Metaphase

A faint sound, not even a buzz, caught Infinity's attention. He found the bee lying on the ground, upside down, its wings battering uselessly against the earth. Its short life span ended in a burst of angry energy; its motion stopped and its legs curled up against its body.

I'd probably run around yelling, too, Infinity thought, if I realized I was about to die. But bees don't usually act like that. . . .

In the driest comer of his garden, he stooped to look at a barrel cactus. For a while it had flourished in this microenvironment. Something about it troubled him: the spongy feel of its skin when he carefully slipped his finger between its hairy spines.

Infinity's mother came from the American southwest, but she had fled to Brazil, a refugee, before Infinity was born. Infinity had never grown a cactus before, never lived where cactuses grew wild. His memories from childhood, before he came into space, were spotty and disjointed, of eroded land struggling to re-establish itself as forest, of displaced people grieving for land they had loved and disconnected from the new land where they now scraped out a living.

Information on cactuses was only one of the many things Arachne had lost when the system crashed. He wondered if anybody had hard references, if Alzena had left anything in her office when she fled. With plants, hands-on experience was best. But references were better than nothing.

He remembered what Esther had told him about her potted cactus. She only realized it had died when her cat knocked it over and it had no roots. He pushed gently at the barrel cactus. Was it releasing its grasp on the soil? Or was the soil just loose? He could not tell.

Better to leave it alone and keep watch on it. If he worried at it, he might damage it.

He hcaded for the administration building, trying again, as he walkcd, to ask Arachne for information about the artificials.

Arachne replied, but the reply contained no information.

It's like they don't even exist, he thought. What if Blades destroyed them, or threw them out into space? That would be crazy . . . but a lot of crazy stuff has been happening recently.

A holographic triptych, a replay of J.D.'s alien encounters, occupied the center of Chandra's large living room, hovering above the thick Berber carpet.

While most people on board Starfarer lived austerely, Chandra lived in a house full of stuff. When she decided to join the deep space expedition's art department, she had ordered a lot of expensive furniture and sent it on ahead. Other people built their own furniture of bamboo and rock foam and canvas. They covered the floor with woven mats. Chandra saw no reason to limit herself to local materials and amateur labor. She made plenty of money; she could afford to indulge herself. Back on Earth, her name on a new production guaranteed attention, reviews, and more royalties than she could spend.

Crimson Ng sat companionably beside Chandra. She watched the replays of Nerno's nest, toying idly with a model bone, part of her newest sculpture. Crimson held the bone up between her and the holographic replays. When she moved the bone, Chandra could see the muscles, the skin, the soft sleek pelt of the animal in Crimson's imagination.

The remains of dinner littered the mosaic table. Chandra had also imported a supply of exotic food; she had been afraid that the meals on board Starfarer would be pedestrian. She had been right. And now, the campus was in such disarray that the central cafeteria could not produce even pedestrian meals.

"Did you get enough dinner?" she asked Crimson.

"I sure did. It was great."

One of the displays repeated J.D.'s first meeting with the squidmoth. Chandra sprawled naked on her leather couch. She could take in her surroundings with her whole body, if she chose, but there was absolutely no point in recording J.D.'s experience secondhand.

Chandra felt jealous of J.D.: not simply envious, wishing to have the experience herself, but flat out jealous.

I should have been there instead of her, Chandra thought. Holographic recordings. Big deal.

Visual and audio recordings could never convey exactly what J.D. had experienced, the way a sensory artist could.

I should have been there, Chandra said to herself. I can see and feel and taste and hear and smell everything, and everybody could experience it again, through me.

No one else on board resented the alien contact specialist's position. They were all perfectly happy to back her up, to support her, to be good obedient members of the team.

Fine for them. Chandra always worked alone.

She had barely recorded a thing since coming on board Starfarer, since giving her life up to this pastoral, small-town campus. Starfarer was as boring as a village back home, despite being a stone cylinder four light-years from Earth. As soon as it was too late to change her mind, Chandra had realized her mistake.

The other experience she would have wanted to capture had also passed her by: transition. When Starfarer fled Earth, she had been connected by hard link to a backup computer, storing a full load of sensory recordings. If Arachne had been up, she could have been ready for transition, and for Starfarer's arrival at Tau Ceti. But she had missed that chance. The Tau Ceti to Sirius transition had been just as bad. Arachne crashed again,

Feral died, and Stephen Thomas and J.D. caught Blades at sabotage.

I should have been part of the hunt, too, Chandra thought. But J.D. didn't even consider trusting me.

Chandra's body still had not recorded transition. She needed a calm, controlled approach to the transition point, not the chaotic flights they had made so far, with the computer web crashing around them.

When J.D.'s recorded image took off her spacesuit and let,Nemo touch her, Chandra groaned in exasperation. The swollen nerve clusters all over Chandra's body throbbed and engorged with anticipation.

"Why didn't you take off your clothes, you stupid bitch?" Chandra shouted. She flung herself against the back of the couch.

"Chandra!" Crimson exclaimed. But at least she spared a little of her attention from the replay, and from her sculpted bone.

"She should've," Chandra said irritably. "She's seen

too many old sci fi movies. She thinks aliens want to have sex with human beings, and she's scared."

"That's silly. Would you've taken your clothes off?"

"You bet I would."

"Wouldn't you be embarrassed?"

"No. Why should P I let people experience my body from the inside out.

Damn! They should've let me go along! Or at least made her make a sensory recording."

"Now I understand," Crimson said.

"What?"

"Why you kept trying to scare J.D. into not going back."

Chandra shrugged. "It was worth a try."

"No, it wasn't. If you wanted to be in the alien contact department, why didn't you apply there instead of the art department?"

"I joined Starfarer at the last minute, it was too late," she said belligerently.

Crimson gave her a skeptical glance.

"I didn't think they'd take me-all right? But I knew I could get in the art department. Will you stop playing with that?"

"I'm not playing." Crimson did not press the point of Chandra's Starfarer affiliation, or her ambitions. "I'm figuring out what it ought to look like. I have to hold it and carry it around and change it till I get the model right. I can't fossilize it till I get it right."

But she put the strange model bone aside and knelt on the couch beside Chandra, gazing at her with concern.

"It would have made more sense for them to let me go than for them to let Zev tag along," Chandra said. "It isn't fair! He'd never've gotten up here if I hadn't smuggled him on board."

"I'd like to go on the Chi, too, you know," Crimson said. "Everybody would. But J.D.'s the alien contact specialist."

"So she's first."

"You've done a lot of other things first. And recorded them for us."

"I've recorded a lot of things best," Chandra said. "But not first. I don't think there's anything left on Earth to do and be, first. That's why I came out here!"

"I don't care if you're first or not."

"I'm glad you like my stuff," Chandra said. "Nobody else on this heap pays it any attention. Maybe three whole people have accessed it in the past two weeks."

"You are in a bad mood," Crimson said, out of patience. Then she laughed. "What's so funny?"

"Chandra, who's had a chance in the last two weeks to spend any time-" Chandra thought Crimson was about to say "to spend any time playing." Bristling, she readied a retort.

11

-on anything but the real world?"

Chandra cut off the sharp words she had planned when she heard what Crimson really said. Finding another reply took her a moment.

"Yeah," Chandra said, reluctant to be placated. "I guess you're right."

On the crater replay, J.D. scrabbled her way up a steep silky slope. The LTMs had caught a glimpse of several of Nemo's attendants, but the recording pitched and yawed till Chandra closed her strange all-over-gray eyes.

"It's making me seasick! They'll have to edit that to death!"

"Shh, look, there's another one of those spider things. I want to watch it."

The creature left off creating a shimmery sheet of new white silk, rappelled to the floor, and snaked off on half a dozen ropy limbs. It looked like a cross between a brittle star, with long whiplash tentacle-legs, and a crustacean, with a shrimplike head and a ring of eyes. Crimson stroked her model bone again. She examined it intently, turned it over, put it down, glanced at the image of Nemo's attendant.

"It's too conventional," Crimson said.

"Huh? My stuff?"

"No, mine. The fossils. They're all on an ordinary vertebrate body plan." "Oh, right. Six-legged, winged, fanged, twelve-eyed vertebrates."

"Even if I did that all at once, they'd be too much like us."

Chandra sat crosslegged on the sofa, enjoying the soft warmth of the leather, and the way the leather stuck to her skin.

"You sure pissed Gerald off when you told Europa you're a paleontologist," she said. "I think you really got her to believe we'd found alien bones on the moon."

"Gerald just doesn't get it," Crimson said. "I am a paleontologist." Chandra laughed. "I like the way you never go out of character." "Seriously. My degree's in paleontology. But it got so I couldn't do field work. When the Mideast Sweep started expanding again."

Chandra sobered and looked at Crimson, tilting her head thoughtfully to one side. She was not sure if Crimson was pulling her leg or not. "Androgeos took one of my fossils," Crimson said.

"What? Why'd you let him get away with it?"

"Because that's what they're for." Crimson laughed with delight. "I hope I get to find out what he thinks of it."

,,He probably got the twelve-eyed fanged one. He'll just think it was one of our ordinary ancestors."

Crimson laughed again, then fell silent.

Gazing into Chandra's eyes-most people did not gaze into Chandra's featureless silver-gray eyes-Crimson touched Chandra's wrist, stroking the bright blue rope of vein that throbbed just beneath her translucent tan skin. Crimson's hands were rough from sculpting, from digging in Starfarer's coarse new ground to bury her fossils in an artificial but convincing stratigraphy. Her fingers circled gently in the sensitive hollow of Chandra's palm.

The nerve clusters pulsed.

Chandra drew away.

Crimson let her hands fall into her lap. She frowned, confused and disappointed.

"What's the matter?"

"I don't do that." Chandra was tempted. But Chandra had made a career of resisting temptation.

"What do you mean? With me? With women?"

"I don't do it at all."

"Why? Why not?" Crimson asked, shocked.

"Every sensory artist in the universe does sex scenes," Chandra said. "You don't have to record it!" Crimson exclaimed. "I didn't want you to record it!"

Chandra squinted at her, trying to see her in a different way, trying to see her even more clearly. She decided Crimson was serious about not recording.

"You'd better go," Chandra said.

Crimson sat back. She picked up the model bone, clenching her fingers around the shaft. Chandra wondered if Crimson would try to hit her with it. That might be interesting.

But instead, Crimson rose slowly, turned, strode across the rich carpet, stooped down and picked up her shoes, and walked out the door without a backward glance.

When Stephen Thomas reached the entrance of the health center, he hesitated. He did not*want to go into the deserted, silent place.

He wished he could go back to Blades's home, push past the silver slugs, drag the chancellor out, and force him to come here and see what he had done. Did he even care that his sabotage had killed an innocent man?

I liked Blades, Stephen Thomas thought. How could I be so wrong about someone? His aura was clear and bright, transparent and guileless. I thought. I stuck up for him, to everybody, even Satoshi and Victoria. Stephen Thomas remembered the chancellor's welcoming party-

It had been several weeks ago. Victoria had been back on Earth, giving a speech at the Houses of Parliament in British Columbia and meeting with the Canadian premier. Everybody thought she was lucky not to have to go to the party, because most of the faculty believed Blades had been forced on the deep space expedition in order to dismantle it. No one had more evidence than campus gossip, but most people believed it anyway. Stephen Thomas believed it. Gerald Hernminge swore it was not true, which was almost enough in itself to make Stephen Thomas believe it. Satoshi did not take much stock in campus gossip.

Stephen Thomas and Satoshi had to go to the party. It would have been an inexcusable breach of academic etiquette not to. It would have been a direct insult.

Gerald, of course, had indulged his prerogatives as assistant chancellor and hosted the welcome party. He had even gone to the expense of importing decent wine from one of the O'Neill colonies. In a few years, Starfarer's vines might produce a drinkable vintage, but for now the homemade brew was beer.

Stephen Thomas went to the party expecting to despise Chancellor Blades. Satoshi went with an open mind. To his surprise, Stephen Thomas found the new chancellor pleasant and interesting and rather shy. But Satoshi took an instant and uncharacteristic dislike to him. Satoshi got along with everybody. Satoshi even got along with Gerald.

When they went home, late, Stephen Thomas was cheerfully drunk. Even drunk, he noticed Satoshi's irritation. He could hardly miss the angry blue sparks.

They lay together in bed. The moonlight reflected through the open French doors of Satoshi's room. Carnations scented the cool breeze.

"You didn't like the chancellor much," Stephen Thomas said. "And you were about the only one who didn't arrive intending to hate him."

"He's a snob," Satoshi said. "He stood off in the corner and watched us like we were experimental animais." "Not when he was talking to me, he didn't."

"He didn't talk to you all evening." Satoshi stroked Stephen Thomas's hip. "Just most of it."

"Is that what bothered you?" Stephen Thomas asked, surprised. "That you thought he was coming on to me?"

Satoshi smiled. "He was."

"Yeah, true, but he wasn't obnoxious about it. He can take no for an answer."

"If it bothered me every time you got involved with somebody," Satoshi said, "I'd be bothered all the time. And if it bothered me every time somebody made a pass at you-I'd be nuts. Why would I pick Blades to get jealous oP"

"How should I know? You won't tell me why you don't like him. So I'm making wild guesses."

"I wasn't jealous," Satoshi said. "But Gerald was."

"Of the pass?" Stephen Thomas asked, skeptical.

"Of the time he spent with you."

That made more sense. One of Gerald's duties, a duty he relished, was to squire dignitaries around. He would expect to introduce Starfarer to the new chancellor.

,,Great," Stephen Thomas said. "One more reason for Gerald to dislike me." "Let's forget about Gerald."

Satoshi kissed Stephen Thomas's lips, his cheek, his throat, nibbling at the thin gold chain around his neck. The crystal slid along the chain and landed against his collarbone, cool as water. Stephen Thomas pulled Satoshi closer, and rubbed the small of his back with one hand. He loved the way Satoshi's muscles moved beneath his fingers.

"You still didn't tell me why you don't like Blades."

"I don't know why I don't like him. I just don't. Maybe I don't like his aura."

"Very funny," Stephen Thomas said. Satoshi did not believe in auras. "His aura was just fine."

"Hmm." Satoshi kept his voice neutral. He knew

when he had teased Stephen Thomas enough. Neither Satoshi nor Victoria would even try to look for auras.

The blue sparks of anger faded from Satoshi's aura. A gold glow of excitement flashed around him, and scarlet contentment shimmered beyond the gold.

Satoshi pushed Stephen Thomas's hair away from his forehead, caressed his face with both hands, and kissed him again, quickly, then harder. He slid his knee up Stephen Thomas's thigh. Stephen Thomas dragged his fingers down Satoshi's belly and ruffled his dark pubic hair with his fingernails. Satoshi's body was like a furnace, blasting out heat, when he was sexually aroused.

"Blades-"

"I don't want to talk about Chancellor Blades anymore," Satoshi said. He clenched his teeth and his back arched. He drew in a long, shuddering breath. He laid his hand over Stephen Thomas's, guiding him. Stephen Thomas forgot about everything except his partner's pleasure.

-Now, in the health center, Stephen Thomas closed his eyes and brought himself back to the present. Leaning against the doorjamb, he imagined making love to Feral.

Though they had never had a chance to go to bed together, they had made an immediate connection. It would have happened. And they had been well on the way to a close, solid friendship. Stephen Thomas had imagined their making love, and he had imagined inviting Feral to join the partnership. Satoshi and Victoria liked him. The family needed another member, and Feral fit in well. Someday they all had to stop grieving over Merry.

But what Stephen Thomas had done, by making friends with Feral, was put him in danger.

The health center was warm and pleasant and deserted. All the people injured in Arachne's first crash had recovered and gone home. Only one person was hurt in Arachne's second crash, and the one person was Feral.

Stephen Thomas passed through the deserted rooms. No one was around to ask him what he wanted, or whether he needed help. The mobile health Als had been disabled just like the ASes.

He expected the morgue to be cold, but it was the same temperature as the rest of the health center. When he opened the drawer where Feral lay, chill air washed over him.

He drew back the shroud. Feral stared up at him with dull, open eyes. Dry blood smeared his face and streaked in caked rivulets from his nose.

Blood from his ears matted his curly chestnut hair.

Stephen Thomas stepped back, in grief and despair,

Everybody had too much to worry about when Feral died, Stephen Thomas thought. Too much to do, to think about one dead man, to worry about what death would do to his gentle brown eyes.

And what did I do? I shut down, got on the Chi, and flew away.

Stephen Thomas took a ragged breath and returned to Feral's side. He touched his friend's cold cheek, his forehead; he drew his webbed hand down over Feral's eyes. The stiffness of death had passed from Feral's body, and his eyelids closed easily.

Stephen Thomas got a washcloth and cleaned the dry blood from Feral's skin and hair. Feral's expression was somber, but Stephen Thomas could imagine his full, mobile lips ready to smile. His chestnut hair curled around his face.

Stephen Thomas had been telling himself all along that he only planned to come to the health center and say goodbye to Feral. But he had been lying to himself.

"Gerald can go fuck himself," Stephen Thomas said. "I'll be damned if I'll leave you here."

Feral's clothes had been ripped and cut away during the attempts to revive him. Livid bruises mottled his chest. Stephen Thomas found a clean sheet and wrapped it around Feral's body. The health center lay well up the side of Starfarer's end hill, where the gravity was very low. When Stephen Thomas picked Feral up,

his body felt absurdly light, as if death had taken away his substance. Stephen Thomas easily carried Feral's body to the hub of Starfarer. The gravity continued to diminish, till it was barely perceptible. He floated himself and his burden to the ferry station, boarded the capsule, and strapped Feral's body on the back platform.

He had not been to the wild side since the wild side's previous spring. Spring on the wild side was fall in the campus cylinder. Summer had passed in the wilderness, winter had passed on campus. A short trip would take him from campus spring into wild side autumn.

Infinity crossed the lawn in front of the chancellor's house. Three exterior ASes, silver slugs, sprawled like shiny boneless rhinoceroses in front of the building and guarded its front door. All the house's other doors, its windows, its balconies, had been covered with ugly, irregular slabs of overlapping rock foam. The secret tunnels leading from it had been plugged with rock foam.

The exterior ASes were the only mobile artificials left working. The chancellor had disrupted the campus by recalling the service machines.

He must have thought that would be a minor irritation compared to Arachne's crash; maybe he thought it would be the last straw for the expedition members.

But his petty irritation had backfired on him. He had not realized the silver slugs could work inside as well as outside-they could work almost anywhere-and had released them to finish repairing Starfarer's damaged hull.

The oversight had been his downfall, for once Stephen Thomas and J.D. traced the sabotage of Arachne to Blades, the silver slugs had driven the chancellor from the administration building, through the underground tunnels, and trapped him in his house. He was cut off from Arachne now. The computer had activated its immune system and destroyed Blades's neural node, and the silver slugs had cut the house's hard links.

Infinity wished Blades had been stopped before anyone died.

Blades could communicate by note. He could ask for anything he liked, and a silver slug would carry it to him. Anything but electronic communication, or company. The slugs guarded his door for the protection of the expedition, and for his own protection as well. They let no one pass in either direction.

Infinity approached the chancellor's house, crossing behind a rough sculpture of tumbled chunks of raw moon rock.

Like the manicured yard in front of the administration building, the green turf around the chancellor's house showed the scars of an angry, milling crowd. The tracks of the silver slugs gouged wide, shallow trenches in the earth.

Infinity paused at the edge of the swath of grass. All three silver slugs lay facing the same direction, an odd alignment.

Curious, cautious, he moved forward. One of the silver slugs, a lithoclast, reared up to sense him. The slugs knew him. He had called them in from repairing Starfarer's outer surface; he had set them to guarding Blades. But they would not let him into Blades's house, even if that was where he wanted to go.

The lithoclast subsided. Its bulk eased onto the ground and spread out, shimmering. It rested, waiting, its senses trained on the group of rocks. The smell of crushed grass, green and light, filled the air.

In a recess in the tumbled stone, lphigenie Dupre sat staring past the silver slugs at the open door of the chancellor's home. Infinity watched her uneasily, reluctant to disturb her solitude, but more reluctant to leave her here alone.

It was unusual to see her on Starfarer's inner surface. She preferred zero gravity, and stayed in the sailhouse or near the axis as much as she could. Arachne ordered her out of free-fall every so often. She complied, reluctantly.

Infinity had not been surprised to see Jenny Dupre

in the waiting room, when the Chi returned from Nerno's web. But he had been surprised when she joined the discussion group. He was more surprised to see her still here.

She leaned against the rock, her long, delicate hands lying with fingers outspread beside her. She wore her hair in narrow black braids caught up at the back of her head. They fell to her shoulders, the bright glass beads an uneven fringe. In weightlessness, the braids fanned out and the beads clicked together softly, constantly.

Infinity joined her and sat beside her, watching Blades's house. The chancellor remained out of sight. The slugs would let him come to the door, but no farther. He could not cross the threshold.

He had been nearly as reclusive before they penned him in.

"Something has to be done," Iphigenie said abruptly.

The sailmaster hated the chancellor with cold outrage. She believed, with good reason, that he had tried to kill her. His attack on Arachne had caused the first system crash, which injured Iphigenie. His second attack had killed Feral.

Infinity considered her statement, careful not to answer too fast, too certainly.

"Isn't that enough?" He gestured to the foam-covered house with his chin. "No," she said. "No. It isn't. He murdered Feral. He meant to kill me. He's dangerous."

"Not anymore."

"What if he gets back inside the web?"

"Arachne's immunized against him."

"And the web was uncrashable!" lphigenie snorted in disgust, "He's been talking to Gerald. And to the American senators. I saw them from the hill." She gestured back toward the end of Starfarer's cylinder. "But when I came down here, they went away."

The two senators had been passengers on Esther's transport, heading home after a fact-finding tour of

Starfarer. They were along for the ride, now, and none too happy about it. "What do you think we should do?" Infinity asked. Isolating Blades in his house had felt like a good compromise to him, when he had thought of it. At least it had stopped the riot lphigenie had tried to start, and no one else had been hurt.

"I think," lphigenie said, "that you don't want to know what I want to see. The best I can hope for, I suppose, is a trial."

"We aren't exactly prepared to try anybody. Is anybody even a lawyer?" lphigenie shrugged.

Starfarer had left Earth orbit precipitously, six months early, without the long burn-in period the faculty and staff had planned. Maybe during the burnin, they would have had to handle antisocial, even criminal, behavior. Maybe then they would have been better prepared for it. But the glow of optimism and cooperative spirit led them to the tacit, naive assumption that every problem could be solved by talking about it, by the meetings they held to discuss other sorts of problems.

The faculty and staff had agreed to continue the deep space expedition, in defiance of orders from EarthSpace, at a meeting. They had held a meeting to decide whether to go after Europa and Androgeos.

"I'm worried about you," Infinity said.

Jenny looked directly at him, gazing at him intently. Always before, until he broke up the mob she created, she had glanced at him briefly, dismissing him. People liked to pretend Starfarer had no hierarchy, but it did. And the hierarchy separated a millionaire solar sail designer from a gardener by quite a distance.

"You are remarkable," she said.

He looked away, embarrassed. He did not like to stand out. He was not sure he wanted to know exactly what she meant. She probably did not mean what she said as a compliment.

"Feral shouldn't have died," she said.

"Nobody should have died."

"I mean-if anyone died, it should have been me. A sacrifice to Artemis, to the wind. Maybe that's why Blades directed his sabotage toward me."

"A sacrifice?" Infinity said.

"Yes. My namesake escaped, but the gods always take their due, in the end-don't you know your mythology?"

"That isn't my mythology," Infinity said.

"Oh," Jenny said. "No, I suppose not. I'm sorry."

"If you want to know about Amaterasu, or Coyote . . ." Infinity shrugged. "But not lphigenia."

"Her father was supposed to sacrifice her to Artemis, for a favorable wind. She escaped. Artemis waited. I escaped. Artemis tired of waiting. She took my young wild friend instead."

"Everybody feels lousy about what happened to Feral," Infinity said. "But if any one of a dozen things had happened differently, he'd be okay." "Blades is responsible." Her eyelids flickered as she cut off her conversation with Infinity to communicate with Arachne.

The faint perception of a small spot of heat told Infinity he, too, had a new message. It was Jenny9s meeting proposal, broadcast through Arachne to everyone on board.

Infinity did not add his second. He thought things would be just fine the way they were. For as long as it took Starfarer to be able to return home. Then the legal system could deal with Chancellor Blades.

On the other hand, it was just as likely that the United States would give the chancellor a medal and arrest everyone else as hijackers and terrorists. Maybe Jenny wanted to be certain of some justice, or revenge. Infinity still did not want Blades prosecuted here. The memory of the mob stayed with him. His friends and acquaintances had put on unrecognizable masks of anger. He did not want to see that again.

He stood up.

"Are you okay? Do you need any help?"

"No," Jenny said.

"Then goodbye, I guess."

He left her sitting among the rocks, and continued on to the administration building.

As soon as J.D. ended the discussion group, Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov slipped away from the clump of people and fled to the nearest access hatch. He had not been able to resist listening to J.D. as long as she would talk about Nemo. But the press of people made him uncomfortable and nervous.

Kolya climbed down the ladder, past ground level, into Starfarer's skin.

He strode along the dim, coolsmelling corridor, toward the nearest elevator.

Until he reached the safety of the elevator cage, he expected at every second to see Griffith behind him, hurrying to catch up. He was sick to death of Griffith's following him around, trying to worship him.

He was rather surprised to have escaped Griffith. He would probably be pleased with himself, if he did not feel so dreadful.

He had not had a cigarette in two days, and he was at the height of nicotine withdrawal.

The elevator slowed and stopped and the floor settled beneath his feet: Kolya perceived gravity as pulling backwards against him, then sliding down to settle in the proper place.

Does anyone ever get used to the sensation of riding an elevator inside a rotating space station? Kolya wondered. I've lived in space longer than anyone, and I never have.

He put on his spacesuit, entered the airlock, and climbed down through the outer shell of Starfarer's campus cylinder. The airlock opened. He climbed down onto the inspection net.

Starfarer loomed over him; the stars spun beneath his feet. The motion of the cylinder took him through darkness, into the hot white light of Sirius, and back into shadow as he plunged into the cleft between the campus cylinder and its twin, the wild side. On the far edge of the valley, he burst into the light reflected by the solar sail. If he looked in just the right place he could see the bright crescent of Nerno's starship, tagging along with Starfarer toward transition.

Kolya eased himself down onto the cables of the inspection web, grateful to be back out in space. He had spent too much time with other people lately, too much energy trying to understand them. They admired him for reasons that had very little to do with him and much more to do with situations in which he had found himself by chance and luck.

Usually bad luck, he said to himself.

It felt good to be alone. He looked forward to reclaiming his hermit status, now that the controversy was over and Starfarer was safe in the hands of people who would use it for its true calling.

Infinity ducked through the hole in the front door of the administration building. The door had not yet been repaired. When Chancellor Blades locked himself inside, the silver slugs, the lithoclasts that dissolved rock, had munched their way through the wood-finished rock foam.

The trail of the slugs led through the wide foyer and up the curving stairs to Blades's office. They had eaten through his door, and herded him through the underground tunnels to his house.

But the ASes and the mobile Als would not be on the upper floors. The only place big enough for them all was the basement.

Infinity went through the building to the back stairs. The halls were cold and deserted.

"Lights on," he said, and the stairwell brimmed with light.

In the basement, hundreds of small robots hunkered together in a random pattern, motionless and silent, like paralyzed hands and blinded eyes. Infinity blew out his breath in relief. The chancellor could have destroyed all the mobiles while he was locked in with them. They were sturdy, but they were not designed to stand up to deliberate abuse.

But as Infinity moved between several squatty housekeepers, a carrier, and a plumber, he felt like he was walking among dead things. The usual faint electronic sound and electromechanical smell had vanished.

Infinity sat on his heels beside a housekeeper. Out of habit, he tried to touch it through his link to Arachne. He got no response. After a moment of fumbling, he found the power switch. It was off. He turned it on. No one ever turned household robots off. No one noticed household robots enough to think of turning them on and off. The ASes went about their business and plugged themselves in to recharge when they had nothing else to do. They were practically invisible.

This housekeeper had nearly a full charge, yet Infinity could not get it to respond.

When he tried the housekeeper's self-test, nothing happened. Nothing at all. No motion, no signal to Arachne. Not even any error messages.

Infinity stood up.

This was bad.

Griffith paused outside General Cherenkov's front door. He had never been to the cosmonaut's house; he had never been invited. He knocked, and waited.

No answer.

Griffith had been sitting with the general during J.D. Sauvage's discussion. He could not figure out where Nikolai Petrovich could have disappeared to. Griffith was trained to keep an eye on people.

He knocked again. His impatience got the better of his shallow courtesy.

He moved across the balcony that fronted Kolya's house, in the third story of the hillside. He looked through the floor to ceiling windows, cupping his hands around his face to shield his eyes from the reflected glare of the sun tubes.

The front of the house was deserted. The floor plan of Kolya's house was probably the same as Floris

Brown's. Three front rooms with a wall of windows, a back hallway, a bathroom, and storage space. The two houses probably were alike, since Brown's was on the first level of this stepped back triplex arrangement. Like most houses on Starfarer, it was built within a hill. Griffith had been inside Brown's house, during her welcoming party, and he had taken the opportunity to snoop. He had been through a couple of deserted houses, too.

Griffith waited; still, Kolya did not appear.

Griffith returned to the front door, hesitated, and reconsidered. He had been good at his job. Good enough to be wary of a man who had been a guerrilla fighter. Or a terrorist, according to the government that had put a price on his head.

Griffith did not expect Kolya's house to be boobytrapped. Kolya lived in space because he wanted peace. He had told Griffith that he was the only human being who was safer on the deep space expedition than on Earth. The Mideast Sweep was still very much in power in Kolya's homeland, and it had a long memory.

Griffith did not expect to encounter traps. But he did expect Kolya to leave ways of detecting intruders. He did not want to risk his fragile new friendship with the man who had been his hero all his life.

If we are friends, Griffith thought bitterly. Some kind of weird friend. He talks to me. He advises me. He asks for my opinion. Then threatens to kill me because of it. Then he apologizes. And then he disappears.

At least he admitted I was right.

Fuck it, Griffith thought. Why do you keep trying to make friends with these people? Most of them still believe you crashed the web. Even though they know Blades was responsible. None of them care that you sacrificed your career and your marriage for their expedition. They don't care that you'll be the first one in jail when-if-we ever get back to Earth.

He turned away from Kolya's deserted and probably unlocked home-no one, except Griffith, locked doors on campus-and headed down the long curving flight of stairs.

As he passed Floris Brown's apartment, a dapplegray miniature horse squealed and kicked up its heels and galloped away from Brown's front porch. The yearling filly raced across the open field and past the herd, alerting and exciting them. The whole bunch of them burst into a run, tangled manes and tails flying and bobbing like dreadlocks.

Floris Brown sat in the shadows of her deep porch, bits of carrot bright against the black of her knee-length tunic. She blinked at him like an aged, prehistoric lizard, her eyes beady within their rim of dark eye makeup. Fox, one of the graduate students, sat at Brown's feet and leaned companionably against her leg.

"You always frighten things," Floris Brown said to Griffith, her voice accusatory. "You frighten people and you frighten creatures. Why didn't you go home?"

He almost said, Because I was trying to figure out a way to keep you disorganized anarchists from getting blown out of the sky.

Instead, he said nothing, but turned away and strode stiffly back toward the guest house.

If he had told her what he had tried to do, she would not believe him anyway.

These people, Griffith thought, are driving me crazy.

Infinity left the administration building and hurried along a path that spiraled around the interior of Starfarer. The anomalies he kept seeing in the growth patterns of the plants added to his distress. A lot of the flowers had been bred for long-lasting blooms: the snow irises and the crocuses lasted well into spring; the daffodils came up so early that back on Earth, the threat of snow would not have passed. On Starfarer, it seldom snowed more than an artistic sprinkle.

He had gotten used to the long bloomings, when Starfarer was half finished, during its muddy first spring.

But other plants had other rhythms, and many of these were disarranged. Crossing a warm microclimate, he entered a grove of orange trees. They were heavy

with fruit. Though the cafeteria was empty of fresh food, in the absence of the ASes, no one had thought to pick any oranges. Infinity smelled not just the sharpness of the oranges, but the heavy sweetness of a profusion of orange buds and blossoms.

The orange trees looked healthy, but their burst of blossoms worried Infinity. Plants under stress reacted like this, with an extravagance of reproduction.

Honeybees harvested the pollen, and more dead bees lay on the ground. Farther along the path, in a cooler microclimate, Infinity passed through a field of spinach that had already begun to bolt.

He was worried for a lot of reasons when he reached the edge of the tumbled patch of ground where the genetics department had been. Lithoclasts crawled through the broken building, dissolving the shattered walls, eating them away. The place had been disinfected. Everything that could be salvaged had been brought out. A great deal of work had been lost, not only experiments in progress but some of the back-up embryonic tissue meant to support Starfarer's biological diversity.

Miensaem Thanthavong, the head of the genetics department, stood at the edge of the broken building, staring at it, her shoulders slumped. Infinity glanced at the lithoclasts again, gauging their progress. It would be a while before they finished cleaning up. After that, the geneticists would call in the lithoblasts, the rock-makers, to rebuild the shell of their building.

Every silver slug that came inside, whether to work or to carry out someone's whim, meant one less attending to the constant job of maintaining the strength and stability of Starfarer's main cylinders. He wondered if the scientists had thought of that.

Professor Thanthavong saw him and greeted him. She looked tired.

He was used to seeing her on a screen, or in a holographic projection.

He always forgot how slight and

delicate she was. Informal as Starfarer could be, he never knew what to call her. Few people called the Nobel laureate by her given name.

"I found the artificials," he said.

"Oh, good. We can use some here. Are they-" Her eyelids flickered as she linked to Arachne's web.

"I'm still not getting She stopped. "What is

it?"

" I think their brains are fried."

Stephen Thomas smoothed the earth over Feral's grave. He leaned against the shovel and rested his forehead against his hands. Sweat dripped down his face and over the sensitive webs between his fingers.

He had chosen a spot on a hilltop within a grove of young oak trees. He chose the spot because he liked it, not because he felt certain Feral would have liked it. He had not known Feral long enough, well enough, to be sure what he would have wanted. Feral had left no instructions. Arachne preserved a record of his EarthSpace waiver, accepted and agreed to, probably without a second thought. Where the record asked for next of kin, Feral had written, "None."

Stephen Thomas sat down and rested against one of the oak saplings. The thin trunk would grow into a mature tree in twenty years, fifty. If Starfarer survived, the oak trees would still be here at the end of the exile.

Sunlight poured down between the brilliant red and yellow leaves. Just as spring was hot back on campus, autumn was hot on the wild side.

"Feral, I wish I had a marker for you," Stephen Thomas said aloud. "I'll get somebody to make you one, as soon as I can. I just couldn't stand to think of you lying there in the morgue. . . ."

He hooked his finger through the thin chain around his neck. The delicate links made a cold line of pressure across the nape of his neck. The crystal pendant swung against his thumb. In some light it was red, in some it was blue, and once in a while it turned black. He stared

into it, twisting it back and forth, watching the colors change.

Stephen Thomas thought about Feral; he thought about looking for his aura. Feral had been unique, surrounded by changing rainbows.

"Victoria's probably right," Stephen Thomas said. "There's no such thing as auras. I make them up to go along with my feelings. To explain them, maybe."

Stephen Thomas wrapped his fingers around the crystal and tugged at it, gently at first, then harder.

"When I met you, I felt the same way I felt when I first met Merry," Stephen Thomas said. "I love Victoria and Satoshi. But that's different. That was slower, and steadier. We all had to work at it. Merry, though . . . sparks. Explosions. All those clich6s.

"But Merry's dead. And you're dead. God damn it, Feral, I'm so sorry.

The chain snapped in his hand. He stared at the broken necklace. A film of blood reddened the gold along a finger's length near the clasp.

Stephen Thomas touched the back of his neck and found the long scratch where the clasp had cut his skin. Salty sweat stung the shallow abrasion. The bloody red-gold chain lay in his hand, tangled around the crystal. Stephen Thomas spilled the necklace onto the bare earth of Feral's grave. Nearby, a silver slug rustled the scatter of dry gold leaves on the ground. Stephen Thomas had called it inside to help him carry Feral's body. Stephen Thomas had been able to manage in the microgravity of the hub. Even coming down the hill, where the perception of weight increased with every step, Feral's weight had been manageable. But he had needed some help in regular gravity.

The lithoclast rippled uncomfortably, impatiently, waiting for him to tell it what to do.

Stephen Thomas did not need it any longer. He dismissed it and watched it crawl away. He only wished he

could as easily command the slugs guarding Blades's house.

How could I have been so wrong about that guy? he wondered.

The heat enervated him. He asked Arachne the reason for producing such an intense Indian summer here in the wild cylinder. Both cylinders ordinarily had mild weather. The temperature range of winter overlapped the temperature range of summer. It seldom froze, and seldom came within complaining distance of body heat. People did sometimes complain that the weather bored them.

Arachne replied that steps were being taken to moderate the temperature. Satoshi would like it over here today, Stephen Thomas thought. Being from Hawaii, Satoshi often complained that Starfarer's weather was too cold. Victoria, on the other hand, had spent much of her childhood in Nova Scotia. She thought that Starfarer had no weather worth mentioning, merely climate.

At the bottom of the hill, an access tunnel opened. The silver slug oozed through it and disappeared, on its way back to its regular maintenance job on the cylinder's outside skin. The tunnel closed. Its hatch, disguised by rocks and dirt and a wilting flower, disappeared against the hillside. The sharp cry of a bird made Stephen Thomas glance up. When he looked down the slope again, he could barely see where the hatch had opened.

He should go home. He should go back to the lab, where the alien cells grew and divided on nutrient plates. By now they had probably produced enough for some analyses to begin. Stephen Thomas tried to find the excitement he should be feeling, but it was too remote. In order to experience elation he would have to open himself to grief as well, grief for Feral and grief for Merry.

He had not been able to fall apart when Merry died and he could not fall apart now. The partnership could not afford it.

STEPHEN THOMAS WOKE. A COLD AND refreshing wind cut the humid, heavy air and rustled the gold leaves overhead. White light speared through the branches and speckled the dry grass.

Back on Earth he would have looked for thunderheads, a thunderstorm, but gentle rain was as extreme as weather ever got on board Starfarer.

Stephen Thomas stretched-and froze. He made himself relax until the ache subsided. He sat up, as cautious as an old man.

"I'll be fucking glad when this is over," he said.

It was possible to change from a

diver back to an ordinary human being. For a decade or so, the U.S. government had aimed a good deal of propaganda at the divers, trying to persuade them to convert.

No diver had ever changed back.

Stephen Thomas could change back if he wanted to, but the viral depolymerase would make him violently ill for weeks. As he was, he could function.

Another factor kept him from the reverse metamorphosis. Arachne's crash had destroyed his medical records and his genetic profile; the destruction of the genetics department crushed his hard-copy backup beyond retrieval. Without the records, there was no sure way to separate the diver genetic material from his own genes.

A wind devil of dry leaves whirled past, paused over Feral's grave, and dissolved. The dry leaves fluttered to the ground.

He pushed his hair behind his ears, climbed to his feet, and stood at the edge of the fresh earth of Feral's grave.

"I'll ask Crimson about a headstone," Stephen Thomas said. "And Infinity will know something to plant."

The crystal glowed black against the drying surface of the disturbed earth. "Goodbye, Feral."

Nerno's chrysalis pulsed gently for hours. It shuddered violently. J.D. sat forward, staring intently at the LTM transmission, enlarging it. The chrysalis hardened into a solid shell, an abalone turned inside out, swirled and knotted with iridescent blue and green mother of pearl.

Nerno's nest grew quiet and still.

J.D. rested in the window seat of her house, watching the LTM transmission, waiting for Nemo to call her back. The nest drew her. But when she returned, Nemo would die.

She felt so strange. Ever since inhaling the link en-

hancer, she had disconnected from her body as if she were drunk. Arachne informed her that the reaction was within the tolerable range of effects. "Tolerable for you," J.D. said aloud. Arachne, of course, did not reply. Starfarer's computer did not engage in rhetorical conversations.

Getting the metabolic enhancer was so easy, she thought. After a couple of days, a couple of biocontrol sessions, I could already call on more energy. I thought enhancing the link would be the same.

She shifted her position in the window seat.

Her head spun. The light felt too bright. The light was too bright, but it had not bothered her so much before.

A faint breeze drifted through the open windows. It felt good. The weather was too hot.

Zev crossed the yard, coming from the river, a fish in one hand and J.D.'s string bag in the other. He saw her, grinned, and waved the fish. J.D. waved in return.

He took the steps to the porch in one stride.

"Are you hungry?"

"I am," she said. That was a difference from being drunk. If she were drunk, she would not be interested in food.

He came into the living room and sat down at the other side of the window seat. He offered her the fish.

"Zev . . . I'd like to cook it, if you don't mind."

She tried to get up. She nearly ran into the LTM display.

Whoops, she thought, bad manners!

She giggled, blinked the display out of her way and reappeared it at arm's length.

Her knees shook. A wave of heat passed up her face. She began to sweat. She sat back down.

Zev watched her with alarm.

"Maybe I won't cook it," she said.

"I'll cook it," Zev said.

"You'll cook it?"

"Sure. We do, sometimes."

"You never did when I was with the divers."

"It was summer."

"Oh." I guess that explains it, J.D. thought, wishing her head would clear.

Zev handed her an orange from the bag.

"Eat that while I cook. There's not very much growing that's ripe yet, it's too early. But there's lots of oranges."

"You didn't have to forage," J.D. said. "I'm sure the central cafeteria has plenty of supplies."

"I guess," Zev said doubtfully. "But I went by, and nobody's there to ask. It was easiest to go fishing."

He took the fish into the kitchen nook. J.D. lay back in the window seat, enjoying the unusual occasion of having someone make lunch for her.

"That smells terrific, Zev."

She peeled the orange and ate a section. She pressed the spicules against the roof of her mouth; they burst, and the sweet, tart juice flowed over her tongue.

To her relief, her head stopped spinning. She did not much like the sensation of being drunk, of having the world whirl around while she stayed still.

She suddenly groaned.

"Did I really say that to Stephen Thomas?" she said in distress.

"Say what to Stephen Thomas?"

"That his hair was down."

"You did say that." Zev joined her, carrying two plates of broiled trout. "Oh, no."

"His hair was down, what's wrong with telling him? You ought to tell him to cut it."

J.D. touched Zev's pale hair fondly. It was short enough to stay out of his eyes when he swam, long enough to fan out around his head when he was in the water.

"I think he likes it long," she said.

Zev rested his head against her hand, then quickly kissed her palm.

"I think you like him," Zev said. He handed her one of the plates. J.D. gave him part of the orange.

"Of course I like him. I like Victoria and Satoshi, too."

She thought she had mastered her reaction to Stephen Thomas. She did not want to talk about it. In her present state, she would say more than she meant to.

She could say it all to Zev. He would find it perfectly comprehensible and natural. Except for her reluctance to admit how she felt. He would find it so natural that he would probably tell Stephen Thomas. J.D. could see nothing coming from that but embarrassment all around.

She took a bite of the fish. It was perfectly cooked; the flakes evaporated in her mouth.

"This is wonderful," she said to Zev. "What did I ever do without you?"

He grinned. "You were an ordinary human being before you met me," he said. "And I was an ordinary diver."

Infinity showed Professor Thanthavong what he had found in the administration building. She called the assistant chancellor.

Gerald Hernminge arrived a few minutes later. He hesitated halfway down the stairs, then strode purposefully the rest of the way to the basement. Infinity explained what had happened. As Gerald listened, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

"How can we remedy this?" Thanthavong asked, her voice sharp. "How could the chancellor do something so stupid, so petty-"

"Please don't yell at me, professor," Gerald Hemminge said. He looked as unhappy as she did. He glanced across the dark basement, over the heads of the artificials, toward the shadowed corners. "I didn't know Chancellor Blades had done this. I would have stopped him if I could."

"We may have to get along without them," Thanthavong said. "Regrowing the brains . . . that may take

resources we can't spare. We'll have to do their work ourselves."

Gerald made a sound of satisfaction, and a wry grin cut through his distress.

"It will amuse me to see Stephen Thomas Gregory beating his shirts against a rock in a stream."

"You and Stephen Thomas should put aside your differences," Thanthavong said. "The expedition can't afford them."

"I would if he would. It won't hurt him to do his own laundry. He has too high an opinion of himself, and his provocative manner-"

11 He has a right to his high opinion," Thanthavong said. "He's a talented young man. My observation is that you provoke each other."

"It isn't just the laundry," Infinity said, feeling provoked himself. Thanthavong and Gerald stopped their back and forth needling. They both looked at Infinity. Gerald had a habit of cocking his head and listening with an expectant, faintly skeptical expression, as if he already knew everything anyone could say to him, as if he were merely waiting to dismiss it.

"The ASes clean up, sure," Infinity said. "But that's just part of keeping everything working. They repair things. They plant the gardens and weed the vegetables and harvest them and cook them-when's the last time you had a hot meal?"

"I've been eating crackers and cheese," Gerald said. "On the run. I haven't used the central cafeteria-are you saying nothing can be cooked?" "I'm saying we'll have to do a lot more work than you think if we can't fix the ASes."

Thanthavong rubbed her chin thoughtfully with one knuckle.

"Somebody's got to grow the food," Infinity said.

"Dig in the dirt?" Gerald said.

"If you want to stay out here longer than the preserved stuff lasts."

"And how long is that?"

"I don't know. Arachne doesn't even know exactly what we came away with and what we left behind-"

"For heaven's sake-"

"Don't blame Infinity," Thanthavong said sharply to Gerald. "I told you Arachne lost backup information in the crashes. Some of this data the web may never even have had. We'll have to take inventory. We'll have to . .

." Her voice trailed off as she considered, then she brought herself back abruptly. "We're lucky someone is looking past the boundaries of their responsibilities," she said to Infinity.

"I suppose so." Gerald stared at the dead artificials again, but the dark corners drew his gaze. He caught his breath, but covered the reaction with a cough. "Can you repair the artificials? Or must we turn Starfarer into a primitive hunting tribe?" He glanced at Infinity. "No offense."

"What?" Infinity kept himself from laughing. What could he say? That his mother's people had been agriculturalists for thousands of years? That the hunting tribes had been a lot of things, none of them "primitive"? That he would truly like to see Gerald in the wild cylinder, trying to play pukka sahib with the shy, rare deer?

They would all be much better off gathering than hunting. A large proportion of the plants growing within Starfarer were edible. He wondered if Gerald had noticed that.

Infinity settled for a shrug. "I'd prefer hunting and gathering to cultivating rice by hand," he said.

The other half of Infinity's heritage was legally Brazilian and ethnically Japanese, but Gerald obviously had no idea what Infinity was talking about. He gave Infinity a blank look.

"Can you repair the artificials?" he said again to Thanthavong. He was sweating.

He doesn't like it down here, Infinity thought. He doesn't like it down here at all.

"Theoretically, of course I know how to regrow the brains," Thanthavong said. "But the technical aspects . . . Obviously, Infinity is correct. We shall have to free resources to repair these creatures. If Arachne's memories of their training are whole, the problem may not be too difficult. If the architecture has to be redesigned from scratch . . ." She lifted her hands, palms up, in a gesture of resignation.

Once more, Gerald glanced around the dark basement. The shadowy artificials surrounded them like a ghostly band of supplicants. Gerald hunched his shoulders.

"I shall have to research the best way to go about the repair," Gerald said. "If you'll excuse me." He hurried up the stairs and disappeared.

"We'd be in a pretty mess," Thanthavong said to Infinity, "if you hadn't noticed this."

"Somebody would have."

"I wonder. We're so wrapped up in what J.D. experienced. . . . Would we all of a sudden look around and see it was too late?"

What she had said to him she had meant as a compliment. But she made him wonder if he had badly overstepped his bounds, and she made him wonder if she thought he was uninterested in Nemo and the alien ship-nest.

He wondered if aristocrats always had that kind of effect. . . .

"Your mother is Japanese?" she said.

"My father."

"How did you come to be named Mendez?"

"My whole name's Infinity Kenjiro Yanagihara y Mendoza. But Mendez is easier for people to remember, and it's the original spelling. From before my mother emigrated."

"Why do you use your mother's name?"

He shrugged. "It's less confusing. I don't look very Japanese. In Brazil it didn't matter, there are a lot of us mongrels around. Most folks knew me as Kenny Yanagihara."

"Did your father grow rice?"

"No, ma'am," Infinity said. "He's . . . he's a lot of

things, but not a farmer. Ronin is more like it. He doesn't grow rice. His family probably never grew rice."

"My father did," Thanthavong said. "In Cambodia. A hundred years ago. With a water buffalo."

She brushed her fingertips across the carapace of the artificial, a touch of sorrow or farewell, and walked toward the stairs.

Infinity followed her out, nonplused by her comment. A hundred years ago? With a water buffalo?

He was not sure of her age, but he knew she was old. Eighty, maybe.

Her father could have been a rice farmer, in Cambodia. A hundred years ago. With a water buffalo.

Carrying the shovel, Stephen Thomas headed home. He had not meant to stay so long, and he wondered how things were going in the genetics department. He checked with Arachne, but found no messages from his students or from his boss.

Involved with Arachne, he stumbled on the rough trail. He dropped the link and put his attention to negotiating the path. He had forgotten how quickly darkness fell in late autumn on board Starfarer. Back in the campus cylinder, where it was spring, the twilights as well as the days were growing longer.

He could not get lost: the sun tube reflected starlight at night, and Arachne could always guide him back to the access if the sky clouded over. As it was doing now. The clouds were thicker and darker than any Stephen Thomas had ever seen here. The temperature had fallen rapidly.

He kept going, following the trail in the darkness as best he could. He touched Arachne now and then to be sure he was headed in the right direction, but he could not stay in constant contact with the computer. He had to keep most of his attention on the trail.

The rain began, a few scattered drops that patted against the dry leaves of the young trees. A rumble of sound rolled over the land.

Thunder.

Stephen Thomas looked along the length of the wild cylinder, amazed to see lightning flicker across the clouds. A break in the sky cover exposed the sun tube, bright with stars, and the far-overhead clouds.

Lightning spiraled down the length of the wild side.

As thunder rumbled around him, Stephen Thomas cursed the lightning, the rain, and Arachne. The trail led up a small hill. He stopped, looking for a way around the base. He had no intention of becoming a human lightning rod. He asked for directions to an access hatch, so he could find shelter underground, but received no reply. The storm cut him off from the web, isolating him from any help. The wind rose, whipping fallen leaves past his ankles. The raindrops hit the ground, coated themselves with dust, bounced back and splashed his legs, and turned into mud. His sore feet slid around in his wet sandals.

The clouds opened. Rain crashed down: the huge, heavy drops fell so fast the air felt like solid water.

A bolt of lightning blasted the earth nearby. The air reeked of ozone, broken cedar, smoke. The rain sizzled and hissed against flames; the fire died with a stench of wet ashes.

Rivulets coursed down the hillside and coalesced into a stream. Stephen Thomas followed the rippling water, looking for shelter. He was soaking wet, and cold, his long hair plastered against his face and straggling down his neck. He wiped rainwater from his eyes.

A lightning flash illuminated the land around him. His eyes and his mind retained a high-contrast picture. The stream was leading him into a gully: he was about to trade being a target of the lightning for being the prey of a wall of water. Even a diver might not survive a flash flood. He dropped the shovel and climbed the rough slope to higher ground, scrabbling up the rock, cursing, scraping his hands on stones.

Out of the reach of the gathering flood, he hunkered

under a scraggle of prickly scotch broom. It gave some protection from the wind, but none at all from the rain. The crisp colorful fallen leaves had turned to a slick, sopping brown mat.

The rain stopped as it had begun: a deluge abruptly changing to a scatter of droplets, then nothing. Stephen Thomas looked up. The clouds had rained themselves away, and the stars bloomed brightly all along the sun-tube.

Rushing brown water washed through the gully below him.

When Stephen Thomas stood up, the scotch broom swept him with another shower. He swore at it, looked around to get his bearings, and picked his way along the edge of the gully toward the trail, The electrical interference with his link had disappeared, for all the difference it made now. He did send a general, irritated note to Arachne about the weather. Arachne noted that the fire danger had ended.

Stephen Thomas hiked through a stand of bushy young trees that showered him with water and dead wet leaves. The trees ended abruptly at the edge of a meadow. The meadow stretched to the steep hill that formed the end of the cylinder. The ferry back to campus waited at the top of the hill, the axis of the cylinder.

When he reached the edge of the boggy field, Stephen Thomas saw someone halfway up the hill, descending in long strides through the low gravity. Stephen Thomas stopped in the shadows of the trees. The person coming down the hill probably could not see him.

It was Griffith.

Griffith unnerved him. Stephen Thomas reminded himself that auras were a figment of his imagination. His perception of Griffith as lacking one meant absolutely nothing. As Victoria had pointed out, Florrie Brown told them all that Griffith was a narc before Stephen Thomas ever thought to look for his aura.

Griffith made him nervous because Griffith made

everybody nervous. He had been the first suspect in Arachne's crash. He was innocent of that charge.

Griffith said he was an accountant for the General Accounting Office. Few believed he worked for the GAO, and nobody believed he was an accountant. Like everyone else, Stephen Thomas believed he had worked against the expedition.

Stephen Thomas moved deeper into hiding among the trees.

Griffith crossed the meadow. He carried a makeshift bedroll. Stephen Thomas wondered why he had not taken a tent and sleeping bag from the storeroom.

It was communal property-but Griffith probably had even less conception of communal property than he had of governing by consensus.

What do I care if he gets wet on his camp-out? Stephen Thomas said to himself.

He stood very quiet as Griffith approached. He was only a few paces from the government agent, and he felt a spark of satisfaction in watching the man, unobserved, from so close a distance.

Griffith stopped.

"Come out of there." He faced Stephen Thomas.

Stephen Thomas hesitated, then shrugged and stepped out from beneath the trees. What could Griffith do to him? Arachne knew he was out here. Stephen Thomas made sure the computer knew Griffith was out here,too.

"You look like hell." Griffith sounded annoyed. "What are you doing in there?"

"Avoiding you," Stephen Thomas said.

Griffith's expression froze.

"What are you doing out here?" Stephen Thomas said.

"None of your damned business." Griffith started away, his shoulders stiff with anger.

"Hey," Stephen Thomas said.

Griffith's pace checked, but he kept going.

"How'd you know where I was?" Stephen Thomas called after him.

Griffith turned back. He looked Stephen Thomas up and down, critically, contemptuously.

"YOU could have been more obvious," he said. "But . . . only if you'd left your scat."

Victoria hesitated on the path to J.D.'s yard. It was later than she had thought. She had spent all day in Physics Hill, analyzing her journey into Nerno's interior. What a strange conglomeration she had come back with. Neither she nor Avvaiyar knew quite what to make of it.

Delicate light poured through the tall windows of J.D.'s main room, and flowed over the wild garden. The huckleberry bushes rustled, their small oval leaves quivering, and something-an owl, a bat?-flew past on whispered wings.

Victoria knocked on the front door of J.D.'s house. Like most of the houses on Starfarer, it had been built and then covered with a hill. Its whole front was windows, except the door. Looking in someone's open windows was bad form.

Backlit by the cool glow, Zev opened the door.

"Hi, Victoria."

"Hi, Zev. Where've you been all day?"

"Professor Thanthavong told J.D. to rest."

"Is that Victoria?" J.D. asked.

"Hi," Victoria called.

Zev stood aside and let her in. She kicked off her shoes at the door. Larger than life, the image of Nerno's chrysalis filled the center of the room, illuminating it. Victoria had kept the same image, much smaller, hovering nearby all day while she worked.

Nothing had changed.

The image overlapped the boxes that remained stacked in random piles in the main room. J.D. had not been here long enough to unpack all her belongings.

Victoria felt comfortable with J.D., and fond of her. It surprised her to remember how brief a time the alien contact specialist had been on board the starship.

J.D. sat in the windowseat, leaning against the side so she could look out the window or at Nerno's image. She had arranged a few things around her: some of her books, a reading light limpeted to the wall, the woven mat Satoshi had given her at her welcoming party. The light was off; J.D.'s attention was on the image of Nemo.

Zev joined her, sitting right-angled to her in the center of the cushioned seat.

Victoria smiled. "You look comfy."

"I feel so strange," J.D. said. "Like I've had too much to drink. I was saying silly things to everybody I saw. I thought I'd better hide out till I felt like myself again."

"Your system's taking a bit of a shock," Victoria said. "I got so involved in analysis-I should have come by to see you earlier."

"I'm okay. Come sit down."

Victoria perched on the other side of the windowseat, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. Zev's body radiated heat.

Stephen Thomas will be like that, soon, Victoria thought.

Zev curled his feet over JDA; his claws gently dimpled her skin above the instep.

"I know the prep is working," J.D. said. "But I don't feel any change in my link."

"Arachne's not set up to dump more information to a person than the regular link can handle," Victoria said. "Not . . . not under normal circumstances."

The safeguards had not worked for Feral. It should have been impossible, but somehow Arachne had overloaded him. His blood pressure had soared, so fast and hard that it blasted open his arteries, his capillaries. The bleeding had simultaneously crushed his brain, and starved it.

J.D. was attempting something very risky.

"Please tell Nemo to be careful when you try this," Victoria said. She knew better than to ask J.D. to reconsider.

"I will. Don't worry." Her gaze drifted to the image of the chrysalis. "It's so quiet," she said. "I got used to the attendants always fluttering around. Did you notice, you could always hear them even if you couldn't see them?"

"No," Victoria said. "I guess I wasn't in the nest long enough."

They talked for a while about Victoria's analysis of Nerno's center. Zev sat between them. Despite his youth, his exuberance, he was content to listen and watch in silence and without trying to draw their attention to himself. He impressed Victoria more and more, the longer she knew him. "Is it what you thought?" J.D. asked. "Neutronium?" Something had to give the planetoid its mass. normal asteroid its size would have negligible gravity.

person would be able to leap off its surface and orbit it before coming down again.

"I don't think so," Victoria said. "I think the gravity source . . . the power source . . . is even more dense."

"A black hole?" J.D. exclaimed.

"Economy quantum sized."

"Pick one up in any hardware store," J.D. said dryly.

"Right. Plus a nice iron shell for it to eat, a drip charge, and an electrostatic field generator. . . . But what the hell do you do to it to make it carry you around the galaxy?"

"A mere trifle," J.D. said.

They fell silent. A pleasurable tension rose between them; the affection and possibility Victoria always felt around J.D. increased. She extended her hand to J.D. J.D. gazed at her, then enclosed Victoria's long dark fingers in her strong square hand.

"Is everything all right?" J.D. said. "I mean She gestured with her free hand, encompassing all of Starfarer.

"I wanted it all to be perfect," Victoria said softly. "We'd take off with a fanfare, and explore, and come back with . . . I didn't know what, but some treasure.

Not a material treasure, an intellectual one." She rested her forehead against her knees. "Some fanfare. Some treasure." She looked up again; if she did not hide her face maybe she could keep from crying. "And I'm worried about my family back home, my great-grandmother especially. I wish you'd gotten to meet her. I wish she'd come on the expedition."

"She'll be all right," J.D. said, her voice reassuring. "They won't blame our families for what we've done. Surely."

"Grangrana has no way of knowing if we're still alive," Victoria said. "She'll be so worried. . . . And Satoshi's parents. They're wonderful. They'll stand up for us. But they'll be scared for us, too."

"What about Stephen Thomas? Doesn't he have family back home, too?"

"Just his dad. I mean, I guess he could find his mom if he really wanted to, but he never has. And Greg is . . . kind of self-centered. He knows all the right buttons to push." She sighed. "I try to like him, I really do.

But it's hard to get worked up over worrying about him."

J.D. squeezed Victoria's hand.

"And I miss my cat!" Victoria said suddenly. "No matter what I said to Alzena, I couldn't persuade her to let me bring Halley along." Sometimes she dreamed of petting the sleek black cat; she would wake remembering the soft vibration of Halley's silent purr. Victoria laughed. "Isn't that ridiculous? Everything that's happened, and I think about missing my cat!" "It's all right," J.D. said. "It's understandable."

"You don't need to hear all this!" Victoria said. "I meant to come and see how you're feeling, not to whine all over you." She let go of J.D.'s hand and pulled herself back, hugging her knees. In a moment she would leave.

She would leave J.D. and Zev alone.

"J.D. and I are going swimming in the morning," Zev said. "In the ocean." Victoria glanced up again. At first she thought Zev's comment was a complete non sequitur. But J.D. and

Zev were looking at each other with understanding, with happiness.

"Would you like to come with us?" J.D. said.

"I'd love to," Victoria said, surprised and pleased by the invitation. "We'll stop by for you. Five a.m."

"Five!" Victoria said.

J.D. grinned. "Second thoughts?"

"Not at all. If you're sure you want company-T'

"I'm sure," J.D. said.

Alone in the dark basement of the administration building, Esther Klein put a box of probes and regenerators on the floor and tossed her lime-green baseball jacket beside it. The hot afternoon had even penetrated to the basement. Repair supplies and the dead artificials surrounded her. Over the dank scent of the basement lay the hint of mycelial growth, and ozone, and decay.

"I'm going to kill Infinity," she muttered. "I'm going to kill him." Esther could have-should have-been out on the surface of the cylinders, in space, checking damage and making sure the silver slugs were properly maintaining the starship. Instead, she was stuck down here nursing sick artificials. It was all Infinity's fault. He was the only person on board who knew she had worked as an artificials tech.

But somebody had to do it, and she was the only person here with any experience. How the administration could let all the techs get recalled and not replace them . . . Esther supposed that was part of Blades's plan. It was convenient for him to let the techs go unreplaced. If they had remained on Starfarer, he would have chosen some other subsystem to disable. Esther remained with the expedition only because she had been piloting the transport that was trapped in the dock when Staty~rer plunged into transition.

Fixing the artificials is the least I can do, I guess, she thought. Considering how much trouble I made by following orders. Following orders! I'm lucky Gerald or one of the senators hasn't punched me out for dragging them along on the expedition.

On the other hand, if I had undocked, I wouldn't be along on this trip, and I'd probably be in jail.

She rubbed her hands down the seat of her pants, rummaged for a probe in her toolbox, and set to work on the first artificial stupid.

She cracked the sea] on its brain pan. Nothing. Blowing out her breath in relief, she opened the bioelectronic brain the rest of the way. Not too bad. Desiccated, like a crust of algae on a mudflat. If all the artificials were like this, she could resuscitate them in short order. She hooked up a rehydration tube and watched for a few minutes. The rumpled surface engorged with saline and fructose and salicylic acid, responding to the rich mix of hormones and growth factors. The fissures deepened.

Esther patted the artificial.

"You're going to remember everything, aren't you?" she asked it hopefully. "Arachne isn't going to be much help, so I'd appreciate it if you'd come out of this with your memories intact. You aren't gonna be much use to me as a stupid vegetable."

She went on to the next artificial and broached its seal.

The brain case hissed and burst open. Esther jumped back. Putrid bits of bioelectronic conductor sprayed her chest. Esther gagged and stripped off her shirt. It fell with a soggy thud. Bioelectronics rotted with all the worst qualities of animal, vegetable, and fungal matter: the sweet and nauseating smell of decomposing meat and the slimy deterioration of plant cells, all held together in a yeasty matrix.

First she hosed herself down, then her shirt, and finally the artificial, sluicing the spoiled brain tissue into the waste digester. The smell hung thick around her. It was not very toxic, but it sure was nasty.

She was soaking wet. Now she was glad of the day's warmth. If she had been working in her jacket, the unofficial uniform of transport pilots, it would be ruined.

I bet Starfarer's storeroom doesn't have any fluorescent chartreuse baseball jackets, she thought.

Esther set to the laborious task of cleaning the brain case. She sterilized it, seeded and sealed it, and hooked it to a feeder tube. That one would be a week regrowing. Then someone would have to retrain it.

She had Arachne display the transmission from Nerno's chamber next to the AS brain schematics. It had not changed since the chrysalis hardened; Esther had practically memorized it. She asked for some music. Trash rock. At least the recent music archives had not been wiped out in the system crash.

She set to work on another brain.

After eight hours, she was cursing Infinity under her breath. The first artificial had been a stroke of cruel good luck. Of the five open ASes, only the first had survived with any usable brain at all. Eighty percent complete destruction rate. Hands on her hips, she gazed around at the hundreds of robots that waited for her attention.

She felt like a cross between Dr. Frankenstein and an AS housekeeper. Or, maybe, considering the spatters of gunk on her clothes, she was more like Dr. Frankenstein's assistant Igor. She wiped a smudge off her wrist, thinking, The doctor never got brains all over his nice white lab coat.

"I need some help here, guys," she said to the deaf and blind and mindless robots.

She could hardly ask Infinity for help. He had more than enough to do.

But Esther knew almost no one else on board. Except Kolya Cherenkov, and she was not going to ask the cosmonaut to do this job.

She only got over to Starfarer once a month or so. Most of Esther's piloting had been between O'Neill colonies. She always accepted the Starfarer run with pleasure.

Esther travelled a lot, she seldom stayed long in one place, and she did not like to sleep alone. Whenever she

boarded Starfarer, all she wanted to do was take Infinity Kenjira Yanagihara y Mendoza to bed with her. He was one of her favorite lovers. But that had not left her much time for making other friends on board the starship.

She asked Arachne to send out a general request for help for tomorrow morning. She cleaned off her tools and put them away. She let the brain schematic fade, and took one last glance at Nemo's chamber. In all the time she had been working, the squidmoth's chrysalis had not changed.

Her shirt lay in a scummy puddle. She had hosed off most of the crud, but doubted she would ever want to wear it again.

Esther shrugged, grabbed her jacket, and left the shirt where it was. Outside the basement, the evening would still be hot. Too hot for her jacket, and she would not even need her shirt.

She ran up the basement stairs, eager to get outside. She was tired and hungry.

She emerged into air so cool it surprised her.

The chill felt wonderful on her bare shoulders and breasts. It had been too hot lately. She set off for Infinity's house with a spring in her step.

A cold breeze hit her. The skin on her arms turned all gooseflesh, and her nipples hardened. Even then she resisted putting on her jacket.

Don't be a jerk, she said to herself. It's dumb to feel so cold just because it was so hot earlier. She slipped into the lurid green satin. Arachne must be fixing the weather, she thought. Glad to hear it.

Stephen Thomas returned home, dirty and sore. It was very late-or very early-and he guessed Victoria and Satoshi had already gone to bed.

Instead oftaking a shower, he told the house to fill the bathtub. As he watched the water rise along the sides of the azure tub, he tried to remember when the

last time was that he had taken a bath. He usually showered, preferably with one or both of his partners. Sometimes they sat together and soaked afterwards, lounging in clean hot water.

He dropped his shorts and shirt on the floor and stepped into the big blue tub.

The mud swirled away from his dirty feet.

Oh, shit, he thought, I should have at least rinsed off. . . .

But the hot water felt so good, rising around his hips, sliding up his back and belly and chest as he lay down, that he could not bring himself to start over again. He stretched out and let himself relax.

He spread his hands out on the surface; the translucent webs between his fingers nearly disappeared. Today his skin was the color of strong tea. He pulled his hand through the water, feeling the new power of his swimming stroke.

Like his hands and his skin, his lungs were changing. Soon he would be able to store more oxygen, and hold his breath much longer than normal. If "normal" meant anything anymore, in relation to Stephen Thomas.

When the changes were complete, he would possess an ability unique among aquatic mammals: he would be able to extract oxygen directly from the water. In an emergency, breathing like a fish would support the life of a mammal for a little while.

Stephen Thomas balfway expected to be possessed by an overwhelming urge to return to the primordial sea, but that had not happened.

Except, he thought, I'm taking a bath.

"The call of the sea," he muttered sarcastically. "Maybe I ought to add some salt."

Zev talked about swimming all the time, but the talk was habit, and homesickness. Staying dry did not harm his health; he had no gills that had to stay wet.

Air bubbles caught beneath the fine new hairs on Stephen Thomas's arms and legs. They tickled. As they escaped and rose to the water's surface, they made a faint, cheerful crinkling noise. Stephen Thomas rubbed

his hands down his legs, down his arms, down his belly, currying the bubbles away.

His skin did not itch so badly, now that his transparent gold pelt had finished growing. His joints had stopped aching, though his shoulders hurt from digging Feral's grave.

He was beginning to wonder if the pains inside his body were all from his encounter with the silver slug. They should be fading. Instead, they had intensified. His pubic bone hurt with a sharp, hot stab and even his penis felt sore. Would he grow fur there, too? That would be too weird.

He knew as much about divers, or as little, as any average ordinary human being. He had never been fascinated with them, as J.D. was, and none of his work as a geneticist had included Changelings. No one worked on Changelings anymore. First it became impossible to get grants for the research, and then the changes themselves became illegal in the United States.

Stephen Thomas told the house to warm the bath. Warm water gushed from the faucet onto his feet.

His toes shot pain up his leg. He snatched his foot away, thinking the tub had burned him. But the water was only comfortably hot. He sat up in the tub and raised his foot to look at it.

Dark bruises arced across the base of each toenail, and the nails felt loose. Stephen Thomas wiggled the nail of his big toe. He grimaced.

It hurt, but it hurt in a way he remembered from his childhood. It was the itchy pain of a loose baby tooth.

Zev's feet had sharp semiretractile claws that curved over the ends of his toes, recessed into the flesh. Stephen Thomas had not thought much about how his nails would turn to claws, and he found that he did not want to think much about it now. He stopped wiggling his toenail and let his foot sink back into the heat.

The idea of being able to breathe underwater intrigued him. He wondered how far the changes had gone. He lay back in the bath, letting the water rise around his head. His hair fanned out, tickling his neck,

drifting between his shoulder blades. Warm water crept up his face, covered his lips, covered his eyes. He could hardly tell the water from the steamy, humid air.

Stephen Thomas plunged his head the rest of the way underwater and took a fast, deep breath.

The water filled his throat and gushed into his lungs, choking him. He erupted from the bath, gasping. He leaned over the side of the tub, coughing water onto the floor. He nearly threw up.

Finally he collected himself, and hunched in the cooling bath. His chest and his throat hurt. The ache travelled downward and lodged in his belly. I guess I'm not a diver yet, he thought.

He opened the drain, stood up, and splashed out of the tub. Droplets of water sparkled all down his body, trapped by the gold pelt. He curried off the water as he had curried away the air bubbles. He needed a sweat-scraper, the kind grooms used on horses or on Bronze Age athletes.

Rubbing himself with a towel, he went down the hall to his room. But in the doorway, he hesitated. He turned away from his comfortable, familiar mess and went to the end of the hall, to the room that would have been Merry's, to the room Feral had slept in. The partnership had never used it before Feral came to visit.

The futon was made up; the shelf doors were closed. It was as if no one had ever stayed here. As if Feral had never existed.

Stephen Thomas slid open the door to the built-in shelves. Feral's few extra clothes lay in a neat stack.

Stephen Thomas closed the shelf door again. He hung his towel carefully on the rack, got into Feral's bed, curled up around the deep pain of his pelvic bone, and fell asleep.

LIKE THE STROKES OF A BRUSH PAINTING, beach grass covered the soft dunes. Beyond the dunes lay Starfarer's ocean.

J.D. walked along a path too narrow to have been made by human feet. She wondered who or what had formed the path-and saw a tiny hoofprint, a small pile of horse droppings. The tough, sharp-edged grass would be little temptation for the miniature horses, but they might like the salt, and the flat freedom of the beach.

J.D. climbed the gentle rise of the dune. At the top, she paused to look across the shore.

The ocean circled the park end of

Starfarer's campus cylinder. It was the pulse of the starship's ecosystem, and the breath of its weather. The smell of salt sparkled in the onshore breeze, and the dry grains of sand hissed as they spun past J.D.'s feet.

Open ocean created long crescents of white beach, separated by headlands and smoothed by the surf. Fqr overhead, on the shore beyond the sun tube, opposite this point on the cylinder, barrier islands protected salt marshes. The lowlands buffered the air and the water and offered shelter and spawning grounds to many of Starfarer's creatures.

The hill that formed the cap of the cylinder rose from the far edge of the ocean, at the rim. The hill supported an ice field on one slope, hot springs on another. Their cold and warm currents circulated the seawater and helped drive the weather.

Zev stopped beside her, staring out at the ocean. He glanced at J.D., his face glowing.

"You go on ahead," she said softly. "I want to talk to Victoria for a minute."

He hesitated, then whooped in excitement and took out for the sea. He skidded down the face of the dune and dropped the beach blanket. Racing across the narrow crescent beach, kicking up bright showers of dry sand, he flung off his shirt; he hopped on one foot, then the other, while he stripped off his shorts.

Zev splashed into the shallow water, pushed forward, swam a few strokes, kicked his heels in the air, .and vanished.

"He's eager, , Victoria said, a smile in her voice. She stopped beside J.D. "He's homesick, I think."

"He doesn't act it."

"He doesn't mope . . . but . . . when you spend time with the divers, you get used to a lot of contact. A lot of touch. He doesn't get that here."

"He docsn't?" Victoria sounded skeptical, and amused. "Could have fooled me."

"Not like back at his home."

The dune grass ended abruptly. J.D. and Victoria

crossed the beach: soft deep dry white sand, a narrow line of drying seaweed and small shells, then damp, yielding dark sand. It was easier to walk, here where the tide had just gone out, where the siphon-holes of clams pocked the surface and squirted when J.D. stamped her foot.

Out in the low breakers, Zev surfaced, waved, beckoned, and disappeared again.

"Are you going to join him?"

"In a while," J.D. said. "Let's go over by that piece of driftwood." She scooped up the beach blanket, and then she thought: Driftwood?

The huge, gnarled tree trunk lay above the highwater line, down where the beach began to curve out to a low headland. Its twisted, weather-silvered roots reached into the air. The trunk itself was larger in diameter than J.D. was tall. The top of the trunk had been broken off in a jagged point, as if wind had uprooted it and the fall had shattered it.

If it had ever lived.

J.D. touched the trunk. It felt like wood, and when she knocked against it with her knuckles, it resounded with a familiar, woody thunk "It is wood! I thought it'd be rock foam. How-?"

Victoria grinned. "Realistic, eh? Cellulose and lignin and what-all.

Crimson sculpted it. She said any self-respecting beach should have cedar driftwood on it."

"It's handsome." J.D. stroked the smooth, weathered surface. "I miss big trees."

"There are some, over on the wild side. Twenty years old, from one of the O'Neills."

"Twenty years old?" J.D. smiled. The broken end of the driftwood revealed the sculpted growth rings. "This would be hundreds of years old."

"Crimson's good, isn't she? She told me she'd grown it layer by layer, and cooked the sculptural material so even the isotopic ratios would be right." "She's very talented." J.D. let her day pack slide off her shoulders, spread out the blanket beside the tree trunk, and sank down crosslegged.

"I don't remember the last time I went swimming," Victoria said. "I've never swum in Starfarer's ocean." She took off her floppy red T-shirt and kicked off her sandals. She was wearing a shiny blue two-piece bathing suit.

Zev had paced them as they walked along the shore. He waved again, called to J.D., bodysurfed halfway to the beach, then did a flip-turn and vanished into the waves again.

"Good lord, he's going to break his neck!" Victoria said.

"No, don't worry. He knows where the bottom is."

"Shall we swim?"

"I want to talk to you for a minute, first."

Victoria knelt beside J.D.

"I'm listening."

Zev was used to older adults gathering to talk while the younger adults swam and played. He was patient, and he knew J.D. would join him soon. He looked forward to casting off the restrictive land manners for a few hours, and he wished he had someone to swim with now while he waited for J.D. and Victoria. He wondered if Victoria's presence meant he and J.D. would have to maintain land manners. How would Victoria know diver manners?

Victoria's intensity both scared and intrigued him. He knew she did not altogether approve of his being along on the expedition. Still, she had let him accompany the alien contact department, so she must like him just a little.

Among the divers, Zev had spoken for J.D. to Lykos; J.D. must have spoken for him to Victoria.

While he waited for J.D., he swam through the shallow ocean.

The starship spun one direction; he swam the other direction, minus-spin, because it felt as if he were swimming downhill. The sensation amused him.

Paralleling the shore, he followed the wide curve of the crescent beach, rounded the headland, and skirted close to the dangerous and exciting rough water. He probed the ocean with sound. He heard and tasted the weathered gnarls of the rock, and the seaweed and barnacles, periwinkles and limpets, anemones and starfish that inhabited the intertidal zone. Offshore, a school of fish scintillated past.

On the other side of the headland, the beach sloped shallowly into the sea, then rose again to form a barrier island half a kilometer offshore. Zev swam through the channel, staying on the surface. The water was silty and brackish and the bottom sand turned to mud. The taste of algae and reeds, shrimp and crabs and the bottomdwellers of sheltered bays, filled his mouth and nose. He stroked toward shore till he could stand, chest deep, in the water. He put his feet into the deep warm mud of the river delta, for the pleasure of feeling the life it succored vibrating against his skin. He pushed off backwards and kicked along like an otter, looking up, tracing out the shore of Starfarer's ocean belt.

He passed the end of the island. Another headland stretched into the sea, separating the delta from an open beach. Zev swam around it and into cold, exhilarating water. He dove, touched bottom, pushed off, exploded all the way out of the water at the apex of his jump, and splashed back into the waves.

Ahead he heard the steady splash of another swimmer. Not J.D. or Victoria, someone swimming near the small crescent beach. Zev turned over and swam hard, glad to find a swimmer to play with. When J.D. was ready, she would call his name and he would hear her.

He reminded himself to maintain his land manners, even though he was in the water. The ordinary humans owned this place, and the customs of divers carried no weight.

Even J.D. had taken time to get used to diver man ners. He remembered how shy she had been at first. For at least - a week, when she came to live with his family back on Earth, she had worn a bathing suit that covered most of her body. Sometimes she even wore a wet suit.

Zev could not imagine swimming in clothes. Now J.D. swam naked, just like a diver. She was not shaped like a diver, but that was all right. He remembered the first time she had joined in playing with him and his siblings and cousins; he remembered the first time he had swum beneath her and stroked her body from her throat to her knees. fie loved the way her body felt against his hands, against his skin. He loved the weight of her breasts, the taste of her tongue. He liked it when they played together in the water, and he liked land sex as well. It felt more serious to Zev, somehow, though that might be because it was just him and J.D. and they concentrated only on each other.

He felt excited. The tip of his penis protruded from his body, into the cold water.

He gave up trying to figure it all out. Making love seriously, making love playfully: he liked both.

Ahead of him, the other swimmer churned the water. Zev remembered how astonished Chandra had been by the differences between male divers and male human beings. He did not want to startle the other swimmer. He let his penis withdraw again.

He touched the second swimmer with his voice. She did not react: she did not know how to listen.

At first he did not recognize her. She looked different underwater. People always did, with their bodies made transparent by echoes. But he was close enough to see her with his eyes. It was Ruth Orazio, the United States senator. Suddenly wary, Zev wondered if she had been involved in deciding that divers should work for the military.

He hung back, ready to dive and disappear, but willing to be friends. He cried out, in the air, with a questioning whistle, a sound of greeting.

She glanced over her shoulder, saw him, and stopped swimming. She turned toward him, treading water, and lifted one hand above the surface in a tentative greeting. Zev ducked, stroked once, and came up beside her. While he was underwater he traced her with his voice more completely, so he would be sure to recog-

nize her immediately next time he saw her swimming. Her bathing suit made it harder to see all the way through her. But not impossible.

"Hi," she said. "Getting some exercise, too?"

"Exploring the sea," he said. He reached up and pushed his wet hair off his forehead with his webbed hand.

"You're Zev, right?"

"Yes. And your name is Ruth Orazio." A strange way to be introduced, by speaking the other person's name, Zev thought. He wondered how two land people introduced themselves if they did not know each other. In the sea, when divers or orcas met, they gave their own names.

"Just Ruth. I'm beat. God, the water's cold today. I need to get where I can sit down, okay?"

Zev followed her toward shore. The waves were very gentle here. Soon Ruth could stand up and walk. She wrung the water from her hair.

Zev stood up and waded beside her. When she was thigh-deep in the gentle surf, she turned to look out over the sea, toward the rocky cliffs of Starfarer's end.

"It's so beautiful down here, I'm surprised there aren't more people. And more houses."

Zev fell to his knees before her, hugged her hips, and pillowed the side of his face against her belly. She stiffened, startled, then relaxed a little and looked at him curiously.

"What are you . . . T'

"I can't hear it, not yet." Zev smiled at Ruth Orazio, blissfully. "It's very little!"

She paled. "How did you . . . T'

"I saw, of course. Can I help teach it to swim?" It would be wonderful to have some youngsters here. He missed his little sister and his cousins. He splashed back in the water, gazing up at Ruth.

"You saw?"

"Underwater."

She did not understand.

"Everything's transparent, " he said.

"Oh. Sound. Of course. Everything would be."

Her expression was so different than what he expected: he was afraid he had misunderstood. He stood UP.

"Aren't you . . . aren't you going to keep it? 1-1 thought since you chose it, you would He stumbled to a stop.

He had not discussed this with J.D. But he had told her, as it was only polite to do, that he had not chosen to be fertile. She had assured him in turn that she too was in control of her reproductive abilities. So ordinary humans were like divers in the matter of deciding to bear children. Or J.D. was even more extraordinary than Zev already knrw.

Or something had gone wrong, and Ruth had to make a decision about it.

He felt confused and embarrassed, when he only wanted to feel joy for Ruth Orazio and her coming child.

"Did you choose?" he asked.

"Yes--of course I did. I want it She stopped and took a long, deep breath. "Zev, promise me something."

"If I can."

"My lover and I have been trying to have kids for a long time. I've had a couple of miscarriages." She hesitated. "Do you know what that means?"

"Yes. I'm sorry." Divers had an even higher rate of miscarriage than ordinary human beings. That did not make the loss any easier.

"It's hard to handle, when that happens," she said. "It's even harder when everybody knows, and then you have to tell them you've lost it."

No diver would have to be told; it would be obvious.

But it would be hard, Zev thought, if someone tried to congratulate you on your happiness, and you had to tell them you were sad instead.

"Yes," he said again.

"So . . . please don't tell anyone you know. Till I'm sure I won't lose it. All right?"

He could not help feeling that she was not telling him something-but he could not think what it might be.

,,Afl right." He agreed reluctantly; he did not know what else to do. "I have to go. A friend is waiting for me.

"Go ahead," she said. "And-thanks for giving me your word."

He waded toward deeper water. When the waves rose around his chest, he glanced back.

"I didn't mean to . . . to trouble you," he said. "Do you have friends to be with?"

"Sure," she said quickly. "Sure I do. You go on, now."

He stroked forward through the waves, and dove.

J.D. wondered why it was so hard to discuss, on land, a subject that was so easy and natural in the sea. She wondered why it was so hard to discuss it with Victoria, who found her attractive, whom she had kissed.

"Divers and ordinary humans have different manners," she said to Victoria. "Zev behaves differently on land than in the water. So do 1, but it's easier for me. The land manners, I mean, because they're what I'm used to. It took me a while to get used to the way divers behave with each other, back on Earth. They play a lot. And their play's very sexual." The words for sex and play were nearly indistinguishable in true speech, the language divers learned from the orcas.

"Yes?" Victoria said.

J.D. glanced out at the sea, and obliquely overhead. The ocean extended in a blue and silver circle all the way around this end of Starfarer. She could see nearly three-quarters of the circle; directly overhead it vanished behind the brilliance of the light tube, and she could not look in that direction.

"If it will make you uncomfortable," J.D. said to Victoria, "for either of us to touch you while you're

swimming, I'll tell Zev that we're using land manners in the ocean today." "It wouldn't make me uncomfortable to touch you," Victoria said. "Quite the opposite. And Zev . . . intrigues me. The question is, what do you want to do?"

"I'd like . . . I'm looking forward to playing. With both of you."

Victoria grinned. "That sounds like fun, eh?"

J.D. smiled in return. "Yes. It does. Let's go swimming.,,

She flipped off her sandals with her toes, stood up, and unbuttoned her shirt. She was not wearing a bathing suit, and she felt shy about undressing in front of Victoria. She faced the ocean and took off her pants. She was built like a long-distance swimmer, medium tall and stocky. She had done competitive endurance swimming when she was in school.

Recently her endurance swimming had consisted of trying to keep up with the divers, a task an order of magnitude harder than swimming a sea race.

Taking a deep breath, she let it out and dropped her shirt. Nearby,

Victoria dropped her bathing suit on the sand.

"Let's go!" She sprinted for the water, laughing, free and excited.

Swimming underwater, Zev heard his name-sound, in J.D.'s voice with her unique true-speech accent. He replied. He could hear her from both directions: without mechanized craft making engine noises, sound could bounce around and around the cylinder. He could hear multiple sets of echoes, each one fainter than the last.

JDA voice came a moment sooner from in front of him than from behind him.

He had swum more than halfway around the cylinder. The shortest way to return, and the most fun, was to swim the rest of the way around in the minus-spin direction. He plunged ahead. The faster he swam, the steeper downhill slope he perceived. He would be back to his starting point in a short time.

Suddenly aware of the restrictions in his movements, the small size of Starfarer, Zev felt closed in. Orcas could travel a hundred kilometers in a day. He was on board a vessel a few kilometers in circumference, twice that in length. Its ocean took up only a narrow ring along one end. Swimming hard through the cold water, anxious to meet J.D., Zcv passed the source of the chill current: a small glacier, flowing and dripping down one narrow angle of the cylinder's end. Zev swam as fast as he could. Bits of ice, calved by the glacier, bobbed on the waves. They were too small to be icebergs, or even ice floes. They were ice cubes, nearly freezing the water, chilling the air. His breath steamed.

Zev was not arctic adapted. Divers had discussed adapting themselves for polar life, but Zev liked the temperate climate of the Puget Sound wilderness. During most seasons back home, the water was cold. But not this cold. He had never swum in such cold water before. His body reacted, his metabolism kicking into high gear, pumping out heat as fast as the cold drained it.

The webs between his fingers paled as his capillaries contracted, conserving heat within his body. He pushed himself to keep going. He could hear the end of the cold water, not very far ahead: his searching voice echoed against the rough interface where the cold current plunged beneath the warm gulf stream.

In the distance, J.D. swam toward him. But she was slower than usual. She was swimming plus-spin. She would feel as if she were going uphill.

Zev asked Arachne if the current was always this cold, and found that the computer web was attempting to solve the problem of the unseasonably warm weather. He began to shiver, deep and hard. He called out to J.D.

She answered, greeting him, teasing him. New energy propelled him.

J.D. heard Zev's call. She replied to him, caressing him with her voice. She heard a change in the water.

She paused for a moment to look ahead. The surface turned from soft blue to dark, dense blue. Zev was fifty meters past the boundary. She did not know what the difference was until she plunged into the frigid current. She gasped and nearly stopped, kicked her metabolic enhancer, and ploughed into the swirling mix of currents.

Zev swam doggedly forward, his stroke rough and noisy instead of smooth and silent.

"Whew!" J.D. said in true speech. "It's cold over here! "

She flip-tumed beside him and matched his speed and direction. She laughed in delight at the change from plus-spin to minus-spin, as if she had caught a wave.

She swam very close to Zev, letting her motion pull him along. Zev let his arms relax against his sides, and rode J.D.'s strength through the rough boundary.

They broke out of the cold, into a current so warm it felt tropical. Zev whistled in pleasure and relief, spiraled out of J.D.'s wake, and let himself sink.

J.D. sank beside him, immersing herself in the heat. "Are you okay?"

"Just cold," he said.

"Your hands are freezing!" She chafed his chilly fingers, then rose with him to the surface, expelled her breath, and drew in fresh air. She wished she had the artificial lung that had aided her when she lived with the divers. She had left it back in the wilderness. Zev had lent the lung to Chandra, then released it.

J.D. put her arms around him. He held her tight, his head on her shoulder. They drifted downward again.

"You rescued me!" Zev said.

"Nonsense." She blew a stream of bubbles at him. "You were all of thirty meters from the gulf stream."

"I.didn't know it would be so cold," he said. "Or maybe I wouldn't have swum all the way around."

"It was cold back there, wasn't it?" J.D. said.

Zev warmed up quickly.

"Do you want to rest?" J.D. asked. She felt full of energy, exhilarated with the effort of the swim.

"No," he said. He grinned. His eyes were bright. "It's good to know everything isn't safe on Starfarer. "

They surfaced and sidestroked against the warm current, facing each other. J.D. let her fingers caress Zev from collarbone to groin. She kissed him.

He had just learned to kiss. She explored his lips and his sharp canine teeth with her warm, soft tongue, then reluctantly drew away.

"Come on, let's go meet Victoria."

"Do we have to use land manners?" Zev said.

"No," J.D. said. "Not here. Not at all."

Victoria was a strong but inexperienced swimmer. J.D. had not wanted to criticize her, but she lost a lot of the power of her stroke because she did not know exactly how to place it. She churned valiantly ahead. J.D. was impressed that she had kept swimming through the open water, rather than heading to shore and waiting in the shallows.

Zev dove. The pressure of the water caressed J.D. as he passed her. He swam close beneath Victoria.

He startled her: she stopped swimming and trod water, kicking hard. He surfaced. Victoria grinned at him, and then, to J.D.'s surprise, jackknifed and dove beneath them both. Victoria's back touched J.D.'s knees, her feet. She surfaced, sputtering water. J.D. faced her, astonished, delighted, and Victoria flicked drops of water from her fingertips into J.D.'s face. Zev circled them both, reaching out with quick touches of his long-fingered hand, his sharp-clawed toes.

J.D.'s body produced energy, heat, adrenaline. She dove, swam between Victoria's feet, and kicked toward the surface. She slid up behind Victoria, stroking her from her heel up her leg, along her buttocks and her spine. Victoria turned to catch her. Their bodies pressed together.

They sank beneath the surface. Bubbles escaped from J.D.'s mouth and nose, tickling Victoria's face.

Victoria broke away and kicked toward the surface. J.D. and Zev rose beside her.

"It's okay," J.D. said. "We're right here."

"I know," Victoria said. She was apprehensive, but not panicked. "It's too deep for me. Let's go closer to shore."

"I wish we had swimming lungs," J.D. said. But even artificial lungs were not the same as swimming free, like a diver.

Victoria set out toward a calm, sandy cove, a small sheltered beach, making good speed despite her thrashing swimming stroke. Zev glided up beside her and J.D. swam on her other side, helping draw her along.

"Swim smooth," Zev said. He showed her a good surface stroke. "You won't get tired so fast, and you won't attract sharks."

"Sharks!" She took in a mouthful of water and sputtered it at him. "There aren't any sharks! The biggest predator is tuna fish."

"Maybe you'll attract tuna fish," he said.

J.D. deliberately put some splash into her swimming stroke. "I love tuna fish," she said. "Is this all I have to do to get one?"

Exasperated, Zev dove. J.D. felt him swimming below her. Soon she noticed that Victoria was swimming more smoothly.

The bottom shoaled up beneath them. The water was blue and clear and warm, the bottom bright with coral and fish.

"It's so beautiful here," J.D. said.

Victoria turned to float face down, her eyes open, gazing into the bright water. J.D. dove beneath her and swam face to face. She reached up. Tentatively, they touched hands. J.D. let herself rise. She kissed Victoria, quick and soft. Zev joined them, brushing his hand up Victoria's back and down across her small breast, her dark nipple. He dove between them, stroking them both with his body and his hands.

J.D. spun out and surfaced to breathe. The sea bottom shoaled up again. The coral gave way to soft bright sand.

They reached a spot where Victoria could stand. The water reached to her shoulders. J.D. came up behind

her. The sea buoyed J.D.'s heavy breasts. She put her arms around Victoria. Victoria turned and drew her down to kiss her, deep and long.

"Is this how divers play?" Victoria whispered, holding her, pressing her body close to JDA.

"Yes.,,

"Serious play." She smiled.

Zev surfaced behind J.D. He slid his hand over J.D.'s shoulder and around to trace the lines of her collarbone. He nibbled the nape of her neck. Victoria placed one hand over his, and slipped her other hand down J.D.'s side, from her waist to her hip and between her thighs. J.D.'s nipples hardened and her heart pounded. The rhythm reached her center, and flowered like a whirlpool, opening.

At her garden gate, Victoria kissed Zev and J.D. Zev's lips were very warm, J.D.'s cool and soft. Victoria held J.D., letting herself relax for a moment within J.D.'s embrace.

"See you later, okay?"

"Soon."

She smiled and watched them walk together, hand in hand, along the path to J.D.'s house. Arachne's holographic image of Nerno's chamber appeared nearby, and paced them.

Victoria asked the computer web to show her the alien scene. It had remained static since Nerno's chrysalis hardened.

Victoria turned through the opening in the rounded earth wall that bracketed her yard. Carnations covered the slopes, blooming wildly, pink and white and red, filling the air with their spicy fragrance. Crocuses and irises covered the lawn. This was Victoria's first experience with planting flowers. She felt a surprising sharp shock of pleasure every time she saw them.

She stepped up on the porch, beneath the roof of shaggy grass that drooped to make the house look like it had eyebrows.

Victoria felt exhilarated, hungry, and scratchy with dried salt water.

It was still very early. She entered her quiet house through the open French doors of her room. Satoshi snored softly in her bed. He had not moved since she left to go swimming. She glanced into Stephen Thomas's room; it was empty.

Now she was worried about him. It was not unusual for him to spend all night working in his lab, but no one from the genetics department had seen him since yesterday. Nor was it unusual for him to spend the night with someone else. But it was unusual for him to disappear without a word about where he had gone or who he was with.

Besides, Feral was the only person Victoria knew of who had attracted his attention recently. Feral's death had affected him deeply. But he had pulled himself together quickly after Merry's death. He surely would not fall to pieces now.

He managed better than I did, when Merry died, she thought. Better than Satoshi did. I don't know how he did it, but I'm grateful that he could. As she headed for the shower, she decided that if he had not come home or left a message by midday, she would ask Arachne where he was. She seldom resorted to having the web chase someone down.

She walked into the bathroom, slipped in a puddle, and nearly fell. Even as she thought, At least I know Stephen Thomas has been home, she saw the damp towels he had left in a tangle and the muddy clothes he had left in a heap.

She kicked the dirty laundry aside, annoyed, and glared at the tracks her younger partner had left on the floor.

Dammit! she thought. I know you're upset and distracted and excited and everything else. But that's no excuse-!

A line of clayey mud ringed the tub. Now she was mad. She was particularly irritated to have anything spoil this morning.

And why do I have to scrub the bathroom down

twice, she thought, because Stephen Thomas can't bother to do it once?

She sprayed out the bottom of the tub so at least she had a clean place to stand.

She washed her hair and rinsed the salt from her skin. The tub was luxuriously large, with a rim wide enough to sit on, and a heater that would turn the enclosure into a sauna. Victoria wondered if Starfarer would ever have enough cedar trees to allow a few to be used as lumber.

Or maybe Crimson's driftwood technique could grow some cedar boards. A sauna that did not smell like cedar was no sauna at all.

She had to use the last clean towel; damned if she would try to dry herself off with the cold clammy dirty ones Stephen Thomas had left on the floor. Grumbling, she gathered up all the dirty laundry she could find. Her house had no laundry facilities; the AS housekeeper was supposed to take care of that.

Satoshi was up now, sitting in the main room with a cup of coffee. He always took a while to get going in the morning. Victoria dumped the laundry by the front door, then turned on the kettle to make a pot of tea. Today the coffee smelled almost good enough to drink. Feral had made good coffee, and he had showed Stephen Thomas and Satoshi how to make it, too.

"Don't take a shower," she said to Satoshi.

"Huh?" Satoshi sounded sleepy-not surprising, since he had been over at the geography department till two o'clock in the morning. But he was awake enough not to be grumpy.

"No clean towels."

"Again?"

"Yeah.,,

"He promised."

"I know."

Satoshi sighed. "He promised to give the laundry to the housekeeper. No housekeeper-"

"I'd split hairs for him, too. Usually. But he did promise. And the tub was filthy."

"So much for learning quaint Japanese customs,"

Satoshi said. "He forgot the one about showering first and soaking afterwards." Stephen Thomas was studying the partnership's ethnic background. Satoshi's mother was of mostly Japanese ancestry, though that branch of his family had been in Hawaii almost as many generations as Victoria's family had lived in Canada. The other side of Satoshi's family, being Hawaiian, had been in Hawaii since people started living there. Victoria could not help but chuckle. "He must have skipped that chapter." Satoshi sipped his coffee and Victoria scalded the teapot and filled it with loose tea and boiling water.

"Let's try not to fight with him," Satoshi said. "The last fight was kind of hard on us all."

"It was," Victoria said. "I will try."

"You were up early this morning," Satoshi said.

"I went swimming with J.D. and Zev," Victoria said, grateful for the change of subject. "And if I'd known how much fun it'd be, I'd've made you get up and come with us."

"Swimming at dawn in this season doesn't sound fun to me. It sounds cold." She brought her teapot over to the table and sat down to wait for the tea to steep.

"We swam in the gulfstream, and the lagoon. Divers don't just swim. They play." She rubbed her foot against his leg, stroking his calf with her instep. "It isn't quite sex, it's too quick. But it's very sexy."

"Quick?" he said doubtfully.

"Quick touches, over a long time." She touched his shin with her toe, like brushstrokes. He looked at her quizzically. "It'd be fun to go swimming with you and Stephen Thomas and make love in the water."

"I don't know," he said doubtfully. "I tried that once, back home. Wasn't very successful."

"Why not?"

"Salt water interferes with the natural lubrication. My partner . . . took exception to continuing."

"Worked for me," she said with a grin.

He put his foot in her lap. She rubbed it, massaging

his sole and stroking her fingertips up the sharp strong tendons. She bent down and nipped his toe gently. Satoshi yelped in surprise.

"I'm starved!" Victoria said. "Is there anything to eat?"

"Not much," Satoshi said. "I made some rice."

Victoria had never warmed to the Hawaiian custom of having white rice with practically every meal.

She jumped up and opened the refrigerator.

"Don't-"

"Wasn't there a tomato in here someplace?" Victoria said. "I could broil it."

She picked it up. It collapsed in her hand.

She made a sound of disgust.

All the vegetables were wilted, the leftovers moldy. The housekeeper had kept the kitchen clean, too, and before Feral came to stay with them they had kept very few perishables around. They never had time to cook, and none of them was very good at it. They had ordered most of their meals from the central cafeteria.

"This is awful," Victoria said.

"I know."

"Why didn't you throw it out?"

"Because I don't know if the recycler's coming. There's a big empty hole in Arachne where the schedule ought to be. I figured the stuff wouldn't smell too bad if we kept it cold."

"Oh," Victoria said. She put the squishy tomato back in the refrigerator. "We've got to do something with it. Do you know how to make a compost heap?"

"In theory."

"Maybe we'd better try it. But I've got to have some breakfast. I'm going over to the cafeteria, want to come?"

"Sure. Shall I get Stephen Thomas?"

"Do you know where he is? All I've seen of him since yesterday is his muddy tracks in the bathtub."

Satoshi hesitated. "He's sleeping in Feral's room."

"In Feral's room? Is somebody with him? Why didn't he use his own room?"

"He's alone."

Victoria stared at him in disbelief.

She strode down the hallway to the spare room. The guest room. The room that should have been Merry's, but never was. She could not think of it as Feral's. He had been a guest, an acquaintance, a passing fancy for Stephen Thomas. Not a member of the family, not even a friend. Not yet.

I don't make friends in two weeks, Victoria thought. Even Stephen Thomas doesn't make friends in two weeks.

She opened the door without knocking, went to the window and pulled the curtains open, and in the flood of light sat on her heels at the edge of the futon.

When she saw Stephen Thomas she drew away sharply, lost her balance, and sprawled backward. She caught herself and knelt beside him.

He lay with one hand over his face, his fingers spread, the translucent webs spread between them. The webs had grown all the way to the second knuckle on each finger. Even his hands had grown. The fine gold pelt surrounded his arm and shoulder like the auras he claimed to see. He had always been so fair: now his skin was deep amber, far darker than his gold hair.

"Stephen Thomas!"

He drew his hand down from his face, opened his eyes, and looked at her blankly. Concern overcame her moment's incoherent, absurd relief that the color of his eyes had not changed. His blank look scared her.

The changing's gone wrong, she thought in terror. He's changed-

She loved him and she found him exasperating, often both at the same time.

If the change were to obliterate his personality . . .

He blinked, and he was suddenly Stephen Thomas again.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "What time is it?"

"It's about eight." She answered the answerable question first. A flare of sheer relief heated her irritation. "What are you doing in here?" "Trying to sleep," he said, and spread his strange, changed, webbed hand over his face again.

"Wake up!" The fear he had given her only made her angrier.

"All iight, I'm awake."

Satoshi appeared in the doorway, worried.

"Why are you sleeping in here? Why not in your room? Why not with us? Where have you been?"

"Take it easy," Satoshi said. After a moment Victoria realized he was talking to her, not to Stephen Thomas.

"I don't much feel like taking it easy right this second," she said to Satoshi. "I want to know-"

"Which question should I answer first?" Stephen Thomas said.

"I don't care!"

"I'm sleeping here because I wanted to. I never did, you know . . . or maybe you don't know."

"It didn't make any difference to me if you did or didn't," Victoria said, "when Feral was alive. But now . . ."

"Where I've been is in the wild cylinder. In a thunderstorm-"

"A thunderstorm!" That was impossible.

"Digging a grave."

"A grave . . . T' Victoria said. "You can't meanYou took his body, all by yourself?"

Victoria's distress was as strong as her anger. She could not bear to think of Stephen Thomas all alone with his grief, burying his friend, and she wanted to have been there, so she too could say goodbye to Feral.

"What about the rest of us?" she cried. "What about his friends, what about J.D.T'

"Gerald said forget about a funeral," Stephen Thomas said. "He wanted Feral just to lie there forever in the morgue! I couldn't stand it. Besides, nobody else thought about him."

"Stop it, Stephen Thomas, that isn't fair," Satoshi said.

"But nobody did anything. Nobody else had even

opened his files to see what Feral wanted, if something happened."

He pushed himself up on his elbows. The gold glow covered his chest and belly. His face and his neck remained bare. Victoria wondered where his necklace was; she had seldom seen him without it. At the center of his collarbone, slightly thicker, slightly darker hair formed a thin line that streaked down his body, stopped just above his navel and started against just below it, and disappeared beneath the bedclothes.

Victoria sat on the edge of the futon. Satoshi joined them, sitting crosslegged on the foot of the bed.

"We didn't have time," Victoria said. "When did we have time?"

"Yesterday," Stephen Thomas said. "Last night. And not just us. Anybody could have looked for his will, the whole time we were gone. Nobody did." "It's awful that he died." Victoria felt unfairly put on the defensive. "It's a tragedy. In the classic sense of the word. If he'd done as I asked-"

"He couldn't! I knew he couldn't. Why didn't you?"

"How could you know? You're trying to beat me up with twenty-twenty hindsight."

"I'm not trying to beat you up at all. I'm trying to tell you where I was and what I was doing and why I was doing it."

"And why I'm responsible for Feral's death."

"No," he said. "No, I'm not blaming you. But I'm not letting you blame him, either. He knew the risks, he chose to take them, he couldn't do anything else."

She said, again, doggedly, "If he'd done as I asked-"

"We'd still be back at Tau Ceti," Satoshi said.

"But we could always take another run at the transition point."

"A hundred light-years behind Europa and Androgeos," Stephen Thomas said. "We never would have caught them. We might even have gotten stranded back there."

"I thought you wanted to stay back there," Victoria said. "To try to colonize the planet."

"What if I did? I didn't block consensus. Feral was trying to help you do what you wanted. Uphold Starfarer's charter. Catch the alien ship-" "And a lot of good it did us!"

"Don't try to tell me Feral died for nothing!" Stephen Thomas shouted.

"I don't want to hear that Feral died for nothing!"

He threw off the blankets and lunged out of bed, sleek and lithe as an otter. Victoria stood up, unwilling to let him flee the discussion.

"Ow! Shit!" Stephen Thomas yelped in pain and sat down hard.

He grabbed his toes and rocked back and forth, his teeth clenched. Victoria stared at him. Satoshi hurried to his side, reached toward him, hesitated, then put one arm around his shoulders.

"What-T'

"Nothing. Nothing at all," Stephen Thomas said. "It's just that all my fucking toenails are falling out."

His little toenail had disappeared; the next largest hung by a thread of connective tissue. His toes were as bruised as if he had dropped a rock on his feet. He wiggled his big toenail, and the next two in turn, each successively looser. Victoria felt a little sick. Stephen Thomas took the hanging toenail between his thumb and forefinger.

"Don't-" Satoshi said.

Stephen Thomas pulled the toenail off.

Stephen Thomas put the toenail, shiny with the transparent polish he used, on the narrow shelf at the headboard of the futon frame. Then he bent over his bruised toe and poked at it, oblivious to Satoshi, who sat back away from him, and to Victoria. She felt ill and angry at the same time. He was so good at deflecting arguments-not defusing them, as Satoshi did, but deflecting anger away from himself and setting up a situation where anger was no longer appropriate, no longer acceptable, and the argument could never be resolved.

Beneath the toenail, the bruised end of his toe had begun to form a valley, a cavity, where a claw would grow. It would interest her, in an intellectual way, if the foot the claw was growing on belonged to a body with which Victoria was less intimately familiar.

Even angry with Stephen Thomas, Victoria felt the attraction of his powerful sexuality.

"Are you done grieving now?" She forced her voice to remain so neutral that her tone came out cold, and hard.

Stephen Thomas's shoulders stiffened. He stared at his foot, then glanced at Satoshi, then turned to Victoria.

,,No," he said. "No, I don't think I am."

"I know you liked him! But you barely knew him. I knew him better than you did-"

"You knew him longer than I did. Not better."

"Next I suppose you'll say the same thing about Merry."

Stephen Thomas looked confused. "What does Merry have to do with this?" "Nothing. Except that Merry was our partner and Feral was our acquaintance, and it seems to me that you're grieving a lot harder for Feral."

Stephen Thomas stood up slowly, gingerly, balancing precariously on his abused feet, and walked out of the room.

Victoria wanted to scream, or apologize, or crywhat she really wanted was for Stephen Thomas never to have received the changing virus, and for Feral and Merry never to have died.

She followed Stephen Thomas as far as the doorway. He was halfway down the hall to his room. In the dim light the new gold pelt was invisible, but it made his outline fuzzy.

He disappeared into his room.

Victoria glanced back at Satoshi, expecting him to tell her what she deserved to hear: that she had been far too hard on Stephen Thomas.

"I shouldn't criticize him for his feelings," she said,

before Satoshi could speak. "Your feelings are your feelings. He can't help being so open. . . ."

"I hate what's happening to him," Satoshi said abruptly.

"I-what?"

"I loved him the way he was," Satoshi said. "God, I don't want to think of myself as changing my feelings for someone because of the way they look.

"

"He hasn't changed that much," Victoria said, because that was how it seemed to her. "Not physically . . ."

"He's changed a lot, " Satoshi said. "And he's going to change more. I hardly even know him now. . . . I can't stand to say it."

He folded his arms across his knees and buried his face against them. Victoria sat beside him and hugged him, trying to reassure him, trying to comfort him, not doing a very good job of it. She was used to Stephen Thomas being the most emotionally demonstrative of them all, to Satoshi being the most reserved and calm, to taking the middle ground herself. Satoshi's shoulders began to shake. Victoria could not remember- Yes. At Merry's funeral, Satoshi had cried. So had Victoria. Stephen Thomas, dry eyed, held them both. At the time she had been grateful that one of the partnership could maintain some equilibrium. She had not considered how strange it was that the calm one was Stephen Thomas.

Satoshi straightened up, drawing in a deep, harsh breath. He flung himself back on the rumpled bed and scrubbed his bare arm across his eyes. He tried to smile.

"This is so weird," he said.

"What is?"

"I'm upset with him because he's doing something so different I can't even understand it . . . and you're upset with him because he's behaving exactly the way he always does."

As he dressed, Stephen Thomas gradually dissociated himself from the fight with Victoria, from the aches in

his bones and the pain in his feet, from everything he had lost in the last week. In the last year.

He usually wore running shoes to the lab. Shoes, today, would make the pain impossible to ignore. He tried his sandals, but even sandals hurt. He shoved them into his pack. Professor Thanthavong would take off the rest of his toenails one by one if he worked barefoot in the lab-she would do it in private; she would do it metaphorically. But she would do it. So he would have to wear the sandals part of the day.

He did not know what to do about the fight with Victoria. Ile could not answer any of her questions any better than he already had. She wanted more from him, but he was damned if he knew what. He would give it to her if he could. He had made himself stay in control after the accident that took Merry, because the partnership needed someone who could still function. And right after Feral died . . . Victoria honestly thought she had put Feral in a position where he would be safe. Stephen Thomas smiled, fondly, sadly. Trust a reporter to get out to the front, even if nobody could figure out where the war was being fought or whether there was a war at all.

Walking cautiously-no point to limping, since both feet hurt-he went out through the French windows of his room.

Despite everything, the hour was still early when he got to the lab. Neither Mitch nor Bay had arrived yet, and Lehua Aki sprawled sleeping on the couch in the Biochem lounge. A small image of Nerno's chamber hovered above her.

By the evidence of their work, his students had all stayed very late last night. The isolation chambers held several racks' worth of growing alien cells.

He was proud of them for getting so much accomplished when he had been useless to them for the past day. They were working under another handicap, too, camping out in the Biochem labs while the silver slugs tried to rebuild Genetics Hill.

Worse than losing their lab space, the geneticists had lost their equipment, the probes and genetic subroutines that everyone developed over time. All the work in progress was destroyed. The missile had stolen a year of Stephen Thomas's professional life.

He checked the preparation he had started the day before. At least one thing was going right today. He had plenty of material for another series of experiments.

Ordinarily, this kind of preparation would be safe by this stage. No matter how virulent the original cells, they were now dead, dismembered, each cell separated into parts. Cell walls. Mitochondria. DNA. But these cells were alien; he had no proof-not even any evidence-that they could no longer replicate once he vibrated them apart with ultrasound and centrifuged them into layers.

He was not particularly worried about infecting Starfarer with some alien illness that would attack animals or people or plants. It would make more sense to worry that tobacco mosaic virus might infect a human being. Those pathogens were from the same evolutionary scheme. But he had cultured an autotroph, a freeliving cell, from Nemo's web. A microbe that could get by on light and water and simple molecular nutrients could grow independently in the starship.

This was something Stephen Thomas preferred to avoid.

He got Arachne to project an image of the squidmoth in its chrysalis.

"Why wouldn't you give me another sample?" he muttered.

He suspected that, eventually, Earth's biosphere would have to co-exist and cope with alien autotrophs, but he did not intend to be responsible for the first uncontrolled contact. Among other things, Professor Thanthavong would not just have his toenails, she would have his lungs as well. In all her decades of research, it had taken a missile attack to contaminate her lab for the first time.

"Damn!" he said suddenly. He had forgotten to set up the DNA sequencing of the soil bacteria from Europa's ship. A complete sequence would give him a detailed picture of the microbe, rather than the more general view of DNA and protein fingerprints. He set up the analysis with a couple of controls and left it running.

"Hi, Stephen Thomas."

Satoshi's young graduate student Fox stood uncertainly in the doorway of the lab. With her forefinger, she nervously twisted a lock of her flyaway black hair into a curl.

"Hello, Fox," Stephen Thomas said.

"Anything I can do?"

"Why? Thinking of changing departments?"

Her expression brightened. "Can IT'

"No.,,

"Oh."

"Don't you have some geography to do?"

"Yeah," she said. She stepped back into the hall and he thought she had left.

He went back to work, forgetting, after a moment, that she had ever been there. He pressed his hands into the manipulator gloves that gave him access to the isolation chamber and his new preparation.

"I could wash some glassware-"

"Jesus!" Stephen Thomas exclaimed.

,,-or something," Fox whispered.

"I nearly dropped this," Stephen Thomas said. "Don't sneak up on people like that."

"I didn't mean to."

"There's nothing you can do here. We don't wash the glassware, we recycle it. Easier to get rid of contaminants. Anyway, you wouldn't want to spend all day up to your elbows in cell guts."

"I wouldn't mind."

"There's still nothing you can do."

"I can't go back to geography."

"I keep telling you, Satoshi isn't mad."

"Did you ask him?"

"The subject never came up. But if he were mad, he'd mention it. Fox: Satoshi doesn't get mad. He'll talk to you. It sounds to me like you need to talk to him.

"He ought to be mad. So should you."

Watching the holographic image from the safety chamber, Stephen Thomas put the prep carefully back on its stand and disengaged his hands from the manipulator gloves. The swimming webs itched slightly; the gloves had pressed the webs back between his fingers farther than they would ordinarily go.

He crossed his arms and faced Fox, leaning back against the lab table.

"I don't blame you for what happened to me. But if you really want to know, I think you made more trouble for yourself and for us than any of us need. You should have been on the transport."

"A lot of difference that would have made! I'd still be here!"

"It'll make a lot of difference. The folks who were on it will be legally tree and clear. Maybe even entitled to reparations. Gerald and the senators and Esther Klein . . . hm, I'm not sure about Esther. Doesn't matter. You and Zev, though-you're in as much trouble as the rest of us. Maybe more."

"I don't care."

"And the president might not be able to-"

"I wouldn't ask him to!"

"You wouldn't have to."

"Stephen Thomas, I just want to be part of the expedition. I just want to help." Her smile strained as she fought tears.

"You are part of it," Stephen Thomas said gently. "And the way to prove you deserved to come with us is to work your ass off. In your own department." "Are you sure-"

"I don't-" He stopped. There was no reason to involve Fox in the partnership's problems. No reason, and no excuse. What good would it do to tell her that he had

not talked to Satoshi about her, or about much of anything else either, for the past several days?

"Satoshi is the most reasonable and sympathetic human being alive. He lives with me, after all." He smiled at her, reassuring. "Okay?"

"Yeah," she said. She smiled back. "Thanks."

"Good. I've got to get back to work."

He unfolded his arms and turned back to the manipulator gloves, spreading his fingers, stretching the webs. He heard Fox's quick intake of breath. Probably she had just realized how much about him had changed, and the changes spooked her. He must look pretty fucking weird from outside, with the webs and the fine gold pelt covering his darkening skin, and his battered toes sticking out of the straps of his sandals.

"I love you," Fox said.

Oh, god, no, not again, Stephen Thomas thought.

For the third time, he faced her. He could not pretend not to have heard or not to understand.

"That's too bad," he said.

She did pretend not to hear or not to understand.

"When Satoshi asked us all over to dinner, the first time I saw you-"

"Fox. No."

"Won't you even consider me? I know you're not monogamous-"

Flabbergasted by the comment, Stephen Thomas laughed.

Fox blushed. "You know what I mean. Whatever the term is when you've got two legal partners and you still get involved with other people. What is it you don't like about me?"

"Nothing to take personally."

She laughed as sharply as he had a moment before. "That's kind of hard."

"I don't get involved with grad students."

"I'm not your grad student."

"Five minute ago you were standing here trying to be.,,

"I changed my mind, okay?"

"I don't get involved with any grad students."

"Why not?" she asked, honestly perplexed. She grinned. "We're people, too-don't you think? So why not?"

"Why not . . . T' Stephen Thomas sighed. "Why not is because in school, every instructor I ever had hit on me." Miensaern Thanthavong was the first superior he had ever had who had never tried to take him to bed.

"How could they resist?" she said softly.

"They should have."

"But this is different."

"No, it's not."

"Sure it is. I'm not your student and you're not my instructor."

He could see this deteriorating into "Is not!" "Is so!" He made himself keep a straight face.

"It doesn't matter whether it's the same or not. The answer's no."

"But-"

"Please take the answer gracefully."

She did not take it gracefully, but she neither erupted into anger nor burst into tears. He never knew what to do when either happened in this particular situation. Anger was easier to defuse than tears. When it was someone crying over unrequited love for someone else, it helped to give them a friendly hug, a shoulder to cry on. Touching Fox now would only make things worse. Stephen Thomas found it very difficult not to respond to another person's grief.

"Okay," she said finally. "If you change your mind-"

"That just isn't going to happen."

She went away, then, but as she disappeared down the hallway he heard what she was saying, as if to herself but in truth to Stephen Thomas.

"Maybe I should have gone home after all."

Stephen Thomas let his irritation out in one quick snarl.

"Oh, fuck!"

He returned at last to his work, pushing away the

anger from his past and the guilt Fox had just tried to hand him. She should have gone home, or tried to. If he had anything to do with her staying, it was not by design. And then he thought: she grew up around politicians. She knows how to turn coincidence to her own advantage.

Mitch hurried in, his long gangly limbs all angles.

"Is Fox okay? What did she want? She didn't even say hi."

Mitch had been trying to get Fox to say hi to him, even to remember his name, since the first week she came on board Starfarer. So far he had had no luck.

Mitch was gawky and shy. Not a bad-looking kid, dark brown hair and eyes, pale intense face, heavy eyebrows over well-defined features, sharp mind and good ideas.

Stephen Thomas, who thought Mitch spent too much time in the lab and not enough with other people, was grateful beyond imagining that Mitch had not heard what Fox had just been saying. If he had, the kid might draw completely into a shell. Bad enough that he could not get Fox to see him. Far worse if he knew she was looking for someone, but the someone was not Mitch.

"She wanted to ask me something about Satoshi," Stephen Thomas said. He finished the 'scope slide, projected the image, and forgot about Fox instantly.

Mitch whistled softly.

Lehua came into the lab, knuckling her eyes, combing her long straight red-gold hair with her fingers. As usual she was dressed better than the grungy-casual popular on campus; her crisp shirt and slacks somehow did not look like they had been slept in. Visitors to the genetics department sometimes mistook her for the professor and Stephen Thomas for a technician. His third student, Bay, followed Lehua in.

Lehua's display of Nerno's chamber drifted in after them, touched the identical display Stephen Thomas had set hovering, and melded with it.

"How come the Biochem couch is so much more

comfortable than the one in Genetics wasT' Lehua asked. She yawned.

"Come look at this," Stephen Thomas said.

Lehua and Bay joined Stephen Thomas and Mitch. Together, they looked at the holographic projection of the 'scope field.

"What is it? Is it what I think it is?"

"It could be a lot of things. But what I'm guessing is 3-D genetic information. Dendritic molecules."

"Dendritic genes?" Bay said with disbelief. He leaned toward the display, squinting in concentration; his crinkly, shiny black hair swung forward along his smooth chestnut skin, the ends tracing the straight line of his jaw. "How would they work? I can't figure . . ."

Stephen Thomas let his eyelids flicker; he connected with Arachne and sent a message to Professor Thanthavong.

He watched the enormous spherical molecules vibrate.

Grief and anger, pain and confusion, had blanketed his life since Feral died. For the first time since then, a flicker of joy broke through.

"I can't figure it out either, Bay," Stephen Thomas said. He knew his expression was a silly smile, and he did not care. "Isn't it great?"

INFINITY MENDEZ JOINED THE REST OF THE faculty and staff, heading for the amphitheater where all Starfarer's meetings

happened. Ordinary meetings were small. The people who came to the regular meetings tended to be either obsessed with getting their own way about almost everything, or passionately committed to the idea of consensus. Both sorts of people could make a meeting amazingly boring.

None of the meetings since the rebellion had been ordinary or boring. And almost everyone left on campus had come to them.

Today's meeting was not ordinary.

Jenny Dupre had succeeded in convening a meeting about the fate of Chancellor Blades.

Infinity wished desperately that Jenny had left well enough alone. If Blades was content to stay walled up in his house till they returned to Earth, why change anything? What else could they do to him but put him in jail?

Will they kill him? Infinity wondered. There are people on board who're maybe mad enough. Jenny. Stephen Thomas. And Griffith would probably kill Blades if he even suspected Kolya wanted him dead.

Infinity did not want to believe the faculty and staff could decide on cold-blooded revenge . . . but he did not want to test them, either. He kept remembering the mob Jenny had created with her anger, when Blades was first discovered.

Arachne was another unknown factor. After observing the evidence J.D. and Stephen Thomas tracked down, Arachne had severed Blades's computer link and immunized itself against his neural signature. The slugs had dissolved the hard links into his house. Without electronic communication, he was very little danger to the starship.

Without his link, Blades must be just about going crazy from boredom, Infinity thought. His house must be like a cave, with the windows covered over and the electricity off. . . .

I To protect Blades, Infinity had given over control of the silver slug guards to Arachne, so no one could pull academic rank or seniority and call them off. He did not know what the computer web would do if the meeting decided to punish the chancellor.

I'll have to block consensus, Infinity thought. If it comes down to that, I'll have to block.

Esther sat down hard beside him. He was surprised not to have seen her come in, because, as usual, she was wearing her fluorescent lime-green jacket.

"Is this place a community, or not?"

"Yes," Infinity said. "Sure. What's the matter?"

"I put out a call for volunteers. Yesterday! Want to know how many responses I got?"

"Just on a guess . . . not enough."

"Nobody!" She made a sound of disgust. "God forbid that any of these famous scientists muck up their hands with rotten AS brains."

Infinity had never opened an artificial, never had to replace one's neural tissue, but Esther had described the operation in more detail than he wanted to know.

"You should have . . ."

"Called you? I suppose you've been lying around doing nothing?"

"Uh, noi exactly."

"I didn't think so. I bet you've been outside since breakfast with nobody to help you."

"Not nobody. A few other folks. And some of the slugs. Kolya, for a while, but I don't know where he went."

Kolya sat on the terrace on Esther's other side.

"Where Kolya went," Kolya said, "was to throw up."

"Kolya, you look awful! What's wrong?" Esther touched his hand. "Your hands are freezingill

She took off her bright jacket and flung it over his shoulders.

"Stick your arm through here-"

"I had better not, I'll rip it." He was slender, and very tall for a cosmonaut, much taller than Esther: she barely came up to his breastbone. The sleeves of her jacket would hit him around the elbows. Kolya hunched himself inside her jacket. "This is better, this makes a difference, thank you."

"What happened?"

He did look pale. Sweat beaded his upper lip and his forehead, and matted his streaky gray hair. And he smelled strange: sharp and acrid, unpleasant. "Nothing happened, exactly. But I am trying to quit smoking."

"Smoking!"

"Smoking! Smoking what?"

"Tobacco, of course," he said.

Esther wrinkled her nose. "I didn't think

"That anyone did that anymore? Such an old-fashioned drug. Like snake oil."

The terraces of the outdoor amphitheater were full to halfway up the slope. The meeting would start soon. This time, they could hope that the light would remain constant. The last two meetings, Blades had sent the light level to extremes to try to disrupt the rebellion.

Kolya pulled the edges of Esther's jacket closer together.

"When I was a cosmonaut, I never smoked. But later . . ." He shrugged.

"I had no reason not to. It can be . . . quite comforting." He smiled.

His front teeth were slightly crooked. "I never expected to live to such an advanced age, or to reach it in a place where tobacco was so difficult to get."

Infinity felt uncomfortable, torn between being glad Kolya was trying to quit and wanting to do something to help. Kolya looked unhappy, tired, and sick.

"Did you run out?" Esther asked sympathetically.

"Abruptly. I kept my stores in one of the genetics department freezers." "Oh."

The freezers in the genetics department had been destroyed along with the rest of the building.

"Maybe it's for the best," Esther said. "I mean . . . it really isn't good for you, and now you'll have to quit."

"I suppose I will. The designer of Starfarer's ecosystem was far too health-conscious to grow tobacco on campus." He chuckled ruefully. "I went so far as to ask Alzena once. She was horrified."

"When she had a choice, she picked stuff you can eat or make things out of," Infinity said, feeling miserable and guilty about Kolya's distress. "Or flowers."

"Very sensible," Kolya said, with resignation.

His hands trembled; the energy that made him seem . . . not younger, exactly, but vital, had drained away.

"I've tried to quit before," he said. "I never succeeded. I'm one of those unfortunates upon whom nicotine takes a very tight grip." He squeezed Esther's hand in gratitude. "I will be all right."

Conversation ebbed abruptly.

The meeting began.

No one rose to speak. Jenny had not arrived, and Gerald Hemminge was nowhere to be seen.

Motion in one of the dark entry tunnels drew Infinity's gaze. Neither Jenny, nor Gerald, but Stephen Thomas appeared, late, accompanied by his clutch of grad students. He paused and glanced around to find a good seat, unhurried, aware of the attention he had attracted but nonchalant about it. He moved, footsore, to a place near the top of the amphitheater.

The one other person Infinity did not see that he expected was Griffith. Infinity did not like Griffith, though the government agent no longer scared him. Infinity wondered what Kolya thought of Griffith hanging around him all the time. When he was not making himself blend into the background, Griffith allowed his attitude of arrogant superiority to slip out. But he worshiped Kolya.

"Why'd Jenny call this meeting if she isn't even going to come to it?" Esther muttered. She shifted nervously. Infinity knew how she felt. Being asked to sit in judgment of someone was bad enough. Being left in the dark about what was going on made it worse.

He linked into Arachne. The computer web acknowledged him. The silver slugs waited to accompany Chancellor Blades to the meeting, to guard him, to guard Arachne while he was free.

But Chancellor Blades refused to accompany the silver slugs.

Infinity let out a quick, sharp, incredulous laugh.

Jenny Dupre and Gerald Hemminge arrived at the amphitheater. Without the chancellor. Jenny looked furious and embarrassed, Gerald, as usual, carefully neutral and controlled.

Jenny did not even find a seat, nor did she state her name, then pause, as meeting etiquette required.

"He won't come out," she said angrily. "He's too cowardly to face his own trial." She sat down abruptly, sullenly, and folded her arms.

Gerald remained standing.

"Gerald Hemminge," he said, and waited. The assistant-now acting-chancellor never lost his kood manners, even when he was using them to be rude.

No one interrupted or challenged him.

"Chancellor Blades . . ." Gerald said. "The chancellor denies that you have a right to try or judge him. He . . . requests . . . that you return to Earth and hand him over to the authorities."

"The same authorities who sent him in the first place!" Jenny said bitterly.

Infinity wished she would at least follow meeting rules, especially since she was the person who had called it.

,,Ruth Orazio."

Across the amphitheater, the senator waited longer than the usual couple of seconds, as if she expected someone to object to her speaking.

"I know you all feel betrayed," she said. "Frankly, I do, too. What's happened is what always happens when decisions get made in back rooms and secrecy. But the justice system of the United States is public and open. If you do return to Earth, the chancellor will get a fair trial-"

"Will we?" Jenny said.

The senator continued as if she had not been interrupted.

11

-a fair trial, and the powers that controlled him will have to come out in the open and answer for what's happened."

Jenny started to speak again.

"Ms. Dupre," Gerald said.

Annoyed, Jenny rose. "Iphigenie Dupre," she said. "If I may-T'

Infinity did not blame her for being bitter and angry. But it hurt to see the change in her. During the first deployment of Starfarer's solar sail, her creation, she had glowed with joy. Stephen Thomas had broken out a

bottle of fancy champagne and let it loose, in the freefall of the sailhouse. Jenny had drunk one of the fizzing globules with a kiss.

"The U.S. constitution says the accused has a right to face the witnesses against him, and the U.S. insisted that we operate under their constitution. Fine. But we're here. We're willing to face him. I'm willing to face him. Nothing says he has to face us. But nothing says we can't make a decision about him even if he isn't here to listen to it.

Or to defend himself. If he could defend himself."

"He also has a right to legal counsel," Gerald said. "Is anyone willing to defend him?"

"I assumed you had that job reserved for yourself."

"Firstly," Gerald said, "I am not a barrister. Secondly, my defending the chancellor would be an inexcusable conflict of interest."

"J.D. Sauvage." J.D. paused, waiting her turn to speak. "I don't see how we can proceed if Mr. Blades won't come out. Maybe it's legal for us to proceed. But should we? I don't think so."

Infinity felt very grateful to J.D. for saying something that he, too, believed. He knew he was going to have to speak out later, and no one was going to want to listen to what he had to say.

"Do you think he should be allowed to get off free?" Jenny asked, disbelieving. "I thought Feral was your friend!"

"He was," J.D. said. "And I'd like to see justice done for him. Justice." "Chancellor Blades is innocent," Gerald said.

Jenny laughed. So did Stephen Thomas, and a few other people, coldly and without joy.

"So much for not defending him," Jenny said to Gerald.

"I can't defend him in a court of law," Gerald said. "Which, by the way, this is not. I didn't say I wouldn't speak for him."

"William Derjaguin." The senior senator from New Mexico stood up.

Infinity had powerful feelings about Derjaguin. Powerful, and mixed. Disappointment because of Derjaguin's implacable opposition to the deep space expedition. Admiration, because De~aguin had been one of the few people to oppose the weapons testing scheme that ended in disaster for the southwest, one of the few to stand up for land others called beautiful and valueless.

No one objected to letting him speak.

"I've talked to the chancellor, too," he said. "Not that it's easy, with a couple of lithoblasts threatening to dissolve me with acid if I go one step closer."

He had it wrong. The lithoblasts would block his way. They could physically restrain him. They might even put up a barrier of rock foam if he was persistent enough. But they would not dissolve him with acid. Only lithoclasts could produce acids and solvents. All the lithoclasts were outside working. People always thought of repair as building, but clearing away was at least as important.

Outside is where I ought to be, Infinity thought.

"The chancellor told me he was innocent," Senator Derjaguin said. "I have a great deal of experience at judging character. I believe him."

"What a load of bullshit," Stephen Thomas said.

"He doesn't believe he can get a fair hearing, on this ship with this crew."

Infinity hated to hear Starfarer referred to-especially by politicians-as if it were a military vessel and the people on board, its recruits. Starfarer was not a warship, and he was not a soldier.

"If he's innocent, he ought to be willing to stand up in front of us and say so," Jenny said.

Both Gerald and the senator reacted with indignation.

"You incited the mob that went after him!" Gerald said. "Who knows what might have occurred, had he not fled-!"

"I had to get him out of the web!" Jenny cried. "Do you blame me? Has anyone ever tried to kill you?"

Derjaguin moved, a quick, repressed reliving of the shock of an assassin's bullet.

"Yes," Derjaguin said.

Jenny had no reason to know the personal, even the public, history of a U.S. senator. He surprised her with his reply, but she continued.

"And how do you feel about the person who tried to kill you?"

"That person . . . is still at large," De~jaguin said. "I've reserved judgment."

"Noble of you," Jenny said.

"Jag," Ruth Orazio said, "you must understand how she feels."

"I do." He turned his presence and his considerable charisma back toward Jenny. "And I can understand your desire for revenge. I hope I never have the person who shot me at my mercy. That's what the judicial system is for. To dispense justice. To prevent revenge."

He must be used to seeing people blossom into eagerness, or wilt into compliance, under the light of his attention. But Jenny was immune. The solar sail designer was at least as renowned as he, and probably richer.

She did not fawn over celebrities. They fawned over her.

"I'm not convinced you've caught the right entity," Derjaguin said. "The crash could have been programmed in from the start. A Trojan horse."

Jenny challenged him.

"Have you looked at the evidence J.D. and Stephen Thomas found? Even looked at it? If you had, you wouldn't think Arachne crashed because of a horse!" J.D. rose again.

"Jenny . . . Infinity's isolated Blades from Arachne. Isn't that enough punishment, for now? If Blades doesn't want to object to his exile, maybe we shouldn't insist on something worse. The way things are, if he's guilty we're all safe. If he's not, we haven't done anything irrevocable."

"How do you know we're safe from him?"

"He's cut off from the web-"

"How do you know we're safe from him?"

J.D. regarded Jenny with sympathy.

"I spend a lot of time in the web. I'm enhancing my link. If there's danger, I'm vulnerable. I think the risk is small enough to take."

Jenny stared at J.D. for several seconds; it felt like a very long time. She turned completely around, raking all her colleagues with her gaze.

She faced J.D. again, having seen that even the people who had joined her mob -maybe those people in particular-would not side with her now. She could produce no consensus for the chancellor's guilt, or for his punishment.

"I think you're wrong," she said. "And I think you'll find it out the next time we go into transition. I'm not touching the web. If we miss the insertion point, that's too damned bad." She straightened her shoulders and flung her head back; the iridescent beads on the ends of her braids clinked together loudly, decisively.

She strode from the amphitheater.

As people rose to leave, relieved to think the meeting was over, Infinity stood up and spoke his name. No one, except Esther and Kolya, heard him. He raised his voice. "Infinity Kenjiro Yanagihara y Mendoza."

Intense meetings drained everyone. His colleagues, realizing he wanted the gathering to continue, sank back in their seats with resignation. "There's some other things we have to talk about," he said.

"Without doubt they can wait," Gerald asked. "A few days-? The other side of transition, at least, when we might know more about our situation?"

"I don't think so," Infinity said. "We have some problems. The first is the weather."

"But the weather has been exceptionally fair," Gerald said.

"It's too fair," Infinity said. "It's too hot for the season. First everything got blasted during the last meeting-"

"But that was an anomaly," Gerald said. "A malfunction of the web while it was regrowing-"

"Or sabotage," Stephen Thomas said. "Let Infinity finish."

Gerald subsided.

"And now this heat wave. Arachne's trying to fix it. Maybe it'll even work out for the best. We don't have the supplies we expected to bring. Maybe this will give us a longer growing season. But . . . Starfarer wasn't designed to spend time around a star like Sirius. It was designed to visit sun-type stars." Infinity glanced over at Victoria. "Next time through transition . . . where will we end up?"

Uncharacteristically, Victoria hesitated.

"I'm not entirely sure yet," she said.

"Good lord!" Gerald exclaimed.

The amphitheater reverberated with tension like a bell.

Collecting herself, Victoria rose. "Calm down, eh? It's not exactly a secret." Her tone was annoyed. "The algorithm's working in plain sight. Anybody can look at the results."

Infinity waited, rather than vanishing into a communications fugue like some of the folks around him.

"We assumed Europa headed for a system that's full of cosmic string," Victoria said. "Pretty safe assumption, eh? She wouldn't want to go somewhere she couldn't leave again. The algorithm's first solution proves it. The second solution indicates there'll be a star nearby."

"And that's all you know?" Senator Derjaguin leaned toward her, angrily. "You don't know where we're going, how far, how long it will take?"

"The third solution will tell us where," Victoria said. "How long-that's always an indefinite number. A range. "

"As for getting back-" Avvaiyar rose at Victoria's side. "That's the point of being sure we come out in a full system-a place with more cosmic string."

"When will we have all the answers?" Gerald asked.

"I don't know," Victoria said. "Along about the next millennium?"

Gerald took a moment to realize he was being twitted.

,,The answers to your bloody algorithm, " he snarled.

"I have no idea," Victoria said. "Before we hit transition . . . I think."

"So we're stuck," Esther said under her breath.

She was right. Infinity saw the situation before Victoria described it. They could pull back and wait for solutions to the current algorithm, to be sure they were heading for a suitable star. They could test other transition points till they found one that would lead them to a sun-type star. But no one could say how long that would take. Arachne was solving the current problem as fast as it could. Giving the computer another could only slow everything down.

"And if we change course," Victoria said, "not only will we be here longer, inflicting Sirius on our ecosystem, but we'll lose any chance we might have of catching up to Europa." She glanced over at Infinity. "I didn't realize the environment was so delicate," she said. "I wish you'd-"

"I didn't know, either!" Infinity said. "It's Alzena who knows all this stuff."

"Why in heaven's name did you let Europa take her?" Gerald said to J.D. "I was afraid Alzena would kill herself otherwise," J.D. said.

As much as Infinity wished the starship still had an environmental designer, an ecologist, on board, he had to agree with J.D. Europa had taken Alzena with her to save her life.

"Alzena is gone," Victoria said, "and I think J.D. was right to let her go. Maybe we can persuade her to come back--"

"But we have to find Europa to find Alzena," Gerald said sarcastically. "Yes.,,

"How convenient." "It's what we agreed to do anyway!"

"Not I," Gerald said. "I blocked the decision-and you chose to break your own rules."

Victoria grabbed her hair with both hands and cried out with frustration. "Gerald-!"

Professor Thanthavong rose.

The amphitheater fell silent.

"Miensaem Thanthavong." She waited through the customary pause. "I cede my time to Infinity."

Surprised, Infinity collected himself and continued.

"The bees are dying," he said.

A few people laughed. A few understood the problem. Most looked perplexed by his comment.

"They're important, " he said. "Directly, to the plants. Indirectly, they represent the ecosystem's health. We'll probably be okay if we're headed for a star that's like the sun," Infinity said. "If we're not He shrugged unhappily.

"All we can do is wait and see," Thanthavong said, as if that ended it. "I'm sorry, that still isn't all. We've got to plan some harvests and some planting. There's a bunch of stuff ripe. We should salvage the spinach. We could pick some of the oranges."

"Volunteers?" Thanthavong said.

One of Stephen Thomas's grad students jumped to her feet and tossed her long straight red-gold hair back over her shoulder.

"I can just see Lehua picking oranges," Esther said softly. "Probably break a fingernail."

"There's never anything in the cafeteria. The ASes are supposed to cook and maintain the gardens. Not to mention do the housework. So-where are they?" Lehua turned toward Gerald, her dark eyes angry. "When are you letting them loose again?"

Esther jumped to her feet. "Esther Mein." She barely paused. "Doesn't anybody around here ever read their bulletins?"

Infinity sat down, grateful that Esther had the en-

ergy to take on the problem of the ASes. Infinity hated speaking in public. He watched his lover with absolute awe. Soon she had faculty members apologizing and embarrassed and anxious to help her fix the artificials, to harvest, even to dig in the dirt that worried Gerald so much. Gerald took on the job-the desk job-of coordination.

"And Lehua's right about the cafeteria," Esther said. "The prepared stuff is pretty much gone. Does anybody know how to cook?"

In the front circle, Florrie Brown rose to her feet. "I'll need help, of course," she said.

"Florrie, are you sure-T'

"I told you I used to live in a commune," she said, as prickly as always. She also told us it flopped miserably, Infinity thought. But maybe-I hope-not because of the cooking.

J.D. lugged a bag of oranges to the storage box. The strap cut into her aching shoulders. She eased the bag to the ground, wiped the sweat from her face, and tried to stretch the cramps from the middle of her back. It was hot out in the orchard. The heat intensified the cloying sweetness of the orange blossoms. J.D. had never lived around orange trees before; strange to see a tree with fruit and blossoms in the same season. And the ripe oranges were not orange, but still green. According to Arachne all that was normal, except that everything had happened too soon, too early in the spring, and the trees had produced an abnormal number of flowers.

At a time when the earth should be damp with spring rain, the ground was dry. Too few bees buzzed in the fragrant orange blossoms. Now that Infinity had mentioned the bees, J.D. kept seeing their small striped yellow and black corpses on the ground.

J.D. poured the oranges carefully into the storage box. She allowed herself a brief glance at the transmission from Nerno's chamber.

Nothing had changed.

Satoshi joined her, watched the transmission with her for a moment, then upended his sling full of oranges into the storage box. J.D. grabbed the sling's bottom and tipped out the last few pieces of fruit.

"I'm glad to have something to do," J.D. said. "Something physical. To keep me from worrying." She gestured toward the display.

"I keep remembering what Stephen Thomas saw," Satoshi said.

"Yes . . . . I wish we had an LTM down at the pool . . . . I wonder if those creatures are metamorphosing, too?"

"Or if they're eating each other up."

They climbed ladders on opposite sides of the same tree. The display shrank to the size of an orange and followed. J.D. moved cautiously, but she felt much better, much steadier, than yesterday. The link was still growing, but her body had accommodated itself to the change.

All in all, though, she thought, I'd rather be swimming with Zev and Victoria. . . .

Her thoughts kept returning to the morning; she found herself staring into space thinking about the flow of Zev's hair against her hand, the taste of Victoria's lips.

Enough woolgathering! she told herself sternly.

Leaves tickled J.D.'s face. She stood in the midst of the overpowering, intoxicating orange smell, blossoms and fruit, ripe and overripe and fermented.

The ladder was not designed to be used outdoors. It wobbled. Everything about this harvesting party was makeshift, from ladders borrowed from household tool storage to the bedsheet carrying bags.

For the first hour or so, everyone had regarded the work as an adventure, an entertaining physical break in days-lives-Aevoted to intellectual pursuits. After two hours, it was no fun anymore.

People used to do this for a living, J.D. thought. All day, every day.

She had never considered what that

meant. If she had thought about it, she would have imagined the experience wrong without knowing it. Now she knew she would get it wrong; she had only a taste of the Work.

On the other side of a heavily laden branch, Satoshi worked steadily. He picked each orange with a sharp snap of his wrist.

"How--" J.D. started to ask about Stephen Thomas, but changed her mind. "How are you doing?"

Satoshi glanced up. His thoughts, too, had been somewhere else.

"Victoria and I decided to have our regular potluck tonight," he said. "Try to get back to normal for a change." He laughed, quick and sharp. "Whatever normal is, these days. We haven't had one since . . . since before you arrived, I guess. Would you like to come? Zev too, of course." "I'd like to," J.D. said. "What should I bring?"

Satoshi grinned.

"Oranges," he said. "What else?"

Shouting erupted from the next row of trees. J.D. turned-she grabbed a branch to keep from overbalancing. An argument-? A fight?

Zev ran past, laughing and shouting, pursued by Chandra. In the gold and green orchard, drenched in white light, they were like fauns. Zev slipped on a rotting orange, caught himself as he fell, turned, scooped up the fermenting pulp and moldy rind, and flung it at Chandra. It caught her full on the chest, spattering her with slimy orange goo.

Chandra stopped short. J.D. had no idea what she would do: she never had any idea what Chandra would do.

Chandra burst out laughing and barreled toward Zcv, scooping up another fallen orange and throwing it at him point blank. He was already running; the orange spattered across his back, staining his sleeveless shirt.

In a moment, the harvesting party had exploded into a full-fledged food fight, fallen oranges zinging past and hitting people, trees, the ground, with a liquid sploosh.

Everybody joined in, the older adults as well as the younger people, everyone but J.D. J.D. observed it from her perch on the ladder high in the tree.

Zev definitely had the advantage, shoveling up the worst of the squashed oranges in his webbed hands, flinging them through the air as if he were playing jai alai.

He looked up at her, laughing.

"Come down!"

She laughed, too. "Don't hold your breath!"

He stopped, and thought about that, an idea that never would have occurred to him back home. In the sea, most ofthe time, he did hold his breath.

"I mean-look out!"

Chandra snuck up behind him and stuffed a handful of slimy orange pulp down the back of his shirt. He yelped and jumped away, spun around and chased after her. She had a good head start.

She almost ran into Gerald Hemminge. He stopped; she stopped; Zev stopped behind her. They looked like a couple of guilty schoolchildren, and Gerald looked like an irritated schoolmarm.

"I thought I could trust you to apply yourselves," he said. "I'm glad I came out to supervise."

"For heaven's sakes, relax," J.D. said. "Nobody was hurting anything."

"We hardly have resources to waste!" Gerald said.

Zev hefted a squashed, reeking orange. J.D. flinched, expecting him to fling it at the acting chancellor. Instead, Zev extended his hand.

"I didn't mean to waste anything," he said. "I didn't throw this one-you can have it if you want."

"How extremely amusing," Gerald said coldly.

J.D. giggled, and had to grab a tree branch to keep from failing. Satoshi started to laugh. Soon everyone was laughing except Zev. He watched Gerald with a completely straight face. J.D. suspected he got the joke perfectly well, but was still pulling Gerald's leg.

Gerald got the joke, and did not appreciate it.

"I see," Gerald said when the laughter finally died

down. "It's terribly funny that the harvest will rot on the trees and we'll all starve. Terribly funny. I see." He glared at J.D., having picked her as the ringleader. "I don't know why I waste my time."

Infinity Mendez came into the clearing where the storage boxes lay. He glanced into one and frowned slightly. J.D. figured he thought the harvesters were pathetic, taking all afternoon to accomplish so little. "That's probably enough," he said.

"On the contrary," Gerald said. "I expect the entire orchard to be picked by tomorrow at the latest."

"Why?" Infinity said.

Gerald stared at Infinity. So did everyone else.

"They store better on the trees." Infinity hesitated. "You never did this before, did you?"

"Certainly not," Gerald said.

"You can pick oranges as you need them," Infinity said. "As long as we aren't planning another frost."

"You said they needed to be picked!" Gerald said.

"I said we needed to plan harvests so we'd have something to eat."

"Thank you for being so articulate," Gerald said. He turned his back on Infinity and the harvesting crew and stalked away into the trees.

"Oh, dear," J.D. said.

Satoshi sighed. "I'll talk to him."

Satoshi grabbed a branch, swung to the ground, and followed Gerald out of the grove.

J.D. glanced toward Infinity. He looked embarrassed. She had thought Satoshi meant to talk to him, not Gerald.

She climbed down the ladder.

"I'm sorry," she said awkwardly to Infinity.

"You didn't do anything," he muttered.

"I didn't listen very well, I think. I remember what you said, and it wasn't 'Let's go pick all the oranges.' "

"I put a note in his mailbox," Infinity said. "Scheduling and stuff . .

. I guess he had too much else to do, I should have talked to him."

J.D. thought it more likely that Gerald had either

ignored Infinity's message or deliberately discounted it. But she was not about to say so to Infinity.

Satoshi knew Gerald heard him, but the acting chancellor stalked through the trees, slapping every branch that got in his way.

"Gerald!"

Satoshi caught up to him.

"Come on," Satoshi said. "This isn't doing anybody any good."

Gerald plowed on, a few more strides, then stopped and glared at Satoshi. "No, apparently nothing I do does anybody any good."

"That isn't what I meant."

"It is what everybody else means."

"Gerald . . ." Satoshi tried to think of something soothing to say, but the truth was that a lot of people found Gerald abrasive. When he supported the proposal to decommission Starfarer, he won himself no friends; when Arachne crashed, he made enemies. Satoshi believed him when he said he had nothing to do with it, but other members of the expedition did not.

"What are you trying to do?" Satoshi asked. "It's too late to stop the expedition."

"I'm trying to make sure we all survive it!" Gerald exclaimed. He caught his error and looked away. "All the rest of us, I mean, of course." He met Satoshi's gaze again. "I'm certain--certain-no one was meant to be killed in the system crash."

"Is that what the chancellor said?"

"I . . . haven't put it to him directly. But I'm certain nonetheless. I very much regret the journalist's death. By all reports he was a talented young man."

"Yes. And a nice guy. He was closest to J.D. and to Stephen Thomas." Satoshi was not about to tell Gerald that Stephen Thomas had buried Feral's body on the wild side.

"You could probably make them both feel better," Satoshi said, "if you told them what you just told me."

"Oh, indeed," Gerald said, disgusted. "And have your partner attempt to knock out all my teeth again. No thank you."

"When you say stuff like that," Satoshi said mildly, "I can kind of understand his urge."

"What would you have me do?" Gerald shouted. "I'm responsible for Starfarer, for all of you-"

"Bullshit," Satoshi said.

11

-and I'm completely losing control. . . . I beg your pardon?"

"You're not Sir Francis Drake, for god's sake. You don't have life and death responsibility and you don't have life and death power. You aren't losing control."

"Perhaps I've maintained that appearance."

"You never had control of the expedition," Satoshi said gently. "How could you lose it?"

Gerald opened his mouth, then closed it again. His shoulders stiffened.

"I had to take over the chancellor's duties. I had no choice."

"That isn't the point. You can't control the expedition. There are a couple of people who could, if they wanted."

"Such as who?" Gerald asked belligerently. "Do you mean the spy? I suppose he could, with enough blackmail and extortion."

"Griffith? No."

It surprised Satoshi that Gerald confabulated power with force. Satoshi had been thinking of ethical power, a quality Griffith lacked almost entirely. Professor Thanthavong possessed it, and so did Kolya Cherenkov. Either one could take over the expedition in a second. Satoshi thought they had that power because they did not want it.

"You're trying to get people to do what you think they should be doing," Satoshi said. "Then you want us all to do it the way you think it ought to be done. Why's that important to you?"

"Someone has to be sure the work gets done."

"But the work is getting done."

"It isn't getting done right."

Satoshi did not say anything about Gerald's current score at getting work done right; he did not want to rub the assistant chancellor's nose in what Infinity had just pointed out.

To his credit, Gerald got the idea.

"I'm doing my best," he said, stiff but sincere. "If you have suggestions, I'd be most happy to hear them."

"Okay. People think you're conspiring with Blades. That isn't doing you any good."

"Conspiring!"

"You, and Derjaguin, and even Orazio."

"Just because we're the only ones who'll speak to the man? I still consider him my superior."

"That's not likely to win you any points," Satoshi said dryly.

"And I have the same sympathy I'd have for any other victim of unjust political imprisonment."

"Unjust-!"

"And don't cite your partner's spurious evidence anymore! Ile found it in Arachne, and Arachne was severely damaged. Besides, Stephen Thomas had a motive to find the chancellor guilty."

"Stephen Thomas liked Blades," Satoshi said.

"He liked Feral better."

Satoshi had to concede that point. "The chancellor's safe, thanks to Infinity."

"Safe? He's in solitary confinement! I have no intention of abandoning him to go mad in that cave."

Nerno's ship continued to pace Starfarer, but Nemo remained silent. The LTMs watched the squidmoth, and J.D. watched the LTM transmissions.

Beneath the mother of pearl chrysalis, the structure of Nerno's body dissolved. Only the single exposed tentacle remained.

Every so often, one of the attendants crawled in, staggering, burrowed into the chrysalis, and disappeared. Luminous white pearl closed the burrows, sealing the attendants inside. Once they touched Nemo's amorphous shape, their forms, too, dissolved.

In the window seat of her house, J.D. sat back from the holographic projection of Nerno's central chamber. Her back twinged and her shoulders ached fiercely. She tried to massage her trapezius muscles, but aside from the difficulty of giving oneself a massage, her bicepses and tricepses hurt as well.

Zev looked Lip from the book he was reading.

"Is it time to go to Victoria's house?"

"Just about," J.D. said. "If I can get up."

"What's wrong?" He jumped to his feet and came over to her, leaving the book open and face-down on the floor. J.D. was glad she collected books for the words and not their physical value.

"I didn't realize picking oranges was such hard work," J.D. said ruefully. She did not think she could jump to her feet if her life depended on it. She reminded herself that she was more than twice Zev's age. "I thought I was in pretty good condition, but I hurt all over."

"I thought it was fun," Zev said. "Easier than picking mussels."

He urged her forward, knelt behind her, and rubbed her shoulders. She leaned back against his hands with a groan of pleasure and relief.

"That feels so good, Zev."

He moved his hands down her spine, and massaged low in the small of her back.

"You picked more oranges than I did," he said.

She chuckled.

"I guess I did. But you moved them farther than I did."

"Faster, anyway."

The fragrance of oranges and the faint sick-sweet scent of fermented juice still embraced him. He put his arms around her. J.D. stroked his arms, the softness of his fine pelt, the hardness of his muscles.

"You like Victoria, don't you?"

"Yes," he said. "This morning was fun."

"It was."

"Almost like being back home."

He bent down to nuzzle her neck, to rub his cheek against her short brown hair, still damp from the shower.

"You like her, too."

"Very much."

"Will she go swimming with us again?"

"I think so. She might even come over and spend the night."

He sat back on his heels away from her.

J.D. turned around. "Wouldn't you like that?"

"I don't know," Zev said slowly, sounding surprised by his own reaction. "Would she come to stay with you?"

"With both of us."

"I like . . . sleeping just with you. Making love just with you. At first it was strange. All land manners are strange at first. But I like being able to think just about you. About what you want. What you need."

She kissed him. His lips parted over his sharp, dangerous teeth. She wondered if he felt jealous, but dismissed the absurd idea of a jealous diver.

"I like that, too," she said to Zev. "We won't give it up. But we can include Victoria sometimes, too."

"Okay."

He bit her earlobe gently. "I'm hungry!"

She laughed. "Me too."

"But I don't want to eat oranges!"

In the main room of the partnership's house, Stephen Thomas slouched on one chair with his feet up on another. He had thrown a towel over his toes to hide the bruises, the loose nails. The bento box containing his half-eaten dinner sat open on his lap.

Victoria wanted things back to normal. Stephen Thomas could not blame her. Tonight was the normal night for the regular potluck for their grad students.

Stephen Thomas wished she and Satoshi had asked him before they scheduled the dinner. He was trying to make the best of it.

As usual, other people came besides the students. Stephen Thomas had invited Florrie Brown, without considering his motives for doing so. He liked her. Unfortunately, Victoria did not, and the feeling was mutual. Florrie thought Victoria was stuck up, and Victoria thought Florric was condescending. Both of them were right. Victoria could be stuck up, and Florrie could be condescending. But Stephen Thomas thought they would like each other if they could ever get over their first encounters. That did not look like it would happen tonight.

He shrugged. Give them time.

Nearby, Lehua and Bay bent over a display of the new cells. Mitch, on the other hand, stood in the shadows gazing mournfully at Fox.

Even Fox had come to dinner. Stephen Thomas was glad; it must mean she had no hard feelings because he had turned her down. He was glad she accepted his point of view. She had not talked to him, but that was understandable. She stayed on the opposite side of the room; about all he had seen of her tonight was her back. Sometimes he had the feeling she had just turned away.

Stephen Thomas poked through the remains of his dinner with a pair of chopsticks, searching each small compartment of the bento box for something he felt like eating.

Maybe I ought to try catching a fish and eating it raw, like Zev, he thought.

J.D. had brought him an orange. "The great hunter offers you the spoils of her kill," she said when she handed it to him.

And we thought we'd opted for the intellectual life when we came up here, he thought.

She had not mentioned Gerald's altercation with Infinity, but Stephen Thomas knew about it. Everyone on campus knew about it. Infinity had not come to the potluck.

Did we ever invite him? Stephen Thomas asked himself with a shock. To any of them? Fuck, I don't think we did. Stephen Thomas made a note to himself to ask Infinity to the next one.

All that was left of his orange was torn rind. He could get himself another piece of fruit, but his feet hurt.

He hoped the potluck would not last too long. If it did go on forever, that would be partly his fault. He had stayed up talking till all hours with almost every guest here, often after Victoria and Satoshi had given up and gone to bed.

It was already getting on toward midnight, and nobody showed any sign of leaving. Most of the kids clustered around J.D. and Zev, asking questions about Nemo, like children anxious to hear an old story told again. The room glimmered with multiple copies of the LTM transmissions, floating like bubbles in free-fall, all different sizes.

On the other side of the room, Florrie Brown and Fox sat with their heads together, talking seriously. Stephen Thomas pushed away a twinge of discomfort. He had no reason but egotism to assume they were talking about him. They spent a lot of time together. Fox had been at Florrie's almost every time Stephen Thomas had stopped by to see if Florrie needed anything.

Fox gave Florrie a quick hug and a grateful smile. She went over to the table and poured a couple of glasses of beer.

Great, Stephen Thomas thought. With everything else that's happened, now somebody will tell our honorable senators that we're giving drugs to the President's underage niece, and that's what we'll get thrown in jail for when we get home.

Oh, fuck it, he thought. A little beer won't hurt her. Didn't hurt me when I was her age, swilling home brew in the basement of the biology department.

On the porch just outside, Victoria and Satoshi stood face to face, framed by the open French window, talking and laughing softly. Just watching them together

shot a ray of happiness through his depression, like light probing a thick curtain that cut Stephen Thomas off from the world. Victoria stroked the back of her hand down Satoshi's cheek, a gesture so loving, so erotic, that Stephen Thomas's eyes filled with tears.

His body responded to his sexual impulse with a stab of pain so sharp he nearly fainted. He caught his breath and froze. His left hand clenched. The chopsticks snapped, ramming splinters into the new web between his thumb and forefinger. His right hand gripped the arm of the bamboo chair, his nails bending against the hard wood.

He breathed cautiously and shallowly for several minutes. When he finally chanced a deeper breath, the pain had faded. He sighed shakily, with relief, put the broken chopsticks into the bento box, and released his death grip on the chair arm. As far as he could tell, no one had noticed his distress, no one knew or cared that he felt disoriented and dizzy. He picked chopstick splinters from his hand.

"I'm disappointed in you, Stephen Thomas."

He looked up.

Florrie Brown glared at him. Her feathery voice had an edge like a paper cut, invisible and shocking.

"Disappointed?"

"I didn't think you were a tease," she said.

Oh, fuck, he thought. What did Fox tell her?

He decided to take no chances on his answer.

"Florric, what are you talking about?"

"I think you know."

Up till now, he had found her coquettish way of dancing around a subject to be old-fashioned and charming. Up till now.

"No.,,

"You make promises, but you never intend to keep them."

"Promises?" What had Fox told her. "What promises?"

"For one*thing, you promised me a tea ceremony."

Thank god, they weren't talking about Fox after all.

"Jesus, the tea ceremony? Florrie, that takes a whole day. You can't just do it, you have to prepare for it. When have I had a whole day free since your welcome party?" Her welcome party seemed like months ago. He had promised her a tea ceremony, and the truth was he had not thought about it since. He still intended to do it, but he still had to finish teaming the damned thing. Not that he was about to admit it to Florrie.

She pressed on, insistent. "You shouldn't make a promise you don't intend to keep."

"I do intend to keep it," he said. "I just haven't kept it yet. There was this rebellion, remember? And then some aliens-it complicated my schedule."