide thread passed into the central tube. J.D. followed it. Behind her, her safety line snaked along the floor and pressed against the convex wall. The line creased the silk, an anomalous, coarse dark strand.

J.D. thought she saw the guide thread move. She hurried forward, but the tunnel's curve straightened and she saw nothing but the guide thread lying motionless on the floor, disappearing into the tunnel's next descent.

But her spacesuit replayed for her what she had seen. The thread had moved. She stopped and leaned sideways, pressing her helmet against the tunnel wall. Could she hear a faint scuffling, or was it her imagination? Replayed and amplified, the phantom sound vanished into background noise.

Increasing her pace, she tried to catch up to whatever was laying the guide thread. But the delicate strand grew even thinner, dangerously thin, as if it were being stretched as it was created. J.D. slowed down, afraid she would cause the thread to break.

She rounded a curve and confronted a complete constriction of the passageway. She stopped. The end of the guide thread lay in a tangle at her feet.

"Damn," J.D. muttered.

She asked for a visual display of the radar traces of the tunnels around her. Her suit obeyed. Up until a few minutes ago, this tunnel had continued, leading deeper into the web.

"Victoria?" J.D. said.

"I'm here." Victoria spoke softly into her ear through her suit radio. "Shall I follow you in?" Victoria was J.D.'s backup; she waited outside the Chi, the explorer spacecraft, at the home end of J.D.'s lifeline.

"Not yet. There's no threat of danger." Disappointed and confused, J.D. smiled sadly. "Maybe I just misunderstood what I was supposed to do." Recently they had misunderstood, and been misunderstood, more often than not.

"J.DT' Zev exclaimed.

The backward-watching recorder, a little tiny machine that clung between J.D.'s shoulder blades, flashed an image to the Chi and to J.D.'s display.

Zev whistled a sharp warning in true speech, the language of the orcas and the divers. The shrill sound raised the hair on the back of J.D.'s neck. She spun around.

The tunnel was slowly constricting. She took one step toward it.

Outside the translucent wall of the tunnel, creatures moved.

J.D. stopped, her heart pounding. She glanced at the LTM display in her helmet, but the recorders saw the creatures no more clearly than she did. Around her, vague shapes made deliberate motions. Legs or feelers or tools pressed the tunnel inward, cinching it with a narrow band that grew progressively smaller.

The tunnel puckered, lifting her lifeline and the guide thread off the floor till they hung in the air, drooping from the closed sphincter.

"J.D., get out of there!" Victoria said.

She was trapped in a silken cocoon, a twist of the tunnel.

"No," she said. "Not yet. Victoria, Zev, I'm all right."

She was frightened, but she calmed herself and slowed her thudding heartbeat. The creatures that had immobilized her came no closer.

"I'm coming in after you," Victoria said.

"No. Stay there."

"But-"

J.D. pressed her hands against the wall. It yielded. Unlike the floor of the chambers higher up, it remained supple. The constricting band stretched. Thinking about what this must look like to all her colleagues, J.D. blushed and released the band. She dreaded hearing Stephen Thomas make one of his offhand, off-color remarks.

But when he remained silent, it troubled her even more. He had been silent a lot, since Feral's death.

"I think I could force my way out," J.D. said to Victoria. "In either direction. But I'm not quite ready to try. I don't think I'm in any danger-"

"You're in the middle of the world's biggest spiderweb, that's all! And the spiders are closing in!"

"I don't feel like a fly just yet. It wouldn't make sense. You'd get awfully hungry, orbiting Sirius and waiting for dinner to come along, what-? Once every million years?"

"Especially if you cultivated a reputation for not being intpresting to visit," Satoshi said.

"Satoshi's right. And Europa said the-" It occurred to her suddenly that her hosts had not referred to themselves as "squidmoths." Europa, representing the interstellar civilization, had done so, but she had spoken of them with contempt. For all J.D. knew, "squidmoth" was civilization's version of an ethnic slur. She decided not to repeat it. "She said the beings here wouldn't talk to us-she didn't say they were dangerous."

"Quite true," Victoria said dryly. "But she was wrong about them talking to us, eh?"

"Urn, yes." The alien human was wrong about a lot of things, J.D. thought, but she felt, stubbornly, that she should wait and see what happened.

"I don't want you to compromise your safety," Victoria said.

J.D. chuckled. "But Victoria . . . this is my job."

A hissing sound, a classic raspberry, interrupted her. At first she was embarrassed, then startled.

Oh, no, she thought. A leak in my suit-?

Instead of fading out, the noise of the raspberry increased.

The suit ought to seal-! J.D. thought.

"Behind you again," Victoria said again, more calmly this time.

More creatures surrounded the other end of the bubble where she was trapped. They loosened the constricting band. J.D. could not be sure, but she believed their shapes were different from the creatures who had trapped her. The sphincter had relaxed enough to let gas spurt into JDA cocoon.

She giggled, involuntarily.

"What?" Victoria said.

"Nothing," J.D. said quickly. The first image to come to her mind was hardly something she wanted to admit to her colleagues, to the records Starfarer's control computer was making, and by way of Arachne, to history. The image was far too undignified.

For once, Stephen Thomas was giving some thought to propriety, for he remained silent too.

J.D.'s giggling fit vanished.

"It's an airlock!" she said. "I'm in an airlock!"

"Could be . . ." Victoria said.

"It makes sense-Satoshi, you said this place must have a reservoir of oxygen and nitrogen. I just found the reservoir."

"The craters do show a lot of outgassing," Satoshi said. "Enough to give the asteroid a very thin atmosphere. Nothing like Europa's ship."

Europa's starship, similar in size and gravity to the starship of the squidmoths, had looked like a miniature Earth: land masses, surface water, a normal atmosphere, plants and animals and topography.

The tunnel before J.D. relaxed, opened, and smoothed. The forward constriction disappeared; beyond the translucent wall, the creatures receded and vanished. The constriction behind her remained tight.

J.D. waited, hoping the alien beings would communicate with her. Her suit radio received only silence.

But at her feet, a second guide thread took up where the first had ended. The second thread was darker and thicker, like a strand of glossy black hair.

J.D. followed the thread deeper into the tunnel.

The soft silk floor silenced J.D.'s footsteps, but she clapped her gloved hands together and heard the dull thunk The spun walls absorbed and deadened the sound, but it was a sound. Earlier, she had been in vacuum; now she was in air. She linked briefly with one of the LTM transmissions and read the analysis: Majority gas nitrogen. Minority gas oxygen, a couple of percentage points higher than on Earth. Trace gases: carbon dioxide, ozone, hydrogen sulfide, a spectrum of hydrocarbons and fluorocarbons.

"If you took your helmet off, you could breathe," Victoria said. "Not that I'm suggesting it."

J.D. glanced over the trace gases again. "I wonder if all this stuff is meant to make me feel at home?"

The air on Europa's ship had been crystalline and pure. Earth, as Satoshi had said, before the Industrial Revolution. Earth, from the time of Europa's birth, nearly four millennia ago. Europa and Androgeos had been rescued from Knossos, after the eruption of Santorini on Thera. They had been saved to welcome human beings to the interstellar civilization.

Some welcome, J.D. thought.

The air in the squidmoths' ship was closer to the air of Earth in the present day, pollution and all.

Or maybe, she thought, the beings who live here just like it that way.

"I wouldn't want to strike a match here."

J.D. pressed further and deeper into the webbing. She wondered if the silk could bum. She hoped not. The high concentration of oxygen would feed a fire into a rage.

As far as she knew, nothing she carried with her could produce an open flame, or even a spark. She was glad the Chi had landed at a good distance. Suppose it had come too close, and the heat of its engines had set the complex structure on fire? That would have been worse than back in the Tau Ceti system, watching the alien museum collapse. Worse, because alien people lived here. A fire would kill intelligent creatures, the only members of interstellar civilization to welcome human beings.

J.D. continued onward. When the guide thread quivered, when she thought she heard the scrabble and scuffle of small feet on the silken floor, she forced herself to maintain her deliberate pace. Whatever or whoever she was following, she did not want to scare it again.

Why are the squidmoths taking the risk of welcoming us? J.D. asked herself. We're outcasts, and our invitation to interstellar space has been withdrawn. Europa fled so she and Androgeos wouldn't be cut off along with us. The same thing might happen to the squidmoths.

Europa had spoken of the squidmoths with contempt and dismissal. Were they so isolated, so lonely, that they would take such a risk just to talk?

The light grew brighter, and the tunnel surface more convoluted, with strands and sheets of silk stretching and overlapping in all directions. The tunnel abruptly ended, several meters up the side of a huge chamber. J.D. stood at the top of the slope, gazing out at a visual cacophony of glowing lines and overlapping, curving, rippled membranes. She felt as if she had walked into a sculpture made of light.

The light-bearing cables focused here. The silk carried the light of Sirius from the surface of the planetoid to the center of the web, softening its harshness while its brilliance remained, shedding a bit of its energy burden on its way into the depths. J.D. had reached a focus of the illumination.

"This is amazing." Satoshi's voice was soft, but excited. He was a geographer: his work involved mathematical analyses of the interaction of people with the environments they created for themselves. J.D. suspected that Satoshi would be studying alien beings who created every detail of their surroundings.

The slope was steeper than the previous descents. J.D. climbed down the soft rumpled silk. The guide thread disappeared into the most concentrated light.

J.D. steadied herself, grasping a glowing, wrist-thick strand. Her suit registered warmth, but her glove protected her from the sensation. This was like swimming with the orcas in a wet suit: removed, alienated.

Interleaved silk curtains curved around the concentration of light. J.D. moved carefully between the soft, bright sheets of fabric, hoping she was not entering a maze. The mazes of Europa and Androgeos had been quite enough.

The guide thread led her in a switchback pattern of arcs: between two curtains, to the edge of one, around the edge, along the next closest arc to the center. The lifeline unreeled behind her, creasing the end of each successive curtain.

J.D. rounded a final curtain and stepped out into an irregular area formed by the overlapping draperies.

A tiny creature, trailing a glossy black thread, riffled across the floor and vanished beneath a sheer membrane. The membrane fluttered, then smoothed itself against a massive form.

J.D. saw the squidmoth.

"My god," Satoshi said, in amazement.

Victoria's response was feeling, rather than words: a deep, astonished joy flowed from Victoria, through Arachne, to touch J.D.'s internal link.

"J.D., it's wonderful!" Zev said.

Stephen Thomas said nothing.

Strangely enough, J.D. had no doubt that she had come into the presence of one of the intelligent beings who inhabited this starship. Back on Europa's ship, in familiar, Earthlike surroundings, J.D. had wondered if she should try to converse with everything: the ground cover that surrounded the landing platform, the aurochs that had chased her up a hillside, the meerkats who had watched her flee. When she finally encountered Europa

and Androgeos, who were very nearly ordinary human beings, she was shocked beyond words.

"Hello," J.D. said to the squidmoth. She stopped, and waited.

The squidmoth said nothing.

It Jay in the focus of the light-conducting curtains, bathed in a bright and gentle illumination. Light that would have driven off an ordinary ocean creature heightened the vivid peacock iridescence of its skin. And yet its shape did hint at an origin in the sea.

The alien's body was at least three meters long, and probably much bigger. It lay cushioned and cradled and partly concealed within and beneath the folded layers of silken web. Its glossy, leathery body flattened at each side into membraneous fins, where the guide-thread creature had vanished. The edges of the fins rippled gently, exposing feathery undersides and delicate jointed appendages. Vestigial legs? Gills, and legs that would be functional in very low gravity, or underwater? J.D. resisted making assumptions. The squidmoth did not look like it walked anywhere, ever, for its fluted lower body disappeared into the wrinkled floor. It looked like it had grown from the chamber, as if it were the intricate exposed root of some life form even larger and more complicated.

J.D. took a step toward it, cautious, moving slowly, keeping her hands in plain view.

She wondered if the being even understood hands. The squidmoth itself had tentacles, a number of short, thick ones and three long, slender ones.

The long tentacles lay in a coiled and tangled mass before the being. A creature the size of JDA hand scuttled down the curtain beside the squidmoth. Scaled skirts hid its legs; its carapace bore an explosion of feathery plates.

The end of one of the squidmoth's long tentacles writhed free, rising like a snake, probing the air. The tentacle caressed and guided the creature toward a large silken pouch that lay crumpled on the floor. Finally, the creature burrowed beneath the edge of the pouch, and inside.

"Thank you for the invitation to visit you," J.D. said. The skin above the squidmoth's tentacles shifted and wrinkled. The leathery, peacock-blue skin split-J.D. started-and opened. A narrow flap of skin wrinkled upward, and the squidmoth gazed out at her through a row of glittery, faceted eyes. The wrinkled skin circled the bulge above the being's tentacles. J.D. tried not to assign familiar body parts to a creature built on a completely different body plan from any she was familiar with. For all she knew, she was approaching the being from behind, the tentacles were its feet, the vestigial, segmented legs were its hands, and the eyes sparkling at her from beneath the mobile brow were sensors of smell or hearing or some sense she did not even possess.

But she found it very hard not to think of the bulge as the squidmoth's head, the tentacles as its organs of manipulation.

Slow down, she told herself; she was giddy with joy and apprehension. Hold on. Remember how embarrassed you were, when you were a kid and you finally looked up horseshoe crabs in the field guide: the long pointy thing was the tail, not its sensors or its whiskers.

J.D. took another hesitant step toward the alien being.

"Hello," she said again.

A voice transmission whispered into J.D.'s suit radio.

,, Do not fear me," said the same flat voice that had invited Starj~rer to visit it.

"I don't," J.D. said. "Yes, I do. A little. Can you hear me?" She was broadcasting through her suit radio, but broadcasting might not be necessary if the squidmoth could hear her through her spacesuit.

Do squids have ears? she asked herself. She had no idea; even if they did, that would not mean the alien being followed any similar specifications.

"My vibratory sense responds to very low frequencies."

"Then you don't hear me-but you receive my radio transmissions." "I receive your transmissions."

J.D. moved a few steps closer to the squidmoth, fascinated. She wanted to ask a hundred questions at once. Remembering how disinclined Europa and Androgeos had been to answer any questions at all, she decided to take things slowly.

She understood the "squid" part of the being's name, but not why Europa had called the being a squidmoth. Moth, because of its vestigial legs? Then why not form the second part of its name from some sea-living arthropod, a crab or a shrimp or a lobster?

The being's eyelid opened widest in the direction facing J.D. Beneath it, several small round faceted eyes peered steadily at her. More of its eyes-J.D. could not help but think of them as eyes-glittered through the half-closed edges of the eyelid. J.D. deliberately moved to the side as she approached the being. Instead of shifting its position, the squidmoth rippled its eyelid open farther toward the back of its head. It must have vision in a complete circle.

"How do you communicate with other sq-" J.D. caught herself in time-"with others of your kind?"

"I communicate with all intelligences as I communicate with you."

Its tentacles moved. The row of short tentacles quivered, and their tips oscillated in a wave that began at one side before it ended on the other, so that two different waves moved along its shorter proboscises. The squidmoth looked like it had a thick, rubbery mustache.

The tips of the three long tentacles rose like the heads of snakes. One moved absently to the pouch on the floor, guiding a small silk-spinning creature across its surface to lay new threads in a bright pattern.

J.D. was nearly ten meters from the squidmoth. Its tentacles shifted and untangled, coiled and writhed.

She thought she had stopped well out of its reach.

She was wrong.

The tentacles whipped toward her. J.D. gasped and jumped back, surprised and frightened. The tentacles

stopped short. They were not yet fully extended; they could reach her. Trembling, J.D. forced herself to stand still.

A month ago, a week ago, she would have been surprised, but she would not have been scared. Meeting Europa and Androgeos had profoundly changed J.D.'s assumptions about what the citizens of an interstellar civilization would be like.

Did you expect them to be perfect? she asked herself, with a tinge of sarcasm. She answered her own question: Yes. I did.

She took a deep breath and moved a step closer to the squidmoth.

"I'm sorry," she said. "You frightened me."

The ends of the tentacles rose, weaving like mesmerized cobras. J.D. held her ground. The tentacles bore no obvious sensory organs: no eyes or orifices, no hands or fingers. Instead, the tips looked soft, furry, feathery, cloaked in a corona of iridescent purple fur.

Sensory cilia? J.D. wondered.

"I frightened you by moving toward you."

The squidmoth's voice remained flat, expressionless, and uninflected.

"You frightened me by moving without warning me," she said, treating its statement as a question. "You frightened me by coming so close, so fast." The tentacles drew back.

Great, J.D. thought. Now I've offended it.

"You prefer more distance."

"I prefer more warning. What do your tentacles do?"

"They touch."

"My hands do that for me." She extended her arms, spreading her gloved fingers.

"I know that."

"Do you know everything about us?" She could not help but think, What's the point of my coming here, what's the point of the deep space expedition, if Civilization already knows more than they ever wanted to know about us?

J.D. had spent her adult life preparing to be the first human to meet aliens. But she was not the first. Europa and Androgeos had preceded her, by thirty-seven hundred years, and that distressed her more than she wanted to admit.

"No, but I want to," the squidmoth said.

J.D. smiled. She still had some knowledge to offer the alien being.

"We're even, then."

"You want to know everything about you."

"That, too. But I meant I'd like to know everything about you."

She hesitated, wondering how forthright she could be in what she said. In all the years she had thought about making contact with an alien intelligence, she had never thought that the first time she stepped into a room with it, it would be able to converse in English. Back on board Starfarer, J.D. kept programs and diagrams, introductions to humans based on physics, on math, on biology, on art. She had thought about communicating with a being that conversed by color, by smell. Her colleagues had done similar work, even before she joined the department a few weeks back, experimenting and speculating on the difficulties of communication. Some people believed alien beings would be so different from humans that they would never be able to communicate at all.

She could speak with the being, but she might not always understand it.

They could easily misinterpret each other.

"Androgeos said you were . . . reclusive."

"Androgeos never visited me," the squidmoth said.

Lacking the clue of voice inflection, J.D. could not tell whether the squidmoth spoke with regret, with relief, or to offer a neutral point of information.

J.D. felt very calm. Her rush of fear had subsided, leaving enough adrenaline behind to make her hyperaware, sensitive, as if all her nerves extended beyond her skin.

"I'm very grateful for your invitation, and very glad

to visit you," J.D. said. "We haven't made proper introductions. My name is J.D. Sauvage."

"I have no verbal name," the squidmoth said.

"Call it Nemo!" Zev's voice whispered in her ear.

"Shh, Zev!" Victoria said.

"Tell me what that meant," the squidmoth said.

"One of my colleagues suggested that I give youthat I offer you a name," J.D. said. "The name of a famous fictional character."

"I will be Nemo," the squidmoth said.

"I'm glad to meet you, Nemo," J.D. said. "May I come closer?"

In response, the squidmoth drew its long tentacles toward itself. They twisted and tangled, their tips coming together and parting. J.D. followed, till she was barely two strides away. Even this close, she could see no reason for comparing the alien being to a moth. Up close, it did not look all that much like a squid.

It was exquisitely, strangely beautiful. Bits of every iridescent color flecked its peacock skin. Its slender jointed legs splayed out into tiny pointed feet, alternately concealed and exposed by the rippling gills.

For all her resolution, J.D. had begun to analyze the being in familiar terms.

"I would like to touch you," the squidmoth said. Its long tentacles, untangling themselves smoothly, coiled before it, their tips waving as if in a gentle breeze. Its mustache of short proboscises continued to ripple. Again, J.D. hesitated, and she realized just how deeply the alien humans' duplicity had changed her.

Dammit, she said to herself, you may not be able to trust everybody out here completely; you may not be able to be as open as you'd hoped. But you cannot be afraid all the time.

"Very well," she said coolly.

The being extended one long tentacle toward her. The tip hesitated at her foot, then curved over her toes and down around her instep, meeting the floor where her boot sank into the thick soft silk. A second tentacle moved toward her, arching up till it reached the level of

her face. The fine hair of the tip brushed her helmet, with a sound as soft as dust.

"This is not your body."

"It's my space suit," J.D. said. "It carries my air."

"You may breathe this air."

"I know. But the suit also protects me from unfamiliar infections-and protects you from contamination."

"Nothing here will infect you."

"Androgeos said the same thing-but he wouldn't tell me how he was so sure. You'll forgive my fears, I hope. I trusted Androgeos, but my encounter with him was . . . unfortunate, in many ways." Androgeos had tried to steal Victoria's new work on cosmic string. He had tried to take away all Earth had to offer to claim respect within the interstellar community.

"Androgeos is young, and zealous."

"Young! He's thirty-seven hundred years old!"

The squidmoth's tentacle brushed back and forth across J.D.'s faceplate.

The pattern of the rippling of its proboscises had changed: from a single wave-form, moving regularly across its mustache, to a double pattern, two waves starting one at each side, clashing in the middle, adding to each other, canceling.

Could I have perturbed it? J.D. wondered. But the question of contamination must be the first one everybody wants the answer to, and the first question these people must have solved. They've been interacting with each other for millennia.

Maybe I made it mad because I don't want to put my life completely in its hands.

"Androgeos is young," the squidmoth said again.

J.D. wondered if she heard a tinge of amusement or irony in its voice. Surely not; it was her imagination.

Strangely enough, Androgeos had struck her as young. He was physically young, while Europa had chosen a more mature physical presence.

"Androgeos acts young sometimes," J.D. said.

"We have nothing to fear from each other's symbiotic microbes," the squidmoth said, and waited.

J.D. hesitated. The potential danger was very low.

She and Nemo were products of completely different evolutionary backgrounds. It would make more sense to worry about catching Dutch Elm disease from a tree.

J.D. reached for the seal on her helmet.

"J.D.-" Victoria said, and then fell silent.

J.D. had walked out onto Europa's planetoid, unprotected. She had hesitated then, too, but she had made the decision to trust the alien humans. In several respects, Europa and Androgeos were not trustworthy at all. But when they assured J.D. she was in no danger of catching, or transmitting, a human or environmental pathogen, they had told her the truth. They had probably eliminated every disease in their environment; they were probably in more danger from Starfarer than Starfarer wits from them. And all Stephen Thomas's tests had come out negative.

It would make no sense at all, besides, to throw Earth 4 lifeline in the form of cosmic string, and then wage biological war on whoever responded. The interstellar community had been keeping an eye on the solar system for generations; if they had wanted to eliminate humanity they could have done it long since, easily, without ever being detected.

The only difference between walking unprotected onto Europa's planetoid and taking off her spacesuit in the squidmoth's presence was that here, her surroundings were strange, and there, they had been familiar. And, perhaps, that then she had not known what her hosts would look like, and now, she was in the presence of a supremely alien being.

Her only reason to refuse was fear: xenophobia.

Recognizing such a reaction troubled J.D. deeply.

Too many bad alien-invasion movies, she said to herself, and then, Bad joke.

She unfastened her helmet. She took it off.

She drew a deep breath.

J.D. started to cough. The air was pungent, musty, reeking of hydrocarbons. It stung her eyes. She breathed shallowly, tempted to seal herself back up with

her own clean air supply. The high oxygen content of Nemo's atmosphere made her giddy.

Once she got used to it, it was about the same as back home in one of the more polluted regions. Spending so much time in the wilderness had spoiled her and weakened her resistance to fouled air.

J.D. unfastened her suit and climbed out of it. She put it carefully on the floor. The LTMs clambered around so they could still see and record her actions. She hoped their resolution was insufficient to capture the trembling of her hands.

Nemo's voice, tinny and indistinct, droned from the helmet. In order to converse, J.D. would either have to wear the helmet without the suit, which struck her as ridiculous, or communicate with Nemo through her direct link. Ordinarily she used the direct link only to communicate with Arachne.

J.D. reached out, cautiously, tentatively, into her link. She could talk with her colleagues via the direct electronic transmission, if she wished, but she usually did not do so. Like many people, she found it discomforting. She did not like the sensation of other people's voices in her head. It took a considerable effort of will to overcome her reluctance and speak directly to Nemo.

"Can you hear me?" she asked.

"I can hear you." Nemo's voice whispered in her mind.

The tentacles of the squidmoth hovered nearby, raising and lowering themselves from the silken floor, twisting and turning as they waited. J.D. faced the squidmoth, moved a step closer, and held out one hand.

The tentacle brushed her palm lightly with its tip. The sensory hairs, soft as fur, quivered against her skin.

J.D. closed her hand gently around the tip of the tentacle. Its motion stilled. Nemo waited, saying nothing. She opened her hand.

The tentacle moved up her arm, curling around her wrist like a snake. Its skin, beyond the fur, felt like suede. Its warmth surprised her. The squidmoth must have a body temperature well above hers, if its appendages felt so warm to the touch. She had unconsciously expected the slick wet coldness of a real squid, the sharp pull of predatory suckers.

Nemo touched her sleeve, exploring it, probing beneath the cuff.

"This is clothing," J.D. said, touching her shirt, her pants. "It's the custom of human beings to wear it most of the time."

Maybe I should strip down, J.D. thought, but I'm not quite ready for that yet.

Nemo touched her palm, her sleeve, her palm again, testing the differences between skin and fabric.

The tip of one tentacle brushed her throat, her lips. She closed her eyes. Fur caressed her eyelids. A second tentacle curled around her waist, gently embracing her. The tip probed at her, tracing the texture of her shirt, touching each button, following the curve of her heavy breasts and coiling softly down her arm. The third tentacle wound around her leg, then its tip traveled up her spine, touching the bump of each vertebra through her shirt.

She opened her eyes. Her lashes brushed against the sensory cilia.

"You detect sensations with these hairs," Nemo said.

"No." She smiled. The squidmoth was trying to make the same kinds of assumptions about her that she was making about it. "That is, I can feel your tentacle, but my eyelashes are for protecting my eyes. Um--do you call this a tentacle?" She brushed her fingers across the soft peacock skin.

"In English, I call it a tentacle."

This time J.D. thought she heard a flash of humor in Nerno's voice. Again, she told herself she must be imagining it.

"I meant, is 'tentacle' an accurate translation of what you call it in your language? What do you call it in yourlanguage?"

"I have no language."

"I don't understand," J.D. said.

"Our communication does not consist of sounds."

"I know, you told me: you use transmissions. But what do you transmit? Words? Visual images? Sensations?"

"A surface of meaning and perception."

J.D. frowned. "A neural visual image?"

"Position, and change of position, within a multidimensional surface of meaning, intensity, rapport between the speakers."

"Multidimensional? More than three dimensions?"

"Many more."

J.D. tried to imagine a more-than-three-dimensional surface; she tried to imagine being shown a more-thanthree-dimensional surface in her mind. An acquaintance of hers claimed to be able to imagine rotating a sphere around a plane, but she had never been able to explain to J.D. how to do it.

"It sounds beautiful," J.D. said.

The squidmoth tentacles twined and curled before her; their tips touched her cheek, her breast, her hand.

"It is beautiful," it said.

"Do you have art forms associated with your communication? The way humans have singing and stories and poetry?"

"It is an art form in itself, whenever a talented one extends the limits and forms new regions and new shapes."

"May I . . . Will you show it to me?"

Without warning, a flash of perception tantalized her brain. She heard sugar dissolving, smelled the pink clouds of a brilliant sunset, sensed the position of a billion raindrops like muscle fibers. She saw a melody of Nerno's vision. Each sensation had its own particular place, its own connections with all the others. More information poured into her. But her internal link acted like the narrow end of a funnel. Nerno's transmission filled the funnel to the brim, and spilled out into nothingness.

J.D. gasped acrid air. She sneezed, and began to cough. Nerno's transmission faded away, and J.D. found herself sitting sprawled on the floor. She buried her

nose in the crook of her elbow, breathing through the fabric of her shirt, forcing herself to take shallow breaths, until her coughing stopped. She wiped her teary eyes.

Nemo lay placidly before her, short tentacles ruffling slightly, long tentacles guiding a frilled, wormy little creature as it spun silver thread in concentric circles.

The radio in her helmet rumbled with a faint hollow sound. J.D. sent an "I'm okay" message back to Victoria and the Chi. The rumbling ceased. J.D. pulled herself together and sat crosslegged near Nemo.

"I didn't understand what you sent me," J.D. said to Nemo. "But you're right, it was beautiful."

"You cannot absorb enough information to gather the complete communication surface," Nemo said.

"Internal links aren't one of our natural senses," J.D. said sadly.

"They're pretty limited."

"it is too bad," Nemo said.

"But any of us can use them to talk to you," J.D. said quickly. "And my colleagues would like to meet you. Would that be possible?"

"I want to become acquainted with one human being, first," Nemo said. "I want my attendants to become familiar with you."

"Your . . . attendants?"

Nemo's fragile legs drummed on the floor. J.D. felt the vibration, and heard a faint thrumming.

She heard the same sound she had heard farther out in the webbing, tiny feet scratching against soft silk. Several small creatures scuttled from beneath the curtains, moving on many legs, and another slithered down a steep slope. They gathered around Nemo, crawling up the iridescent skin. Their dull colors changed and brightened. Like chameleons, they blended into their background. If she watched carefully she could make out their shapes, malleable and indistinct, reaching out with long pincered fingers to groom Nemo's skin. One clambered up the feathery gill-leg, and vanished beneath the fluted fin.

"The attendants are not used to the presence of other beings."

"Oh," J.D. said. She did her best to be diplomatic. "How long will it take?" She wondered if she would get a useful answer; she did not even know if Nemo reckoned time in long spans, or short ones.

"I don't know, I've never received a guest before," Nemo said.

"Never?"

"We're solitary beings," Nemo said.

"Does it-does it bother you to have me in your crater?"

"I enjoy unique experiences." Nemo guided the circling creature around the edge of the disk of silk.

"Would you like to visit Starfarer? I don't know if you're mobile or not-" And I have no idea what you might be sensitive about, either, she thought, doubting the brilliance of her spontaneous suggestion. I only know that human beings are most sensitive about what's hardest, or impossible, to change. "You-you or any of your people-would be welcome on board Starfarer, if you cared to visit."

The squidmoth's mustache ruffled, from left to right, then back again. "You inhabit the inside of Starfarer, " Nemo said.

"Yes.,,

"I wouldn't fit inside Starfarer, " Nemo said.

"Oh." She glanced at Nerno's iridescent back, the tail section disappearing into the floor. "How much of you is out of sight?" Anything that could fit inside the crater would fit inside Starfarer, though the logistics could be difficult.

"You see all of me."

"I don't understand," J.D. said.

Nerno's long tentacles touched the silk, the walls.

"All you see is me," the squidmoth said.

"The whole crater?"

"Everything," Nemo said.

"The whole ship?"

"What you call the ship."

That stopped her. She wiped one more unexamined assumption away, embarrassed to have made it without even noticing, and revised her perception of the squidmoth. J.D. had assumed Nemo was her counterpart, the individual who volunteered, or was chosen, to meet an alien being.

She had assumed each of the silky craters held a being like Nemo, each in its own web.

"You're all alone here?"

"I am myself," Nemo said without inflection.

Great question, J.D., she thought. What would you say if somebody asked if you were all alone in your own body? "No, I'm here with a bunch of white blood cells and a liver"? But-no wonder Europa and Androgeos said squidmoths were reclusive! '

She looked around with an even finer appreciation of her environment and all the other species living here, helping to repair and remake the structure, adapted or co-opted to a perfect interaction. . . .

Were they symbionts, or did they correspond to blood cells, or organs?

She was still trying to put names from her own frame of reference, from her own linear language, into a system that corresponded more closely to Nerno's multidimensional communication.

"Who do you communicate with?" she asked abruptly.

"I communicate with whoever speaks to me."

"I meant . . . if you're the only one of your people in the Sirius system, how do you communicate with others? We haven't found any way of sending electronic signals through transition. Can you-T'

She stopped her excited rush of questions and waited impatiently for Nerno's reply. She imagined the anticipation of her colleagues pressing against her link to Arachne.

If Nemo knew how to communicate through transition, the deep space expedition would be able to tell Earth that it had met alien beings. That could change everything.

If we could let them know back on Earth, J.D. thought, that an interstellar civilization really exists . . .

J.D. knew it was Utopian to believe human beings would come to their senses, and end their interminable and dreadful power games, if they knew of a civilization beyond themselves. She knew it was Utopian . . . but she believed it anyway.

And if Starfarer could send back word that it had met other intelligences, the members of the expedition might be forgiven for taking Starfarer out of the solar system against EarthSpace orders.

If they could signal through transition, at the very least they could let their friends and relatives know they had survived the missile attack.

"I am mobile," Nemo said, "like all my people."

"Oh," J.D. said, as suddenly disappointed as she had been elated. "Then you can't signal through transition?"

"No.,,

"Can anyone?"

"No one I know of."

"You go visiting."

"I go visiting," Nemo agreed.

J.D. sighed. It had been a long shot. Cosmic string theory allowed only large masses to enter transition. No one-no one human-had figured how to chitchat across the transition threshold. Apparently no one nonhuman had made such a discovery, either.

Talking about cosmic string reminded her of something she had put off discussing for too long.

"I understand your wanting to get used to meeting people," she said to Nemo. "But if you want to meet any other human beings, you have to do it soon. Starfarer has to move out of the star system before the cosmic string withdraws. If it does withdraw-you'll have to move, too, or you'll get stranded."

"I will not allow myself to be stranded," Nemo said.

"Good . . . I was afraid . . ." She shrugged. She was ambivalent about bringing up the subject. "I'm surprised you'll talk to us. Aren't you afraid of being contaminated by us? You've talked to me more than Europa and Androgeos did altogether, I think."

"They were disappointed that you failed the test." "But it was a mistake! We weren't armed with nuclear weapons. Or with anything else, for that matter. Nemo, we were attacked in our own system. We dragged the missile through transition because it hit us."

"That is a shame," Nemo said.

"And the only thing that will keep us from being attacked again, if we go home, is proof that Civilization exists."

"Your own people would kill you because you failed," Nemo said.

Another silk-spinner crept out of a fold in the wall and joined the silk worm in the new circle of fabric. The second spinner scrambled across the disk, leaving a radial trail of thread that secured the delicate, tight spiral.

"They wouldn't kill us, but they'd put us in jail." Nemo's attention to the handwork exasperated her.

Is there any way to get Civilization to listen to us9 she thought.

"Maybe you should neither go on, nor go home, but allow yourself to be stranded," Nemo said.

"We've thought about it," J,D. said. The ecosystem could support far more people than the ship carried; it could support them indefinitely. "We could turn Starfarer into a generation ship, and form our own little isolated world. . . ." The whole idea depressed her. It meant abandoning Earth. She could not imagine anything more selfish. "I'd rather go back and get put in jail!" she cried aloud, and her voice broke. She struggled to calm herself.

"I did not understand that," Nemo said.

J.D. repeated herself. Her electronic voice sounded so calm, so rational. "Imprisonment is preferable to freedom." Nemo's eyelid opened all the way around, and the tentacles extended to J.D. and touched her forehead, her shoulder. The silk-spinners, deprived of guidance, wandered across the fabric and trailed threads that left flaws in its surface.

Nerno's tentacles drew away from J.D. and returned to the spinners.

"No! But ... we didn't come out here to found a colony. That's against everything we agreed on, everything we dreamed of! We came out here hoping to join an interstellar community. We came out here to meet you! And now you tell us we have to go back, or abandon Earth, because of a mistake-!" "Five hundred years isn't so long," Nemo said.

"Not to you! You and Europa and Androgeos will still be here when five hundred years have passed. But I'll be dead. Everyone on board Starfarer will be dead. And if we go back to Earth with nothing but the news that we've failed . . . I'm afraid human beings won't survive at all."

"Many civilizations have destroyed themselves."

J.D. looked away from Nerno's brilliant, colorful form, with two long tentacles shepherding the spinners, the third waving delicately in the air. "I'd hoped . . ." She started to take a deep breath, felt the tickle of acrid gases in the back of her throat, and instead blew her breath out in frustration. "I hoped you might tell me that no civilizations are ever lost. That somehow we always manage to pull ourselves out of destruction." "Civilizations are lost all the time, J.D."

"I meant . . . a whole world's civilization." The culture she lived in had reached out for the stars, and had attained them, however temporarily. Why should that be proof against extinction?

Nerno's tentacle brushed her toe, her shoulder.

"So did L" the squidmoth said.

CHAPTER 2

J.D. SAT CROSSLEGGFD BESIDE NEMO, THE SILK beneath her warm and soft. She could happily stay here for a week, just talking. She shifted her position, resting her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand, looking at Nemo, amazed and enthralled by the being. She watched, in silence, as Nemo guided the silk-spinners. The disk had become an iridescent pouch, like several others lying at the edge of the chamber.

"Tell me about Civilization," J.D. said.

"Beings exchange their knowledge," Nemo replied.

The two spinners, one wormlike, one

resembling a starfish crossed with a lace handkerchief, met nose to nose. "But there's more than that!" J.D. said. "How many worlds are there? How many people? How many kinds of people? What are they like? What kind of governments do they have? I want to know everything, Nemo, about Civilization and how it works, about the movements of the cosmic string-!"

The worm reared up, the starfish twisted. They touched. Each extruded a spurt of silk.

"The people of Civilization will want to describe themselves to you." "What do they do when they meet? How do they reconcile their differences?"

The bursts of thread caught together and tangled. As the creature.s danced, Nemo urged them easily around the pouch. Their motions formed the silk into a fluted rim.

"They make peace, or the cosmic string withdraws."

"That's simple," J.D. said dryly. "A little Draconian, but simple."

When the silk worm and the starfish returned to their starting point,

Nemo flicked them both off the edge and into the pouch.

"Tell me what you're looking for," Nemo said.

"We're looking for answers," J.D. said. "Answers . . . and more questions."

"Tell me what answers you're looking for."

"We already found one-a big one. You. We built Slarfarer to find out whether other civilizations exist. Or whether we were alone. Now we know that answer."

"The answer to your question is self-evident," Nemo said.

"Not to everyone. At least not to a lot of human beings. Their philosophy depends on their being alone in the universe."

"Earth has passed through a decline," Nemo said.

"I-what do you mean?"

"Europa and Androgeos knew of other beings."

"After they were rescued, after they left Earth and joined Civilization-" "When they lived on Earth, they spoke to others."

"They had myths. They believed in gods and demigods and fantasy creatures. That doesn't count as knowing about spacefaring beings."

"Yet their myths were more accurate than Earth's current myths of solitude."

"There are lots of different myths on Earth right now. But . . . you're right. Europa and Androgeos came from a sophisticated culture. That's probably why they fit in so well with Civilization."

Nerno's feet drummed softly on the floor, a complicated rhythm. Seven against five? J.D. could not quite tell.

"If we do go back to Earth-I'm not saying we'll accept the exile, but if we do-there are lots of people who won't believe we've met alien beings." "You'll tell them you met alien beings," Nemo said.

Several attendants scuttled and swooped nearer. Nemo rounded them up and herded them into the pouch.

"I'll tell them, but they won't believe me. They'll say we faked the records. They'll say it's all a monstrous hoax."

"You wouldn't fake information."

J.D. thought she heard shock in Nemo's voice.

"But they'd say we did. So we could claim we succeeded. So we could claim they shouldn't put us in jail because we were right all along. They'll want proof that we're right."

She waited, but instead of replying, Nemo lifted the delicate pouch and placed its fluted edge against a silkdraped wall, where it stuck.

"You could prove we were right, Nemo," J.D. said.

"If they saw me, they'd believe you'd met alien people.

"They sure would."

"If they saw me, they wouldn't put us in jail."

J.D. laughed. "They wouldn't put you in jail, that's

for sure." She stretched out her hands to Nemo. "It's a lot to ask, I know, but five hundred years isn't long to people like you and Europa. Wouldn't you at least think of visiting the solar system? You could learn everything there is to know about human beings."

"Your invitation's tempting," Nerno said.

"You'll do it?" J.D. exclaimed, astonished.

"I'm sorry, I have another commitment."

"I understand." The thrill J.D. had felt dropped abruptly into disappointment, with sad amusement that people gave the same excuses everywhere. "Five hundred years is too long."

"This time it is, I am sorry."

J.D. rose and stretched.

"I've been here for hours," she said. "I have to go back to the Chi for a while."

"You are leaving."

"I have to rest, and eat-" She shrugged. "Things that are easier back on the Chi."

"I can offer you food," Nemo said.

Nemo snaked out one long tentacle to the far side of the chamber. The curtain there was a mass of iridescent bubbles of silk. Nemo's tentacle quivered across the surface.

It moved. The bubbles fluttered and bobbed and separated, the whole mass expanding, opening like a flower.

Each sphere was a living creature, depending from the curtain by three long slender limbs. The creatures had no heads, no other appendages, only a circular ring of spots.

Eyespots, J.D. thought, knowing she was making another assumption without much evidence.

Nemo chose one at the edge of the mass and stroked it. It released its hold on the silk and wrapped its legs around Nerno's tentacle.

Nemo extended the creature toward her.

"A decorative food," Nemo said.

J.D.'s helmet radio emitted a noise, not Nerno's voice, but Victoria's, a quick sound of protest more

quickly cut off. J.D.'s friends worried when they thought she was in danger, but they were beginning to understand that facing the danger was her responsibility. They were beginning to understand that they had to let her do her job. Stephen Thomas had once offered to take her place, but he had only offered once: her reaction assured that. The other members of alien contact thought of her as mild-tempered, even meek, and she was. But when Stephen Thomas suggested that he go out instead of her, she lost her temper. "The food will not hurt you."

J.D. accepted Nemo's offer.

It touched her lips. The jointed legs fluttered against her tongue; the abdomen disappeared like sea foam or cotton candy, bursting with a flood of strange flavor: sweet and gingery, spicy-hot enough to make her draw a startled breath. The air passing over her tongue dissolved the spicy taste into a cool musky flavor like perfume. She crunched the delicate legs, but when she swallowed even the legs had evanesced.

The evanescence dissolved straight into J.D.'s blood, straight to her brain.

J.D. broke out into a sweat, she flushed from collarbone to forehead, and her heart began to pound. As J.D. gasped for breath-and coughed violently in reaction to the air-Victoria's voice rumbled from J.D.'s suit helmet, rising in pitch. A spot of heat appeared in the back of JDA mind, a signal from Victoria. J.D. let it in.

"J.D., I'm coming after you!" Victoria said directly into her mind.

"Nemo, what's happening?" J.D. said.

Trying not to sound panicked, she sent a message back to Victoria and the Chi. "No, don't, not yet. I'm all right. . . . I think I'm all right."

"It's the effect of decorative food," Nemo said.

Nemo's long tentacle manipulated another creature from the wall and carried it beneath Nemo's mustache of shorter tentacles. The creature disappeared, with a faint crunch.

Veins in the gauzy fins over Nemo's legs darkened,

and the fins rippled rapidly. The long tentacles twined around each other, leaving the silk-spinners to their own direction. The tips of Nerno's legs pattered erratically against the floor. Nemo's eyelid opened completely, then closed, then opened again in J.D.'s direction.

J.D.'s flush passed, and her heartbeat steadied. Only a quiver of sexual excitement remained, pleasurable and comforting and startling.

"Some effect," J.D. said.

"That's the decoration." Nerno's fins returned to their normal color, and settled back into their usual gentle wave. Instead of replacing the spinners on the rim of the silken pouch, Nemo let them wander in patterns across the surface.

"Did you know how I'd react to it?" J.D. asked.

"Tell me how it felt."

"Like ninety-proof champagne. Like excitement."

"Yes," Nemo said.

"How did you know?"

"Human biochemistry."

"Is that how it feels to you?"

"If excitement feels the same to me as it does to you.,,

"Is this what you live on all the time?"

"No one can live on decorative food," Nemo said.

"What do you live on?"

"Starlight," Nemo said. "Radiation."

"Photosynthesis-?"

The theory had always been that the metabolism of animals was too high to be sustained by sunlight alone, that fictional creations like giant, walking, talking plants could not exist-or at least that they could not walk very far, very fast, or think very much.

"The light.of Sirius helps sustain me.9'

That would explain the other crater-nests, the ones filled with smooth silver silk in parabolic shapes: solar collectors, focusing the starlight, converting it, and funneling it to its users.

Nemo touched the silk-spinners and guided them to

the rim of the pouch. They had created a pattern of scarlet and indigo. J.D. wiped her forehead. Her hair was damp with sweat. The first effects of the decorative food had passed, but her hands were shaking. She wondered if the food acted with a wave effect, or if it was about to give her a flashback.

I'm hungry, she thought. I'm hungry and I'm exhausted and I have a bad case of sensory overload. And like Nemo said . . . nobody can live on decorative food.

"Nemo, I must go back to the Chi for a while. I have a lot to think about, and I'm tired-aren't you?"

"No, I don't tire."

"You're fortunate. Would you like to visit with someone else while I'm gone?"

"I will think, until you return."

She took that as a polite refusal.

As she put on her spacesuit, she wondered how to persuade the alien being to let her colleagues come into its nest. They would be horribly disappointed if they could not.

Several of Nemo's attendants whispered past her on tiny invisible feet, and clustered around the gossamer thread that had led her in. When they passed over it, it parted. They hunkered down over the pieces, drawing in the threads.

"May I have a piece of your silk?" J.D. asked Nemo, gesturing to one of the threads.

"Tell me what you'd do with it."

"I'd give it to one of my colleagues to analyze. He studies genetics." "You may have it."

J.D. pulled the sampling kit from the thigh pocket of her spacesuit and used the sterile tongs to pick up a thread. One of the attendants lunged, arching upward to snap with shiny jaws. Startled, J.D. snatched the sample away.

"It doesn't want me to take it," she said to Nemo.

"It doesn't have much tolerance for change."

The attendant flopped back to the floor, forgot about J.D., and headed for another loose bit of silk.

J.D. put her prize in a sample bag and sealed it.

"Thank you, Nemo," she said. "I'll come back as soon as I can."

"I will wait."

"Shall I leave my lifeline here? Then I could follow it in when I come back."

"One of my attendants will spin you to me," Nemo said.

"But that's so much trouble for you, when I could just follow the line." "The line is essential to you," Nemo said.

"No, not really. It's for safety, for backup."

"J.D.," Nemo said, and J.D. thought she heard a hesitation in the squidmoth's voice, "the line is uncomfortable."

"It-what?"

She thought about the line, snaking back and forth through Nemo's body, pressing against, even cutting into, Nerno's tissues and organs.

"I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed. "Nemo, why didn't you say something before?" She blushed, mortified at having thoughtlessly caused Nemo pain. "I want you to feel welcome," Nemo said.

J.D. grasped the end of Nerno's tentacle gently. "I'm so sorry," she said again. "I won't bring the line when I come back."

"Thank you," Nemo said.

As she left the bright sphere of light in the center of Nerno's nest, the long tentacles slithered after her, touching her heels. She paused at the opening between two inner curtains, glanced back, and waved. Nerno's mustache vibrated.

"Good-bye for now," she said.

"J.D."

She glanced back. "Yes, Nemo?"

"Tell me the questions you seek."

J.D. smiled. "We won't know what those are," she said, "till we find them."

Reeling in her lifeline, J.D. left Nerno's chamber and entered the labyrinth. At the first switchback turn, the line had pressed against the edge of the curtain. When she released it, a dark welt formed. She touched it gently, sorry for the pain she had caused.

Motion fluttered against her fingers. She started and drew back her hand. Several palm-sized flat creatures, the same color as the curtain and camouflaged against it, had snugged up against the place where the cable had lain. Now, as J.D. watched, they flowed over the welt, covered it, and settled against the fabric. The welt vanished beneath a rough line of scar tissue.

J.D. left the labyrinth and hurried through the cathedral corridors, climbing toward the edge of the crater. Now she noticed more of the creatures who maintained the intricate environment that was Nemo. They crept up every wall, spinning, weaving, unweaving; they peered at her with eyespots or antennae from luxurious folds of drapery; they scuttled away before her so all she knew of them was the sound they made when they fled. And always she was aware of the larger creatures beyond the sides of the tunnels, shapes and shadows, the touch of a powerful limb tenting the wall or the ceiling.

Maybe I should think of Nemo as an ecosystem, she thought. Or maybe I need a whole new term.

She passed through the double sphincter that formed Nerno's airlock, no longer frightened by the monster-organisms that closed in to change the shape of the tunnel.

She started up the long steep hammocks that led to the surface.

The closer she got to the outside, the more deeply the lifeline had cut into Nerno's fabric. In places, she had to pull it-as gently as she could-from beneath the healing creatures.

At the last place where the lifeline had sunk in, just before J.D. emerged from the crater, a healing creature

had fastened itself firmly to both sides of the welt. J.D. pulled on the lifeline, but not gently enough. The creature's body ripped open. Pale fluid dripped out. The creature's edges had melded into the wall.

The lifeline fell free.

J.D. stared at the dripping tissue. The dripping slowed, and the fluid solidified. Soon the edges had healed, the walls began to absorb the two halves of the creature, and more healers came fo finish covering the welt. J.D. let the lifeline reel in, glad she had reached the last steep slope.

Victoria was waiting for her at the edge of the crater, her slender, compact body radiating energy and excitement. She gave J.D. a hand up the last long step, squeezing her fingers. Behind the gilt surface of her faceplate, she looked amazed, exhilarated, relieved.

A deluge of questions and comments and exclamations poured through J.D.'s earphones. It was as if everyone had waited as long as they possibly could, till she stepped out of the alien being's home, and then could hold their curiosity no more. J.D. felt a surge of panic. Victoria must have seen it, because she squeezed JDA hand again and opened a voice channel back to Starfarer.

"Come on, folks. J.D.'s had a long afternoon. You saw everything she did."

The cacophony eased. Someone muttered, "Sorry," and someone else said, "But it isn't the same." That sounded like Chandra, the sensory artist. "Nevertheless," Victoria said. "I'm closing down the PA for a while. We can all talk to J.D. when she's had a chance to collect her thoughts."

The monitor signals vanished, leaving J.D. in peace and silence.

"Thanks," J.D. said. "You could have said, 'Till J.D.'s had a chance to pee,' but I'm glad you didn't."

Victoria chuckled.

"You were fantastic, J.D." she said. "I wouldn't have had the nerve to do all that you just did."

J.D. smiled, exhausted but elated. No matter what

happened now, she had begun to make friends with Nemo, with an alien being. Too many things on the deep space expedition had gone badly up till now.

She needed a success. They all did.

"Let's go in," Victoria said.

"Okay.,,

They retraced their footprints through the dust of the planetoid's rough surface, returning to the ungainly explorer craft, the Chi.

J.D. unplugged the end of her lifeline from the flank of the Chi and let it snap back into the reel. She unhooked the reel from her suit, and handed it to Victoria.

"From now on," she said, "I'm working without a net."

Outside the spacesuit locker, Zev and Satoshi waited for Victoria and J.D. "You have a hell of a lot of guts," Satoshi said.

J.D. knew he meant to offer her a compliment, but she also heard the note of caution in his voice.

"More guts than brains?" she said.

"Maybe," he said. "But maybe . . . that's what the alien contact specialist needs." He grinned at her, and she smiled back.

"Thanks."

Satoshi was the most restrained of the three members of the family partnership. Unlike Stephen Thomas, who said whatever he thought, Satoshi more often than not kept his opinions to himself. J.D. valued his rare comments, and rarer compliments.

Satoshi went to Victoria and brushed his fingertips against his partner's very curly short black hair, smoothing it where her helmet had pressed against it.

J.D. rotated her shoulders and stretched. Zev came to her and hugged her tight. She stroked his fine pale hair, and laid her hand against his cheek. The diver's smooth mahogany skin radiated heat. Zev wore only light shorts and a sleeveless shirt, both

too big for him, both borrowed from Stephen Thomas, who was nearly thirty centimeters taller than Zev. Zev owned almost no clothing, only a heavy wool suit, part of his disguise for boarding Starfarer. He would have abandoned clothing as quickly as he had abandoned his fraudulent identity, if J.D. had not told him it would be socially unacceptable. He never wore clothes back in Puget Sound.

Zev took her hand between his, spreading his long fingers to enclose her hand between the translucent swimming webs. He looked up at her, his dark eyes bright with excitement.

"When you go back, I want to go with you," he said. "I want to meet Nemo." "We all want that," Victoria said, her voice intense. "I hope it happens." "I do, too," J.D. said.

Her colleagues had all been disappointed when Europa refused them permission to explore her starship. J.D. hoped the same thing would not happen with Nemo.

"Where's Stephen Thomas?" J.D. asked.

"In his lab." Satoshi sounded troubled. He ran his hand through his short black hair. "I've hardly seen him all day."

"I need to talk to him before I go back out." J.D. was disappointed that he had not joined the others to greet her. She held out the sample bag with the fragment of Nerno's thread. "And I have a sample for him. Didn't he see me pick it up?"

"Maybe he thought it was for me, eh?" Victoria said. She grinned. "I would like a piece of it. It looked like it had some interesting optical properties."

J.D. held out the sample bag to Victoria, embarrassed to admit how much she had wanted to give it to Stephen Thomas herself.

"Tell him not to chop it all up looking for microbes," Victoria said. "Why don't you give it to him, and freshen up, and we'll get ready for the conference and meet you in the observers' circle?" "Okay," J.D. said.

A few minutes later she hurried from her tiny cabin and headed for the Chi's labs. The labs were larger than the cabins, but still minuscule. J.D. stopped in the doorway of the genetics lab. Stephen Thomas sat at the work bench, staring into the microscope's holographic image. The image rotated, then flipped over.

Another holographic projection, the image of Nerno's crater, hovered in the air where he could glance up and see it.

"Stephen Thomas," J.D. said.

"Hi, J.D." Stephen Thomas straightened and turned, hooking his elbow over the chair back. "That was some expedition."

He smiled at her.

"Thanks," she said softly, keeping back everything else she might have wanted to say to him.

He looked drawn and distracted. He had been uncharacteristically silent since they left Starfarer. Of everyone, he was taking Feral's death the hardest. It broke J.D.'s heart to see him so withdrawn, so deep in shock. Grief concentrated his beauty, rather than fading it, heightening the blue of his eyes and refining the planes of his classic features. He had pulled his long blond hair back and tied it very tight. His skin, so fair a few days ago, continued to darken. Except for the pale new scar on his forehead, his skin now was a smooth cafd au lait. Eventually he would be the same color as Zev: dark mahogany, deep brown with a reddish sheen.

"I brought you a sample." J.D. held out the sample bag. "There's not much of it, but it's less abused than the other one."

She had inadvertently pulled up a weed from Europa's ship. If she had not been running away from an aurochs at the time, she probably would have stuck it back in the ground instead of shoving it into her pocket. On the other hand, if she had not been running away from an aurochs, she would not have pulled it up in the first place.

Stephen Thomas accepted the bag. J.D. expected

him to react-with excitement, with disbelief that she had picked up no more than a discarded bit, with a profane expression of joy, with some unexpected impulse unique to Stephen Thomas Gregory. When she had given him the battered weed from Europa's ship, he had kissed her forehead.

This time, he simply held the bag up to the light. The silk caught the illumination and carried it from one end to the other. The tips of the thread glowed bluc-white; the length of it shone luminous indigo. Between Stephen Thomas's fingers, the newly-formed swimming webs glowed pale amber.

"I wonder if Nerno's microflora is as diverse as the web fauna," Stephen Thomas said. "This'll be contaminated. . . . Too bad you couldn't collect it before you got out of your suit. People just emit bacteria like crazy. But it shouldn't be too hard to separate the alien bugs . . ."

"I'm sorry." J.D. blushed, both annoyed and embarrassed by the implied criticism. "I couldn't just go in and start ripping up bits-"

He shrugged. "Can't be helped." He turned toward her again. "Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm glad to have it."

" If you say so," J.D. said, and rushed to change the subject. "I want to enhance my internal link. Can IT'

"Sure, but why the fuck would you want to?"

"Weren't you watching? Weren't you even listening?"

"Of course I was watching. Why are you pissed off at me? Is everybody pissed off at me?"

"No, of course not, I'm sorry." J.D. gestured at the floating image. "I want to communicate with Nemo on Nerno's own terms. So I have to enhance my link. Can I start working on it now?"

"No, I don't have any prep here." He frowned. "You'll have to ask Professor T'hanthavong if she can mix some up for you in the biochem lab. The readymade stuff was in the genetics building, so it's under forty tons of rubble."

"Oh," J.D. said, disappointed. "Okay. I'll talk to her." As soon as I get some sleep, she said to herself. As soon as I can sound coherent. Though Professor Thanthavong was usually pleasant and invariably at least civil, J.D. always felt intimidated by the idea of walking up to a Nobel laureate and talking to her as if she were an ordinary person. Miensaem Thanthavong was not ordinary.

"Just how much are you planning to enhance the link?" Stephen Thomas said. "As much as I can."

He knit his eyebrows. "You won't like it. You'll be a zombie whenever you use it. The synapses have to feed in somewhere, they'll take over all your other senses."

"I don't care," J.D. said. "It's important." Her link warmed in the back of her mind, notifying her of a message. "Excuse me it second." Her eyelids fluttered. As she went into a communications fugue, she thought, Most of us close off the rest of the world when we use our link, so what does it matter?

She accepted the message. Nemo's characteristic signal touched her mind. "Nemo! Is everything all right?"

"The attendants are prepared," Nemo said.

"Does that mean- Are you willing to meet my colleagues? Can we visit you?" "Yes, you may visit."

J.D. opened her eyes. "That was Nemo! Come on!"

Without waiting to explain, J.D. ran out of the lab.

J.D. TWEAKED HER METABOLIC ENHANCER again. It flooded her body with extra adrenaline, hiding her exhaustion. She led the way to the edge of Nerno's crater.

"It looks different," Victoria said.

"It is," J.D. said.

The surface had changed, and the entrance. The tunnels were rewoven, reformed. If J.D. had left her line in the nest, it would not simply have cut into the edges of Nerno's curtains. It would have grown into the fabric of the nest

. . itself, like gravel in a wound.

Satoshi knelt at the edge of the crater and peered down the new slope.

"There's our guide," he said. "One of the lifeliners." They followed the creature's thread downward. The lifeliner ambled before them, no longer trying to hide.

"The route's easier," J.D. said, with wonder. "Nemo remade all the tunnels." They were higher, the slopes shallower. She never had to stoop. She let her eyelids flicker, touched her internal link, and sent a quick message of thanks to Nemo.

"I rebuild all the time," Nemo said.

J.D. hurried between the pearly gray curtains. Without the lifeliner, without its thread through the labyrinth, she would be lost.

"It's beautiful," Zev said. "It's like anemones."

"Anemones?" J.D. said. "How do you mean?"

"On the curtains."

"Look at it in the ultraviolet," Stephen Thomas said. "It's like flowers. Jungle."

J.D.'s suit obediently displayed Nerno's web in the UV.

The web exploded.

Intricate patterns whirled into alien plants and surged with violent blossoms. Auroras chased themselves in spirals that expanded to-cover every surface, then diminished to a single point, and vanished.

Dazzled, J.D. took a step forward and ran into a silken wall. Victoria grabbed her arm and steadied her.

"Whoa, careful."

She stopped and closed her eyes and canceled the suit display. When she looked again, the storm of color had vanished and the path lay clear before her again, winding between the curtains and their invisible decorations, their camouflage.

"Wow," she said softly. "That's something."

"It sure is," Victoria said.

"Can you see it?" Satoshi asked Stephen Thomas. "I mean, like Zev? Without the suit display?"

"Yeah," Stephen Thomas said. "I can see it."

The path spiraled deeper into the crater. They reached the airlock. As the shadows outside bore down on the walls, Satoshi cupped his hands against the translucent tunnel. "Damn, I wish I could see them!"

The pocket filled with air; sound returned.

The interior end of the airlock relaxed and opened. They continued to the central chamber. The maze of curtains around Nemo remained, but the chamber extended farther upward, and the curtains reached to its ceiling. In single file, the members of the alien contact department followed the lifeline through Nerno's maze.

The gossamer thread ended. J.D. entered Nerno's chamber. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and Zev came in behind her.

"Hello, Nemo." J.D. unfastened her helmet. The thick, smelly air displaced the tasteless air of her support system.

Nemo's eyelid rose; the faceted eyes glittered. Nerno's central tentacle snaked out and grasped J.D.'s wrist. She gripped it, her fingers closing around silky fur. The tentacle felt hot, like the tail of a cat basking in the sun.

"These are my friends, my colleagues," J.D. said to Nemo.

"Welcome," Nemo said.

"Thank you," J.D. said.

The others took off their helmets. J.D. had warned them of the exhaust-fume smell, and they had seen the LTM analyses. Stephen Thomas wrinkled his nose in distaste, and Zev sneezed.

"Tell me if you thought new things." Nemo said.

"I sure did," J.D. said. "We all did." She and her companions removed their spacesuits and left them at the edge of the inner chamber. J.D. approached the squidmoth. "How are you? Did you think new things, too?"

"I thought of some old things," Nemo said.

"I want to introduce my friends," J.D. said. "Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, who's the head of the alien contact department, and a physicist. She discovered how to use the cosmic string to enter transition."

"I am glad to meet you, Victoria," Nemo said.

The long central tentacle snaked out and hovered. Victoria extended her hand, and Nemo laid the soft tip of the tentacle in her palm. She shivered.

"I'm glad to meet you, too, Nemo," Victoria said through her internal link.

"Here's Satoshi Lono. He's a geographer. He studies how communities interact with their environments. And Stephen Thomas Gregory, who studies genetics. And this is my friend Zev. Zev is a diver."

Nemo went through the new greeting ritual with each of J.D.'s colleagues in turn.

"You're the ichthyocentaur," Nerno said to Zev.

"That's what Europa called me," Zev said. "But the word means I'm part fish. I'm not."

"You are different from J.D.," Nemo said.

"Of course. I'm a diver, and J.D.'s still a regular human being."

J.D. was touched that he used the word "still." She would probably always regret turning down the chance to become a diver that Zev's mother had offered her.

"And Stephen Thomas is different from you all," Nemo said.

"I'm changing into a diver," Stephen Thomas said. "I'm about half and half at this point."

"Maybe someday J.D. will decide to change, too," Zev said.

A spinner crept from a fold. Nerno's tentacle snapped out and grabbed it and teased it into spinning and urged it in a tight circle and started to weave another pouch.

"Can we look around?" Stephen Thomas said.

"You would like to see other parts of me."

"Yes.,,

"The attendants will take you to what you wish to see.,,

Three lifeliners crept into the chamber.

The lifeliners led Victoria, Satoshi, and Stephen Thomas out of Nemo's chamber through the same path. At the first split in the path, two went one way and one went another.

"See you guys later," Stephen Thomas said. He strolled after the spinning creature and disappeared between two curtains.

Victoria started to call after him.

"He'll be all right," Satoshi said.

Victoria stepped back, took a shallow breath of the fetid air, and blew it out abruptly.

"I know," she said. "But I'd feel easier if our guides didn't look so much like scorpions."

Intellectually she understood all the reasons for believing they were safe with Nemo. Emotionally, she had a harder time. She was very glad Nemo had not offered them all decorative food.

I wonder how you turn it down if you don't want it? she said to herself. Maybe you say, Thank you very much, but I don't care to be decorated. Satoshi grinned. "They do look like scorpions, don't they? Not as mean, though, or they'd be beating the hell out of each other right now."

The other two lifeliners scuttled down the path. At the next fork in the corridor, they diverged.

Satoshi grabbed Victoria in a quick, fierce hug, then hurried after his lifeliner.

Victoria descended through twisting tunnels, curving tubes of watered silk that spiraled steeply downward. The color-shot patterns quivered beneath her footsteps, and the lifeliner scuttled drunkenly along the shifting floor.

Victoria jumped, experimentally, cautious because of the low gravity. She hit the ceiling, pressing into the warm, slightly sticky fabric. She broke away from it with a faint ripping sound, bounced to the floor, and rebounded. By the time she came to a sprawling halt she

was laughing at the position she was in, and even at her fear.

Above her, the ceiling darkened where she had hit it. A shape passed over the bruise. The silk dimpled from the other side as one of Nerno's attendants stepped lightly across the upper curve of the tunnel. It was like being underwater during rain. The brief shadow of the cloud, the quick touch of raindrops sweeping delicately across the surface. The shadow faded; the bruise disappeared.

Victoria continued down the tunnel.

The air grew sharp and clear. Ozone tinged it. When she touched her hair, static electricity crackled.

And the gravity grew stronger.

At first she thought she was imagining the gradual effect, but it was real. It makes sense, she thought. Grade-school physics. I knew there had to be something inside Nerno's ship at least as dense as neutronium. And I'm getting closer to it.

The LTM sensors registered a slight increase in the radiation level.

Nothing dangerous yet. Victoria knew she should not stay long, but curiosity drew her on.

The lifeliner scrambled onward and downward, leading her toward a lambent glow.

Victoria followed the creature around a bend in the tunnel.

The creature stopped. The tunnel ended its spiral and curved abruptly straight down.

Victoria glanced back. Her escape route was open and clear. She crossed the last few meters to the sharp curve of the tunnel, passing the lifeliner.

A thick panel of transparent webbing covered the end. She knelt on the floor and gazed down through the clear surface. It was like looking into a well, a well lit from below, or through a pane of old, wavery glass.

A shining sphere lay in the center of Nerno's planetoid. A curving pattern of pale cables suspended it and held it in place-held the planetoid in the proper relationship to it. Here and there, more of Nemo's creatures crept about. They looked like the lifeliners, but they had much heavier carapaces, shorter spinners, legs nearly invisible. They picked their way across the suspension cables. In front of them, the white cables flexed in response to the spinners' motion and the faint occasional vibration of Nerno's sphere. Behind them, they left dark metallic rope of twisted wire.

Victoria ignored the faint scratching noise behind her. She wished she could see into the sphere, but she knew it was protecting her from radiation and energy flux that would kill her, and all her colleagues, and probably Nemo as well. The sphere hid the engine that powered Nemo's voyaging.

The lifeliner scratched persistently at the floor. Victoria finally noticed the sound and glanced over her shoulder.

The creature huddled over a tangled tracery of silk. It scratched again, ran a little way up the tunnel, stopped, and ran back toward her. It did not turn; it ran both directions with equal ease. Wherever it moved, it trailed a line of silk. Its scorpion tails twitched, fore and aft. ,,Okay," Victoria said. "You're right. It's time to get out of here."

She rose, glanced one last longing time into the center of Nemo's starship, and followed the lifeliner back toward the surface.

"Thank you for showing me," she said aloud to the creature and silently to Nemo, using her internal link.

"You are welcome," Nemo said.

Satoshi followed the small scuttly creature spinning black silk before him. He wanted to get close to the lifeliner, to pick it up and inspect it, to subject it to the electronic gaze of the LTM clinging to his shirt. J.D. had asked him to be careful, and he approved of her caution. But he wanted to see and understand every facet of the environment surrounding him.

The wide, low corridor narrowed, the deep-fissured

walls smoothed, and the firm, springy floor dropped into a slope. Satoshi climbed downward. The light began to fade. The slope ended in a tall, cylindrical chamber hung with heavy, fibrous curtains and pierced with two more tunnels slanting up and out, like the one through which he had descended.

The lifeliner stopped and huddled against the wall.

Satoshi sat on his heels beside the creature. The lifeliner rubbed against the wall, severing the silk.

"Is this the end of the road?" Satoshi said softly.

He walked around the edge of the chamber, touching the long bright swaths of drapery.

They open, he thought.

He looked up.

Long-lidded glittery eyes looked back.

Satoshi started and spun around.

At the top of each set of curtains, a creature clung to the vaulted ceiling. If Satoshi had not met Nemo, he might not have recognized them as creatures, or the circular fissure as their eye-slits. The creatures hugged the wall, arching long legs overhead till they touched at the center of the ceiling. The legs pressed upward and outward like an arch, holding the creatures in place.

The mouth parts of the creatures, tremendously enlarged, formed the curtains.

One of the sets of curtains suddenly billowed wetly outward. A blast of oily, pungent air swept over Satoshi, knocking him down and slapping him to the floor. The pressure pushed the hot fumes up his nose. He sneezed convulsively, three times, four.

The curtains fell back and the tempest vanished.

Satoshi lay flat, catching his breath, breathing shallowly. His eyes and throat stung. A second set of curtains quivered. He ducked and buried his head beneath his arms as the curtains billowed and a second blast crashed over him.

He looked up and around just in time to see the third set of curtains quiver. He watched long enough to see them open, pulling apart in the center, remaining closed at top and bottom. Beyond the curtains, acid

dripped down color-striped stone, dissolving it, releasing roiling clouds of gas.

He ducked again as the hot, polluted air filled the chamber and billowed out through the tunnels. The curtains fell closed with a wet slap.

He pushed himself cautiously to his feet. He felt damp and greasy. The curtains hung motionless.

"Nerno!" he said through his link. "What's going on down here?"

"Fresh air," Nemo said.

Satoshi started to laugh. "That's more fresh air than I can handle all at once," he said. "This place is amazing -but do you mind if I leave before the next storm?"

"I'll wait till you're safely away."

"How long do I have? Can I look around?"

"I must hold my breath."

"Oh. Okay, I'll hurry."

As he headed for the exit tunnel and the silken guideline, he took one last look around, at Nemo's lungs, at the symbiotic creatures who not only pumped air through Nerno's body but created the air as well.

Stephen Thomas strolled after his lifeliner. When he was well out of sight of his partners, he stopped at the intersection of several tunnels. The creature beetled on and disappeared around a curve.

Stephen Thomas deliberately turned down a different tunnel.

He made it about a hundred meters. The lifeliner's carapace scraped the floor behind him as the creature scuttled after him, spewing thread. "Think you're going to stop me, huh?" Stephen Thomas said. "Just how the fuck are you going to do that?"

It closed the gap, spinning out a lifeline of increasing slenderness and delicacy.

"Stephen Thomas," Nemo said directly to the internal link.

Stephen Thomas stopped. J.D. had adapted easily to

direct communication. But Stephen Thomas wished he had brought a portable radio headset.

"I hear you," he replied.

"It's hard to follow you when you go so fast."

"That's all right," Stephen Thomas said. "I won't get lost, I don't need a babysitter."

"You do not wish to study genetics."

"I-What?"

"My attendant will take you to where you can study genetics."

"Can I take samples?"

"You have a sample."

Great, Stephen Thomas thought. A few alien bacteria off a shred of string. They probably have as much relation to Nemo as E. coli does to human beings.

"Thanks a lot."

"You are welcome."

"Oh, fuck it," Stephen Thomas muttered aloud.

When the lifeliner went into reverse and trailed a thread parallel to the one it had left coming in, Stephen Thomas shrugged and followed the creature wherever it wanted to,take him.

"Suppose I'd kept going," Stephen Thomas said to Nemo through the link.

"I suppose you'd kept going," Nemo said.

Stephen Thomas waited. Finally it occurred to him that Nemo had done exactly what he had suggested.

"If I'd kept going," Stephen Thomas said, "what would you have done?" "Nothing."

"Would you let me go anywhere I wanted?"

"I'd warn you of dangerous spots."

The lifeliner stopped in a gap among several curtains. Light shined out into the corridor, brighter than the light from the optical strands woven into the walls. The new light shimmered, like reflections from water.

The lifeliner leaped, trailing silk, and disappeared.

Stephen Thomas moved forward curiously. Warm, pungent air flowed toward him. Sulfur and hydrogen sulfide and other, more complicated chemicals made

him breathe shallowly through his mouth. If the air got much worse, he would have to turn back. He tapped into the analysis of the LTM clinging to his pocket, and scanned the chemicals. None of them would kill him in their current concentrations. Not immediately.

The curtains created a spherical chamber around and above a water-filled depression, and trapped the heat and the stench. Stephen Thomas stood on the bank, inspecting the place curiously. Sweat beaded on his forehead, on the back of his neck.

The lifeliner's thread vanished into the oily, organic sheen floating on the pool. The light was so bright, the surface so obscured with rainbow brilliance, that Stephen Thomas could not see to the bottom.

Nemo likes water as scungy as the air, Stephen Thomas thought. If I'm supposed to dive in after the lifeliner, forget it.

He lifted the thread. Its end emerged, broken, from the water.

Broken or dissolved, Stephen Thomas thought.

"Hey, critter," he said aloud.

The water shivered at his feet. He stooped down, expecting the lifeliner to answer his summons.

The surface splashed upward, spraying him with the scummy soup. He shouted in shock and flung himself back, His feet slipped into the water. "Shit!" He jerked his feet back and scrambled for the entrance. He reached safety. He pulled off his shirt. The front and the arms were stained-he was glad that for once lie had worn a long-sleeved shirt and long pants-but the back was clean. He used it to wipe the liquid from his face and hands.

The pale blue silk of his shirt discolored to brown.

"Jesus, Nemo, what's-oh, fuck!"

His sandals were smoking. He snatched them off and threw them into the corridor and rubbed his feet on the remnants of his shirt.

"What's going on down here?"

"Genetics."

"Survival of the fittest?" I knew there was a good

reason to study molecular genetics, he thought. "You told me you'd warn me of dangerous places."

"But you asked to observe, not interact," Nemo said.

"I didn't mean to fall in your damned pond."

Stephen Thomas got the distinct impression that the squidmoth was laughing at him. Scowling, he sat crosslegged well above the waterline, rested his elbows on his knees, and leaned his chin on his fists.

The caustic liquid had not discolored the skin of his feet, or of his hands, even the delicate new swimming webs, so he supposed his face was not disfigured either.

The splashing creature had submerged, unseen. But the surface roiled slowly, as if gentle whirlpools drifted across it, now and then colliding, mixing, separating.

From the safety of the entrance, Stephen Thomas could not see what was going on. He rose and went cautiously nearer the edge. He bent just far enough to peer into the pool.

The lifeliner burrowed into the bottom until nothing showed but its two scorpion tails. Dark blue filaments, slender at the root, wide and flat in the center, and tapered at the ends, grew from the bottom like kelp. They stretched toward the center of the pond. Just above the root, each bore a cluster of scarlet flowers.

A tantalizing array of entities crawled and swam and burrowed among and below the kelp. Stephen Thomas wished he had a protective suit. He was not going swimming unprotected in Nerno's pool. He doubted even his spacesuit would help. It might keep out the noxious liquid and gases the pool was emitting . . . then fail catastrophically as soon as he entered vacuum. Another unfamiliar creature ploughed toward the lifeliner. It was shaped like a sowbug, but the size of Stephen Thomas's cupped hands. Several rows of spines ran down its back. They wavered, pressed backward as the creature crossed the muddy bottom.

The spined sowbug lunged forward, straight between the lifeliner's extended scorpion tails. Silk burst from the tails, erupting onto the spines, and the tails flailed at the attacker. But the sowbug fastened on. Silt spewed up, obscuring the fight. Trails of yellow blood filmed the water. The lifeliner humped up out of its burrow, flexing its body spasmodically. One tail crushed a patch of spines. The sowbug shuddered, then clenched.

The lifeliner relaxed and grew still. As Stephen Thomas watched, the sowbug bore down on it. It fell apart in battered pieces, leaking guts and golden blood.

Stephen Thomas backed away from the pond. He felt sick. His vision blurred. He stumbled out into the corridor, fighting for breath.

Don't throw up, he told himself. Not here, not now. Whatever you've seen, whatever it signifies, don't let it affect you.

He grabbed his shirt and his sandals and fled from the soft vicious sounds of struggle.

J.D. and Zev remained with Nemo.

One of the armor-scaled creatures flowed up to Zev's bare foot and extended its frilly mantle, rippling out to touch him. Zev watched it curiously. Then, fearless, he picked it up and turned it over to look at it. Its feathery appendages waved frantically, and a stream of fluid spurted from its underside. Zev laughed. An old hand at catching creatures who used water jets and ink and even tiny poison darts for defense and escape, he had been holding it at an angle. The liquid jet missed him and spattered, pungent and oily, on the floor. Zev put the creature down, and it zipped off under one of the silk-sheet walls.

Zev crossed the distance to Nemo. He knelt down and touched Nerno's sleek side, stroking the iridescent skin. Nemo blinked slowly. The long eyelid closed. Nemo reminded J.D. for all the world like a huge mutant cat being petted. The long tentacles moved languorously, tapping against the silk floor, the spinners, Zev's leg.

Nemo plucked one of the honey ants and gave it to Zev, plucked another and handed it to J.D. J.D. ate hers

slowly, preparing for the rush and dizziness. Zev popped his into his mouth and crunched it.

"Oh, I like that," he said out loud, his voice breathy. He returned to using his link. "Thanks, Nerno! I wonder if you'd like beer."

Nerno's long eyelid opened; the glittery eyes peered out. The long tentacles Surrounded Zev, touching and stroking him.

"I eat only insubstantial food," Nemo said.

Zev sat quiet and interested as Nerno's tentacles explored him.

The tentacles touched and probed his body through the thin fabric of his shorts and shirt. Zev, not in the least uncomfortable, stroked Nerno's back and played his fingers along the shorter proboscises that formed Nerno's mustache.

Nemo touched Zev's face with the tip of one long tentacle.

"You have had your children."

"Me?" Zev said, startled, yet flattered. "No, I've never been asked to father a child. Not yet."

Nerno's short tentacles wuffled in a complex wave.

"You're a juvenile."

"I'm grown!"

Nemo pulled the tentacle sharply back. Zev leaned toward the squidmoth and touched the purple fur.

"I didn't mean to frighten you," Zev said.

"Zev's an adult," J.D. said. "But divers wait till they're older, usually, before they reproduce."

"Humans change to divers," Nemo said.

J.D. was having trouble following Nerno's reasoning, though the insubstantial food made her feel intense as well as dizzy, able to make great leaps of intuition. Unfortunately, figuring out what Nemo meant, or what Nemo wanted to know, was too great a leap even for J.D.

"Divers started out as human beings. But we changed ourselves. My grandparents did."

"Divers are not the adult form of human beings."

"No," J.D. said. "I mean, that's right. Humans can change to divers and divers can change to humans, but we usually don't."

"I was never an ordinary human being," Zev said. "And we breed true. Diver genes are dominant. If J.D. and I had children, they'd be divers."

"There's another difference between Zev and me," J.D. said. "Zev is male and I'm female."

She was glad to have a relatively neutral way of bringing up the subject of sex and gender. Though Nemo had not balked at any of J.D.'s questions so far, she had felt shy of asking about the reproductive strategies of squidmoths. And though J.D. assured herself that a squidmoth would be shy of completely different subjects than the ones human beings found difficult and delicate, she did not find broaching the question of sex any easier. "Europa is a female and Androgeos is a male," Nemo said.

"Yes. Exactly."

"This is significant for your reproduction."

"Yes. For us, and for most of the higher animals and plants on Earth. To reproduce, we need a male and a female. How does it work for you?"

"We exchange genetic material, then save it for our reproductive phase." Male first, and then female, J.D. thought. Or hermaphroditic-Then: You're doing it again, she thought. Trying to fit Nemo into familiar terms. Just because you think you've pinned something down, just because you've named it, doesn't mean it fits in the box you've made of the name. "How often do you reproduce?" J.D. asked.

"One time."

"Do you have children, then? Young ones, offspring?" Nemo was a being of great age; J.D.'s impression was that Nemo was an elder of the squidmoths. "I have no offspring yet."

"How do you decide when to have them?"

"I decide when the juvenile phase of my life is finished."

J.D. started to say something, then stopped, for she had been about to interpret Nerno's comment without double-checking her assumptions.

"Do you mean that you decide when to become an adult-when to become sexually mature?"

"I decide when to enter my reproductive phase."

"Is that when you become an adult?"

"Yes.,,

"Are you still a juvenile?"

"I'm still a juvenile."

"I thought you were old," Zev said. "Older than Europa, even."

"I am older than Europa," Nemo said.

"And still a juvenile!" J.D. said, amazed.

Maybe that's why Nemo's willing to talk to us, J.D. thought. Jusi a crazy kid.

"Nemo, how long is your lifespan?"

Nemo hesitated.

I wonder, J.D. thought, if Nemo is afraid I'll say, "Take me to your mother"?

"I'm nearly a million subjective years old," Nemo said.

Some juvenile! J.D. thought. If Nemo's a juvenile, how old and wise the adults must be!

"Did Civilization increase your lifespan, too, like Europa's?" J.D. asked. "Or do you naturally live a long time?"

Again, Nemo paused before replying. Would the squidmoth start behaving like Europa and Androgeos, withholding information because it was valuable, and human beings had so little to trade for it? She could not bear to think that after all, Nemo would send the humans away.

If everyone in Civilization is four thousand years old, a million years old, J.D. thought, no wonder they think of us as immature. But . . . do they have kids of their own? Europa gave me the idea there were a lot of different people out here. Where do they put their popula-

tion? She wondered, feeling depressed, if the people of Civilization crammed themselves together, like human beings in some of Earth's cities, and comforted themselves by calculating how many people could be packed into a given area, and still have a spot of ground to stand on.

"Civilization helped my people naturally live this long," Nemo said.

"Do you build in a long life-span? Instead of prolonging it with outside treatments?"

"More or less," Nemo said.

"Who decides who gets to make those changes?"

"With enough knowledge, you can change yourselves."

J.D. sighed. "We'll have to discover the knowledge on our own, I'm afraid," she said.

"When you come back, Civilization will give you another opportunity to ask for it," Nemo said.

"We don't want gifts!" J.D. said. "Not now, not in five hundred years! We want partnership. We want friendship and communication." She stood up, too agitated to remain lounging on the soft silk floor. "I know it isn't very long-sighted to care that I'll be dead when we get another chance. But I do care! I want to see the interstellar Civilization for myself. Can't anybody out here understand that?"

"I understand."

Europa had referred to the squidmoths with contempt. J.D. thought Europa's assessment of Nerno's people was wrong. J.D. thought Nemo might know more about the inner workings of Civilization than Europa did, more about the power structure, more about the cosmic string.

On the other hand, J.D. could not imagine Europa living anywhere for four thousand years-for one yearand not scoping out the power structure.

"And . . . I'm selfish," J.D. said. "Now that I've met you, how can I go home and know I'll never get to talk to you again?"

"I'll be sorry when our talks end, too," Nemo said.

"They shouldn't have to, though, that's the point," J.D. said. "The nuclear missile was a mistake. Bad luck, and misunderstanding, and error. It wouldn't happen again in a hundred years. In five hundred! Especially if people back on Earth knew about Civilization."

"The nuclear missile was bad luck," Nemo said.

J.D. chose to interpret the expressionless comment as agreement, rather than as a question, or as skepticism.

"I have to find the other people, Nemo. The ones who came before. I have to explain what happened, so they'll stop withdrawing the cosmic string." "There are no other ones anymore, J.D."

J.D. sank down. Androgeos had said the same thing, but J.D. had stopped believing Androgeos when he tried to steal Victoria's transition algorithm. Hearing Nerno say the same thing shocked her. She trusted and believed Nemo.

"How do you know? How can you know the other ones are gone?"

"There haven't been any in a million years."

"Maybe you Just never met any," J.D. said. "The galaxy's a big place."

"Have you been everywhere?" Zev asked. Several of Ncmo's attendants had gathered at Zev's feet, snuffling at his toes, at his semiretractile claws. He petted them like kittens, like the baby octopuses the divers liked to keep around.

"I haven't been everywhere," Nemo said.

"So there might be some you don't know about." J.D. smiled sadly, but she felt hopeful again.

"I don't think so."

"We've got to keep looking. Maybe I'm too arrogant, but I think our people would be an asset to Civilization. And maybe I'm not arrogant enough, but I don't think our nuclear missiles are a threat to any of you. Even our military thinks interstellar war would be stupid and unwageable."

"Stupid isn't equivalent to lacking destructive power," Nemo said.

J.D. slumped, her hands lying limp on her knees. It was essential to her, even if selfish and simple-minded, to return to Earth with a successful expedition. She was terrified at what would happen-not only to her and her renegade colleagues, but to their whole planet-if they returned a failure. The rush of Nerno's insubstantial food had vanished, leaving her drained and shaky. She was too tired to think, too tired to talk. She could not remember the last time she had rested. She goosed her metabolic enhancer, but it too had exhausted itself.

"Where do you come from?" Zev asked.

Nemo did not reply.

"Bad question?" Zev asked.

Nerno's long tentacles writhed and coiled slowly around the half-formed bag; their sound was of waves caressing dry sand.

"No question is bad," Nemo replied.

"But you didn't answer."

"I come from here," Nemo said.

"From Sirius, you mean?"

"Yes."

"It's lonely here," Zev said. "No other people. No life on the planets." "My people didn't evolve here," Nemo said.

"Then where?"

Nerno's tentacles twined, quivered, relaxed.

"I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"I don't know how."

J.D. saw in her mind the glimmer of a star map. Zev brought it from the Chi's onboard computer and sent it through his link. The sun was a point of light in the center; its near neighbors spread out around it. J.D. closed her eyes and looked at the map in her mind.

"Can you see this all right?" Zev asked.

"Make it bigger."

The scale changed. The dark space containing a few sparks changed into a crowded field of stars.

"How's that?"

"Make it bigger."

Zev scaled it all the way up to the Milky Way and its neighboring galaxies, bright multicolored spirals and ellipses, dark dusty clouds. "Big enough?"

"Not that big," Nemo said.

"Can you travel between galaxies?" J.D. asked.

"We are not so advanced."

Zev showed Nemo a representation of the Milky Way.

"On the other side," Nemo said.

The galaxy rotated. But its other side was dark and empty, for no human being knew what lay beyond the crowded stars and dust clouds of the galaxy's center.

"We don't have that information," J.D. said.

"I could show you. . . " Nemo said, then, "No, I cannot, because of your link."

Zev let the map fade. J.D. sighed, and opened her eyes, more determined to enhance her link as soon as she could.

"You've come a long way," Zev said.

"My people have."

A lifeliner scuttled into the chamber, trailing silk. Right behind it, Victoria swung around the edge of the curtain. Ecstatic, she strode toward Nemo.

"Nemo, your center-I want to know all about it! Is it neutronium? How did you build it? How does it make you move?" She switched from using her link to speaking aloud. "J.D., are you okay?" She dropped to her knees next to J.D. and put her arm around J.D.'s shoulders. J.D. leaned against her gratefully.

"Just tired," she said.

"My center's difficult to explain," Nemo said.

"Try me.11

J.D. could hear the dryness in Victoria's tone; she wondered if Nemo could.

"I mean difficult physically."

"How so?"

"Your link is like J.D.'s," Nemo said.

"It's too narrow," J.D. said. "None of us can take in everything Nemo could show us."

"Arachne and I could exchange information," Nemo said, "about my center, about the galaxy."

J.D. glanced at Nemo, then quickly at Victoria.

"No," Victoria said. "No, I'm sorry, I don't think that's possible." "Talking is enjoyable, but slow, and imprecise, and insufficient," Nemo said.

"Maybe . . . limited access to Arachne?" J.D. said softly.

Victoria twitc~,~d her head sideways, a quick, definite negative. Full access to Arachne meant access to Victoria's algorithm. Limited access .

. . who could tell how deeply Nemo might delve? The algorithm was the only thing Starfarer had, the only thing Earth had, that Civilization had shown the least interest in. Once Civilization possessed it, human beings had nothing left to bargain with.

"I'm sorry, Nemo," Victoria said. "That isn't a decision I can make myself. I'll have to discuss it with my colleagues. Do you understand?"

"No," Nerno said.

How could Nemo underst~ind' J.D. thought. All alone here, with the power to go anywhere, and do anything . . .

"Human beings and divers talk about what they do," Zev said. "And about what they did and about what they plan. Sometimes it's boring, but it's very serious."

Nemo touched Zev's forehead, then J.D.'s cheek, with one soft tentacle. The other two tentacles continued to guide the spinners around and around and around the edge of another pouch.

"I must think, and you must all talk together."

"Yes," J.D. said. "As soon as Satoshi and Stephen Thomas get back-"

"They'll meet you at the airlock."

It was the first time Nemo had interrupted her. J.D.'s gaze met Victoria's. Victoria looked thoughtful. J.D. felt stricken. She had been dismissed.

THE OBSERVERS' CHAMBER WAS A TRANSparent, flattened bubble attached to the side of the explorer spacecraft, with a clear view in every direction except immediately back toward the Chi. It was J.D.'s favorite place in the explorer. She sometimes sat out here all alone when they were traveling, just to watch the stars.

She took her place in the circle of couches. Her couch faced outward, directly toward Nerno's crater. Several hundred meters distant, above the crater rim, the variegated silken surface caught the brilliant light of Sirius and flung it outward.

J.D. felt too tired to talk, too tired even to think. But her colleagues back on Starfarer had been waiting for hours for this conference. It was not fair to ask them to wait any longer.

Zev and Victoria were already there, waiting for her. With her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her jeans, Victoria stood outside the circle, gazing toward Nemo's crater.

Zev lounged in the auxiliary couch to the left of JDA seat. He grinned at J.D.

"Nemo reminds me of home," Zev said.

J.D. stroked the young diver's arm fondly. His fur, so delicate it was nearly invisible against his mahogany skin, felt warm and soft.

"Nerno's not like anything back in Puget Sound," J.D. said. "Not anything like."

"I know. But he reminds me anyway. He doesn't look like he's been swimming in a long time."

"Nemo can't go swimming," J.D. said, a little impatiently. Imagine a being the size of Nemo, the size of the planetoid, swimming anywhere.

"Not now, " Zev said. "But critters like Nemo don't always look the same." Zev was right. Nemo could have gone through more than one form. Maybe that was why Europa called Nemo a squidmoth. J.D. added Zev's observation to the list of subjects she wanted to discuss with the alien being.

Through her link, J.D. reached out tentatively to Nemo.

"Nemo?" she asked. "I'm going to talk to everybody back on board Starfarer. You can join in, if you like."

She waited. She received no reply.

I know how Nemo feels, J.D. said to herself. I'd like to sit quietly all alone for a while and think about everything that's just happened. No.

First I'd like to get some sleep.

The image of Gerald Hemminge appeared nearby. The assistant chancellor of Starfarer also acted as the alien contact department's liaison to the starship.

"Are you ready?" he asked. "Everyone's anxious to start."

"In a minute, Gerald, thank you," J.D. said. "We're still getting ourselves together."

"Very well." As he turned, he faded out.

Stephen Thomas entered and crossed the transparent floor of the circle.

He had changed to a Starfarer T-shirt and a clean pair of long pants with the Starfarer logo on the thigh, unusually subdued clothes for Stephen Thomas. But he no longer looked as bedraggled as when he came out of Nerno's crater.

He stopped beside Victoria, but he did not speak and he did not touch her. He stared out the transparent side of the observers' circle, his gaze on Nerno's spiky curtains of silk. The severity of his hair, pulled tight and tied at the back of his neck, made him cold, and aloof.

J.D. wondered what he was thinking about. The alien museum, on a harsh little airless world not too different from this one, fusing and destroying itself as he watched? The collapse of the genetics department around him? The changing virus turning him into a diver? No . . . none of those, of course. He was thinking about Feral, wondering how the enthusiastic young journalist would have reacted to Nemo. He was mourning the delight Feral would never feel. Mourning Feral.

Then Victoria briefly touched her younger partner's hand, and they turned to join the circle. Stephen Thomas looked straight at J.D., completely expressionless, and she had no idea what he was thinking.

She glanced away, embarrassed to be staring at him, and blinked fast to clear her eyes of tears.

Victoria took her place in the seat across from J.D. Stephen Thomas sat at J.D.'s right.

Satoshi came in a moment later. He always moved so smoothly, so athletically: he nonchalantly carried two brimful mugs of tea. He handed one to J.D.

"Careful. It's hot."

"Thanks," she said. Trying not to move the cup, she leaned forward and took a sip so she would not spill it.

It was hot. She had to slurp it so she would not burn her tongue.

"You looked like you could use it," he said. He sat in his couch one place to Zev's left.

Now the members of the alien contact department were all in their places, quartering the observers' circle like the cardinal points of a compass. Zev broke the pattern, but J.D. was glad beyond words that he had joined the expedition, and grateful that Victoria had not objected when he accompanied her on board the Chi.

Zev enfolded her hand with his long webbed fingers. In the sea, he would have touched her more closely. He was leaming land manners. J.D. was leaming that on land, land manners were not always preferable. Even when they were more appropriate.

He cared more about her than about her success with Nemo, she thought. His curiosity had brought him to the expedition-that, and missing her. Maybe missing her had been the most important factor. He participated with delight in the expedition, but the most significant part of life, for divers, was the connection among friends, family, and lovers. J.D. and Zev were all three to each other.

She squeezed his hand gratefully, sipped her tea, and collected herself for the conference. She felt like she had crashed from the high of an intense long-distance swim. Besides the physical effort, the emotional exertion had taken its toll.

In principle, she supported the idea that her colleagues should be able to accompany her vicariously. She welcomed the ability to call on their knowledge and ideas and questions. In practice, she hated every minute she spent in front of cameras and recorders.

"Did you have a chance to look at my LTM recording?" Stephen Thomas asked. "No," J.D. said. "I'm sorry." They had only been back on board the Chi for a few minutes. She had not had a chance to look at what any of her colleagues had seen on their excursions into Nemo.

"I think you should. It was weirder than shit. Hard to figure out what it meant, or what Nemo intended to tell me."

"I'll look at it as soon as I can. And we can ask about it, as soon as Nemo starts communicating again."

"Okay."

J.D. folded her hands around the tea mug. A comforting warmth seeped through its insulation.

"I guess I'm ready. Shall we start?"

"Okay." Victoria's eyelids flickered and she went into a brief communications fugue to notify Gerald. "We're on."

All their colleagues from Starfarer could now see and hear and speak to everyone on the Chi.

"J.D.," Victoria said suddenly, "Nemo will probably listen to everything we say."

"Of course," J.D. said. "Yes. I hope so. Listen, and maybe join the conversation."

"We shall all bear that in mind," Gerald Hernminge said. "We'll start the questions with Senator Orazio. Senator?"

Victoria sat forward-about to object, J.D. thought, because the two United States senators were not members of the deep space expedition.

They were unwilling guests. They had been on a fact-finding tour of Starfarer when it plunged out of the solar system, fulfilling its charter, but disobeying the orders of EarthSpace and the U.S. military. Instead of speaking, Victoria sat stiffly back. J.D. glanced at her with a sympathetic expression.

The holographic image of Ruth Orazio, junior senator from Washington State, appeared before J.D.

"J.D., you must try again to persuade Nemo to return to Earth with us." "Senator . . . my question to Nemo was hypothetical. We aren't on our way back to Earth."

Orazio had always supported the deep space expedition, and against all probability, she still did. How long her support would last was another question entirely. J.D. would not blame her when it waned; she had never

agreed to leaving her family, her profession, her home world.

"We have to go home," Orazio said. "You came away unprepared, undersupplied, and understaffed, with an undependable computer web. It's dangerous to go on this way."

"And more dangerous to go back," Stephen Thomas said.

"The expedition members have already decided that question." Victoria did not soften her cold tone with the Canadian speech habit of raising the inflection of a sentence at the end, turning it into a question, inviting the listener to agree. "It isn't appropriate to argue it again now."

"Dr. MacKenzie, we all know you'll never agree to any plan that furthers the interests of the United States." William Derjaguin, the senior senator from New Mexico, spoke out of turn. "At least let us discuss the subject!" Derjaguin had always opposed the expedition bitterly. Being kidnapped on a hijacked starship did nothing for his temper.

"We discussed it at length," Victoria said.

J.D. broke in. "It wasn't fair of me to ask Nemo to go to Earth in the first place," she said. "The cosmic string has receded from the solar system. We can still go home. But we can't leave again until the cosmic string returns."

"Unless it returns," Victoria said.

"Europa said squid-Nerno's people just orbited stars and listened and watched," Orazio said. "And Europa said nobody even did that once we could detect them."

The interstellar community had paid Earth very little attention at all, Europa claimed. Civilization never involved itself in the affairs of non-spacefaring worlds. Europa had found the idea of UFO reports quite amusing, which was an interesting reaction considering that she herself had been abducted by a UFO. But Civilization limited itself to the secret rescue of a few doomed individuals, including Europa and Androgeos. It saved them from natural disasters in order to train them to greet the first expedition of starfarers from their own home world.

Other than that courtesy-a courtesy J.D. thought not only questionable but condescending-the interstellar community ignored new intelligences until they proved they were interesting enough, advanced enough, to bother talking to. So far, human beings did not qualify.

,,They've had to avoid us for two generations," Ruth said. "What better star to orbit now than ours?"

"What better star to avoid," Stephen Thomas said, "than the home of warlike barbarians?"

J.D. chuckled ruefully. "Good point."

Ruth smiled. "But who could resist trying to convert a bunch of barbarians? Victoria, I'm not letting you off the hook about going home. If we can persuade Nemo to go with us, then the deep space expedition will have accomplished the aim of its charter. You'll be able to prove an interstellar community exists."

"The senator makes an incontrovertible point," Gerald said. "Under those circumstances, we'd have no other ethical choice than to go home. Whether we could leave again would be completely immaterial."

Gerald Hernminge was one of the few expedition members who thought the starship should go home. He was one of the few who had argued for following EarthSpace orders, for converting the campus to an orbiting spy platform.

But what he said was true.

"Nerno's already said no," J.D. said.

"But people sometimes change their minds," Ruth said. "I intend to try to persuade Nemo to go home with us, if I get the chance."

J.D. smiled back. She had admired Senator Orazio before she ever met her; having met her, she liked her.

"When we do go home," J.D. said, "whenever it is, nothing would make me happier than to have Nemo come along with us."

"I have a question," Gerald said, in the round, highclass British tones that always managed to sound more or less disapproving, "if I may step out of my liaison position for a moment."

"Go ahead," J.D. said.

"I was rather surprised . . . that you ate a live animal."

J.D. grinned mischievously. "It was good, Gerald. Essence of' fresh shrimp, with honey-orange sauce. Quite a rush, too. It wasn't any stranger than eating an oyster."

"If you say so," Gerald said. "There is a question from the astronomy department. Awaiyar?"

The tall, elegant astronomer appeared in the circle. She gestured, her hands as graceful as a dancer's, and the image of the Milky Way also appeared. It turned, revealing the unmapped area beyond its core.

"We have a matter of policy to decide," she said. "Can we afford to turn down Nerno's offer to exchange information?"

"Can we afford to accept it?" Stephen Thomas said, sounding grim. J.D. wished she had had a chance to see what he had encountered in Nerno's crater. She could not spare the attention, now, to look at it, but it had spooked him badly. Her impression was that Stephen Thomas Gregory did not spook easily.

"What do you think, J.D.T' Victoria asked.

"I . . ." She took a deep breath. "I want to say yes. I trust Nemo-"

"That fact is self-evident," Gerald said dryly.

"But we aren't just talking about me. I think . . . I think we still have time to think about it and decide."

"We have only a few days till we enter transition," Avvaiyar said.

"I know." J.D. reached out briefly through her link toward Nemo. This is your chance to persuade my colleagues, she thought.

But Nerno did not reply.

"I think it's too dangerous to give Nemo access to Arachne," Victoria said.

"You're suggesting that we give up a great deal in order to protect your new transition algorithm," Gerald said.

"That's right," Victoria said.

"In other words, you feel your work may be the only thing human beings will ever have to trade that the interstellar community will want." "What's your point, Gerald?" Stephen Thomas carried his voice with an edge.

Gerald ignored Stephen Thomas. "Rather arrogant, perhaps, Victoria." "Yes," Victoria said.

"There's no need for personal animosity," Professor Thanthavong said.

"I meant no animosity. I'm merely suggesting that if we gain this new knowledge, we can go home-with or without Nemo-and consider the expedition a success. If Nemo takes the transition algorithm, what of it? We'll have five hundred years to develop something equally impressive."

"I can't believe you're so anxious to give up and go home!" Victoria said.

J.D. leaned back in her seat. This was an important discussion, and she was an important part of any conclusion. She had to pay attention to it. She closed her eyes. Just for a moment.

Satoshi woke. Victoria snuggled against him, one arm beneath her cheek, the other draped around his waist. They had dozed, waiting for Stephen Thomas. The bed felt empty without their younger partner.

When J.D. fell asleep in the observers' circle, Victoria had decided not to awaken her. No one was ready to make a decision about Nemo and Arachne, so they ended the conference. Everyone, on the Chi and back on Starfarer, was as grateful for a few hours' rest.

Everyone, apparently, except Stephen Thomas.

I wonder where he is? Satoshi thought. Sleeping alone in his cabin?

Not likely.

Stephen Thomas liked to sleep with his partners. He liked to sleep in the middle, the way Merry used to.

Not that Stephen Thomas had taken Merry's place, or even tried. No one could ever do that. But after Merry's accident, only a few months after Stephen Thomas joined the family partnership, the triad had comforted them all.

I wonder if our family would have survived after Merry died, Satoshi wondered, if not for Stephen Thomas? I don't think it would have. I fell apart pretty badly, and so did Victoria.

The old ache and the numb shock returned. He hugged Victoria fiercely, desperately. The pain had barely diminished in the time since Merry's death. It hit less frequently, but it hit just as hard.

Victoria woke. She held him, stroking his smooth short hair, murmuring comfort in his ear.

"I love you," Satoshi whispered. "I don't know what I'd do without you and Stephen Thomas."

"I love you, too," she said. "And if I have anything to say about it, you'll never need to find out what you'd do without me. But where's Stephen Thomas?"

"Maybe he thought we were sleeping in his room tonight."

Victoria looked at Satoshi, askance. They seldom all slept in Stephen Thomas's room. He had a lot of good qualities, but neatness was not one of them. His room back on Starfarer was bad enough. The Chi's forays into free-fall turned his cubicle into a disaster area,

"I'll go see," Satoshi said.

He crossed Victoria's ' cabin and his own, pushing the connecting door the rest of the way open to create a single space. The door into Stephen Thomas's room stood ajar. Satoshi pushed it open. Stephen Thomas was not there. His patchwork quilt, a wedding gift from Merry's family, Jay rumpled across his bed.

He can't still be in his lab, Satoshi thought. Can he? Maybe he fell asleep there.

Satoshi pulled his own ratty bathrobe out of the storage net on the wall, put it on, and crossed to the laboratory section of the Chi.

At the doorway of Stephen Thomas's lab, Satoshi stopped. His partner tilted his chair to its limit, his hands behind his head and his feet braced against the lab table. Stephen Thomas gazed, frowning, at the magnified image of growing cells.

"Hi, Satoshi," Stephen Thomas said without turning around. He took his feet off the table and let his chair drop forward.

Satoshi put his hands on Stephen Thomas's shoulders.

"Coming to bed?"

Stephen Thomas shrugged.

If Stephen Thomas had asked him to go away, he would have complied. Stephen Thomas could be moody, and he could say, often bluntly, what he wanted. But he had been so quiet recently that Satoshi worried. They had been through a lot. Maybe it all was catching up with Stephen Thomas. Maybe he was still in shock because of Feral's death.

Or maybe turning into a diver was not as benign a procedure as Zev thought.

It troubled Satoshi that Stephen Thomas had chosen to let the changes proceed. They had begun by accident, by mistake. Satoshi wished the accident had never happened.

You don't have any right to tell him what to do with his body, he told himself sternly.

Don't I? he replied to himself I love him. I care what happens to him.

And I think this is crazy.

"I don't understand what's going on with these cells," Stephen Thomas said.

"Which ones are they?"

"From Europa's weed. Ordinary soil bacteria. Same as back on Earth, she said."

"But?"

"But not quite. They'll grow on dirt from Starfarer, if I sterilize it. Not otherwise. I must have missed something."

"It's late, you're tired. You're working too hard."

"I'm not working hard enough." Stephen Thomas slapped the lab table with a sharp, shocking strike. "Or I'd be able to figure this out. Everything I've done since we left home has been crap."

"Come to bed."

"I wouldn't be good company."

"Are you okay?"

"Twitchy. Achy. I'll probably thrash around. I'd keep you both awake."

"I don't care," Satoshi said.

Satoshi looked at Stephen Thomas for a long moment. He was as susceptible to his partner's extraordinary beauty as anyone. As everyone. He stroked Stephen Thomas's long blond hair. It had, as usual, come untied. It curled around his partner's face and tangled down over his shoulders.

"Is your hair going to change color?"

"Probably not," Stephen Thomas said. "No reason it should. Zev says I should cut it, to be a proper diver."

"You never cut it to work in zero g, why should you cut it now?"

"I'm not going to. Starfarer doesn't have a proper ocean, so I can't be a proper diver no matter what."

Most divers had dark eyes. So far, Stephen Thomas's eyes remained brilliant sapphire blue. Satoshi hoped they would not change. He started to ask. But if they were going to change, he did not want to know.

Satoshi slid his hand beneath the collar of his partner's shirt, a deliberately arousing touch. His fingers stroked the soft new fuzz of fine, transparent diver's fur.

Satoshi froze. He willed himself to leave his hand where it was. He could not tell if Stephen Thomas noticed his reaction.

Stephen Thomas put his hand on Satoshi's. The

swimming webs felt warm against Satoshi's skin. Satoshi shivered. Stephen Thomas tensed and closed his eyes.

"What's wrong?" Satoshi asked.

"I've just beat my body up pretty good the last few days," Stephen Thomas said.

"But Zev said-"

"I had a run-in with a silver slug, all right?" Stephen Thomas said angrily.

"What? How? When?"

"When I tried to get into the chancellor's house."

"Why?"

"Why the hell do you think? He killed Feral! I wanted . . . I don't know what I wanted. I don't know if I would've killed him. But the slugs make fucking good watchdogs. It just about squashed the crap out of me. For a while I thought it broke my pelvis."

"Are you sure-"

"It's just bruises."

"Good lord," Satoshi said. The lithoclasts guarding Blades were the size of rhinoceroses. "You could have been killed."

"I know. I won't do it again." He moved Satoshi's hand away, gently but firmly. "I want to sleep alone tonight." His voice was careful, neutral. Satoshi hesitated. "Okay," he said. He was upset and confused and he had no idea whether he was relieved or disappointed that Stephen Thomas would not come to bed with him. "See you in the morning."

He started out of the lab.

He could still feel the fur against his fingers.

"Satoshi!"

"Yeah?" He turned back.

"Don't tell Victoria," Stephen Thomas said, his voice intense. "About the slug."

Satoshi frowned. "I hate it when you ask me to keep things from Victoria."

"I shouldn't have told either one of you, dammit! I knew it would just upset you both-"

"All right. All right! I won't tell her."

He left his younger partner alone.

He returned to Victoria. She lay on the sleeping surface of her cabin, one knee drawn up, the other leg extended, her fingers laced behind her head, her eyes half closed.

"He wants to sleep by himself tonight."

Her expression was her only question.

"He said he was achy, he said he'd thrash around. . . ." Satoshi was not lying. Not technically. "I don't know," he said.

"One of his moody spells," Victoria said. She had learned to overlook them, as Stephen Thomas preferred. "He'll be okay in the morning."

"Victoria," Satoshi said, "he's growingfur."

"I know. I saw." She grinned. "I think it's kind of sexy, don't you?"

She reached out to him. He grasped her long, slender fingers, lay beside her, and pulled the blanket over them both. Victoria hooked her foot over his leg, sliding her instep up his calf. She pulled him closer and kissed him, hard and hungrily. He opened his mouth for her tongue, and rolled over on his back, drawing her on top of him, abandoning himself to her, abandoning his worries and his fears.

And yet, making love with Victoria in the starlight, in the harsh reflected shine of Sirius, Satoshi missed the touch of Stephen Thomas's body, the strength of his hands, his voice.

After Satoshi left, Stephen Thomas stared at the cell cultures for a few more minutes. He did not want to move. His whole body hurt.

Just ignore it, he said to himself. You'd feel worse after a rough soccer game.

He was used to recovering quickly. He still did recover quickly: a few days ago he had had two black eyes and a livid cut across his forehead. Those bruises had vanished and the scar was fading.

The ache of the changing virus remained. And once in a while, completely unexpectedly, real pain ambushed him. Before he realized how badly the slug had bruised him, he had feared something was going wrong with the changes.

He wished he could just take to his bed and get his partners to bring him chicken soup. They would do it, too . . . except that then he would end up having to tell Victoria what had really happened. Admitting to Satoshi what a fool he had been was bad enough. He did not think he could stand to admit it to Victoria.

He swore out loud, shut down the lab, and went across the Chi to his cubicle. In the far cabin, Victoria and Satoshi murmured to each other. An ache radiated from the center of his pelvis. It spread in a wave. He quietly closed the door that joined his partners' cabins to his own.

He stripped off his clothes, untangled his quilt, and lay down on the sleeping surface. He pulled the quilt around his shoulders. It used to smell like Merry, but it did not anymore, even in his imagination.

He was wide awake. He flung off the quilt, turned over, stretched, and looked at himself.

His body proportions were similar to Zev's: he was slender, narrow-hipped; he had good shoulders. But Zev, like most divers, was rather short. Stephen Thomas liked being tall. He hoped that would not change.

So far, his toenails had not begun to change to semiretractile claws. He curled his toes. His feet were about the only part of him that did not hurt.

His skin changed from day to day. Not only its color. He had traded the maddening itch between his fingers, while the webbing formed, for a milder itch all over his body as the fine, nearly invisible hair grew in.

He liked the delicate pelt. He thought he would find it sexy on another person. He rubbed his hand down his forearm, down his side. He hoped Victoria and Satoshi would get to like it, too.

I wonder whether Merry would have liked it? Stephen Thomas thought. Probably. Merry was always the one who wanted to experiment.

The partnership had never quite perfected the com-

plex, erotic chaos of four people making love to each other in the same bed. They had needed more time. They had all been looking forward to trying sex in freefall. But they never got to try it as a foursome; Merry died before their first trip into space.

With a sharp pang of loneliness, Stephen Thomas wished he were sleeping with his partners. But all his reasons for sleeping alone remained. He hurt, he was restless, he would keep them awake. Besides, he liked to please them, and for the past couple of days his interest in sex had been very low.

That worried him. He explained his lack of interest to himself with the bruises, the persistent ache, the occasional intense pain.

He told the lights to turn off, curled up in his quilt, and hugged his knees to his chest. That eased him a little.

His mind spun around the strange behavior of his cell cultures, the disturbing encounter with Nerno's pond creatures.

Trying to take his mind off his work, Stephen Thomas thought about Feral. Feral liked change, just like Merry did. That was one of the reasons Stephen Thomas had been attracted to hirn. Feral had joined the expedition's revolt without hesitation. Hc had been excited when Stephen Thomas decided to finish turning into a diver. He had even been envious. Stephen Thomas smiled wryly to himself.

Some of these changes you wouldn't be envious of, my friend, he thought. But I bet you would've liked my new fur.

On impulse, he opened a private channel back to Starfarer. In response to his call, Gerald Hernminge appeared, his dark hair mussed. A wrinkle, the image of a crease in his pillow, was imprinted across his cheek.

"Did I wake you up?"

Gerald glanced sideways, realized he was transmitting his image, and snapped a command to Arachne. He faded out.

"What is it? Has there been a new development?"

"No," Stephen Thomas said. "Nerno's still quiet."

"Then why did you call me? Don't you ever sleep?"

No, Stephen Thomas thought, I don't, these days.

"I called you because I want to talk to you for a minute. Why'd you answer, if you were asleep?"

"Because I'm your bloody liaison!"

"But I marked the message private-"

Stephen Thomas stopped. No point in deliberately getting into an argument with Gerald. They argued enough anyway.

"It's about Feral."

"What about him?"

Gerald's image reappeared. He had combed his hair and put on a shirt. Except for the crease across his cheek, he looked wide awake and professional.

"His funeral. We should do something-"

Gerald stared at him. "You never cease to amaze me. You're in the midst of humanity's first alien contact-"

"It's only the first if you don't count Europa," Stephen Thomas said. "Europa isn't an alien."

"Europa's the first human to meet aliens-Look, Gerald, forget Europa, I want to talk about Feral."

"There's nothing we can do here and now."

"I know, but when I come back-"

"When we return to Earth, we'll turn his body over to his family."

""at? That might be years!"

"I sincerely hope not."

"Besides, he hasn't got any family."

"The proper authorities, in that case."

"But-"

"I'm sorry. There's nothing to be done. I haven't any authority to make any arrangements. It will have to wait till we go home."

Stephen Thomas started to object again, but Gerald interrupted.

"And now, if you don't mind, some of us would like to be fresh for the next conversation with Nemo."

He broke the connection.

"Shit," Stephen Thomas muttered to the air where Gerald's image had faded.

J.D. woke, disoriented. Stars and darkness surrounded her.

It was nearly morning. She was still in her couch in the observers' circle, but the couch had been extended flat. A blanket covered her.

Oh, no, she thought. I fell asleep during the conference. I was just going to close my eyes. . . .

Zev curled nearby, on his own couch. He woke and drew in a deep gasp of air. Divers slept like orcas, napping till they needed another breath, waking, breathing, drifting back to sleep. Zev turned toward her, his dark eyes reflecting light like a cat's, his fine fur catching the starlight. He looked like a gilded statue, with eerie emerald eyes.

"Hi, Zev."

In silence, he left his couch and joined her in hers, snuggling close.

His webbed hand slid beneath her shirt and over her full breast. In a moment of embarrassment she started to draw away. But the sensors and the cameras and the microphones were all turned off. No one could watch them through the transparent walls of the circle. The Chi was quiet, Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas asleep together in their cabin.

J.D. hugged Zev closer, and kissed him. Her tongue touched his sharp, dangerous canine teeth. He nibbled at her lips, at her throat, at her collarbone, unbuttoning her shirt with his free hand. She pressed her hands down his muscular back, beneath his loose silk shorts. His body was hot against her, urgent with his insistent, ingenuous sexuality.

He wriggled out of his shorts. He straddled J.D.'s thighs while he unfastened her pants and pushed them down over her hips, then when she had kicked them to the floor he moved between her legs. Among divers, men as well as women produced a sexual lubricant. As J.D. and Zev played and caressed and teased each other, Zev grew slick just like J.D.

J.D. kissed Zev's shoulder. His fur felt soft and bright against her lips. She gasped as he stroked her inner thigh with his warm webbed fingers.

They moved with each other in the slow, luxurious rhythms of the sea, leading each other on. The rhythm quickened, grew desperate and joyful, and they loved each other beneath the alien stars.

J.D. FELT P14YSICALLY REFRESHED, IF STILL intellectually and emotionally overwhelmed by her time with Nemo. She and Zev had slept for several hours, first in the observers' chamber and then in J.D.'s cabin, holding each other. Zev nuzzled her throat, or kissed the cleft between her breasts, whenever he woke to breathe.

She left him napping in her bed. While she bathed and dressed, she reviewed the proceedings of last night's conference, including the few minutes after she had fallen asleep.

I don't believe I did that, she thought.

She told the onboard computer to

take away that display and show her the recordings of her colleagues' experiences with Nemo.

Nemo had tempted Victoria with the inner workings of a starship, and tantalized Satoshi with more hints of the complexity of the web community. What Nemo had offered Stephen Thomas, J.D. did not understand any better than Stephen Thomas did. The violence of the inner pool shocked her.

We were visiting an alien, she thought. We have to expect encounters that are . . . alien.

And . . . if I were inside my own body, watching blood cells attack pathogens, watching osteoclasts break down bone, I'd be just as surprised, and repelled.

She kept waiting for a message from Nemo. It worried her to have heard nothing.

You're thinking hard and long, Nemo my friend, she said to herself I wonder what that means for us?

The computer put away the displays. J.D. went to the galley to find some breakfast.

Satoshi hunched over a cup of coffee, staring into the steam.

"Good morning," J.D. said, surprised to see him. Satoshi was not known as an early riser.

"Hi," he said shortly.

"I'm sorry about yesterday," she said.

He raised his head; his expression remained blank, distracted.

"Huh?"

"For falling asleep."

"Oh. God, don't apologize. You've been going flat out for days."

J.D. reconstituted some milk-Starfarer did not have any cows, and she had not worked herself up to making hot chocolate with goat's milk-and heated it.

"Satoshi . . . do you think we ought to let Nemo into Arachne?"

He sipped coffee, his strong square hands wrapped around the mug, lifting it slowly, putting it down deliberately.

"Yes," he said. "As a matter of fact, I do."

"You do!"

"I think the potential's worth the risk."

"That's my reaction, emotionally," J.D. said. "But intellectually I keep telling myself it's a terrible idea."

"I understand Victoria's point of view," Satoshi said. "But the trade .

. . a million years of observation, even if it's limited observation-" "Who knows about that," J.D. said.

"Right."

"What does Stephen Thomas think?"

"I don't know what Stephen Thomas thinks or feels or wants!"

Satoshi's outburst startled J.D.

Satoshi lifted his mug, but set it down hard instead of drinking.

"He spends all his time alone, in his lab, or-" His hands clenched around it. "He's changed so much."

J.D. sat down across the table.

"Because of Feral? Because of turning into a diver?"

"I don't know," Satoshi said sadly, more calmly. "Feral, being a Changeling, misjudging Blades . . . that's all part of it. But not all." He stopped and sat back, embarrassed. "You don't need to hear this."

"It's all right," J.D. said.

Victoria's voice flowed through the intercom.

"Hey, you guys, anybody up? Come look at this!"

J.D. and Satoshi hurried to the observers' chamber, where Victoria sat with her couch turned to face the curved glass wall.

J.D. saw what Victoria was watching. She whistled softly through her teeth as she slid into the auxiliary couch next to Victoria's and turned it toward the outside.

A protrusion of silk led from the crater, across the rocky surface of the planetoid, nearly to the Chi. It looked like a thick, rumpled carpet. As J.D. watched, it extended itself another handsbreadth. The leading edge roiled and quivered as silk-spinners created it from the inside out.

"it worried me at first," Victoria said, "but Nerno's

making no attempt to camouflage it. I tested the silkit's strong, but it wouldn't withstand the Chi's engines if we lifted off. I don't think it's any danger."

"I wish Nemo would answer my transmissions," J.D. said. "I could ask about it. And about what Stephen Thomas saw. I'm worried. . . . I don't know what to think about the silence. Or the way Nemo dismissed us yesterday."

"Nemo hasn't given up on us entirely," Victoria said. "The planetoid is following Starfarer toward Europa's transition point."

"Nerno's coming after us?" J.D. exclaimed, surprised and delighted. "Mm-hmm. Following, but not closing any distance. That's probably a good thing. Starfarer doesn't need any more gravitation perturbations."

"I'd love another expedition into the web," Satoshi said. "I have a good start on an analysis. But only a start."

"We might have more time, if Nemo follows us all the way through transition-"

"Nemo can leave from the same point and come out at the same place on the other side," Victoria said. "But without my algorithm, the route will be different."

"Tracking Europa?"

"Probably. I suppose it's possible Nemo has another algorithm."

"Europa gave me the impression everybody in Civilization uses the same one. The best one they've found yet."

"Yes. Me, too. If that's true, however long it takes her to get wherever we're going, that's how long it'll take Nemo. It will take us less time. But I don't know how much less time. Whether we'll catch up to the alien humans or not . . ."

"Wait, back up a minute," J.D. said. "You don't know where we're going?" "Not yet, eh? It's complicated. Arachne hasn't solved it yet."

J.D. looked at her, astonished.

Victoria smiled, contentedly.

"It's okay, ch? The algorithm shows that wherever we're heading, it's full of cosmic string. So even if we lose Europa, we can keep going."

J.D. stared through the transparent wall. The tube of silk reached the foot of the Chi. There, it paused.

"What will we do, if we lose Europa's trail?"

"I don't know," Victoria said. "I just don't know."

They sat side by side and stared at the projection from Nerno's crater. The projection began to inflate, like a balloon blowing up.

What is that thing? J.D. thought.

"Do you want me to open Arachne for Nemo?" Victoria asked abruptly.

"Yes," Satoshi said.

Victoria gave him a surprised look.

"Could you take your algorithm out first?" J.D. asked.

"No. Not anymore. Arachne's still finding the solutions we'll need. And by now the algorithm's hardwired in. It's part of the computer's thought patterns."

"Then . . . I guess you'd better keep Nemo out for the time being."

"Yeah. That's what I think, too."

Suddenly Nerno's tube reared up like a snake. Satoshi leaned closer, fascinated.

Victoria jumped to her feet. Her eyelids fluttered as she touched the Chi's onboard computer, preparing for emergency liftoff.

"Wait, Victoria!"

Victoria opened her eyes, frowning.

"It's an airlock," J.D. said.

As they watched, the swaying tube draped itself against the Chi's outer hatch. Its puckered end opened, crept outward, and its edge fastened itself around the sea] of the hatch, trembling with the workings of small creatures within its walls.

A spot of heat appeared in the back of J.D.'s mind. She opened herself to the transmission.

"Nemo? Is it you?"

"J.D., please come to me."

Alone, J.D. hurried through the airlock and into the new tunnel. She did not even stop to put on her spacesuit; she simply grabbed a pocketful of LTMs and headed for Nemo's crater.

At the edge, she paused. A frayed bit of silk led downward. It was the same lifeline that she had followed yesterday. No lifeliner waited to spin her a new thread.

She descended, expecting the thread to vanish into a reshaped curtain. Each time she rounded a curve, she expected to see a lifeliner hunkered down waiting for her. But the configuration of the nest had not changed. The corridors were very quiet. J.D. saw none of the spinners and weavers and scavengers that had been so common yesterday. The curtains looked drab and dusty. She tapped into an LTM perception of the ultraviolet. Instead of bursting around her in patterns and colors, it faded into a gray moir6. The shimmering blossoms had faded to blurs.

The larger attendants no longer haunted the spaces between the corridors, throwing their shadows against the tunnel walls. The nest felt deserted. Even the lightlines had faded, as if their optical properties had deteriorated.

J.D. climbed and slid down a long slope. At the bottom, an attendant with several broken spines tried valiantly to drag away a fallen curtain. The curtain's edges shredded as it moved.

The attendant gave up trying to move the disintegrating fabric. Scrambling over wrinkles and folds, it crawled to the center, and picked and chewed at the material.

J.D. sat on her heels and watched it; in a moment it had eaten a fist-sized hole. She rose quickly and continued deeper into the web.

She reached Nerno's chamber. The squidmoth lay

motionless, eyelid closed, beside the line of silken pouches. Still another pouch lay nearly completed beneath Nerno's limp tentacles. The spinners wandered around the top, stumbling into each other, creating the lacy edge.

"Nemo?"

The squidmoth's eyelid opened slowly. The long tentacles moved lethargically in a tangle; the short tentacles hung limp. A fine mist of silken strands covered Nerno's lower body, restraining the last couple of pairs of vibration-sending legs.

"Are you all right? Were you asleep?-But you don't sleep."

"In this form, I don't sleep." Nemo extended the long tentacles toward her. She grasped one; the others curved around her body. Their warmth soaked into her.

"I'm glad you're still talking to me," J.D. said. "I was afraid you weren't."

"You've decided not to trade information with me."

Here in Nerno's crater, J.D.'s impulse to give Nemo access to Arachne felt much stronger than her thoughtful decision to protect Starfarer's computer web.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Europa and Androgeos-Androgeos mostly-scared us. Give us all a little more time with you."

"You're different," Nemo said.

"In what way?" J.D. was afraid Nemo would say, I misjudged you, I don't want to talk to you anymore, go away.

Nemo's proboscises regained their normal activity; the mustache began to ripple.

"It's your scent that's different."

J.D. was not wearing perfume-she seldom didand she had used the same soap as always.

She supposed she smelled strange to Nemo, as Nemo smelled strange to her. But . . . Nemo had not said strange, or unpleasant. Nemo had said "different."

She started to blush. She did smell different today, even to herself, with a trace of the deep sexy musk that remained after she and Zev made love.

"I suppose I do," she said. "Human beings smell different depending on what they're doing, or what they've eaten, or the state of their health." She hoped that would do for now. She supposed she should tell Nemo in detail why and how she smelled different from yesterday. She might have been able to do so if they had been alone. But they were not alone. They were under the eyes of the LTMs and everyone on Starfarer.

Why, she thought, is it harder to tell other human beings about intimate actions-actions we share, after all-than it would be to tell someone completely alien? Because an alien would be objective about it? Because if an alien said, "How extremely strange," it would hurt less than if a human said the same thing?

"Does it bother you that I smell different today?" J.D. asked.

"Your new scent makes you a different shape in my mind."

J.D. smiled. She hoped her new shape in Nerno's mind was not quite as undignified as it had been when she was with Zev. At least they had been making love within a gravity field. In zero gravity, sex could be hilarious.

"Today you're different, too," J.D. said. "Are you . . . wearing clothes?" "No," Nemo said.

Nemo reached up to the bank of honey ants and plucked one. Only a few remained. A burst of saliva flooded J.D.'s mouth. She could taste the sweetness and feel the rush. But instead of offering the honey ant to J.D., Nemo stroked the creature till it folded its legs. Nemo slid it into the silken pouch. Disappointed, J.D. watched it vanish.

A spinner emerged from beneath Nerno's vibrationsending legs. It crawled up the side fin and over Nerno's back, trailing a strand of silk. J.D. tapped into an LTM perception in the ultraviolet. The blanket of silk around Nerno's tail section rippled like water, like sunlight pouring through leafy trees and dappling the ground.

Several more spinners climbed up Nemo's side, helping create the layered fabric.

"You are so beautiful," J.D. said.

"I'm changing," Nemo said.

"But how? Why?"

"I'm changing myself into an adult, because I'm very old."

"But you said you're just a child."

"No, I told you I'm a juvenile."

"But when you said you'd lived for a million yearsI thought you were just at the beginning of your life!"

"You asked my life span."

J.D. grasped Nemo's tentacle suddenly. She sank down beside the squidmoth and stroked the soft, brilliant skin. She had asked Nemo's life span.

Nemo had lived a million years.

"How long do you live, after you become an adult?"

"Until I reproduce."

"In a hundred years?" She was afraid to hear the answer. She made up one she hoped to hear. "Five hundred?"

"In a few hours."

"Oh, no-!"

I keep making assumptions! she shouted, angrily, to herself. Assumptions! "You're protesting my decision," Nemo said.

"Not your decision, just the timing. I just met you! I like you, I don't want to lose you!"

"If I'd known you were coming, I'd have waited to change."

"Can't you wait now?"

"No, I've been preparing for too long."

"You can't go back?"

One of the attendants that cleaned Nerno's skin scuttled across the floor.

Nemo's tentacle snapped out of J.D.'s hand and caught the creature. It struggled as Nemo placed it in the gray silk pouch. Holding the pouch with all three tentacles, trembling, Nemo sealed its edge to the curtain.

"All my attendants are parceled out." Nemo touched the bulging pouches. "Parceled out? Why? What are those things?"

"They are egg sacs for my children."

"Can't you change your mind?"

"Do you wish me to change my mind?"

J.D. wanted to say, Yes! Don't change, don't die.

"What would happen if you stayed a juvenile?" she asked.

"My attendants would die."

"And your children?"

"They'd never be born."

"What about you?"

"I would leave nothing behind me."

"Tell me your life cycle," J.D. said.

"I awoke, I remembered my parents, to thank them, and I listened and I learned and I grew into my body."

J.D. clutched at a hope. "You listened to your parents? You learned from them? They were there to teach you?"

"They weren't there, but I remembered what they left for me, and I added to what they had learned."

"Were they dead?"

"My juvenile parent might still be alive, but my adult parent died, of course."

"When you exchange genetic material with others of your people-that's being a juvenile parent?"

"Yes, we're the juvenile parents of each other's children."

"But you don't bear the children until after you metamorphose into an adult," J.D. said, beginning to understand.

"That's right."

"And then you'll die."

"I'll die."

"And you can't delay the change."

Nemo touched the sacs again, handling them delicately so as not to damage the hibernating attendants and groomers, spinners and honey ants and silk-eaters. Nerno's legacy, parceled out into each offspring's cradle.

"I could stop the change."

"Then what would happen?"

"I'd never change at all."

"Never? You'd be immortal?"

"Until I got bored."

"That could be a long time, Nemo."

"But I'd have no offspring, and then no one would remember me."

Nerno's tentacles withdrew from the silken sacs. The long tentacles twined together, apart, and circled JDA body, quivering, brushing her body with quick, delicate touches.

"I'd remember you," J.D. said sadly.

"You aren't immortal."

"No," J.D. said.

"It's important for my children to remember me."

"Will your children be identical to you, with identical memories-" She stopped. "No, of course not, they have another parent. A juvenile parent."

"They'll know all I know, but they won't be identical to me."

"I understand." She let Nerno's tentacle curl and cuddle in her hands, like a warm, furry snake. "I wish we'd met sooner. I would have liked more time to know you." She tried to smile. "About a hundred years." "Maybe you'll know my children."

"I hope so."

The silk-spinners continued to crawl around and over Nemo, guided and encouraged, now and again, by one of the long tentacles.

"What will happen now?" J.D. asked.

"Soon I'll sleep, and you'll return home, and when I awaken I'll be changed."

"What will you change to?"

"You can see, if you want."

"I'd like that. Thank you. How will I know? When will it be?"

"It's different for everyone."

"I'll wait." "No, go home, I'll call you to return."

"All right," J.D. said reluctantly.

J.D. watched the silk-weavers flow back and forth and around Nemo's body.

We could have kept Feral's body alive, she thought. We could have regenerated his burst arteries and damaged brain, but he wouldn't've been Feral anymore. He would've been a child in an adult's body, with part of his life already spent.

Trying to persuade Nemo to stop changing would have been the same as reviving Feral's body after Feral himself was gone. J.D. thought about the rhythms of life. Nerno's rhythms differed from the rhythms of a human lifespan, but they were no less demanding. For all her disappointment, J.D. respected the decision Nemo had made.

Nerno's eyelid closed completely, nearly vanishing against the shimmering peacock pattern.

"Nemo!" J.D. said, startled, afraid the squidmoth had gone to sleep without saying goodbye. "Nerno?" She sent the message softly through her link, an electronic whisper.

The eyelid quirked open.

"I'm sorry-I was afraid you'd gone already."

"I'm curious about sleep." After that, Nemo said no more.

J.D. sat beside Nemo for a long time, until the spinners finished the dappled chrysalis. The LTMs watched the scene. They would record everything, even changes that happened too quickly, too slowly, too subtly for a person to notice. J.D. put them on the floor and turned them all away from herself so she had a semblance of privacy.

The silk covered Nemo, except for the bright furred tip of one tentacle. "J.D.?"

"I'm here, Victoria."

"Shall we go home?"

J.D. shivered. The web cooled as the light dimmed,

as if the fibers of Nemo's construction were metamorphosing along with their creator.

J.D. replied reluctantly. "Sure. I'm coming."

The Chi's outer hatch closed. Nemo's tunnel loosened its seal, dropped away, and withdrew. J.D. watched it, wondering if it meant Nemo was still aware of events and surroundings.

She tried to send Nemo one last message. She received no reply.

The Chi returned to Starfarer. At first the starship was a tiny dark blot against the huge silver expanse of its distant stellar sail. It resolved, gradually, into the two enormous rotating cylinders that formed the starship's body. The Chi oriented itself to the hub of the campus cylinder, then approached the dock.

Slowly, perfectly, it connected.

J.D. took a deep breath and let it out, returned the reassuring pressure when Zev squeezed her hand, and kicked off gently from the Chi's access hatch into Starfarer's waiting room. Her overnight bag bumped against her leg; she wished she had a backpack like Satoshi's. They had called for an artificial to take their gear back into Starfarer, but none answered. Victoria had a small neat shoulder bag. Stephen Thomas carried a sample case on a strap, and his quilt, folded up and tucked under his arm. He no longer looked at all awkward in zero g, as he had when she first met him. J.D. floated in amidst a crowd of people: Starfarer's faculty and staff. Professor Thanthavong. Senator Orazio, whom J.D. had expected to see, and Senator Derjaguin, whom she had not. Gerald Hemminge, trying to shush the racket so he could moderate the discussion. The sailmaster, lphigenie Dupre, who had for once come down out of the sailhouse. Awaiyar Prakesh, whose work dovetailed with Victoria's at the point where astronomy and physics intersected. Crimson Ng, the sculptor, and Chandra, the sensory recorder, both from the art department. Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov, the cosmonaut, hero of his homeland, refugee from his homeland. Griffith, who claimed to be an accountant from the General Accounting Office, even though no one believed him, as usual tagging along after Kolya. Infinity Mendez, whose actions after Feral's death had probably kept more people from dying. Esther Klein, the transport pilot. Floris Brown, the first member of Grandparents in Space. A gaggle of graduate students: J.D. recognized Lehua and Mitch and Fox. J.D. had no grad students of her own. Job prospects for alien contact specialists were rather low.

They all floated in the barely perceptible microgravity of the waiting room at the hub of the cylinder, surrounding the members of the alien contact department. The noise rose to a painful level as everyone burst out talking at once, asking more questions, making more comments.

"I'm sorry," J.D. said. "I can't hear you all."

Chandra, the sensory artist, pushed herself in front of everyone else and ignored Gerald's efforts to organize. She turned her strange opaque gray eyes on J.D. She looked blind, but her vision was more acute than any ordinary person's, and she could store and recall any image she perceived. "Weren't you scared?" Chandra asked,

"Now and then," J.D. said. "But Nemo seems very gentle to me."

"Gentle! Did you see what happened to Stephen Thomas?"

"Nothing happened to Stephen Thomas," Stephen Thomas said, drifting between Florrie Brown and Fox. "I don't know what was happening to those critters, but nothing happened to me."

"It could have. We don't know what Nemo wants. Maybe when it reproduces it needs a nice warm body to lay its eggs in."

"I don't think so," J.D. said.

"Why not?"

"Because Nerno's a civilized being."

Chandra shrugged. "And we're half-evolved exiles. Why should Nemo care what happens to us? Europa didn't care if she stranded us in orbit around Sirius and we never got home."

"Nemo only eats insubstantial food," J.D. said.

"Who said anything about eating? Besides, Nerno's metamorphosing. Lots of critters eat one thing during one stage of their lives-I don't know, leaves or grass or flower nectar-that eat other stuff, other times."

"This is a subject worth discussing," Victoria said, "but let's not be morbid about it."

"I'm not morbid."

Stephen Thomas looked at her askance. "Have you taken a look at your own work lately?"

"Screw you, Stephen Thomas Gregory. And how are you going to feel if J.D. comes back full of maggots?"

"That's her job," Stephen Thomas said easily.

"Stephen Thomas!" Professor Thanthavong exclaimed.

J.D. laughed. "I asked for that one, Professor-Stephen Thomas is quoting me. But, Chandra . . . there's a principle of astronomy that says you aren't likely to be in the right place at the right time to observe an event of cosmological significance. Considering Nerno's age, the principle applies. It'd be a tremendous coincidence if I arrived just in time to feed Nerno's offspring."

"Unless it isn't a coincidence at all."

"What-? Oh. I see what you mean."

"Nemo chooses when to become an adult. So maybe squidmoths hang around waiting till there's somebody just right, and then . . ."

"I think,77 J.D. said, "that you've been watching too many old monster movies."

"Maybe you've written too many sentimental sci-fi novels!"

"Sentimental!" J.D. exclaimed, affronted.

"Yeah, in the end everything comes out right for everybody. " Chandra made a noise of disgust.

J.D. almost laughed and almost cried.

I think I'm too tired to be having this conversation, she said to herself.

"Er," Gerald said, at a loss and trying to make the best of it, "perhaps it would be better to postpone literary discussion until a later time? Now, we shall break into smaller groups and meet separately. That way our colleagues won't be quite so overwhelmed."

Hearing the murmurs of agreement, J.D. gave Gerald a grateful glance.

With that, the tight sphere of people broke up into smaller clusters, sorted broadly by occupation: physical sciences around Victoria, social sciences with Satoshi, biological sciences with Stephen Thomas. The group around Stephen Thomas included Florrie Brown. When she joined him, he took her frail hand and kissed it gallantly. She smiled, and J.D. realized that beneath her remarkably quaint heavy black eye make-up, beneath the pink and green and white braids drifting around her mostly shaved head, Florrie Brown was beautiful.

Professor Thanthavong joined J.D. briefly.

"Are you certain about changing your link?" she asked.

"Yes," J.D. said. "I want to enhance it. There still may be time to use it."

"Very well," Thanthavong said. "I've made the preparation. See me when you're ready."

"Thank you," J.D. said, as Thanthavong touched the wall, pushed off, and floated toward Stephen Thomas's discussion section.

Stephen Thomas led his group out of the waiting room, heading down into Starfarer's main cylinder and out of zero g.

The group was much smaller than it should have been. Many of the scientists of the multinational faculty

had been recalled by their governments, protesting the threat of change in Starfarer's purpose. So they had all been left behind when Starfarer fled. Stephen Thomas was glad Florrie Brown had joined his group. He liked her; he only wished she and Victoria had not started out on the wrong foot. Besides Stephen Thomas, the scientists included Professor Thanthavong, a couple of biochemists and a botanist, and a dozen graduate students: Lehua, Bay, Mitch, Fox-"Fox, what are you doing here?"

Fox was one of Satoshi's graduate students.

"Satoshi isn't talking to me."

""at?" he asked, incredulous.

Both Satoshi and Stephen Thomas had good reason to be annoyed with Fox. She was only twenty, too young to apply for a place on the deep space expedition. She had refused to return to Earth. Stephen Thomas and Satoshi had been in the genetics building, trying to persuade her to get on the transport and go home, when the missile hit Starfarer and brought the hillside down around them. But the missile might have hit anywhere. Stephen Thomas found it impossible to blame Fox for staying behind, and he assumed Satoshi felt the same. So what, if they got charged with kidnapping when they got back home? Their prosecution for hijacking the starship would probably take precedence anyway.

Unless kidnapping the niece of the president of the United States took priority over everything.

"Satoshi thinks it's my fault you're turning into a diver!" Fox said.

"Oh, bullshit."

"Don't make me leave," she said.

He shrugged. "Doesn't make any difference to me."

Stephen Thomas was tired and distracted. Most of his body had stopped aching for the moment, but his toes hurt fiercely. He wanted a hot bath.

He thought it might help.

Thanthavong watched him with concern. "Come

along, Stephen Thomas. Questions can wait till we're back on solid ground,"

"It doesn't matter," he said. Everyone was used to his bitching about zero g, but he had spent so much time in weightlessness recently that he had overcome his aversion to it. Or . . . his body was preparing him for living in water.

He followed Thanthavong obediently. He was in the habit of complying with her requests. Like everyone else, he admired her to the point of awe.

When the changing virus infected him, and she prepared to treat him against it, saying no to her was one of the hardest things he had ever done.

They made their way to the long hill that formed one end of Starfarer's campus cylinder. The hill, with its winding switchback paths, led down from the axis to the cylinder floor, the living surface. The air was sharp and cool with rain. Overhead, puffy clouds softened the sharp bright line of the sun tube and, beyond the tube, the cold glitter of lakes and streams on the far side of the cylinder. Starfarer's small shallow ocean, gray and foggy, circled the opposite end of the cylinder. Stephen Thomas kept waiting to feel some primeval call to the sea, but it did not happen.

You aren't turning into a fish, he said to himself, repeating Zev's distressed protest to a joke about what was happening to Stephen Thomas. You aren't turning into a fish. You aren't going to get pulled to the sea to spawn.

At a hairpin turn of the trail, halfway to the floor of the cylinder, benches clustered in a small circle. The false gravity was about half of Starfarer's regular seventenths g. One could sit without bouncing into the air.

Thanthavong took a seat and motioned the others to join her. Stephen Thomas limped to a nearby bench, lowered himself gratefully, and stretched his long legs. He curled his toes, pressing them against the soles of his sandals, straightening them quickly when the ache turned to a raw jolt of pain.

Everybody else joined the circle and watched with anticipation as Stephen Thomas slipped his carryingcase strap off over his head and held the case in his lap. The grad students had been waiting for something new to work on. J.D. had brought Stephen Thomas a crumpled plant from Europa's ship, but the plant was, as Europa said, of Earth origin. Though the bacteria associated with it were still acting strange, they matched ordinary Earth species. He was glad he finally had something for his students.

"Stephen Thomas?"

He opened the sample case. He had not transmitted any of this information, or discussed it on the public access. Europa and Androgeos had made him more cautious-more sneaky-than he had ever been before.

"The optical fiber J.D. picked up is just a polymer. Organic. Similar to silk, a little stronger." He shrugged. "Most of its interesting qualities are optical. But it was shed into a living ecosystem. Good and nonsterile. Particles in the range from viral to amoebic. I made some slides, and . . ."

He pulled the cushioned isolation chamber out of the case and held it up, letting light flow through the windows ofthe sample vials.

Tiny cell colonies traced one inoculation stab.

He had not expected-not dared to hope for-the growth to appear so quickly. He had been afraid to hope for any growth at all.

Most of the tubes of growth medium remained clear. No surprise: he had no way-yet-of knowing what to feed an alien cell.

But something, some alien equivalent of a bacterium, was an autotroph: an organism that could grow and replicate using only simple sugars, oxygen, water. . . .

He offered the isolation chamber to Thanthavong.

"No," she said. "No. You carry it. I'm afraid my hand . . . might not be steady enough."

They had met the alien humans. They had encountered an alien species of intelligence. But this microscopic quantity of life was the first alien cell they could look at, grow, and study.

"Maybe some of the other microbes feed on the autotroph," Lehua said. "Right." With a little luck, he could end up with a self-sustaining mixed colony of alien microbes.

"Did you have enough to do any tests?" Thanthavong asked.

"Just one." He paused. "Whatever Nemo's ecosystem uses to make whatever it uses for genes . . . it isn't DNA."

J.D. and Zev found themselves among a diverse group of faculty and staff, including most of the artists, Jenny Dupre, and Senator Orazio.

J.D. wished she did not have to meet with them all so soon after getting back. She was tired, and sad. Still, she understood why her colleagues were here waiting for her. She would have been with them, if she had not been a member of the alien contact department.

"There's no question of letting the alien into Arachne," Jenny Dupre said.

"I don't think so," J.D. said sadly. "And I'm beginning to think that's a mistake."

"The web's still too fragile to risk it!"

J.D. (lid not blame Jenny for her concern. She had nearly died in Arachne's crash, the crash that killed Feral. If Feral's death was murder rather than accident, as Jenny believed, then Jenny had probably been the target.

Nevertheless, the more J.D. thought about it, the more she disagreed with keeping Nemo out.

She wanted to be back with Nemo.

She was still moving through microgravity, so she tried to keep her eyes from closing as she went into a communications fugue. She did not want to crash into a wall while she was not looking.

She touched Arachne, sending a gentle message to the squidmoth. Nemo made no reply.

J.D. forced her attention back to the group she was with, to their questions and curiosity.

All she could do now was wait.

M

CHAPTER 6

STEPHEN THOMAS LEANED HIS HEAD against the isolation box and drew his hands from the manipulators. For the moment, he had done all he could do, inoculating growth medium with Samples of alien cells and sacrificing a few of the precious organisms for microscope slides. Within a day, if the alien bacteria continued to grow at their current rate, he would have enough cultures to give samples to his colleagues.

He stretched his body against the hot stiffness of his bruises. He wished he were home in bed. He stepped back from the box, and his feet flashed quick pain up his legs.

"Christ on a crutch," he muttered, "that's enough, all right?"

He shut down the isolation box. The lab was quiet and empty. After the conference, he had sent everyone home. He wanted his students to be fresh when he had something for them to work on.

He grabbed one of the scanning microscope preparations and an inoculated isolation tube of culture medium, and carried them down the hall to Professor Thanthavong's office.

He met J.D. and Zev in the hallway. Zev led J.D., watching her worriedly.

A small holographic display, the LTM transmission from Nerno's chamber, tagged along behind them.

"Hi, Stephen Thomas." J.D.'s voice was pitched half an octave higher than normal. Her eyes were bright and very dark, the pupils dilated to the edge of the blue-gray irises.

"Hi," he said. "Are you drunk?"

"I told you, I don't drink."

"Oh, right." She had even turned down a sip of celebratory French champagne, the day Starfarer's sail first deployed. God, but that felt like a long time ago.

"It's the link preparation," Zev said, sounding worried. "She just breathed it, and it's making her weird."

"Maybe you better get her home to bed."

"I'm trying, " Zev said. "Come on, J.D., okay?"

"Okay." She followed Zev obediently down the hallway. When she passed Stephen Thomas, she said, "Your hair's down." Now her voice was lower than usual.

Frowning, Stephen Thomas watched them go. He tucked the straying strands of his hair behind his ears.

Zev drew J.D.'s arm across his shoulders and led her out of the biochem building, talking to her softly.

Stephen Thomas shrugged. They were doing fine without his help. He limped into Professor Thanthavong's office. He could use some help himself. "Professor Thanthavong?"

She opened the recycler and tossed in the prep bottle and the inhaler by which she had administered the link enhancer to J.D.

"Hello, Stephen Thomas." Nearby, a couple of holographic images hovered, frozen. When her attention returned to one, it would continue its report. Stephen Thomas put the slide and the chamber on her desk. "I should have enough samples for everybody soon. But here's one, to start."

"Thank you," she said. She gestured to a chair. "Sit down. You look footsore."

Footsore was hardly the word for it, but he held back from complaining to Thanthavong. She probably would not say, "I told you so," but she was not likely to offer much sympathy, either. She had not wanted him to turn into a diver in the first place.

He sat down, wondering if he would be able to get up again. Professor Thanthavong was small, and all her furniture was too low for him. Sitting down eased the pain in his feet, but renewed the ache in his body. He did not mention that to Thanthavong, either. She had rescued him from the slug. She had probably saved his life. Then she had read him the riot act about his behavior.

She gestured to one of the displays, the report Stephen Thomas had made on the alien microbes.

"This is good work," she said.

"More questions than answers," Stephen Thomas said.

"That's why it's good work. You got a lot accomplished while you were gone." She paused. "You weren't able to collect more samples," she said, a question rather than a comment.

"I was tempted," Stephen Thomas said. "But I didn't want to screw J.D. up with Nemo."

"Ah."

"But maybe

"Out with it, Stephen Thomas."

"I tried taking a culture off my shirt. The stuff I wiped up from the pool. Nothing's growing. Yet. Maybe it will."

"We can hope."

"Yeah.

"These other experiments you're doing," she said. "With the soil bacteria from Europa's ship."

"I haven't figured those out yet. Any ideas?"

"Their DNA fingerprints are very close to normal. About what you'd expect if they diverged four thousand years ago."

"They look the same," Stephen Thomas agreed. "But the buggers act different."

"Have you sequenced them?"

"Not yet. I was resequencing bacteria from J.D. From all of us in alien contact."

"You suspect contamination?" she said sharply.

"No. I was double-checking. It's strange, though. You'd expect some exchange between us and the alien humans. Nothing pathological. The normal skin microbes and so forth."

"But you found none."

"No. Europa told the truth about something, anyway. "

"Or we're blessed with unusually robust microbial flora," Thanthavong said dryly. "Your students could have done the sequencing."

"I didn't have the heart to make the kids stop watching the reports." "Graduate students expect to work," Thanthavong said. "You're perhaps a bit too indulgent of yours. The sequencing should be done soon."

"Do we have a machine to use?"

"Biochem's is at your disposal."

"Good. Thanks." He had not been looking forward to the commute up the hill to use the sequencer in the Chi. "I'll go-"

"Go get some sleep, Stephen Thomas! I said 'soon,' not 'instantly.' Leave instructions for your students to do it. You look worn out."

"Yeah. Okay. I'll see you tomorrow. Today. Later." His time sense was completely skewed.

Stephen Thomas went outside. He paused in the

dawn air, enjoying the coolness. The daytime temperatures on Starfarer had been warm for spring. He touched Arachne and left a message for his students, obeying Professor Thanthavong as far as that went.

But he did not go home to bed. He had something to do. If he did it now, while everyone was still caught up in the reports from the Nemo expedition, no one would stop him. If he waited, he might not be able to carry out the task at all.

Infinity Mendez dozed on his futon, drifting in and out of sleep, telling himself he should get up and go to work. Beside him, Esther Klein slept soundly, her snore a soft buzz.

By this time of the morning, Infinity had usually been up for a couple of hours. He liked to be outside in the gray foggy dawn while the light tubes slowly brightened. But he and Esther had sat up late talking to J.D. Sauvage.

Every so often, Infinity stopped and said to himself, We've met an alien being. No matter what happens now, we did what we said we were going to. Like just about everyone else on board, Infinity would have liked to tag along with J.D. He wished he could lie here all day, cuddle with his lover, replay the transmissions from the Chi, and wait to see what happened next.

But anticipating what happened next meant anticipating the death of Nemo. Come on, he said to himself, suddenly restless. Get up, you have things to do.

Esther curled on her side, facing him, her knees drawn up beneath his legs, her small square hand draped down between his thighs.

Light washed the room. Starfarer's light always came from high noon, straight overhead, from the light tubes along the axis of the campus's cylindrical body.

Infinity had gotten used to the unchanging direction of the light before the campus was even finished. He

had belonged to the construction crew that built the starship. Infinity knew Starfarer from the outside in. Having helped build its shell, he now helped maintain its ecosystem.

Infinity covered Esther's hand with his own. She snuggled closer, still asleep. Moving away from her warm touch, Infinity slid out from under the covers, drew the blanket up around Esther's shoulders, and looked for his clothes.

It's sure harder to keep track of things without the artificial stupids, Infinity thought. They should have been released by now. . . .

Chancellor Blades had impounded them, but he could not control them anymore.

Maybe Gerald's been too busy to let them loose, Infinity thought. He smiled to himself. Big job, being acting chancellor of a bunch of revolutionaries. Probably Gerald had just not got around to the task. When Chancellor Blades impounded the machines, he got everyone's attention. The ASes did the kind of work nobody noticed till it did not get done. It was annoying to order dinner and get nothing; to find dirty clothes still lying around instead of washed and pressed and returned to the shelf.

What a lot of people did not realize was how important the ASes were to the health of Starfarer. The faculty thought of the ASes and mobile Als as conveniences. But the machines also watched and maintained and repaired the complex structure of the starship.

Infinity threw on his jeans and sandals and his leather vest, combed the tangles out of his long black hair, and left the coolness of his house. Outside, in his garden, bees buzzed loudly and birds called and chirped and rustled the bushes. The morning was warm for spring. The afternoon would be uncomfortably hot.

The quality of the light made him uneasy. Arachne filtered it so the radiation of Sirius resembled the light of the sun; still, its white harshness remained. It worried him. He belonged to the staff, not the faculty, so under

normal circumstances his responsibility was low and his authority negligible. Alzena Dadkha, the director of the ecology department, should have been in charge.

But Alzena was gone. Unable to reconcile her conflicting loyalties to her family on Earth with her responsibility to the deep space expedition, she had fled with Europa and Androgeos. Europa had taken pity on A]zena's despair.

Infinity touched Arachne through his link, asking for access to the interior spectrum. The computer gave it without hesitation.

A bee whizzed past him, flying fast with an angry buzz.

Whether Arachne would or would not permit him to alter the light filters made no difference at all. The filters pegged out at their limits. He could have less light, or more. But he could not get a spectrum any closer to real sunlight than he already had.

The bee circled wildly. The frantic buzz stopped short. Infinity frowned. The fat honeybees were usually as placid as cows. He worked around them all the time, moved the hives, collected the honey. He had never even been stung.

He moved cautiously toward the last place he had heard the bee, expecting to find it nuzzling the center of a flower for pollen and nectar. But the flowers were still in the breathless morning.