Metaphase

"And you flirt with people without any intention of carrying through."

He laughed. He could not help it. Victoria and Satoshi teased him-even Merry had teased him, and Merry was hardly one to talk-about carrying through all too often.

Florrie brought her hand down fast and slapped his forearm, surprisingly hard.

11OW-F,

"Don't you laugh at me!"

"What'd you do that for? And I wasn't laughing at you, I was just-"

"Don't change the subject!"

"What is the subject?"

"You toyed with Fox's affections and then you broke her heart."

"Now wait a minute-"

"You counseled her-"

"Counseled her! Christ on a couch, I listened to her bitch about her family!"

"And you let her sit in on your seminars-"

Stephen Thomas tried to think of a seminar Fox had sat in on. The impromptu discussion on the hillside? Not that it made any difference.

"I let anybody sit in on my seminars. That's what seminars are for. You sit in on my seminars."

"Don't patronize me!"

She raised her hand.

Stephen Thomas lifted both arms to ward off the blow he expected.

"Don't hit me again!"

"Why shouldn't IT' Florrie clenched her fragile fist. "Because you're too good for anybody to touch you?"

"Because it hurts!"

The rest of the company had tried hard to pretend nothing unpleasant was going on. This was too much; they had to notice. When the hush fell, Victoria glanced inside. A moment later she and Satoshi were hurrying across the room.

"Florrie, stop it!" Satoshi said. He got between her and Stephen Thomas without actually shouldering the old woman aside.

"Aunt Florrie, what are you doing?" Fox was still carrying the two glasses of beer, but her hands shook. Foam dribbled down the sides of the glasses and splatted on the floor.

"I'm giving Mister Stephen Thomas Gregory a piece of my mind, that's what." "You're making a spectacle of yourself, Ms. Brown." Victoria's calm voice held the coolness that meant fury.

"Florrie, how could you?" Fox cried. "I told you what I told vou because . . . because

"I thought you wanted my help!"

"I only wanted you to listen. What could you do to help? He already said no!"

"Sometimes . . ." Florrie's voice faltered for the first time. "Sometimes people say it and don't mean it."

"I don't say it unless I do mean it," Stephen Thomas said. "Fox, I thought you understood that you shouldn't take it personally-"

"Personally? Why should I take it personally? All you did was tell me to fuck off and die!"

"I told you I don't sleep with graduate students."

"And now I'm being humiliated in public-"

"Not by me!"

Tears streamed down her face. She looked around, distraught, at her fellow students, and her major professor, and her professor's partners, one of whom she loved.

Lehua tried to change the subject. "About time to pack this party in," she said. People began to edge toward the door.

"Don't anybody leave on my account," Fox said.

As Fox turned to flee, Florrie snatched at her arm.

"Fox, my dear, let me-"

Fox turned back angrily, trying to speak. The beer sloshed out of the glass in her free hand and splashed down the front of Florrie's black tunic. Florrie gasped and stepped away. The glass slipped out of Fox's hand and shattered on the floor, gouging the smooth rock foam. Droplets spattered on Stephen Thomas's bare calf.

Fox looked at Florrie, looked at the broken glass, looked at the full glass in her other hand. It was as if nothing she could do could possibly make things any worse. Stephen Thomas saw it coming, and did not move.

Fox splashed the second glass of beer in his face, flung the mug on the floor, and fled to the explosion of shattering glass.

"Are just going to let her run out of here?"

Florrie sounded so mad that Stephen Thomas had no idea whether she meant someone should go after Fox to comfort her, or go after her to berate her for bad manners.

Stephen Thomas started to rise, painfully. Cold beer dripped down his front and plastered his silk T-shirt and his running shorts to his body. "I guess-- "

"Don't, you're barefoot!" Satoshi said. "There's glass all over."

"I don't think it's a good idea for you to go," Victoria said.

"So you'll just let the child run all alone into the dark-"

"Ms. Brown," Victoria said patiently, "there aren't any wolves out there."

"This is no time for humor. You're a very cruel young woman."

Victoria turned her back on Florrie Brown. "Satoshi?"

Satoshi had already started for the door. "I'll try to find her. I wish I knew if she's even speaking to me. . . .

"I'll go with you," J.D. said.

"Thanks."

Stephen Thomas sagged gratefully back into the squeaky bamboo chair, surrounded by shards of broken glass. What he would have said to Fox, if he found her, he had no idea. He was damned if he would apologize for doing what he thought was right.

J.D. and Satoshi and Zev crossed the yard. Starfarer's bright night turned the blossoms in the grass and on the banks to pale shadows on dark shadows. J.D. hesitated at the break in the garden wall. Satoshi stopped beside her. "Any idea where she might've gone?"

"Home, I guess," Satoshi said. "I don't know." He sounded resigned. "She didn't exactly tell me her secrets. She kind of gave up on me when I couldn't get her a waiver to come on the expedition."

"I didn't think anybody under age got one."

"Nobody did."

"I did," Zev said.

"Chandra invented you a new name and a new occupation and a new family, and changed your subspecies!" Satoshi said. "If she didn't add five years to your age, too, she's not as smart as I thought she was."

"Oh," Zev said. "Yes. She probably did that too."

"Fox's family's so wealthy," J.D. said. "And so powerful . . . She's probably used to getting her own way. Except about the expedition."

"And Stephen Thomas."

"And Stephen Thomas." J.D. knew more or less

how Fox felt, though she had not compounded her problem by telling Stephen Thomas. Or Florrie Brown.

"We'd better try her house-"

"She's over there," Zev said. He pointed.

"Are you sure?"

"I can hear her."

They went with him down the path.

"She's crying," Zev said.

"Fox?" J.D. called softly.

She heard no answer, but a moment later someone came toward them through the darkness.

One of Stephen Thomas's grad students-J.D. tried in vain to remember his name-appeared from between the small young trees. J.D. had met him at the party, but she had not seen him follow Fox.

"She doesn't much want to see anybody," he said apologetically.

"I'm worried about her, Mitch," Satoshi said.

"Yeah, she's pretty upset. Embarrassed, mostly."

Satoshi hesitated. "I'd better talk to her."

"I'll stay with her. She'll be okay, honest. I promise."

"I'm sure that's true," Satoshi said, "but I still have to talk to her." Satoshi stepped around Mitch and entered the deep shadow of the tree. Fox sat against its spindly roots, her head buried against her folded arms. "Fox." Satoshi knelt beside her.

She raised her head. Her face was blotched and tearstreaked.

"You're not speaking to me," she said.

"Of course I am. You haven't made it easy, though, the last few days."

"I didn't want her to do anything!" Fox exclaimed. "I just wanted to .

. . to tell somebody how I felt."

"I know."

"I really do love him." She stopped, as if she had just realized who she had said that to. "I'm sorry, but I do."

"I know you do," he said. "It's . . . hard not to."

She smiled, shakily. "You're so lucky. You and Victoria."

Satoshi turned the conversation away from the partnership, back to Fox. "Please try to understand how he feels about what you offered him. He won't-he can't-accept."

"He told me why, but it doesn't make sense. He didn't ask me-and there weren't any conditions!"

"No. But . . . things can change."

Satoshi started to tell her that Stephen Thomas's decision was for Fox's own protection; but that would insult her, to have the decision so one-sided, so out of her hands. He almost told her that the situation had nothing to do with her directly, and decided she would be even more insulted.

She hid her face against her arms again; her voice was muffled. "It hurts so bad," she said. Her shoulders shook.

"I know," he said. "I know."

He waited till she had stopped crying.

"I think you should go home," he said, when her breathing eased.

"No! I don't want to talk to my housemates tonight. I don't want to talk to anybody. "

"And I don't want to leave you out here all by yourself."

She pushed herself back against the tree, glaring at him.

"What could happen?" she shouted. "I want to be outside, okay?"

The tall shadow that was Mitch moved from the reflected starlight into the darkness nearby.

"I couldn't help hearing what you just said." Mitch hesitated. "Nothing before, but, when you yelled . . ." His voice trailed off. "What if I hung around? For company, I mean."

Fox took a deep breath and let it out slowly, steadying her voice.

"That'd be okay," she said. "I'd . . . I'd like that. I'll be all right, Satoshi. Hey. It isn't like Stephen Thomas is the first person to ever turn me down. And . . . I'm glad you're still talking to me, anyway."

He suspected that Stephen Thomas was, in fact, the first person to ever turn her down, but he appreciated what she was saying to him. "Everybody's talking to you," he said. "It's justEverything will be all right,"

"Yeah," she said. "Okay. Sure. I don't want to talk anymore." She turned away, huddling against the tree. It should have been a thousand-year-old oak, with great gnarly roots reaching out around her.

"Okay," Satoshi said. He rose. Mitch passed him and hunkered down near Fox.

Stephen Thomas has a high opinion of Mitch, Satoshi thought. He's a good kid, and he'll keep Fox company as well as anybody can. Lord knows, better than I can, all things considered.

Mitch glanced up at him and raised one hand in a gesture of acknowledgment and farewell.

Satoshi returned the gesture, and joined J.D. and Zev.

"Is she all right?" J.D. asked.

"I think so," Satoshi said. "I hope so."

They returned, in silence, to the partnership's house.

Coldly courteous, Victoria mopped the worst of the beer off Florrie's dress. The antipathy between them had reached a new peak.

Victoria delegated Lehua and Bay to see Florrie home. Finally the main room of the partnership's house was empty except for Stephen Thomas and Victoria; the garden was deserted.

"That horrible woman," Victoria said.

Stephen Thomas covered his face with his hands, then pushed his fingers up through his hair.

Victoria tried to grin. "What did her aura look like tonight?"

"I don't know," Stephen Thomas said. "There's no such thing. You were right all along. Auras are bullshit."

Victoria looked at him curiously, but let the comment pass.

She cleared up the glass; it made a wet, scraping noise when she scooped it into an empty bento box. The house did not even have a broom and dustpan; cleaning the floor was the housekeeper's job.

When she was done, she sat on her heels beside Stephen Thomas and stroked his arm, moving her fingers along the growth pattern of the fine gold hair. He tensed at the trickle of pain that crept along his bones. Victoria took her hand away.

"What a fucking nightmare," Stephen Thomas said.

"I don't suppose," Victoria said hesitantly, "that you could have let her down a little easier?"

"Oh, shit, Victoria!" Stephen Thomas exclaimed. "How could I let her down, when I never picked her up? One minute I was telling her that no, Satoshi wasn't mad at her because the genetics building fell on top of us while we were trying to talk some sense into her-"

"Very convincing," Victoria said dryly.

11

-and the next she was telling me she was in love with me. And I told her what I always tell grad students-"

"Okay, I'm sorry, never mind," Victoria said. "Into the shower with you." Stephen Thomas levered himself up. The towel slid off his toes. He yelped in pain. His right big toenail had gotten caught in the terrycloth loops. Only the nail of the left big toe remained. He could barely put his feet on the floor.

"I feel like my toe bones are coming out the ends of my feet."

Victoria grimaced in sympathy tinged with disgust. She slid her arm around his waist. His cold wet shirt warmed, where her body pressed against his. Stephen Thomas laughed suddenly.

"What?" Victoria said.

"My bones sort of are coming out the ends of my toes."

"Stop," Victoria said, her tone unsure. "Please stop."

"All right." They reached the bathroom. "I'll be okay now. I just want to slop off the worst of the beer."

"Will you come to bed?"

"I don't . . ."

"I only want to know you're there!" Victoria took his hand and held it between her own. "It feels like forever since I've touched you!"

Stephen Thomas drew his hand away. "This'll all be over soon," he said. "Soon. Then everything will be back to normal."

Victoria let her hands fall to her sides.

CHAPTER 10

THE LIGHT TUBES HAD JUST BEGUN TO change from night to day, from sheer black touched with brilliant, multicolored stars to an antique-gray luminescence.

Victoria, Satoshi, and Stephen Thomas crossed the dunes. A silver crescent of beach curved around Starfarer's warmest lagoon. Cool night air, flowing over the surface of the water, turned to gilded fog. Phosphorescent waves crept like living tendrils over the sand.

Stephen Thomas had his doubts about this excursion. But he did not have the heart to turn Victoria down.

n, some

Not again. She deserved some fu

play. She had even persuaded Satoshi to get up early and come along.

Maybe it would work out all right. Stephen Thomas felt pretty good, especially compared to the way he had felt yesterday. His last toenail had fallen off, and his feet did not hurt quite so badly. He suspected they would hurt worse later; he could already feel the small sharp lumps of claws developing where his nails had been.

Last night's stabbing pain, from his penis to his spine, had not reoccurred. The pain had scared him. His bruises should be healed by now. Maybe the slugs had hurt him worse than he thought. A hairline fracture, something the health center could miss?

Victoria stood on the beach, up to her knees in dense fog, kicking off her jeans and stripping her shirt off over her head. Satoshi undressed beside her, slowly and deliberately.

"Come on," Victoria called, her voice low and eager. Water condensed in her hair and caught the light, shining soft as transparent pearls. She splashed into the sea. The fog closed over her, muting sounds.

Naked, Satoshi folded his pants and laid them on a twist of driftwood. "Reminds me of the genetics departmenthe said. "During the attack. The fog . . ."

"I don't-" But Stephen Thomas did remember-

The missile struck. The building quivered and fell around Stephen Thomas and Satoshi and Fox. It crushed the freezer. Liquid nitrogen flowed out in a thick, unbreathable fog. A shard of rock foam struck Stephen Thomas across the forehead, and blood flowed into his eyes. Everything he saw after that, he saw through a red haze. When he saw his own blood, he fainted.

-The flash of memory disappeared. Stephen Thomas shivered.

Satoshi drew a deep breath. "Oh, hell!" He sprinted across the wet sand. With a yelp, he launched himself and belly-flopped into the waves.

Stephen Thomas took off his shorts and shirt and kicked away his sandals. The new diver walked into the sea for the first time.

The warm water slid up his body, raising the fine new hair away from his skin. Air bubbles caught and sparkled beneath his pelt. Stephen Thomas stroked forward into the sea. The bubbles escaped, swirled away, spiraled to the surface, and burst with a velvety pop. The warm water soothed and relaxed his body. He wished the water were cold and exhilarating.

He opened his eyes.

He could see perfectly. The water was very clear, the bare white sand arrayed in ripples. His hair tendrilled in front of his face. He pulled forward with a long breaststroke, and the motion pushed his hair out of his eyes.

Victoria swam toward him, her stroke smooth and strong. Satoshi slid beneath him, nearly silent. Satoshi was close enough to touch Stephen Thomas, but he kept his arms close to his sides, streamlining his body. Victoria did touch Stephen Thomas, swimming past on the surface, stretching out her arm, stroking him against the direction of his fur from the back of his knee, up his thigh, across his buttocks, along his spine. He tensed, shuddered, relaxed. He kicked forward, rising beneath Victoria's hand, letting her fingers and the pressure of the water smooth his delicate pelt back into place.

When she swam beside him, he turned to face her. They sidestroked, slowed, and he caressed her. He wondered where Satoshi was. With the thought, Stephen Thomas found his partner treading water behind him in the faint, fuzzy sound picture of his surroundings.

Exhaling explosively as he surfaced, Stephen Thomas gasped in a deep breath and dove beneath Victoria. He touched and teased her, all over, with his fingers and his tongue. He slid his hands, his swimming webs, over her breasts. Her nipples hardened, their heat glowing. He could smell and taste her excitement, familiar, comforting, arousing, intensified by his changing senses. He listened for Satoshi; he opened his mouth

and let the sea water flow over his tongue. Satoshi hovered, near, yet out of reach, and the taste of his body in the water was cool, uninterested. Stephen Thomas blew his breath out in a stream of bubbles. Victoria touched his hand, then swam toward Satoshi. Stephen Thomas followed, kicking along easily beside her. lie touched her breasts again, stroked his fingertips down her body, and slid his hand between her legs. He let the rhythm of her kicking rub the swimming web against her clitoris. She gasped and pressed her legs together and lost her momentum. Stephen Thomas jerked his hand away, afraid he had hurt her with the strong, resilient edge of the web.

But Victoria grabbed his wrist.

"Yes," she said. "That's just right-it's like . . . like being made love to by a silk scarf."

They trod water together, face to face in the warm sea. Victoria embraced both men, drawing them to her and against each other, clasping Stephen Thomas's hand between her thighs. She kissed Satoshi, then Stephen Thomas, her tongue quick against his lips, sliding between his teeth, hesitating as if she had never kissed him before. Stephen Thomas tasted her, with new intensity.

The triad sank. Breath bubbled from Victoria's mouth, from her nose, tickling Stephen Thomas's lips and face. She pulled back and kicked to the surface.

"Let's go where it's shallower," she said. "I can't breathe underwater!"

She grinned and plunged toward shore, diving between Stephen Thomas and Satoshi.

Stephen Thomas followed her, pressing himself past Satoshi, letting the whole length of his body stroke his partner's belly. Stephen Thomas felt no arousal in him, no excitement.

Victoria stood chest-deep in the water. The fog was dissipating; it swirled around her like a wraith. Gentle waves covered her breasts, then exposed her again. She hugged Stephen Thomas and wrapped one leg around his hips. Satoshi swam up behind him and touched him, tentatively, sliding his fingertips over his shoulders.

Stephen Thomas gave himself to the seduction of the water and his lovers' desires and his own.

Suddenly Victoria cried out. She pulled away. Off balance, Stephen Thomas and Satoshi both splashed forward, submerged, and tumbled apart. Stephen Thomas gulped a mouthful of salt water and struggled to his feet, gasping and coughing.

"Stephen Thomas, oh, I'm sorry, I thought-"

She stopped and patted his back gently till he got his breath again.

"I can't breathe underwater, either," Stephen Thomas said. "Yet. What .

. . are you okay? Did I hurt you?"

"Oh-not really. Not exactly. When we started, it was wonderful, but then-" She glanced ruefully at Satoshi. "I guess you were right."

"Yeah," he said. "I guess so. Sorry."

They stood together, closer to shore, waist-deep in the water and nearly in full daylight. The fog had vanished with the breeze that chilled the air. Chagrined, Stephen Thomas shivered.

"Yeah," Victoria said. "It is cold." She sounded disappointed, but also amused. "Maybe we should go back home . . . back to bed."

"I just can't," Stephen Thomas said. "I've got to get to the lab." The last thing he felt like, right now, was sex. His penis hurt, and it had begun to itch and sting.

Great, he thought. Just fucking great. I can't do anything for the people I love, and now I've got a case of jock itch, too.

"Yesterday, with Zev and J.D.," Victoria said. "It was awfully nice." "Maybe divers have secret sex techniques," Stephen Thomas said, trying to joke. "Maybe I don't get to find them out till I'm completely changed. Maybe they're hard-wired."

"Maybe," Satoshi said dryly to Stephen Thomas, "Zev is smaller than you." He glanced at Victoria. "Is he?"

"I didn't notice," Victoria said lightly, and then, in

response to the skeptical glances of both her partners, she protested. "No, really. J.D. wanted to talk and Zev went on ahead. Then we were in the water. He liked . . . being touched quickly. You couldn't hold him, he'd slip away." She paused, thinking. "I never got a good look at him, eh? I certainly didn't say, 'Stand there while I look at you, Zev, and see how you measure up to my partners."'

They waded toward shore. Stephen Thomas was anxious to get out of the salt water. He hoped that then the stinging would stop.

"Good lord!" Satoshi exclaimed. "What happened--did you go face forward in the sand? You're all scraped-"

"No, I never hit bottom." Stephen Thomas looked down.

The blood drained out of his face.

The darkening skin on his penis had sloughed off, fading from its new deep tan to a sickly gray, hanging in flimsy strips, leaving the shaft angry-red, ugly.

Stephen Thomas knocked hard on J.D.'s door. No one answered. He banged his fist on the dense rock foam.

"Hey! Zev! "

He was about to be very rude and look through the open French windows when Zev opened the door. He saw Stephen Thomas and grinned.

"Hi-"

"Why didn't you reply to my message?"

"I'm sorry, I was busy."

"Busy!"

"Yes, J.D. and I were making love." Zev joined Stephen Thomas on the porch and closed the door. "Don't shout, she's sleeping."

"I need to talk to you!"

"Shh. Let's go for a walk."

He led Stephen Thomas through the wild garden, away from the house and the open windows of J.D.'s bedroom.

"Are your claws growing yet?" Zev looked at Stephen Thomas's feet.

Because of the bruising, it was hard to see what was happening to his toes.

"Yes, and they hurt like hell."

"I'm sorry."

"Stop apologizing! You're always apologizing to me.,,

"But what's happening to you, it's my fault."

"It's done. Stop feeling guilty, and tell me what I should expect."

Zev glanced over at him, curious, troubled.

"But you know what. You're turning into a diver."

"I want to know what's normal and what isn't." He turned to Zev, shouting again. "Is it supposed to hurt this bad? Is my skin supposed to peel off?"

Zev took a step away from him. "I'm sorry-"

Stephen Thomas flung up his hands in exasperation.

"-but I don't know all those answers," Zev said. "Your . . . your skin is peeling? That doesn't sound right. Did you get sunburned?"

Zev's distress scared Stephen Thomas.

"You don't know?"

"If J.D. had accepted our invitation and come to live with the divers, Lykos would have been with her. My mother knows all about how the changes happen. But I don't. I was born this way."

"Great," Stephen Thomas said, disgusted.

"I'm . . . never mind."

"Victoria and Satoshi and I went swimming this morning. We tried to make love in the water. But we couldn't because it hurt her. It didn't with you. Why not?"

Zev thought for a moment. "Maybe ordinary human men are bigger than diver men?" he asked.

"I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours," Stephen Thomas muttered. "What?"

Stephen Thomas shrugged. "Nothing. Forget it."

He strode angrily along the path beside the river. A ghost of pain grew behind his pelvic bone, as if a knife

were tickling him, teasing him with the threat of the fatal stab. He slowed down and tried to stay calm, hoping to stave off the pain with caution. Zev caught up to him.

"Can I look at you, Zev? I don't even know what I'm going to look like when this is over."

"You'll look like Stephen Thomas, you won't look like me."

"I mean naked."

"You can look at me if you want. Can I look at you? I never saw-"

The pain hit Stephen Thomas. For no reason, and with too much warning, the pain flamed through his pelvis, along his backbone.

He gave up. He sank to the path, drawing his knees to his chest and wrapping himself in his arms. The hair stood out straight all over his body. He shivered, and groaned.

"Dammit, Zev, what's happening to me?"

Zev sat on his heels beside him, upset and helpless.

"I don't know."

"I wish you'd quit saying that!"

"I better call Victoria."

"No!" He grabbed Zev's arm. Moving made the pain shoot through him again; his fingers clenched harder than he meant them to.

The young diver flinched but stayed where he was, balancing on his toes, scared for Stephen Thomas but not scared of him. Stephen Thomas had the feeling that Zev could break his hold in a second if he chose. He let 90. " Please don't call Victoria, or Satoshi, or anybody. Just give me a minute."

"You'll feel better in the water. Can you stand up?"

"Yeah." The stabbing pain diminished to a throbbing ache. He stayed where he was. "But I can't walk all the way to the other end of campus. Not right now."

"You don't have to. Come swim in the river."

"Is that all you ever-" Stephen Thomas heard himself complaining to Zev about Zev's obsession with water the way Victoria complained to him about his being able to see auras. It did not matter that he no longer saw them. Now he knew how Victoria felt,

Except that it would feel good to be in the water. A warm bath, a cold swim-anything to ease the throbbing ache in the center of his pelvic girdle, and the itch that was turning sore and hot.

He lurched to his feet. "Okay."

They tramped through a meadow of wildflowers, a carpet of color like the pastel reflection of a rainbow. Stephen Thomas followed Zev down the riverbank to a beach ol'small rounded rocks, designed to look waterworn, ancient. They were of course no such thing. They were moon rock, reshaped and carefully placed during Starfarer's construction.

The river curved, cutting into the stratified bank, exposing one of Crimson's fossil beds. The water rippled and softly splashed. Downstream, the channel narrowed; the river roughened and raced with a hollow roar. Stephen Thomas took off his shirt, hesitated, and slipped out of his shorts. He moved gingerly.

Zev watched him, worried that he might collapse again.

"Is it swollen?" he said, when he saw Stephen Thomas naked. "Does it hurt?"

"It isn't swollen. It's sore."

"Then I don't blame you for leaving it out." The river rocks rattled hollowly as Zev crossed them. He tossed off' his clothes and picked his way over the treacherous footing to the river. Stephen Thomas followed slowly.

Zev threw himself into the midstream current, let himself be carried fifty meters through the rapids, then vanished beneath roiling white water.

"Zev!"

Upstream from the rapids, halfway back to Stephen Thomas, Zev reappeared. He waved and beckoned.

It looked like fun, but Stephen Thomas lowered

himself into the cold eddy near shore. Today, a sitz-bath was about his speed.

The water did feel good, easing the soreness, massaging away bits of dead skin.

Zev splashed toward him.

Stephen Thomas got a close look at an adult male diver for the first time. Struggling to stay calm, he patted the water. He slapped harder than he meant to, sending an angry splash toward Zev.

"Sit down."

"Does your penis hang out like that all the time?" Zev asked suddenly. Stephen Thomas shifted on the uncomfortable rocks. He was trembling.

Instead of replying, instead of asking all his own questions, Stephen Thomas started to laugh. Hysteria tinged his laughter, but this really was funny. He thought Zev looked strange, and Zev thought Stephen Thomas looked just as alien.

Zev smiled uncertainly.

"Yeah," Stephen Thomas said. "It hangs out like that all the time. But I guess . . . it won't for long. Does it . . . T' He took a deep breath. "I guess you don't know if it falls off, or withers away, or He stopped, confused. "But Victoria said-"

"It won't do either," Zev said. "I don't think it will. It will just go inside."

Though Zev had no idea what stages Stephen Thomas would have to go through to become a diver, he knew-he was an example of-the result. He explained to Stephen Thomas about internal genitals, and then he showed him.

"It's more streamlined," he said. "All aquatic mammals are like this."

"So are a lot of terrestrial mammals," Stephen Thomas said. "But not ordinary humans. It never occurred to me. . . ."

Now, at least, some of the pain made sense. If his body was creating a place for internal genitals . . .

"You're a lot different than I thought," Zev said. "I knew you kept your scrotum outside-that's so silly, you have to work so hard not to be fertile-but I didn't know you kept everything outside." He shrugged cheerfully. "I didn't know men humans looked so different from women humans. Divers don't."

Stephen Thomas let himself slide into the water until it covered him completely. He wondered how long he could stay submerged. He wondered if he could breathe underwater yet. He tried to take a breath.

He jerked upright, choking and coughing and gasping for air, just like last time.

Zev watched him, bemused.

"What are you doing?"

Stephen Thomas flung his wet hair out of his face. "Trying to breathe underwater."

"Why?"

"To see if I could. Maybe I don't want to come up."

"You shouldn't breathe underwater unless you have to," Zev said.

"Why not?"

"Your lungs get full of water. It's hard work, and it isn't very good for you. It's just to save your life if you get stuck. You get enough oxygen to keep your brain from dying till somebody finds you. You can get pneumonia if you're not careful."

"Great." He coughed and snorted and got rid of the rest of the water. "Anyway," Zev said, "you should stick your penis out when you want to pee. Especially if you're living on land, otherwise you'll get all itchy."

"What about sex?"

"Then it sticks out by itself," Zev said solemnly. "Of course."

"Right. Of course." God, Stephen Thomas thought, I'm blushing. "Why did it hurt Victoria when we tried to make love in the water?"

"I don't-" Zev cut off what he was going to say, and thought for a minute instead. "Did you try too soon? Were you ready?" "Of course she was ready," Stephen Thomas said, irritated. "What kind of a jerk do you think I am?" It annoyed him to have to ask for advice in the first place, but to have Zev act like a teenage sex therapist-"Were you ready?"

"Obviously," Stephen Thomas said sarcastically. But then he went back in his mind and listened to what Zev had just said. "What do you mean by 'ready'?"

"She-"

"Not for Victoria. For me. How would you know if you were ready?"

"I'd be slick, of course," Zev said.

"Oh," Stephen Thomas said. "Oh.

"That doesn't happen to men humans?"

"No.,,

"And it didn't happen for you?"

"Not as of this morning."

"You're still changing," Zev said. He patted Stephen Thomas on the arm. "It'll be better when you're done." He cocked his head, thoughtfully. "You'll have to learn how to retract and extend. I never thought of that." He jumped up and stood knee-deep in the water. "Come on. Come swimming." Stephen Thomas pushed himself to his feet. "I can't right now, Zev."

Zev glanced over his shoulder, wistfully, down the river. "Are you okay? Can you get where you're going by yourself?"

"Sure."

Zev grinned and waved and pushed off backwards. The current caught him. He vanished into the tumble of white water.

Stephen Thomas waded out onto the dry rocks. They were uncomfortably hot. He slid his feet quickly into his sandals and shook himself off. Droplets scattered from his body. In the bright light, his pelt was white-gold against his darkening skin.

He eased into his shorts, tempted to return to the cool solace of the river. He needed time to think and

reflect . . . or he needed to be distracted from too much thinking and reflecting.

As he climbed the path, Crimson Ng strode down it, pulling a wheelbarrow. "Hi," she said.

"Hi. Current project?"

"A new one." Crimson let him look into the wheelbarrow. He expected to see the bones of one of her heavy-boned, long-fanged predators.

The rough slab of stone contained alien shapes, the fossilized soft bodies of creatures never in any vertebrate line. Tentacles writhed and tangled. Eons ago, some violent accident had crushed the feathered legs. "It looks like-"

"I devolved Nemo," she said. "And invented the rest of the ecosystem."

She gazed past Stephen Thomas to the riverbank, barely aware of his presence. "It's ready to go in the ground. Want to help?"

"No," he said, aware that she was offering him a courtesy. "Thanks. I have to stop by the lab, and then I promised Fsther a stint with the ASes."

"Yeah,' Crimson said. "Right. I should do that, too." She grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and hurried past, instantly oblivious to everything but her work.

The cells from Nemo's ship thrived in growth medium. Stephen Thomas set to work parceling cultures out for the other departments.

Stephen Thomas tried not to worry about the weird changes in his body; he tried not to dwell on them. It was hard, when what felt like the world's worst sunburn was peeling and itching in his crotch. He could not forget the raw red flesh. Zev's explanation helped, but not much.

He kept imagining that his genitals had drawn up inside his body. Imagining, hell! he thought.

He knew if he scratched himself, it would just start hurting.

I'd rather have the pain than the damned itching, he thought. But when he remembered the pain, he changed his mind.

He surrounded himself with images: Nerno's chamber, a recording of the cell growth, a micrograph of the huge dendritic molecules. He brought the cell growth image closer, and speeded up its replay.

The cells grew in a snowflake-shaped colony, stretched out in a network of interconnecting processes. The pattern was clearer in two dimensions than in three. In three, the concentric layers obscured and confused the lacy structure.

He let the cell colony recede and studied the strange three-dimensional polymers that he suspected of being the alien cell's genetic material.

He could not figure them out. The magical beauty of DNA was that its structure implied its means of replication: simple, elegant, self-evident. The double-stranded molecule split; the dividing cell recreated the missing half of each strand, using the strand itself as a map for its mirror image. Dendritic molecules, though, were both more complicated and, ordinarily, simpler: structurally more complicated, but with less room for variation within the structure. He could figure out how they could form. But he could not figure out how they replicated. If they replicated. And he could not yet see a straightforward way of getting genetic information into or out of them.

You have plenty of time, he said to himself. What do you have to show for visits to two alien ships? One ordinary bit of living bunch-grass, and a couple of species of alien bacteria. Shit, all you have is time. You can afford to dissect a sample atom by atom, if that looks promising.

Stephen Thomas composed a note telling his colleagues that their alien cells were ready. He closed his eyes and linked with Arachne.

The computer opened up to him, serene and limit-

less, apparently unscarred and undaunted by the system crashes that had crippled it. Arachne's confidence could mislead him into believing nothing had changed. The truth was that the crashes had left invisible pockets of emptiness, as undetectable and as treacherous as snowcovered crevasses in a glacier.

Stephen Thomas sent out his message, then, on impulse, asked Arachne to show him Feral's files.

Feral had specialized in reporting on the space program. Both Victoria and Satoshi held him in high regard as a writer, but Stephen Thomas had read few of his articles. Stephen Thomas had liked Feral for himself. Feral had left a lot of work on the system. A collection of his finished pieces, written back on Earth. Some slice of life reportage. A long series he called "Life Log." The last installment reported Feral's trip from Earth to the transport to Starfarer. It ended with the communications cutoff before the missile attack. After that, his work lay unfinished, stored in private files.

Someone should put it together and publish it for him, Stephen Thomas thought. If we can get to it.

The names of the files were intriguing. His final "Life Log."

"Resonances: Starfarer. " "Stephen Thomas."

Stephen Thomas asked Arachne to let him into the files. Receiving a polite refusal, he shrugged. He had not expected it to be that easy.

Feral had recorded no will, no next of kin, which could mean that the files were locked forever. But Stephen Thomas was not ready to give up.

He tried the obvious sorts of passwords: Feral's name, his birthdate. Stephen Thomas even tried his own name.

Nothing worked.

I'll figure it out, Feral, Stephen Thomas thought.

Reluctantly, he put the locked files away and withdrew from Arachne. He had promised some time to Esther Mein and the artificials. He had better get going.

Mitch sauntered in, looking ridiculously happy.

"Sorry I'm late," he said cheerfully and without a

shred of regret. He dragged a chair up beside Stephen Thomas and straddled it.

Stephen Thomas thought, this does not sound like unrequited love anymore.

I wonder . . . ?

"Listen, Mitch-" Stephen Thomas said. "Yesterday. When Fox was here. It all came right out of thin air."

"I know. She told me. And at your house last night, she just wanted to talk to somebody. She sure picked the wrong person." Mitch chuckled. "Boy, is she mad at Florrie."

"That's probably the only thing Fox and I agree on right now," Stephen Thomas said. It hurt that Florrie had junked the connection they had made-that he thought they had made-so readily.

"She's pretty embarrassed, too. I think she's afraid everybody will take your side."

"There aren't any sides! Shit, people aren't taking sides! Are they?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. Maybe a little bit."

"Thank you for your incisive analysis. Is Fox okay? Are you?"

"Yeah. She was upset last night, but He shrugged, and grinned, awkward, pleased with himself. "I just sort of patted her till she fell asleep. I sat up with her all night. It was kind of "Romantic?"

Mitch started to answer. He stopped. He laughed with a high, delighted, nasal bark.

"It was cold, is what it was, and along around dawn it got kind of damp.

How come it's so cold at night and so hot during the day? I kept thinking I should wake her up and get her home. And then I wondered how come she could sleep and I couldn't."

"Maybe you should've waked her up long enough to ask to share her jacket." Stephen Thomas thought, It's still unrequited, but at least this is a little more promising for Mitch than it was before.

"I just hope . . ." Mitch's voice trailed off.

"That you won't get pneumonia?"

Mitch laughed again. "That from now on, she won't forget my name every time she sees me."

"I don't think you have to worry about that anymore," Stephen Thomas said.

Victoria jammed her shovel deep in the heavy, clayey dirt. Starfarer had not been in existence long enough to develop much good topsoil. Spring rain saturated the ground, and the abnormal heat of the day supersaturated the air with humidity. She turned over a spade full of dirt and broke it up into clumps.

She had promised to spend the morning working in one of the garden plots. Esther could give no estimate of how long it would take the field tiller to regrow its brain. For the last half hour, Gerald and Avvaiyar had been arguing the possibility of building a plow.

"There's nothing simpler than building, a plow," Gerald said. "Then the only difficulty is figuring out how to hitch it to one of the silver slugs."

Victoria leaned on her shovel. "Infinity said we should quit calling them in for anything that wasn't an emergency."

"I see," Gerald said. "Perhaps I should turn over coordination to our Mr. Mendez."

Victoria thought that might be a good idea, but Gerald was in such a foul mood, and so obviously irritated at Infinity, that she decided not to say so.

"I think we should catch some of the horses and get them to earn their keep for a change," Avvaiyar said.

"They're pets, " Victoria said. "Could they even pull a plow?"

"Why not? We could hitch them up in series like a dog team."

"I think you'd have better luck with a dog team."

"If we had any dogs."

"Clearly the silver slugs are the best choice," Gerald said. "Unless we propose to pull the plow ourselves."

"Forget it!" Victoria snapped. She jammed the shovel into the ground.

I'll dig up every square meter of Starfarer with a shovel, Victoria thought angrily. I'll catch fish to put in with the corn seeds. I'll stand up to my knees in water to set out rice plants. But I will not pull a plow!

Infinity headed for an access tunnel to the surface of Starfarer. fie needed to get outside for a while. At least out in space he would be safe from more of Gerald Hemminge's cold messages, like the one Arachne handed over this morning:

"Do not ever contradict my orders again."

So much for government by consensus.

The nearest hatch lay beyond a patch of temperate forest. The shade of the fast-growing trees and the green-gold coolness made Infinity happy.

A small creature squawked in terror. It struggled and fluttered, pummeling the ground.

Infinity sprinted toward the sound. Last year's fallen leaves deadened the thud of his boots.

He stopped.

A bird lay on the ground, a sparrow, its brown feathers blending in against the forest colors. Infinity knelt and touched it. The heat of its body radiated through its soft ruffled feathers, but it was dead. He turned it over. Its blood dripped to the ground, bright red, wet.

Whatever had killed it had disappeared. It left no footprints, only disturbed ground.

Infinity picked up the bird and took it off the path. He left it where Starfarer's scavengers would find it.

But what had killed it? Falcons and a pair of eagles lived on the wild side, but Alzena had not, as far as he knew, introduced predators into Starfarer's campus cylinder.

Maybe Alzena had let loose some small carnivore. She might even have reported it in the daily news. If she had, Arachne's crash had lost it. Curious, Infinity followed the scuffed-up leaves. He wondered if he was seeing a real trail, or a path his eyes and mind were making up. The dead leaves glistened,

black from winter, damp and rotting into the soil. Here and there the leaves rumpled, like a carpet pushed into folds by a scampering child.

Each step released the fertile, musty smell of leaf mould. The young forest basked in the hot spring sun, green and gold, the new leaves nearly full. A life cycle began above Infinity's head and circled beneath his feet.

Alzena had planned the ecosystem carefully. First she had prepared the soil and the free-living microbes. Then she had established the plants and the pollinating insects, the invertebrates, the scavengers. Then she added the smaller herbivores, the songbirds, the bats. When each branch of the environmental network made its connections, she added to its complexity.

She might have released a mammalian predator, a badger, a ferret, a fox. The time was right. Otherwise the forest's life cycle would overbalance. Had she had time to complete the network? Infinity did not know.

He reached the edge of the forest. The trees gave way to a meadow. Infinity blinked in the sudden brightness of hot sun. The stream's reflection dazzled him; water brushed past him with a musical sigh.

A piercing whistle cut the air.

Infinity barely caught the quick motion at the top of a tumble of stones. The black tail of a small furry animal vanished behind the rocks.

Infinity sprinted for the bank. He clambered up the slope, pebbles sliding beneath his feet.

When be reached the top, only the stream's humming disturbed the silence. A dragonfly hovered, vibrated the air, vanished, and reappeared five meters away as if it had teleported.

Infinity sank down, lying flat on the slope. The stones pressed the heat through his jeans and into his skin. He was glad of his leather vest.

For a long time, nothing moved.

Whatever it was, I lost it, Infinity thought. It ran off into the bushes, or along the stream bank out of sight. . . . And maybe it didn't have anything to do with the dead bird. Maybe it was just minding its own business when I jumped out and scared it. But what was it? The tail was wrong for a squirrel or a chipmunk, but it wasn't naked enough for a rat.

I hope. We're in trouble if the campus has rats.

The rocks beneath him had not had time to weather. They were sharp and raw.

Enough of this great native hunter business, he thought. I'll get Arachne to keep watch on the spot. . . .

Just before he moved, a creature scampered to the highest point of the bank. It moved with a smooth canny pacing gait. It rose on its hind legs, its back to him, counterbalanced by its tail. It gazed upward, watching for predators. Paws crossed on its belly, it turned to survey the land.

It saw Infinity. They stared at each other for a split second, each as surprised as the other, the creature peering with shiny black eyes through a black mask of fu r.

It cried out in warning; it dropped to all fours and fled, pacing quick-footed down the slope and between some rocks.

It was one of Europa's meerkats.

"Damn!" Infinity said softly. He rose from the sharp-edged stones, no longer trying to hide.

He supposed he should trap it, or even shoot it. It had no business here. It did not fit this environment. It was a creature of heat and deserts. Why'd Europa leave it here? he wondered. Or did she leave it? Maybe she just forgot how many she brought with her. Maybe this one got lost.

The arrival and departure of the alien humans had been abrupt and confused enough for the disappearance of one small critter to attract no notice.

I wish we had noticed, Infinity thought. If Alzena knew a weasel was running lose in her ecosystem, I bet she'd have snapped out of her funk.

I bet she'dve stayed.

In response to Infinity's request, Arachne set a watch on the mouth of the den, and began a simulation

of what effect the meerkat could have. Infinity decided not to do anything until the simulation produced results, not even to tell anyone he had seen the creature. Someone might panic and come out hunting it. Infinity felt sorry for the meerkat, stranded in an inhospitable environment, a communal being left all alone.

J.D. descended into the basement of the administration building. Her hands and her hair reeked with fragrant citrus oil. She had spent the morning helping sort and store yesterday's oversupply of oranges. Ordinarily J.D. liked the smell of oranges. After two days of it, though, it was the last thing she wanted to smell.

That was what she thought until she entered the basement.

She nearly gagged. The stench of rotting AS brains filled the cavernous room, intensified rather than attenuated by the flow of air pushing past her. Esther must have turned the ventilation up to maximum, and still the sick-sweet odor overwhelmed everything. Including the scent of oranges.

A few ASes stood on one side of the room, hooked up to nutrient feeders.

A larger group stood in ranks, carapaces open but empty. The majority of the mobile artificials remained in a large ragged crowd that stretched into the darkness.

Esther glanced up from an open AS.

"Hi, J.D. What's up?"

"Can I help?" She took a long breath through her mouth.

Esther smiled wryly. "It is pretty awful, isn't it? We're trying to get the bad part done before it gets worse. Still game?"

"I guess SO."

Esther took her to the clump of ASes where her volunteers were working. "It's not that complicated," she said. "Just nasty."

Stephen Thomas looked up from the AS that had spattered him with grayish slime.

"And if you need advice," he said, "I consider myself an expert. Hours of technical experience."

Esther chuckled. She opened the carapace of the housekeeper in front of them and cleaned out the broken brain. J.D. watched, fighting nausea. "This is disgusting," J.D. said. "And I have a strong stomach. It doesn't bother me to eat raw clams. It didn't even bother me to eat sea urchins or beche de mer."

"Not to mention those things with the legs," Esther said.

"Those were pretty good, honestly," J.D. said. "I don't know about this, though."

Stephen Thomas shuddered theatrically. "Eating doesn't come into the equation," he said.

J.D. grimaced. "Sorry. I should have thought how that would sound."

Esther finished cleaning the carapace. "Then you just wash the remains down the waste digester-" She stopped. "I wish that wasn't what it was called," she said.

They all laughed, if shakily. J.D. mastered her nausea, took a long breath, let it out, and snapped open the seal on the next AS. Spores puffed up from a drying mass of mold mycelia, another strand of smell added to the tapestry: dry, musty, lingering.

"I'll do my best," J.D. said. She sneezed.

Esther patted her arm and went away. J.D. picked up the vacuum nozzle and set to work. The vacuum whispered as soft as the mold spores, sucking out the dead tissue.

Stephen Thomas straightened up and stretched his back. The swimming webs on his hands had completed themselves. His skin had darkened past gold to bronze.

"How are you?" she asked. She felt awkward making small talk with him, especially after last night.

"Running on empty," he said.

"Oh . . . I thought the party broke up right after . . ."

"We got up kind of early," he said. He hesitated, then continued with the first real excitement she had

heard in his voice since Feral died. "I found some stuff of Feral's. Some stuff in Arachne, I mean."

"His stories on the space program?" J.D. said. "Yes. I read them-" Thinking of Feral made her sad. She had liked him. He had been both sweet-natured and intense. She had not even minded, too much, when he teased her about her attraction to Stephen Thomas. She had not even been jealous when she realized it was Feral's attraction Stephen Thomas would respond to.

Not jealous, but a little envious, she thought wistfully. I have to admit I was envious.

"Not just his stories. He had another project going. He collected a lot of research. J.D.-Feral logged his life."

"What do you mean?"

"Not like Chandra. He wasn't built for that. But he kept up a running dialogue with the computer web. Notes on what he was doing, his observations, his conversations-"

J.D. remembered some of the things she and Feral had discussed. She felt herself blushing, the heat rising up her cheeks, uncontrollable. Her skin was so fair that when she blushed it was painfully obvious.

If I were turning into a diver, she thought, I wouldn't have this problem anymore.

"What's the matter?" Stephen Thomas asked.

"Nothing!" she said, too quickly. "I mean . . . Feral and I talked about some personal subjects. I hadn't intended . . . it wouldn't be interesting to anyone else. I'm sure he didn't bother to record that," she said hopefully.

"He was a journalist," Stephen Thomas said. "You should have known he was taking notes on everything."

"I suppose . . ." She felt embarrassed. Feral's notes could reveal her with naked transparency to Stephen Thomas. Not that her embarrassment would make much difference in the scheme of the world. Stephen Thomas was used to handling people he wasn't interested in. Last night proved that. But she would prefer not to put herself in the same situation as Fox.

"You better know this, too," Stephen Thomas said. His manner had changed. He sounded cold. "If I can, I'm going to edit what he collected and publish it for him."

Both his words and his tone hurt her. She could think of no explanation for his sudden change of attitude. Unless, of course, he had already seen her conversations with Feral and was giving her fair warning, both of his publishing plans and of his lack of interest in her.

"I'm sure he'd like that," J.D. said, forcing her voice to stay steady. Stephen Thomas replied belligerently. "But?"

"But nothing. He loved you. He'd trust you to handle his work."

Stephen Thomas glared at her, inexplicably. He was angry and yet his eyes were full of tears.

He threw down the cleaning tools, left the AS half enervated, and stalked out of the basement without another word to anyone.

It would be pointless to follow him; obviously he did not want to talk to her. And if she begged him not to embarrass her in public, that would be even worse. So what if everybody knew she thought he was the most beautiful human being she had ever met? She had a lot of company in that thought, and she had avoided making a fool of herself to him directly.

I would have thought he'd just laugh, she thought. Say to himself, Oh, fuck, another one. Or even say to me, J.D., what the hell made you think I'd even be interested? And maybe I'd say, I didn't think you'd be interested, that's why I never said anything to you. If you were a gentleman, you never would have said anything to me.

She stamped her foot angrily at herself, pushing away her anxiety.

She hoped Stephen Thomas would cool off; she hoped he would eventually be able to be friends with her again. She hoped he was not so irritated that this would damage her friendship with his whole family, with Victoria.

Stephen Thomas ran home through the hot afternoon. He entered the garden, soaked with sweat, reeking of rotten AS brains. He went straight to the bathroom, stripped, and flung his clothes into the sink. While the sink filled with warm water and soap, he grabbed a clean towel off the shelf and wrapped it around his hips.

Ordinarily he would not bother, but he could not stand to look at himself. When the change was over, delicate thin skin would cover his penis. Not quite a mucous membrane, but skin at least as sensitive as his lips. So far, though, the skin still peeled like sunburn, and his penis and scrotum had begun to withdraw into his body. He felt squeezed.

He did not yet have voluntary control of his genitals. As Zev said, he would have to learn. They were new muscles, or muscles he never knew he had. They ached with tension.

The soft cotton towel rubbed the fine gold hair on his hip, pushing it upward. He pulled off the towel and smoothed his pelt. He slid the towel downward before wrapping it again, so his fur would stay sleek. Now he understood why Zev wore as few clothes as possible.

He washed his T-shirt, swished it around in the sink, squeezed out the water, and held it up.

The stains from the AS bioelectronic guts marred the turquoise silk.

"God dammit!" he shouted. The shirt was ruined. He flung it across the bathroom. It slapped against the glass tiles and lay in a puddle.

It was his favorite shirt. Victoria had brought it back with her on her last trip to Earth. He should have packed it away with his other silk shirts, to save for special occasions. But he could not bear to give it up so soon.

"Dammit, dammit, dammit," he muttered.

He snatched the shirt from the floor, wrung soap and water out of his shorts, and slapped both pieces of clothing over a towel rack to dry. By the time Starfarer

got back to Earth-if Starfarer got back to Earth-he would probably be grateful for anything to wear. Whether it was stained and ruined or not.

He dropped his towel on the floor and got into the shower.

Admit it, he said to himself as water streamed down his body. You aren't mad about the shirt. Yes, I am, said another part of himself. All right. But what you're really mad about is that J.D. got to sleep with Feral and you didn't.

It was so obvious. When J.D. heard that Feral had recorded their conversations, she had blushed from the curve of her breasts to the roots of her hair. Though she was unusually shy about discussing personal subjects, she was transparent, emotionally and physically.

Stephen Thomas felt completely opaque, even to himself. What difference did it make? Why shouldn't they get together? They had spent the whole trip from Earth to Starfarer on the same transport. Feral was alone and J.D. had thought she might never see Zev again. They had spent a lot of time together, tracking down the system crash. If they had found some pleasure in each othcr, he could only be happy for them both.

Would you regret Feral's death any more, he asked himself, if you and he had made love? Would you regret it less?

He answered himself, in his weird monologous dialogue: If I regretted Feral's death any more, I think I'd go nuts. It doesn't make sense to be mad at J.D., to be jealous of her.

As he had when Feral died, when Merry died, he pulled himself away from his anger and his grief. Both were pointless, and he could not afford to let himself fall apart.

Kolya was miserable. Coffee did nothing to ease nicotine withdrawal; neither did beer. Both made him need to pee more often. So now he was sweating an ill-smelling sweat and having to pee all the time. He had drunk

enough beer to disorient himself, to make his balance chancy. He had drunk enough coffee to make him jumpy. He had thrown away the usual easy relaxation and cheer of Gerald Hemminge's best English stout.

He lay folded up in the window seat, the curtains pulled aside, a chill breeze blowing through the open windows. He sought the cold so he would have a sensation to concentrate on besides the need to smoke a cigarette. Someone knocked on his door. He frowned. He had not heard anyone approach. He was not that drunk. . . .

Another knock. Kolya stayed silent, stayed still. Soon they would go away. The door opened a crack. Kolya tensed.

This wits ridiculous. There were no spies for the Mideast Sweep on board Starfarer. If there were, they would have sought him out months ago. Either he would be dead, a victim of the Sweep's death sentence, or he would have killed them in self-defense.

And it would be doubly ridiculous to be stalked by the Sweep during the only time he had been really drunk in the last twenty years.

"Kolya?"

Kolya's body sagged with relief, his reaction magnified by intoxication. Then, angry, he pushed himself to his feet and jerked the door open. Griffith started. For an instant he looked as dangerous as he was.

"I might have known," Kolya said.

Griffith was the only person on campus foolish enough and self-confident enough to enter Kolya's house, or rude enough to enter anyone's house, uninvited.

"What is it?" Kolya snarled.

Taken aback, Griffith hesitated.

"Do you want something?"

"I can't figure you out," Griffith said.

"That suits me well," Kolya said.

"One time I see you, you're friendly. The next time

you threaten to kill me. Then you apologize. Then you bite my head off." "And you suppose," Kolya said irritably, "that your actions have nothing to do with my reactions?"

"I was worried about you. You look like shit, since you ran out of cigarettes."

"Thank you, Marion. I'm grateful for your opinion."

Griffith glowered at him, as he always did when Kolya used his given name. Kolya sometimes could not resist, though he knew he should have more self-discipline. Today, though, getting a rise out of Griffith gave him no satisfaction.

Kolya sighed and stepped back from the door.

"You may as well come in." He did not particularly want to talk to Griffith. But he had neither the energy to make him leave nor the strength to remain standing.

He folded himself back into the window seat. He had never gotten around to getting a chair, for he seldom had visitors. Griffith sat crosslegged on the floor without comment or complaint.

Griffith had changed his clothes. When he came on board he wore the attire of a General Accounting Office middle manager, slacks and shirt and jacket. Now that he had given up pretending to be a GAO accountant, he wore Starfarer regulation pants, cotton canvas in a rather military green with an EarthSpace logo on the thigh, and a similar sweatshirt. If he was trying to fit in, he had, for once, guessed wrong. No one on campus wore regulation clothes without altering them.

The strangest thing about Griffith's clothes was that they were grubby. Griffith looked rumpled, not his usual neat and unnoticeable self. Kolya tried to recall seeing him unkempt before, even after an hour in a survival pouch.

"Where have you been?"

"Camping," Griffith said. "in the wild cylinder. I needed . . . to get away for a while. To survive on my own.,,

An overnight on the wild side, which-as far as Kolya knew-hosted no large predators and few pests,

did not sound very challenging. But, then, Griffith came from the city. Kolya's lips twitched up in an involuntary smile that Griffith saw before Kolya could repress it.

"What's so funny?"

"Marion Griffith, guerrilla accountant."

Kolya thought he had gone too far, as he often did with Griffith. Sometimes he went too far deliberately; this time, he had spoken without thinking because he was past rational thought. He shivered, and wished again for a cigarette.

Griffith opened his mouth to retort, then stopped. He shrugged, and his lips quirked in a smile.

"More or less accurate," he said.

He always had maintained that he really was an accountant. But he usually did not admit that he was anything more.

"Do you want a cup of tea or something?" Griffith said. "When's the last time you ate?"

"Who knows? It isn't tea I want. It's nicotine." He shivered, imagining one long drag on a cigarette. Then he could not stop shivering.

Griffith went to the kitchen nook, heated water, made two cups of strong tea, brought them back, and insisted that Kolya drink some. It did help. He still felt dreadful, but his shivering stopped.

"What is your father's name?" Kolya asked.

"Peter," Griffith replied. Then his usual suspicion kicked in. "Why?" "Your patronymic is Petrovich. The same as mine."

"I guess. So?"

"Your given name doesn't form a diminutive that you'd like any better than you like Marion. Masha, perhaps."

"You're right. I don't like it any better."

"It's a custom for friends to call each other by their patronymics. I'm going to call you Petrovich."

"What should I call you?"

"Petrovich."

"Uh . . . okay."

No one had called Kolya "Petrovich" in many years. In decades. He had persuaded his colleagues on Starfarer to call him Kolya, or Nikolai Petrovich, instead of General Cherenkov. But he had never before developed a relationship of the right sort, respect and friendship combined, to ask anyone to call him simply Petrovich.

"And I am all right, Petrovich," Kolya said. "Thank you for your worry. Every minute, I think, I cannot survive this, and every other minute I remind myself I have no choice."

"What if you did?"

"But I don't! It's pointless to speculate."

"But what if?"

Kolya slid down in the window seat till he was lying flat on his back, with his feet up against the wall. His thigh muscles twitched and trembled. He flung one arm over his face. The unpleasant cold sweat soaked into his sleeve.

"I would probably kill for a bit of tobacco."

"You don't have to. Here."

Kolya looked out from beneath his arm. Griffith held a fistful of large crumpled green-brown leaves.

"What-! "

"If I remember right, and if Arachne's refs are right, that's what this is."

Kolya scrambled to his feet. He grabbed the leaves, rudely, crushed them under his nose, breathed deeply. They smelled like tobacco. Green, wet tobacco. The smell of it made his whole body thrill.

"Alzena said there was no such thing."

"Maybe Alzena wasn't the most reliable witness in the world. Or maybe," he said quickly, "somebody else planted it. Or maybe I'm wrong and Arachne's wrong and it isn't-"

"It is."

Now that Kolya had it, he had no idea what to do with it. He peeled off a shred of the leaf, put it in his mouth, and chewed. The green tobacco released the worst taste he had ever experienced, sour, bitter, potent.

Saliva spurted froin every salivary gland, as if he were about to vomit. His mouth filled with revolting liquid. He gagged. He pushed past Griffith, hurried out onto his porch, and spat violently over the rail. The green blob of chewed tobacco plopped in the dirt.

He hung over the porch rail, panting and sweating. His mouth tasted vile. "God, I'm sorry," Griffith said.

"Don't be," Kolya said.

It astonished him, how much better he felt, and how quickly, as if the nicotine had diffused straight into his brain. He fingered the leathery leaf, and pulled off another shred of tobacco.

Victoria entered the physics building gratefully, glad of the cool constant underground temperature. She wiped the sweat off her face with her soaked sleeve. She felt dirty and sticky. Her shoes were muddy from the garden; so were her pants, from the knees down. She flung herself gratefully into the deep, soft chair.

The maintenance work on Starfarer was important, of course, but she had to get some of her own work done. If she could spend some concentrated time on the algorithm, she knew she could speed it up. Starfarer was less than a day away from transition, and she still could not tell where they were going.

I keep reassuring people about it, she thought, but I'm nervous, too.

What if Europa suspected we might follow, what if she led us somewhere she can survive, but we can't? Would she do that? Are we such a threat that she'd be willing to wipe us out?

Starfarer ought to be more resistant than Europa's ship to difficult conditions. Starfarer enclosed its ecosystem. But Victoria had no way of knowing what hidden abilities Europa's strange ship might have, and Infinity had brought home to her the essential fragility of Starfarer.

No, she thought. Fragility's the wrong word. But resilience has limits.

She gave herself a moment to appreciate the tightknit, symmetrical form of the three-dimensional representation of her multi-dimensional algorithm. It hovered, complex and colorful, forming itself in the corner of her office.

It stopped.

Victoria jumped up, her sore shoulders and sweaty clothes forgotten. She queried Arachne, expecting to be told No, be patient, it just looks finished, it's still working, inside where you can't see.

Arachne presented her with the algorithm's solutions.

Starfarer was about to set out for 61 Cygni.

Victoria whistled softly. 61 Cygni was a long, long way away: completely on the other side of Earth from Tau Ceti. And yet the transition duration had a lower maximum than the range from Tau Ceti to Sirius.

"Curiouser and curiouser," she said softly.

She checked the spectral signature. 61 Cygni A was a K5 star on the main sequence, not too different from the sun. She hoped that would reassure Infinity; she hoped the change toward terrestrial conditions would stabilize Starfarer's environment. She put a message into Arachne for everyone to see.

She hurried next door to JDA office and found her colleague curled up in the deep fabric-sculpture chair, writing in her notebook. The holographic image of Nerno's chamber hovered over her desk.

"J.D.! The algorithm's done!"

"It is? Victoria, that's wonderful!"

J.D. tried to jump up out of the chair, but it was so low and so soft that it made her struggle. She made a sound of disgust. J.D. hated her office furnishings. They were left over from her predecessor in the alien contact department, and she had had no opportunity to replace them. Victoria hugged J.D., joyful. J.D. embraced her gently, and let her go with regret.

Arachne presented a star map, and a copy of the algorithm.

"It's beautiful," J.D. said. "Beautiful results. It's different from the others."

"They're all different," Victoria said. "But . . . you're right. The other solutions had some visual similarities. This one's completely changed."

"61 Cygni," J.D. said softly. "Will we find our neighbors?"

"Could be."

They knew they had neighbors: Europa had referred to them. Unfortunately, she had not been willing to reveal anything about them, including where they lived or how to make contact with them.

J.D. sat on the edge of her desk and stared at the solution, the star chart, the time range.

"What is it?" Victoria asked.

"Nemo."

Victoria sat beside her. "There's still time. We don't hit transition till tomorrow afternoon. Nemo knows what we're doing. If he-she-T'

"I don't think our pronouns fit Nemo," J.D. said.

"One wouldn't have started metamorphosis and invited you back if one knew there wasn't going to be time."

"I hope not. Only what if Nemo didn't have any choice about when it began? We pretend we know all about our own physiology. But we still can't predict exactly when somebody will be born . . . or die."

"Nerno will follow us through transition. We can meet on the other side." "If Nerno's still alive." J.D. gestured to the time range. "Using Civilization's algorithm, the trip will take a lot longer."

Victoria hesitated. "Do you want me to give

"I . . ." J.D. leaned back, gripping the edge of the desk. "You have to make that decision."

They sat together in silence. The algorithm was an example of natural beauty, like a waterfall, a mountain view.

Victoria laid her hand over J.D.'s.

"Yesterday was fun," she said softly.

Yes.

J.D. brought Victoria's hand to her lips. She kissed her palm, her fingertips.

"Come stay overnight with me and Zev," she said. "Would you?"

"I'd like that," Victoria said. "Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and I have some things to work out, first. But soon."

"Is everything okay?"

Victoria shrugged, and smiled as well as she could manage. "Changing into a diver is more disorienting than Stephen Thomas expected. Not just for him."

Stephen Thomas started dinner. He was a lousy cook, but he needed to pretend everything was normal. He boiled water and stirred in the rice.

At that point, both his imagination and the household's supplies failed him.

He could go over to the central cafeteria and get bento boxes . . . except if he did, he would have to face Florrie Brown.

Outside, Victoria and Satoshi crossed the garden, laughing. Stephen Thomas opened the door.

"Stephen Thomas! The algorithm's finished!"

Victoria fairly glowed with the success of her work. She showed off the algorithm's new pattern.

Stephen Thomas was glad to see her happy, after so much stress and despair, after this morning's fiasco in the ocean. Satoshi acted more content, too, though Stephen Thomas felt an inexplicable distance separating him from his partner.

Inexplicable? he thought. How would you like it, if Satoshi's skin started peeling off?

He could not answer the question. He wanted to think he would take the changes in stride, if they were happening to Satoshi, or if something comparable were happening to Victoria. But he distressed himself, with his battered toes, his raw penis, the swollen flesh redesigning itself to hold his genitals within his body. At the moment he did not want anyone to look at him, much

less touch him. How could he be sure he would accept it any better if it were happening to one of his partners?

Victoria came up behind him, slid her hands around his waist, and leaned her cheek against his shoulder. His body balanced on a narrow line between pleasure and pain. One step farther would take Stephen Thomas wholly into one or the other, but he could not tell which. He wanted to fling himself around and take her in his arms and never let go. But he was afraid. Afraid of the pain, afraid of losing someone else he loved.

He put his hands over hers, stilled her.

"I talked to Zev," he said. "When the changes are done . . ." He felt awkward, discussing what had happened. He had never felt awkward discussing sex. He had never hurt anyone during sex, either. Not until today. "I won't hurt you again," he said.

"It didn't exactly hurt, " Victoria said.

He laughed, harsh and skeptical.

"A little," she admitted. "I was more surprised-"

"It won't happen again," he said, with more intensity than he intended.

He pushed her hands away. She stepped back.

"People weren't built to screw in the ocean," Satoshi said.

"Human people," Stephen Thomas said, his voice sharp. "It'll work after-" "Maybe for you. Where does that leave me?"

Victoria glanced uncomfortably from Stephen Thomas to Satoshi.

"I didn't intend to make a big deal out of this, eh?" she said. "I thought it would be fun."

"Yeah," Stephen Thomas said. "I know."

He and Satoshi gazed at each other. Stephen Thomas looked away.

"I'd better drop by the lab. Don't worry if you don't see me till late." "It's already late," Victoria said.

"Are you coming back?" Satoshi asked.

"What?"

"Are you coming back?" Satoshi repeated himself, emphasizing each word. "What kind of a question is that?" Victoria cried.

Satoshi did not answer her. He glanced down, then stared at Stephen Thomas, into his eyes. Stephen Thomas wondered if he could get out the door before Satoshi said anything else.

Satoshi kept his expression neutral.

"Are you going to tell us . . ."

He stopped. The careful, neutral tone caught in his throat. When he spoke again, his voice shook.

"Are you leaving us? If you are, do you plan to tell us?"

Hurt by Satoshi's unfairness, shocked into anger, Stephen Thomas replied without thinking.

"I don't know."

He fled.

STEPHEN THOMAS PLUNGED DOWN THE dark curved stripe of path, through the pale glow of flowers and the carnationspiced air. He stopped at the garden gate, his breathing hard and shaky.

He had nowhere to go. He did not want to spend the night in the lab. He was too tired to get any work done. He was damned if he would sleep on the couch in the student lounge, in public; he had no idea how his body would betray him next. His makeshift office was too small to sleep in.

He should turn around, go back inside, and tell Victoria and Satoshi he wanted to go to bed and go to sleep

alone. But nothing would be that easy, not after what he and Satoshi had said to each other. Satoshi's question had struck painfully at what Stephen Thomas feared might be the truth.

Is he right? Stephen Thomas wondered. He leaned against the steep bank that formed the garden wall. It was cool and damp. Ivy crinkled against his hands.

What would it be like to live apart from Victoria and Satoshi? A couple of weeks ago the idea would have been unimaginable. Now, strain showed between them all. Stephen Thomas had said things to Victoria that he regretted; and he had felt so disconnected from Satoshi since the changes began that he hardly felt like they were living together at all.

He glanced back at the house. In the main room, Victoria and Satoshi held each other. Stephen Thomas felt excluded and exhausted, unable to face talking to his partners, or anyone else, tonight.

Lots of people on campus would give him a place to sleep. Some of them would not even ask why he needed somewhere to stay. But Starfarer had many of the attributes, positive and negative, of a small town. Including the gossip.

What about the guest house? Stephen Thomas thought.

It was where Feral had been planning to stay, till Stephen Thomas invited him to use Merry's room. As far as Stephen Thomas knew, no one was staying there at all. A solitary retreat where he could get his bearings was exactly what he needed.

A vile smell rolled out of Kolya's oven. Not the odor of tobacco smoke, but the poisonous scent of crushed nightshade leaves: Nicotine, nicotinic acid, tobacco boiled and abused into a useless mush.

Griffith recoiled and hurried to open the front door.

"Don't do that!" Kolya said.

"But-"

"Someone might smell it."

Griffith bolted outside and slammed the door behind him.

Kolya glanced regretfully into the dish. One of the tobacco leaves lay steaming in its own juice.

"This is not a success," Kolya said.

He joined Griffith on the front porch.

"Petrovich, you look positively green."

"I feel negatively green."

Kolya chuckled.

"I tried smoking once," Griffith said. "I didn't like it."

,,The leaves need preparation. That green tobacco was not tasty."

"I know," Griffith said.

Kolya gave him a questioning glance. Griffith shrugged.

"I've tried a lot of things . . . at least once. I didn't like chewing tobacco any more than I liked smoking."

"It smells better when it's cured," Kolya said.

"You need to dry the stuff. And ferment it."

"Ferment it? Like beer?"

Griffith shrugged. "The refs say you ferment it. They don't say how."

"I was trying to dry it, I thought that would be adequate."

"You don't cook much, do you?" Griffith asked.

"Rarely. Why? Do you?"

"Yeah. Some. A little. I don't think microwaving is a good way to dry something out."

"Why didn't you say so before?"

"I didn't want . . . I don't know."

Kolya smiled wryly. "I'm not always right," he said. "Haven't you learned that yet, Petrovich?"

"I guess not."

"What would you suggest we try?"

Griffith glanced toward Kolya's front door, and his color grayed. "What do you mean, 'we'?"

"You shouldn't have-" Kolya stopped. If he embarrassed Griffith about finding the tobacco for him, Grif-

fith would likely decline to get more when Kolya ran out.

,,Maybe toasting it would work," Griffith said. "Toasting it gently."

Stephen Thomas entered the lobby of the guest house.

None of the people in charge of it remained on board Starfarer. With the cleaning ASes out of commission as well, dust had begun to collect in comers and on the windowpanes.

Stephen Thomas climbed to the second floor. Since he was the only guest, he supposed he could have any of its dozen rooms.

He opened the door to the room Feral had been planning to use.

Stephen Thomas had shown Feral to the guest house-

Feral had just arrived on the same transport that brought J.D. to

Starfarer and returned Victoria from her trip to British Columbia.

Stephen Thomas and Feral had barely met. But Stephen Thomas liked him from the start.

He and Feral had stood in the doorway. The room was comfortable and attractive. It had better furniture than Merry's room, the unused room, back at the partnership's house. But Stephen Thomas did not want to leave Feral here all alone.

"You don't have to stay here," Stephen Thomas said. "Come home with me.

We have a spare room."

"That would be great." Feral smiled. He had a great smile. "It's tough to get involved in a community when you're staying in a hotel. Thanks." -Stephen Thomas still wondered if, somehow, Feral's association with the alien contact department-or with Stephen Thomas and his family-had contributed to his death.

Someone had used the room since Stephen Thomas was here last. The bed had not been slept in, but scraps of paper lay on the desk in the bay window. Arachne

maintained a small display nearby. Bright sunlight washed out the display's colors; Stephen Thomas could not decipher it from here.

He crossed to the window, sat at the desk, and glanced up at the display.

It contained a copy of the alien maze that had-they thought-been humanity's welcome into the interstellar civilization.

Stephen Thomas smiled sadly. Lots of people had kept a copy of that maze around, trying to decipher it. Until Starfarer encountered Europa and Androgeos, and discovered that their welcome had been withdrawn. The maze was just a maze.

Arachne informed Stephen Thomas that Feral had set the maze image in the window.

Feral used this room as an office, Stephen Thomas thought.

That made sense; all the members of the partnership had offices outside the house. A separate office made it easier to concentrate on work, and to get away from work at home.

Stephen Thomas wished he had known about this place. He had no particular reason to know; Feral had no particular reason to tell him or not to tell him. He just wished he had known.

Stephen Thomas picked up the scraps of paper. They contained a couple of handwritten scribbles.

"Family.,,

"Maze."

Passwords, Stephen Thomas thought. Feral wrote down passwords till he was sure he had memorized them.

He asked Arachne for Feral's locked files.

He tried the word "Maze" as a password.

It was a public key. Not the key itself, of course, which was too long to remember, but a vector to the key.

Arachne responded with a message from Feral.

Please record your observations about the deep space expedition. I'll use your replies in the book I'm writing. I hope everyone will choose to sign their comments, but you can remain anonymous . . .

. . . but if you want to remain anonymous . . .

. . . but if you insist on . . .

Stephen Thomas frowned. This was getting him nowhere. He could send a message, but it would go oneway into Feral's file, encrypted through the public key, and only Feral would be able to get it out. He wondered why he had not known about it.

You don't know about it because it isn't finished! he thought. What else could those last lines be? Feral was tinkering with his announcement, trying to balance his preference for signed contributions with his willingness to respect privacy. He never had a chance to release his project. He set it up, but he never polished it, never told anyone that it existed, never released the public key.

"Shit," Stephen Thomas muttered. "Oh, shit, what a goddamned waste. . . ."

A public key implied a private key. Stephen Thomas fingered the second scrap of paper. "Family."

He was afraid to try ii. "Maze" had given him a tantalizing glimpse. "Family" might give him Feral's private key. Or it might give him nothing. Stephen Thomas turned the soft ragged scrap of paper over and over in his fingers, afraid to speak the word to Arachne, afraid to encounter the same bleak emptiness that had surrounded him when he first learned of Feral's death.

He rubbed his eyes; he spread his fingers across his face and looked at the world distorted by his amber swimming webs.

Closing his eyes again, he spoke to Arachne.

" 'Family' is the private key," he said.

Arachne opened a hidden room to him, a room filled with Feral's log files. Stephen Thomas stretched out on the bed, and went exploring.

Feral kept lists. A list of places he had been. A list of his articles, of course. A list of the pieces he wanted to write, the places he wanted to go, the people he wanted to interview.

A collection of references he planned to look up: Technical reports on Starfarer, on Arachne. The thesis Stephen Thomas had defended in order to earn his Ph.D.

Stephen Thomas smiled sadly. No wonder it was on the "to be read" list. It was technical and specialized, tough going for a member of the field, much less a lay person.

We're even, Stephen Thomas thought. I haven't read much of his stuff and he hadn't read any of mine.

He moved on through the reference list.

Professor Thanthavong's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for medicine, for creating viral depolymerase. That one was an important, touching historical document, written years before Feral was born. Before Stephen Thomas was born. It was a shame Feral had never gotten to it. Maybe he had heard it, on one of the documentaries made about the professor. He had known a lot about her; he had admired and respected her.

J.D.'s first novel. Stephen Thomas felt an embarrassing flash of satisfaction that Feral had not read it. It was neither dry nor technical, but it was hard going: obscure and unbalancing, disturbing. As hard to read in its own way as the Ph.D. thesis. When Stephen Thomas had tackled it, he had given up halfway through.

He left the list of work Feral would never see, and glanced into the file of work that Feral had read. It extended back to Feral's early teens. It ranged far and wide over subjects and technical level. Right at the top, most recent, was a book on braiding hair. That struck Stephen Thomas as strange. Feral's chestnut hair had been medium length and curly. Not as curly as Victoria's, but tight enough to keep it out of his face.

He left that file and explored farther, deeper.

He could hear Feral's voice in every sentence. Stephen Thomas forced himself to listen, to stay calm. He could not manage to remain unmoved.

Fantasies made him ache with regret and physical pain; observations made him laugh, and wince, in the darkness. He saw himself through Feral's eyes.

Arrogant and charming, physically compelling, his sexuality insistent and innocent . . .

Stephen Thomas resisted "innocent." Insistent, maybe, though he hoped he was civilized about his affairs. He thought he was. He was capable of backing off, of taking no for an answer, though hardly anyone ever said no to him.

Stephen Thomas is vulnerable . . .

Vulnerable? Stephen Thomas thought. What the fuck did I ever say to Feral, to anybody, that made him think I was vulnerable? Vulnerable about what? Bullshit.

He saw a couple of files that referred to J.D. He skipped them. He could not bear to look at them right now.

And then he came upon a picture of himself, a picture altered by Arachne to show his long hair loosely French braided, the light, sun-bleached strands on top crossing the darker blond hair underneath.

He leaned forward in the dark, staring at the picture of himself. In his imagination, Feral separated strands of his hair, smoothed them, plaited them. Stephen Thomas tried to comb his hair with his fingers, tried to loop the strands together the way they were in the picture, but his hair slipped from his grasp when he held it loosely, or cut against the swimming webs when he held it tight.

He felt in danger of breaking down. He let his hair fall; he buried his face against his knees and crossed his arms around his head and curled himself up.

J.D. cuddled with Zev, gazing out across the open field. The river in whose banks Crimson buried her fossils rushed and gurgled in the quiet night.

Zev sighed and nestled closer. He had begun to breathe constantly while sleeping on land, instead of intermittently as he did in the water. He had begun to sleep soundly instead of napping like an aquatic mammal.

J.D. wished she could sleep so soundly. But Nerno's long silence troubled her. If Starfarer entered transition before Nemo called her, would she ever see the squidmoth again? If Starfarer left Nemo behind in the star system of Sirius, J.D. would not have to witness Nerno's death. But Nemo would die alone.

She touched Arachne, looking for messages. Silly; unnecessary. When Nemo called, J.D. would know.

A breeze sprang up. It flowed past the open French windows, bringing the scent of spring flowers, new grass, even a hint of the sea. Strange: shouldn't the breeze flow toward the sea, this time of night?

The night grew darker as clouds collected. The breeze, gusting faster, chilled the air.

J.D. snuggled deeper in the comforter. Zev made a questioning sound in his sleep, and rubbed his cheek against her breast. She stroked his fine pale hair. His body felt hot against her.

Outside, the breeze evolved into a wind; it rushed across the field and into the house, rattling the windows. It touched her face with icy fingers, ruffling her hair and Zev's.

I should get up and close the windows, she thought. But she did not want to disturb Zev, and the cold had not yet penetrated the comforter. There was no hint of rain, only the insistent wind. It whistled and hummed; it rattled in a nearby stand of bamboo.

J.D. thought the first white flakes were flower petals, whipped and scattered from a cherry tree. Some of

them landed on the comforter at her feet. They disappeared, leaving a dark, wet patch.

Snow.

The snow surprised her, but a quick touch to Arachne assured her that it

did, on occasion, snow on board Starfarer.

Within a few minutes the snow was falling fast and hard, huge wet flakes driven horizontal by the wind. J.D. slid from beneath Zev's warm arm and went to the windows. The wintry air exhilarated her, roused her, almost as much as diving into the sea. Before she started to shiver, her metabolic enhancer kicked in.

Zev joined her by the window, sliding his arm around her waist. She hugged his shoulders. They stood together, in silence, watching the late spring blizzard, thinking how beautiful it was.

A spot of warmth blossomed at the back of J.D.'s mind.

With a start of excitement, J.D. closed her eyes and accepted the message.

"J.D.," Nemo said, "it is time to come and witness my metamorphosis." "I'll get my colleagues," J.D. replied. "We'll be there in-"

"Come in your ship alone," Nemo said,

"Alone?"

She did not think of danger, but of disappointment. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas-how could she tell them they could not come? And Zev-? He stood beside her, watching her expectantly, made aware by her physical reaction that something was happening,

"Nemo, please-they'll be so sad.

"You are frightened."

"No!"

"I will transmit instead. You need not come."

She was sure she heard regret in Nerno's voice, and she knew she had to go. By herself. How could she let Nemo change and die, all alone?

"I will," J.D. replied. "I'll be there soon."

Stephen Thomas fell into an exhausted sleep. Maybe the sleep did him some good. Near dawn he woke, moved cautiously, stretched, and discovered that he no longer itched and ached. Tentatively, he slid his hand between his legs. He bolted up, snatching away the bedclothes and dragging down his shorts. His genitals had pulled themselves nearly inside him.

Though he knew what to expect, he still felt shocked and scared and sick.

He tried to control the new muscles, the changed muscles, to extend or retract. Nothing happened. He was stuck three quarters of the way between ordinary human and diver. Stephen Thomas shifted uncomfortably. He felt no pain, only a tense discomfort. But he sure looked weird.

What the hell am I going to do, Stephen Thomas thought, if I can't learn the control?

The skin of his penis was soft and new and very sensitive, so sensitive that touching it brought back the threat of pain.

"Fuck it," he muttered. "Or don't." He lay down and flung himself over, twisting himself in the blankets.

When Arachne signaled an urgent message, he wanted to ignore it, he wanted to refuse it. Instead, he struggled up again and accepted it.

"What?"

J.D.'s image appeared in his room.

"Victoria, Satoshi, Stephen Thomas," she said. Was it only his imagination, or had she hesitated before saying his name?

As she spoke, holograms of Victoria and Satoshi appeared nearby. Arachne oriented their images as if they were all in the observers' circle. Stephen Thomas could project his image and join them. He remained invisible. "Nerno's called me."

"We'll be right there!" Victoria said, excited.

"There's something else," J.D. said.

"What is it?" Satoshi asked.

"Nemo asked me ... to come alone. Alone on the Chi, I mean."

Stephen Thomas flopped back on the bed in disbelief.

,,I'm sorry," J.D. said. "I tried to . . . I'm sorry."

Zev's image appeared, too, in his usual place to J.D.'s left.

"I can't go, either," he said sadly. "Nerno won't let me.,,

"How can it stop us?" Stephen Thomas asked angrily.

J.D. glanced toward the place Stephen Thomas would be if he were sending his image. From her point of view, his voice would emanate from an empty spot in the air. From his point of view, she looked straight at him.

"I don't know," she said mildly. "But I also don't know that I want to find out."

Victoria, too, glanced toward Stephen Thomas's invisible presence.

"It isn't something we're going to test," she said. "It would be . . . bad manners."

"What the hell difference does it make?" Stephen Thomas said. "No matter what we do, we don't measure up to what Civilization expects of us. We might as well behave badly and get some benefit out of their shitty opinion."

"No." Victoria turned away from him. "And if you insist on being invisible, you can be invisible." She spoke to J.D. "Get ready. We'll be over to see you off. To help if we can."

"Oh, Victoria," J.D. said. "Why come all that way in this weather?" "Nonsense. We'll see you in a few minutes."

"All right." J.D. smiled, gratefully. "Thanks."

Her image faded out, and so did Victoria's.

What weather? Stephen Thomas wondered. A storm, like wild side's, on campus? Was I sleeping so hard I didn't even hear it? What the hell is going on?

Stephen Thomas went to the balcony door and

cupped his hands around his face to look outside. The night was bright with a layer of shining snow, and flakes drifted from the sky. He cracked the door open. Cold air washed over him. It felt alive, it felt like the bubbles in champagne. The snowflakes landed with a faint, musical, crinkling sound. "Stephen Thomas?"

Stephen Thomas turned quickly. Satoshi's image remained in the middle of the room. Satoshi gazed into thin air like a blind man.

"Are you still there? Are you all right? Where are you?"

"I'm all right."

"Will you project, dammit?"

"I don't have any clothes on."

Satoshi hesitated. "I don't care. I want to see you."

"What are you so mad about?" Stephen Thomas asked.

"Mad? Why should I be mad? You withdraw, you disappear-"

"You can find me if you want me!"

"I started to. But you acted like you wanted time alone. I can't read your mind, I-"

He stopped, upset and confused.

"I can't read yours, either, Satoshi," Stephen Thomas said quietly.

"No," Satoshi said. "I know you can't. Look, I'm sorry about- We have to talk. I'm afraid you-" He glanced away, to reply to Victoria, outside the area of his image. "Be right there," he said over his shoulder. "Will you meet us at the dock?" he asked Stephen Thomas.

Stephen Thomas had no idea how he would react when he saw J.D. again. One temper tantrum was plenty for any twenty-four hour stretch.

It's not her fault, he told himself. None of this is her fault. Or Victoria's,- or Satoshi's.

"Come on," Satoshi said, his tone uncharacteristically edgy. "The weather's not that bad."

"Okay," Stephen Thomas said quickly. "I'm on my way."

J.D. asked Arachne to notify the rest of the faculty and staff of Nemo's message, but she put no emergency flag on her communication. There was no point to rousing people out of their warm beds, just to sit around waiting till she reached the planetoid. In an hour or two they would wake up, admire the snow, drink their morning coffee, and watch whatever she was able to send back.

J.D. waded through the drifts. Zev leaped along beside her. She smiled. She loved to watch him. He scooped up a loose handful of snow and threw it, the way he had flung the oranges. It scattered into J.D.'s hair. She decided not to show him how to make a snowball. She was sure he would figure it out for himself soon enough.

"It snowed once when I was a kid," he said. "But not very much."

He was wearing his suit and his shoes. Divers enjoyed cold water, but Zev was neither acclimated nor adapted to arctic conditions. The snow caught in the cuffs of his pants, forming icy pellets.

J.D. looked up, hoping for a break in the clouds, a glimpse of the other side of Starfarer. All she could see was snow falling from the luminous grayness of the night sky.

Arachne guided J.D. to an access hatch. Knee-deep snow covered it, pressing it down so it could not open automatically. J.D. kicked the snow away. The hatch buzzed and groaned, trying to rise.

"Help me, Zev." She groped for the emergency handle, grasped it, and pulled. Zev hunkered down, grabbed the edge, and pushed.

The hatch popped open. Wet clumps of snow avalanched into the entrance. J.D. and Zev climbed into the warm service tunnels of the starship, the veins in its skin that led to its underground organs, and all the way to the outside. More snow fell in with them and around them and on top of them. J.D. brushed it from her shoulders and hair, and did the same for Zev. She stamped her feet, leaving a patch of slush on the rockfoam floor.

J.D. continued toward the docking end of campus. She squelched along in snow-soaked shoes that grew wetter, but no less cold, as the snow melted. She hurried, anxious to reach Nemo before the squidmoth emerged from the chrysalis.

We should have stayed, she thought. If we'd stayed, the whole alien contact department would be there. Not just me.

She and Zcv met no one. Hardly anyone ever had the need to come down here. Infinity did, J.D. knew, and Kolya, when they went out on the skin. Even if people did often use the access tunnels, anyone with any sense would be asleep. She hoped everyone would wake up in time to see the snow, because it was beautiful. She also hoped it would be melted by the time she returned.

"You can tell me what Starfarer looks like," she said to Zev, "when the clouds have snowed themselves out, but before the snow melts. It will be pretty, with everything covered in white."

"I'd rather come with you."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Squids never do what you tell them," Zev said.

"They don't?"

"No. They make terrible pets." He considered for a moment. "I guess it's because they're always afraid you'll eat them."

When J.D. and Zev floated into the waiting room at the Chi's dock,

Victoria and Satoshi had already arrived. There was no sign of Stephen Thomas. J.D. wondered if he was still trying to avoid her.

Victoria kicked off from the handhold, brushed against J.D., and hugged her. As they spun slowly across the waiting room, J.D. held Victoria, bending to rest her head on her shoulder. When she finally drew back from their embrace, she kissed Victoria's cheek, her lips. Victoria laid her hand along the side of JDA face and looked into her eyes.

"Good luck," she said. "I hope . . . I don't know. Just good luck."

"I want you all with me," J.D. said. "I don't understand . . ."

"I wouldn't want a lot of people hanging around staring at me if I were changing my shape," Satoshi said, just as Stephen Thomas arrowed in through the doorway.

"I don't know," Stephen Thomas said, his tone careful, brittle, and offhand, his sapphire eyes shocking and intense against the new bronze of his skin. "As a life experience, it's got its points."

"I didn't mean-" Satoshi said, flustered. "I was talking about Nemo." Stephen Thomas shrugged and touched the far wall, bringing himself to a stop. His thin damp clothes clung to his body. He ran his hands along the sides of his head, slicking the curling tendrils of his wet hair. He separated two thick strands from the temples and twisted them at the nape of his neck to hold back the rest of his hair.

"You must be freezing!" Victoria said.

Stephen Thomas glanced at Satoshi. "What do you mean, the weather isn't that bad? How bad does it have to get?"

"If you dressed in something more than underwear-"

"You used to like my clothes."

"J.D.," Nemo said in JDA mind.

Nerno's voice slid smoothly along JDA enhanced link, following the surface of a four-dimensional melody onto a fifth dimension.

"It is time."

"I have to go." Still caught in Nerno's melody, J.D. could barely whisper. "I'm sorry ......

"How long will you be gone?" Victoria asked.

"I have no idea."

"We're going into transition in a few hours! You've got to come back before then."

"But . . ." Her voice trailed off. She glanced around, from Victoria, to Satoshi, to Stephen Thomas and quickly away, finally to Zev. "I have to "

"Nemo must understand the problem," Stephen Thomas said. "Maybe it'll hurry up-"

J.D. glared at him angrily. "Hurry up and die?"

He shut up. J.D. wished she had overlooked his careless comment; surely he had not meant to sound so inconsiderate.

"I'm sorry-" J.D. said.

"Never mind." His voice was hard; he sounded the way he had yesterday, just before he stalked away from the AS repair. "You're right. Of course."

"I'm going," J.D. said. "I only wish you were all coming with me. You know that, I hope."

"Of course we do," Victoria said, worried. She kicked off gently toward her and embraced her again. They parted reluctantly. Satoshi's hug was friendly, Stephen Thomas's brief and cool. Zev hugged her and kissed her cheek, her lips, the base of her throat.

And then the hatch was closing behind her and she was alone in the Chi. J.D. hurried to the observation circle and strapped herself into her couch.

The hatch access retracted with a loud, mechanical clang. Arachne finished the launching check and gave over control to the onboard computer, an expert system that would ferry her to Nerno's ship, and back, without her intervention. She had not given it a second thought when she was on board the Chi with her colleagues; now, alone, she was worried.

How silly, she thought. No one in alien contact is a pilot. If the computer failed we'd all have been in trouble.

As far as she knew, Esther Mein was the only person on Starfarer who knew how to fly spaceships. Every time someone proposed to save money by eliminating human

pilots from the transport runs, the proposal failed. Now J.D. understood why.

The edge of the dock slid past the transparent surface of the observers' circle.

J.D. was free in space.

Starfarer loomed, first a rock face, turning, beyond its support structure, then resolving into a pair of huge rock cylinders that faced her end-on, one spinning clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. Off to one side, the stellar sail gleamed in the sunlight. The sail powered Starfarer's headlong flight from Sirius, toward the cosmic string, toward its plunge into transition.

The Chi's engines vibrated. Their subsonic moan surrounded her. The acceleration pressed her gently toward the straps of her couch. The Chi spun so the observers' circle faced forward, away from Starfarer. The effect was of the acceleration moving around her, pushing her first from the back, then from the side, finally settling her into the cushions. The couch folded at her hips and knees, moving halfway to its chair configuration.

Starfarer fell behind her.

She could not yet pick Nerno's dark little planetoid from the starfield. She felt alone, and isolated.

During her two previous trips on the explorer, she had often come to the circle and sat alone in the transparent chamber to watch the stars. The darkness and the beauty had been soothing. Now, riding the deserted ship away from Starfarer and her colleagues, she felt alone and apprehensive. Her veneer of confidence dissolved, revealing the bravado behind it.

She could feel the presence of her colleagues, watching her, as the public access transmitted her image back to the starship. Instructing the computer to focus the exterior camera on Nerno's ship, J.D. transferred the image-to the public access transmission. Once she herself no longer occupied the center of public attention, she felt easier.

The PA channel reproduced Nerno's planetoid in the center of the observers' circle. Stark white light gleamed

from the silk-filled craters and threw the rocky surface into deep relief. Victoria's image appeared before J.D. The Milky Way shone faintly through the translucent image. The effect intensified J.D.'s impression that she was riding in a ghost ship.

"Want some company?" Victoria said.

"Yes.,,

"About Stephen Thomas Victoria said. "I'm

sorry. There's no excuse for his behavior."

J.D. could think of lots of excuses, or at least lots of reasons, and it surprised her that Victoria apologized for him instead of defending him. But, of course, Victoria did not even know the real reason. J.D. supposed she should tell her, but she could not bring herself to do so.

"He's under a lot of stress." Trying to be tactful, J.D. ended up feeling evasive.

Victoria laughed. "But he thrives on stress. If he doesn't have enough in his life, he does something to stir more up."

J.D. smiled. "A useful trait, thriving on stress. I wish I had a touch of it myself."

"Everything will be all right," Victoria said. "I trust your instincts about Nemo. You were right about Europa and Androgeos."

"I guess I was," J.D. said. "I wish I'd been wrong."

J.D. was the one who had realized how desperately Europa wanted Victoria's transition algorithm: so desperately that she was willing, in effect, to steal it.

"Would you do me a favor?" J.D. asked.

"Of course."

"Ask Zev to stay with you while I'm gone? Divers don't spend much time away from their families."

She remembered how desperately lonely she had been on Starfarer at first, before Zev arrived, before Victoria first kissed her. She had felt like she was starving to death through her skin.

"As good as done," Victoria said.

"Thanks."

"J.D . . ." Victoria said.

"Hmm?"

"Please come back before Starfarer goes into transition."

"I will if I can."

"You have to! It's too risky otherwise. Something might go wrong. You might end up anywhere."

"Victoria, you're scaring me. I'll do my best. I promise."

"I know you will."

Victoria looked like she was about to burst into tears. The change was so sudden and so unexpected that J.D. involuntarily reached toward her. Toward her image. Feeling foolish, J.D. pulled back. It would not have surprised J.D. to be having this conversation with Zev; it did surprise her to be having it with Victoria.

Victoria wiped her eyes. Her chin stopped quivering.

"Sorry," she said, trying to smile. "I didn't mean to do that. I miss you already. I can't imagine She stopped.

"Then don't," J.D. said, chiding her gently. "Imagine me coming home."

Infinity opened the access tunnel, expecting night, and emerged into a white-out.

Thick sloppy clumps of snow slid through the opening onto his face. He was so surprised that he ducked back into the tunnel and let the hatch thunk shut over him.

Snow? It was far too late in the year for snow on Starfarer. When it did snow, it frosted the ground with a light sugar-coating of small, dry, sparkling flakes that sublimed at the first touch of the sun.

Infinity brushed away the clusters of heavy wet snow melting on his shoulders. He touched Arachne, asking for a way to change the weather, demanding an explanation.

What a mess, he thought, when he saw the reply. Arachne tried to cool things down-but now the weather's oscillating between extremes. We're in trouble. If we don't get to 61 Cygni soon, and stay there for a while . . . we're dead.

Arachne could open the sun tubes early and pour heat into campus. The snow would stop . . . and a monsoon would start. Rain and melting snow would saturate the land. The result would be floods, erosion, mudslides. He could tell Arachne to shut off all heat transfer into the ship, to starve the weather of energy. Then they would get a hard freeze. Probably an ice storm. That would be disastrous for the vegetation and the animals.

As far as Infinity could tell, letting the snow fall till the clouds exhausted themselves would cause the least damage.

He was glad the planting had only just started, that the seeds had not had time to germinate. Some of the crops would survive.

They'll survive if this doesn't happen again later in the spring, he thought. Arachne's got to get a chance to stabilize the weather.

He climbed out of the hatch into the snow.

The oranges, Infinity thought. The damned oranges . . . if they freeze, Gerald will love saying "I told you SO."

The snow fell hard and fast. Infinity was only fifty meters from his front door, but he would have been lost without Arachne to guide him home.

He stumbled into his house and closed the door quickly. Esther slept, her snoring a soft buzz. The lights rose.

"Dim!" he whispered.

Esther sat up in bed, blinking in the twilight.

"Hi," she said sleepily. "What happened? You're all wet."

"It's snowing."

He started to shiver. Esther jumped up and hurried to him, pulling the blankets with her. She took off his sodden shirt. He fumbled at the buttons of his jeans. The cold had numbed his fingers, though he had been outside only a few minutes. Esther pushed his hands

away, helped him finish undressing, and wrapped the blanket around them both.

"You're so cold!" She rubbed his back, and warmed his hands between his body and her own. "Come to bed and get warm."

"I can't," he said. "We need to call out everybody, and call in all the slugs-"

He paused long enough to tell Arachne to sound the alarm.

"We have to go around and knock the snow off the plants. It's too heavy, it'll break the branches. The citrus trees . . . if we open the access tunnels, and force warm air out around them, maybe we can keep them from freezing."

Esther slumped against him, resting her forehead against his chest. She had spent another whole day in the basement of the administration building. "Open all the access tunnels," she said. "What about the sun tubes? Spotlight the orange grove."

"I wish," he said.

He showed her Arachne's report. Esther took in the risk at one glance and whistled softly. Warming a single spot with the sun tubes in this weather would not start a monsoon. It would start a tornado.

"Damn." She sighed. "I've been lying in bed for the last hour, I kept falling asleep and waking up and thinking how cold it was and how nice it would be when you got home and got in beside me."

His hands felt warm, now, nestled against her belly. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close. His long hair, still wet, swung forward and touched her cheek. A drop of icy water flicked from the end of one lock and dripped on her face.

"When this is done, we can stay in bed all day."

Esther giggled.

"What?"

"I was griping this afternoon that I had to work inside." She quoted an aphorism favored by transport pilots: "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it."

A few minutes later, dressed in dry clothes-the

warmest he had; Esther wearing one of his flannel shirts under her jacket-they hurried out into the deepening snow. Arachne guided them to the access tunnel. The snow formed a curtain, as featureless and impenetrable as full darkness. The flakes turned sharp and hard and dry.

If they froze, it might be better to risk rain and floods.

Infinity just did not know,

As they passed through his garden, he wondered, briefly, if his cactus would survive.

Infinity's message spread through Starfarer's night, asking people for help and alerting them to the danger of the snow's beauty.

Stephen Thomas followed a medium-sized silver slug into a young apple orchard. The trees bent beneath the snow. Infinity had recommended knocking away the snow if the tree leaned over, if it looked like it might break.

The slug burrowed through to the ground and pushed itself forward, ploughing the heavy wet snow to either side. Stephen Thomas walked in the cleared path, grateful that he did not have to break trail. He was wearing his warmest clothes, but his warmest clothes did not amount to much.

At least the snow had stopped failing.

Following the slug at a respectful distance, Stephen Thomas used its trail to get to the saplings. If he pulled the outer branches gently, he could knock off the snow without standing beneath an avalanche. He could not tell if the apple blossom buds were damaged.

Being so near the silver slug made Stephen Thomas wary. He knew, intellectually, that this one had no reason to turn on him. The one that had pinned him down had been protecting Chancellor Blades. But if-if-the slug did attack, Professor Thanthavong might not come along this time to release him.

In the distance, a tree branch snapped with a violent crack. Its covering of snow cascaded down to land with a feathery thud.

As Stephen Thomas worked in the orchard, he let his attention drift back into Feral's files. He still avoided the notes on J.D. Stephen Thomas liked J.D.; he did not want to spoil his affection for her by feeding his stupid jealousy.

Feral would still be alive if any one of half a dozen events had occurred only a little differently. If he had been involved in the web more shallowly. If he had heard JDA warning, or Victoria's. If Stephen Thomas had not so easily restored Feral's canceled guest access to Arachne.

Feral had logged the incident in which he had been thrown from the web.

It was such an unusual thing to happen that Stephen Thomas set it aside for later, when he could give it his full attention.

The slug crawled through the orchard and headed across a meadow. Stephen Thomas was tempted to call it back, to get it to break a trail through the drooping pear trees a few fields over. Surely Infinity had enough slugs to uncover the access hatches among the orange trees?

Stephen Thomas stamped his cold feet. Infinity had recommended that no one stay out in the snow too long. Stephen Thomas decided to go inside for a while and get warm. When he came back out, maybe he could borrow another silver slug.

The whole world was black and white, silver and gray, motionless. Stephen Thomas stretched. The clouds had snowed themselves out; the sky had cleared except for an icy cloud blanket around the sun tube.

Obliquely overhead, on the far side of Starfarer's interior, black streams meandered through the white landscape. A pinprick of darkness appeared where someone knocked the snowy cover from a sapling.

Zev slogged from one buried sapling to another. JDA transmission of Nerno's planetoid followed him.

Back home, when his family returned from their migration, the sea water was cold with winter. Summer would not touch the sea for a month yet. But he had never felt so cold in the sea as he did now. He was wearing his suit, and a sweater of J.D.'s, but still he shivered.

At the moment, Zev envied Victoria, even though he knew she was risking her life. She had gone out to the sailhouse to help Jenny Dupre align Starfarer for transition, doing the same task Feral had been doing when he died. Zev understood that Victoria was in danger. Risk was always more exciting and more fun than discomfort.

His hands were nearly numb. He had no gloves. He had wrapped his hands in clothing, and he carried a bundle of bamboo with which to knock the dense, heavy covering of snow from the collapsing branches. But if he unwrapped his fingers, his swimming webs would be gray with cold.

He banged the bamboo against a drooping, bending evergreen shrub. The sticks hit with a quiet crinkle of wood on ice. The wet snow beneath the new ice let loose with a soft, sliding thud. The straining evergreen shrub exploded upward. Zev did not move fast enough when the boughs sprang free. Snow and ice erupted like a geyser, showering his chest and face and hair.

He brushed away the melting clumps and the frozen shards. His wet hair slicked down cold around his ears; ice water dribbled down the back of his neck and under his collar.

Zev found himself staring at a hummock of snow, not only wondering if it was bending or leaning or merely, safely, crouching, but wondering if it were a plant. He was so cold, and none of this was any fun. But almost everyone was outdoors tramping through the snow, making sure the animals had shelter, trying to save young trees from breaking beneath their freezing shrouds.

He worked his way toward Satoshi, on the other side of a line of trees. The snow collapsed and slid, avalanching as Satoshi knocked it free.

Zev joined him and worked alongside him.

"I'm very cold, Satoshi. You look cold too."

"I'm all right," Satoshi said, but his teeth chattered.

"I think we should go inside and warm up."

"In a while," Satoshi said stubbornly. "You go ahead. I want to do a little more."

Zev followed, unwilling to leave Satoshi out alone in the snow. He wondered if hypothermia was less serious on land than in the sea. He doubted it, and he thought Satoshi was right on the edge.

They walked through a stand of young lilac bushes, knocking away the icy blanket to release the bright green leaves, the heavy purple and white blossoms, and the disorienting fragrance of lilacs in the snow.

"Infinity said not to stay out too long." Zev did not like to argue with someone older than himself. Among the divers, it was very bad manners. But this was different. Hypothermia caused confusion in the wisest, most experienced person.

"We haven't been out that long," Satoshi said.

"You're shivering."

"Do you want all the plants to die?" Satoshi spoke more sharply than Zev had ever heard him.

"No, but I don't want you to die either."

"I'm not going to die."

"Do You hear something?" Zev stopped. Before Satoshi could answer, Zev plunged between two bushes that showered him with snow and wilted lilac flowerets.

In a clearing in the middle of the lilac grove, Chandra stood naked, arms spread wide, gazing up into the clouded sky. The chattering of her teeth had attracted Zev's attention. Her clothes lay in a sodden pile, ice crystals forming on the folds.

"Chandra!"

She lowered her head and looked at him with her strange, blank-gray eyes, but she did not answer him. Her fingers were blue with cold. Swollen nerve clusters twisted and bulged all over her body and her face and her hands. "How long have you been out here?"

Satoshi followed Zev into the clearing.

"What's the matter with her?"

Chandra tried to reply to Zev, but her teeth chattered so hard she could not speak.

"I think she's collecting an experience," Zev said. "But I think we should get her inside."

"What about the trees?" Satoshi looked around at all the lilacs bent over and crushed in the snow. "I feel sorry for the little trees."

Stephen Thomas heard the flutter and snort of horsy breath, and the muffled beat of hooves. The herd of miniature horses broke from the edge of the forest. They plunged through the meadow, spraying snow, lithe animal shapes, brown and chestnut and gold against the stark landscape. Squealing, they galloped and plunged through snow up to their chests, toward a person standing uncertainly in the meadow.

It was Florrie Brown. Morrie was the last person Stephen Thomas wanted to see, this side of Fox.

Stephen Thomas wished he could vanish into the orchard, but he was taller than most of the young trees.

The herd exploded past Morrie, wheeled around, and galloped toward her again. She never moved, but wrapped her arms around herself, hugging her fringed black poncho tight. She flinched when the horses crowded her. Stephen Thomas wondered why she was so frightened. She often sat on her front porch, feeding tidbits to the miniature horses. Sometimes they climbed up on the porch beside her.

He crossed the field, kicking away the snow. It caked on the legs of his pants.

"Go on, shoo!" he shouted.

The appaloosa stud flung up his head, nostrils flaring. Stephen Thomas's scent spooked him. He squealed and kicked and plunged away, and the whole herd vanished into the evergreens.

Florrie stood shaking among the hoofprints.

"Did you have to scare them?" she said. "I thought they'd knock me over."

He stopped.

"I thought you wanted them gone," he said.

She looked back across the field, toward her house fifty meters distant. "It's so slippery out here, I was afraid I'd fall."

"Why'd you come out, then?"

"I'm going to work, of course. To the cafeteria. People still have to eat." She squinted at him, peering up into his face. "Are you Stephen Thomas?"

"Of course I am," he said, startled.

"You look so different. I didn't recognize you."

"I don't look that different," he said. Not where she could see him. "Do you need some help, or do you want me to disappear again?"

"I'm afraid to fall," she said.

Stephen Thomas took this as one of her roundabout ways of getting something without coming right out and asking for it. He could hardly leave her out here in the field. He offered her his arm.

"I'll walk over with you," he said.

She hesitated, then grasped his elbow with both hands. They walked in silence for a while.

"You shouldn't have teased us," she said. "Me and Fox."

"Teased you!"

"Flirted with us. Without meaning anything."

"I never flirt unless I mean it. I never flirted with Fox at all. Did she say I did?"

"She said . . . she fell in love with you. But you hurt her feelings, and I thought you planned to hurt mine."

"Thanks a lot." He glanced down at her. "So you decided I'm a malicious shithead."

"What was I supposed to decide?"

"I'm glad to know the depths of our friendship," Stephen Thomas said bitterly.

"I thought you liked me!" Florrie said.

"I thought the feeling was mutual," Stephen Thomas said. "Why did you change your mind?"

"I told you. I thought you didn't mean any of it."

"Why didn't you ask me, instead of lighting into me like that?"

"Because I was angry. For Fox. But now you're mad at me. And so is she." Stephen Thomas sighed.

They approached the cafeteria. The silver slugs had partially cleared the path, but had not got all the way down to the rock foam. The beaten snow had turned to ice, with a treacherous texture of frozen ripples. Someone should have scraped the path, but there was probably not a snow shovel to be had on board Starfarer.

Stephen Thomas walked carefully. Florrie grabbed tight to his arm. If he slipped and went down, she would fall, too.

"Aren't you?" she said. "Mad at me."

"I wish you'd had enough regard for my friendship to get my side of what happened," he said.

They reached the porch of the cafeteria. Stephen Thomas helped her up the ramp, over the threshold. Here the floor was merely wet and slick, not icy. Warmth and the aroma of herbs and hot pepper, cooking food, surrounded him. His stomach growled. He was famished. He could hardly remember when he had eaten last, and he could not think when he had been so hungry. He could even imagine diving into the lake and coming up with a fish to eat raw, as Zev had done the other day.

Cold as he was, the idea of diving into a chilly lake gave him a thrill of pleasure.

"So that's all it was," Florrie said, her voice cutting and sarcastic. "Just friendship. How very flattering."

Stephen Thomas glanced at her, surprised and confused. Friendship was an important word to him, one he did not take lightly or offer easily. He had had fewer close friends than lovers in his life.

"It could have been friendship," he said.

Florrie drew herself up angrily. "Then you never were serious."

When she took on that imperious tone, Stephen Thomas found it even easier than usual to see beyond the changes of age and the papery delicacy of her skin, even past the character time had given her. The stunning beauty of her youth overwhelmed all that. No wonder she expected people to throw themselves at her feet, and no wonder they did. She attracted people, and they wanted to please her.

She glared at him.

"I thought as much."

She let go of his arm and left him, making her way toward her helpers, who greeted her and waved and hurried over to help her out of her layers of dramatic black wraps.

I told her how I felt, and she didn't believe me, he thought. Damned if I'll tell her again. Give her another blade, when she's already proved she'd use it to cut out my guts? Fuck it.

His feet were so cold he could barely feel them. It was time to take Infinity's cautions seriously and get warm. Not here, though. The smell of boiled coffee made him feel sick.

He grabbed a couple of hot lunches from the holding table and plunged back out into the cold, heading home.

Maybe Satoshi would be home for a little while, too, and they could eat together and talk while they got warm.

Satoshi was right. They needed to talk.

"Over here!" Zev shouted.

The crunch, crunch, crunch of footsteps on icy snow came closer. Infinity Mendez appeared at the edge of the clearing.

"How are you guys-" He saw Chandra.

"Satoshi doesn't want to go inside," Zev said. "Neither does Chandra, I think." "The trees-" Satoshi said.

"I'm not done." Chandra's shivering made her words nearly unintelligible. "Am I saving anything? My brain is cold."

"I told everybody-!" Infinity cut off his outburst and continued, more quietly. "Come on, Chandra, you've been outside too long. You, too, Satoshi."

He took off his outer coat, started to put it around Chandra's shoulders, but suddenly changed his mind and gave her his heavy inner shirt instead. When he put his coat back on he felt the inside pocket as if he was afraid he had lost something.

"Where does she live?"

"I don't know," Zev said. "But Satoshi's house is over there, and it has a big bathtub."

Infinity looked very worried. "Damn, if people didn't pay attention . .

."

Infinity let his eyelids flicker, going into a communications fugue with Arachne. Zev felt a warm spot at the back of his mind that meant an emergency message. He grabbed at it, hoping it was from J.D. He glanced at the exterior planetoid image, which had followed him obediently into the lilacs.

The emergency message was not from J.D.; it was the message Infinity had just sent to everyone on board, warning them again not to stay out too long.

Chandra had apparently read the message, too.

"You just told me that," she said querulously, as Infinity led her across the field. Zev followed, pulling Satoshi along.

With Zev helping Satoshi and Infinity helping Chandra, the cold little group reached the partnership's house. Inside, the warmth of the air closed in around Zev but barely touched him. He wished he were bathing in the hotsprings where the divers lounged and played.

Stephen Thomas sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in a red kimono, drinking hot tea. His wet clothes lay in a pile near the door, soaking one of Satoshi's floormats.

"I was about to come looking for you guys," Stephen Thomas said mildly to Satoshi. Then Infinity came in

with Chandra. "Christ on a toboggan, what happened to her?"

"Is there more tea?" Infinity said.

Stephen Thomas had already jumped up to get more mugs.

Satoshi stared at the water dripping from his clothes and hair onto one of the floor mats he had made. He moved off the mat, but stumbled. Stephen Thomas steadied him, wrapped Satoshi's hands around a warm mug, and held them there. With his help, Satoshi sipped the tea.

Zev hurried down the hall to the bathroom, shedding his wet, cold clothing. By the time he reached the blue glass tub, the household controller had already responded to Stephen Thomas's orders. Hot water gushed into the tub, and the rock-foam floor heated itself. He felt much better naked, with warm air folding itself around him, warm stone beneath his feet.

Infinity and Stephen Thomas followed him into the big bathroom, bringing Chandra and Satoshi.

"I got some good stuff." Chandra sounded drowsy. Zev had heard her say the same thing before-when she nearly drowned in the divers' wilderness, before he got her to the artificial lung.

"Don't go to sleep!" Infinity chafed Chandra's hands. "What you almost got is frostbite," he said. "Not quite, but close."

Stephen Thomas helped Satoshi into the big tub. Infinity turned Chandra toward it, too, but she held back.

"I don't like water," she said.

Zev jumped into the tub. The hot water stung his chilled feet.

"It's okay, Chandra," he said. "Remember? You were okay when you swam with me."

He took her cold hand and drew her forward. She resisted, then relaxed and came to him and stepped delicately over the rim and into the water.

The tub was more than big enough for three people. Maybe land people liked bathtubs they could nearly swim in. That seemed strange to Zev, to want to be in a

place not quite big enough for swimming. He gave up trying to figure it out, and let himself sink into the tub beside Chandra. She had stopped shivering. She held her teacup close to her face, breathing the fragrant steam.

Lying between Zev and Chandra, but with his feet pointed the other direction, Satoshi was coming back to himself. Stephen Thomas sat on the edge of the tub, mostly covered by the kimono. Zev wondered how his changes were progressing. Claws had begun to form in the clefts where Stephen Thomas used to have toenails.

"I don't believe I said that stuff," Satoshi said. "Sad for the little trees? God."

"You get confused when you get hypothermia," Infinity said. He was the only one of them still fully clothed; he was also the only one of them who had spent time outdoors without getting soaked to the skin. He shrugged inside his heavy jacket.

"Are you okay?" Stephen Thomas asked.

"Yes," Infinity said quickly. "Sure, why?"

"You look uncomfortable."

"It's too hot in here." He let his eyelids flicker. "Esther and Kolya and Griffith are checking on people," he said when he opened his eyes. "I better go help. Will you folks be all right?"

"I think you got to us in time," Satoshi said. "We'll keep an eye on Chandra, though. Thanks."

Infinity left. It seemed to Zev that as well as being uncomfortable he was upset, but no one said anything about that. Stephen Thomas stroked Satoshi's shoulder; Satoshi Jay up to his neck in the hot water and stared into the steam; Chandra . . . who could tell, by looking at her, what Chandra thought or felt?

Satoshi had not even noticed when Zev tried to tell him he was getting too cold, and that made Zev feel hurt. He let himself relax, took a deep breath, and submerged completely in the comforting hot water. His breathing automatically ceased.

He was suddenly surrounded by splashes and shouts. He sat up again, spilling water over the side of the tub.

")What's the matter?"

"I was afraid you'd passed out!" Satoshi said. "I thought you were going to drown!"

"I won't drown," Zev said. "It's warmer, okay?"

"Okay," Satoshi said doubtfully.

Zev took Satoshi's hand, and submerged again, keeping hold so Satoshi would know he had not died.

J.D. gazed through the Chi's transparent wall. Nemo's planetoid had expanded from an obscure point of light to a perceptible disk. The stars spread out beyond it, a field of colorful, dimensionless points. The starship was a shape of variegated light and darkness, approaching fast. It looked different from when she had left.

J.D. glanced toward its image; she asked the Chi for magnification. "Omigosh!"

The surface of each silvered crater no longer lay concave within the rock, but had swelled into a hemispherical bulge. Only the one J.D. had entered remained in its original shape.

Messages flew back and forth and around Starfarer, within Arachne, an excited whisper in the background of J.D.'s mind, as her colleagues discussed the planetoid's changes, noticed new ones, and speculated.

"Nemo!" She sent the communication direct, without thinking or worrying about it, without the usual hesitation of direct contact with another being.

"I am here, J.D."

"Your ship--your body . . . it's changing."

"My body is changing," Nemo agreed.

"I'll be there soon."

"I am anxious to see you."

The Chi closed in on the worldlet, spurred by JDA anxiety, edging close to the safety limit of its fuel supply.

THE C111 LANDED NEAR NEMO'S CRATER. The tunnel extension remained, lying relaxed on the ground. It rose like a snake and fastened itself around the airlock. J.D. waited impatiently for the lock to cycle. As soon as it opened, she hurried into Nerno's warm, caustic air, plunged down the slope, and followed the intricate path by memory and scraps of the lifeline.

Eagerly, she anticipated the touch of Nerno's speech through her new link. She could almost, but not quite, recreate the multidimensional spaces Nemo had shown her. She reached for them, tantalized; they remained just beyond her grasp.

"Nemo, I'm coming."

"I am anxious to see you," Nemo said again.

She burst into Nerno's chamber, into warm bright light. Her throat burned. Everything was silent, motionless. The silken sacs bulged, waiting. J.D.'s LTMs perched halfway up the surrounding curtains, watching, recording, electronically probing the plump and iridescent chrysalis.

J.D. moved cautiously toward Nerno's shell. The single free tentacle twitched, its fur standing out, ruffling, smoothing itself.

"I'm here," J.D. said. Her comment spun off into a sleek new surface. Instead of words in Nerno's reply, she discerned a feeling of welcome and gratitude. She sank down next to the chrysalis.

She waited.

The chrysalis began to shift and churn. At first random, the motion evolved into a regular wave of contraction from back to front. A second wave began, opposing the first. The waves canceled each other, separated.

The chrysalis alternated between stillness and slow rippling, like the tides, like birth contractions.

The welcoming surface in J.D.'s mind quivered and fragmented, leaving emptiness.

"Nemo?"

Silence.

One of the mother of pearl circles along Nerno's flank dissolved.

Iridescent liquid splashed out like blood. Tiny fringed appendages probed through the new hole. A small new creature pulled itself free. One after another, the pearl disks melted and dripped away. The creatures dragged their amorphous bodies from Nerno's chrysalis, fell into the mother of pearl puddles, and writhed, splashing and squeaking.

J.D. watched, amazed, frightened, wishing she could do something to help, wishing she knew the normal progress of the change so she could be sure that what was happening was right. Were the new creatures attendants, or were they parasites, feeding on Nemo's flesh?

The new creatures washed themselves in the liquid pearl; their bodies condensed and hardened like organic precious stones. They pulled themselves beneath Nemo's twisting chrysalis.

J.D. reached out spontaneously to grasp Nemo's uncovered tentacle, but stopped with her hand just short of it, taking in its warmth. She was reluctant to cross the last millimeter, afraid her touch might disrupt the change.

The opposing waves of contraction strengthened and met, meshed and augmented. Nerno's chrysalis writhed violently.

The shell burst with the high, tense scream of ripping silk. J.D. held herself motionless by force of will. Her heart pounded.

The edges of the shell pulled apart, shredding and tearing, falling to the floor in ribbons of color. The opening exposed a dark, crumpled, angular mass.

The single tentacle writhed and convulsed and lashed around J.D.'s wrist. It was as hot as an electrical wire with too much current flowing through it. J.D. gripped the tentacle and held it. She thought of comfort, reassurance. She had never borne a child herself, or attended a human childbirth, but she had witnessed an orca bearing her young one. The divers and the orcas had given her the privilege of sharing their joy.

She hoped Ncmo was doing the same.

The angular mass moved. A bundle of sticks rose from the destruction of the chrysalis, drawing with them a fine film like a veined soap bubble, like the swimming webs of a diver's hands. The sticks resolved into fanshaped frameworks, several pairs emerging from the length of the broken chrysalis. The veins engorged; the skin lost its transparency, but its iridescence increased. Delicate scales of color formed a pattern as complex and seductive as the alien maze. The new wings were as thin as gauze, yet J.D. could stare into their depths forever.

She broke her gaze and squeezed her eyes shut, disoriented.

She was scared.

If my instincts about NemO were wrong, she thought, it's too late now.

She shivered, and repeated to herself: It's my job.

It was her job, and she could not change the way she approached it. Maybe eventually-maybe inevitablyshe would regret leaving herself open. But for now she would expose herself to whatever Nemo chose to offer.

The head of the new being emerged last, rising from the tangle of shredded skin. Iridescent facets of chitin interlocked to form its surface, glistening like the carapace of a beetle.

But the eyes were Nemo's, a ring of compound lenses protected by a mobile lid that opened, blinked, and closed halfway, languorous.

Nemo's wings stretched high above her, ten meters, fifteen, reaching to the roof of the chamber, brushing it with their tips. Five sets of wings, and at least one more trapped closed where Nerno's body disappeared into the floor of the chamber.

The wings fluttered. Dry now, they rustled like moths, and J.D. understood the name of Nemo's species. Europa had thought the name an insult, but she had never known its meaning. Embraced and dazzled by the fluttering wings, J.D. felt sorry for the alien humans. They had accepted the judgment of Civilization. They had never given Nerno's people a second thought.

The knowledge both depressed and encouraged her. She had come into space hoping, perhaps, to find a utopian system that would magically rescue Earth from all its problems. At the same time, she feared perfection. She distrusted easy answers.

There are no easy answers, J.D. said to herself. And Civilization isn't the perfect organism Europa represented it to be. They may have the right to judge us. But they don't have the right to judge us without appeal! "Nemo?"

"I am here, J.D."

"I'm glad to have you back," J.D. said.

"I'm glad to be done with the change."

J.D. did not know what to say, because the change meant Nemo soon would

die.

The pearl creatures crawled out from beneath Nerno's body, pulling with them shreds of Nerno's shell. One snatched up a bit of the shredded chrysalis and shoved it into its mouth. The iridescent fragment crinkled like paper and disappeared.

Like a horde of fuzzy ants, the tiniest animals swarmed up Nerno's wings and groomed them.

"I thought you were beautiful before your metamorphosis," J.D. said. "And I think you're beautiful now."

Nerno's wings swept down, brushing JDA face, and up again. They quivered, and the quaking sound filled the chamber with the sound of leaves in the wind. The wings were much more mobile than the wings of moths or butterflies; the articulated framework moved the surfaces like bird wings.

The tentacle around J.D.'s wrist relaxed and drew away. She had almost forgotten it; she flexed her fingers and shook her hand to get the blood flowing again. Nemo brushed her cheek, her shoulder, with the tip of the tentacle.

Creatures crept from folds in the floor, from pores in the curtains, creatures different from the attendants of Nerno's previous form.

A whole group of larger attendants, nearly the size of housecats, bumbled out. They looked like giant sowbugs with a mass of small, slender hind legs and a cluster of thick, pudgy-toed front legs. Each time one bumped into another they slowed, till they all coalesced into a pile.

J.D. turned some of the LTMs toward the new attendants. She let her eyelids flutter, tapping into the transmission, hoping for more information than her own senses could supply.

Her connection to the LTM link exploded, leaving her stunned and confused and frightened.

The attendants scuttled around, multiple feet scrabbling and scratching on the floor in frenzied motion.

They scrambled toward the LTMs and engulfed them, climbing over them, tumbling recklessly.

Nerno's pleading voice penetrated her disturbed link. "J.D., stop, stop." All J.D. could think of to do was shut down the LTMs. They folded beneath the attendants, and cut off their sensors.

The attendants fell away from the LTMs. From giant sowbugs to tentacled shrimp, they withdrew and returned to Nemo's side.

"Nemo, what happened?" J.D. was shaking. The dissolution of the link was too much like what had happened to Feral. "That's how I watched your metamorphosis-I thought it would be safe for you!"

"But, J.D., I am different now," Nemo said, "and my attendants are different."

"I'm so sorry."

She did not know what else to say. She locked all the LTMs-her attendants--on passive systems only, and set them to record.

"What about my link to Starfarer?"

Nemo hesitated. "It's very strong, and very near. . . ."

J.D. got the hint. She sent a quick message back to Starfarer. I'm okay. But I'd better shut down communication for a while.

With a word of understanding and regret from Victoria, a yelp of protest from Zev, and a curse of apprehension from Stephen Thomas, J.D.'s perception of her link to Starfarer vanished into silence.

"Did I cause you harm?" J.D. asked Nemo. "Are you hurt?"

"I'm unhurt. But there's not much time."

Nerno's tentacle stretched out, wrapped itself around one of the silken sacs, and drew it in, slowly, painfully.

"What should I do? Can I help?"

"You may help," Nemo said.

J.D. hoped the obvious thing to her was the obvious thing to the squidmoth. She picked up the sac in both

hands and presented it in front of Nemo. It was astonishingly heavy.

"What happens now?"

"I combine my genetic material with the genetic material of the juvenile parents of my offspring."

The single tentacle curled around the sac. Nemo's head reared up, exposing a gaping, toothless mouth. Like a frog's tongue, the tentacle drew the sac inside.

"Nemo, what-T'

"I cannot speak with you now, J.D."

Nerno's adult body was slender and mobile, unlike the ponderous squidlike juvenile body. The legs and the feather-gills and the rippling horizontal fin had vanished -transformed into wings? Or was that too simple an analysis?

Nemo's wings began to beat, in a wave from front to back. The motion of the wings eased the bulge of the sac through Nemo's new form, expanding the translucent, peacock-hued skin before the sac, contracting behind it. The colors changed over the bulge of the egg sac, flowing from iridescent red through orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.

The egg case hesitated at a second, smaller bulge in Nerno's. body, beneath the last free pair of wings. The two shapes touched, merged, engulfed each other; and then the egg case continued to move.

Nerno's wings fluttered faster, harder, creating a low, trilling whirr that filled the air. The giant sowbugs streamed from their congregation and surrounded Nemo's body where it entered the floor. Using their front appendages, they massaged the egg sac and pushed it along. It disappeared beneath the level of the floor. The whirring wings relaxed, and drooped.

The attendants fell away and crawled blindly around, undirected, slowing as they touched, till they lay again in a compact, pulsating mass.

"You may help," Nemo said again.

J.D. hurried to the pile of satchels and brought another. Again, Nemo engulfed it. The wings stretched,

pulsed, and resumed their flowing, steady beat, pumping the sac on its long traverse.

J.D. fetched another egg case.

"Not yet, not yet," Nemo said.

She stopped.

Maybe it's a reflex, engulfing the egg sac, J.D. thought. Maybe that's why the tentacle is so slow. Maybe the timing is critical.

Another bulge began to form beneath Nemo's posterior full wings. By the time the second sac reached it, it had stopped growing. Again the bulges merged, again the sowbugs pressed the egg bulge out of sight.

Time passed.

J.D. continued to bring the egg sacs to Nerno's mouth, leaving the tentacle to conserve its strength for the engulfing. Nemo remained silent, eyes closed, body and wings pulsing with exertion.

J.D. was in awe of the effort Nemo expended. Of course the squidmoth could not talk to her now. But the silence of J.D.'s enhanced link felt huge and empty. She wondered if the change had been futile, just enough to give her a glimpse of Nerno's complete communication.

With each egg sac, the traverse through Nerno's body occurred more slowly. The secondary bulge, the egg, took longer to form.

J.D. helped, and waited, for several hours. Her friends back home would be worried by her silence.

After the fifth egg sac, Nerno's wings drooped. J.D. stroked the heavy, chitinous head. Nemo's tentacle curled; the wings rose, and stretched. J.D. picked up another egg sac and brought it to the tentacle.

I must be getting tired, too, she thought. These things are beginning to feel heavier and heavier.

Nerno's tentacle wrapped around the egg case, dragging it weakly in. J.D. stood anxiously by while Nerno's mouth worked around it. The iridescent wings sagged nearly to the floor, and their colors had begun to dull. Right after the metamorphosis, Nerno's body had looked sleek and well-fed. Now it had begun to shrivel.

Nemo's sunken flanks defined the egg case in more detail. The long wings labored to continue their beat. Even the attendants moved slowly, tentatively.

The egg case merged with the egg bulge, and disappeared, and the giant sowbugs tumbled away from each other in response to the renewed throbbing of the wings.

The tentacle sagged out of Nerno's mouth, twitching and searching. J.D. hurried to bring the seventh sac. Nemo engulfed it, and the first set of wings moved it with agonizing slowness.

Six more egg cases remained in the pile. J.D. felt frightened, because Nemo could never ingest them all before Starfarer hit transition. She should give herself at least an hour to get back.

Nemo quivered, exhausted. J.D. stroked Nerno's tentacle, the pulsing flanks.

Nerno's wings swept down, trembled against the floor, and lifted themselves slowly, painfully.

The passage is going to take at least an hour, J.D. thought. If I'm quick-

She touched her link to Nemo. "I'll be right back." She gently squeezed the furred tip of Nerno's tentacle. Hoping the squidmoth could hear her, could still understand her, she rushed back to the Chi.

On board Starfarer, the sun tubes brightened with morning. The temperature rose slowly. All over campus, the snow began to melt. Icy drips collected at the ends of branches and splashed to the ground; rivulets rushed down hillsides, formed tiny new streams, flowed into the rivers.

Infinity's boots squished in mud and crunched the ice crystals that remained beneath the surface.

He reached the dripping orange grove, stopped, and looked around.

The emergency measures had saved most of the trees. The fruit was another story. About half the ripe

oranges had fallen, and the blossoms for the next crop had wilted and died. Infinity sighed.

Guessed real wrong on this one, he thought.

His inside coat pocket scrabbled against his chest.

He opened the coat and slid his hand into the pocket.

11OW!" He jerked back his hand and inspected his nipped finger.

"Is that the thanks I get for saving you from freezing?" Infinity said aloud.

The meerkat burrowed deeper, her claws catching on the material of his coat.

"What is it you want?" He had tried to let the meerkat loose near her burrow, but she would not go.

I bet this critter is Europa's house pet, Infinity thought. And I'll bet she wants to live in a nice warm house.

Especially since she's about to have kittens.

Someone squelched through the deep mud toward him. Infinity caught a glimpse of Gerald Hernminge on the other side of the orange grove.

Listening to Gerald say "I told you so" was the last thing Infinity needed. The last thing, except maybe having Gerald find out about the meerkat.

J.D. rushed back to the Chi. The Chi's transmission to Starfarer had not troubled Nemo, so J.D. could safely open her link.

Zev's image popped into being before her.

"J.D.! We thought-I was afraid-"

"I'm fine, Zev. How much got through before I pulled the plug?"

J.D. grabbed sandwich makings out of the cupboard and started some coffee. Victoria's image appeared near Zev.

"Just enough to scare us. We've been so worried about you!" Victoria floated in the sailhouse, helping Jenny position Starfarer for transition. Jenny still did

not, could not, trust Arachne. That left Victoria to buffer her, in the same position Feral was in when he died.

"You're worried about me?" J.D. asked. She slapped a sandwich together and wolfed down a bite.

"At least everybody knows where I am." Victoria smiled wryly.

"I'm right here," J.D. said. "I'm going back inside in a minute."

Satoshi appeared, surrounded by the complex equipment of the observatory. "How mad is Nemo?"

J.D. swallowed another bite of sandwich.

"Nemo's not mad at all, as far as I can tell." She glanced at the image Arachne created of Nemo's planetoid. Several of the craters bulged with distended silk.

"You aren't in any danger?" Victoria asked.

"I'm sure not."

Esther Mein's image appeared. "I can bring help with the transport. It's ready."

"Thanks, Esther. But it isn't necessary. Really. I better get back."

"How much longer?" Victoria asked.

"I just can't say."

"You're cutting it awfully close!"

"I can't help it."

"But what are you doing?" Zev asked.

"I guess . . . I'm acting as midwife. I have to go, Zev, I love you. Keep an eye on those other craters. I think . . ." She smiled. "I don't know for sure. But I think you should watch them."

She rushed back through the tortuous silken path. The curtains continued to deteriorate. J.D. followed a trail of her own footprints, bruises in the silk, back to Nemo's chamber.

Infinity patted the nest of towels on the floor of the closet. In the comer, the meerkat stood in sentry position, her paws crossed on her rounded belly. She fixed

him with a suspicious gaze through her mask of black fur.

"Oh, my god," Esther said behind him.

"Don't scare her," Infinity said.

"I can't believe Europa left her behind! What a rotten thing to do." She knelt beside Infinity and tried to pet the meerkat. The meerkat snapped at her. Esther snatched back her hand.

"I think we better leave her alone."

Infinity sat back on his heels. The meerkat walked a few steps on her hind feet, then dropped to all fours and jumped into the center of the towels.

Someone knocked on the front door. "Are you ready?" Kolya asked.

Infinity quickly slid the closet door most of the way shut, hiding the meerkat.

"We're ready."

He and Esther joined Kolya on the front porch.

"This is getting to be a tradition," Esther said, "watching transition from outside-" She cut herself off when she saw Griffith. "Oh . . . are you coming?"

"I'm checked out on the suits," Griffith said, defensive.

"I invited him to come with us," Kolya said. "He's allied himself with the expedition. We should accept that."

Infinity shrugged. "Whatever you want."

"Do you feel better today?" Esther said to Kolya. "You look better." She hugged him, then drew back, startled.

Kolya reeked with the smell of tobacco. Not the sour smell of his sweat, when the nicotine fits had hit him, but the fresh sharp smell of smoke. "You said you ran out of cigarettes," Infinity said.

"I did," Kolya said, embarrassed. "But . . . I found another source. Tobacco grows wild. My friend Petrovich discovered it." He gestured toward Griffith.

"But you'd almost quit!" Infinity glared at Griffith. "Some friend you are!"

"Mind your own damn business," Griffith said.

"It is MY- 11

"No, it isn't," Kolya said gently. "I appreciate your concern, my friend. And you're right, I'd be better off if I'd quit. But I was miserable and sick, and now I'm not miserable and sick. Let's leave it at that."

He set off across Infinity's garden, heading for the access hatch on the other side of the field. Griffith followed him, hurrying to keep up. Infinity glared after them. Esther took his hand. "Come on," she said. "He's right. It isn't any of our business."

Without replying, Infinity walked with her through the garden. They avoided the corner where his cactus grew. He was afraid the floods had drowned it.

The path was full of water. A nearby stream had escaped its banks and turned the meadow around it into a pond. The access hatch was underwater.' Kolya and Griffith hesitated at the pond's edge.

"We'll have to find a hatch on higher ground," Kolya said.

"Can't you make the water level go down?" Griffith said to Infinity.

"No."

"But-"

"I can't, " Infinity said. "There was too much snow. It melted too fast. There's no place else for the water to go. It's flooded the rivers, too." "You should evacuate some of the water into space."

"We already lost some when your damned missile hit!"

"It wasn't my missile!"

"Starfarer's a closed ecosystem. If we lose much water, it'll turn into a desert."

"Okay, but doesn't this place have reservoirs? Can't you fill them? Or let the ocean get deeper?"

"All of that's happening," Infinity gave up trying to keep the note of irritation from his voice. "What do you want me to do, bail?"

"Petrovich," Kolya said to Griffith, "the rivers drain

into reservoirs and the ocean. As you can see, they're working as fast as they can."

Griffith shrugged. "Lousy planning, then."

"I'm going over to the wild side," Infinity said. "The rest of you can do what you want."

He walked away with his hands shoved into his pockets, his shoulders hunched. After a moment, Esther caught up to him.

"That Griffith can be a pain," she said.

Infinity did not reply.

"Okay, what's wrong?" She splashed through a puddle. "It is Kolya's business whether he smokes."

"I planted it," Infinity said.

"Huh?"

"I planted the tobacco!"

He stopped. Esther stopped, astonished.

"I planted it. There's not that much. I never thought anybody'd use it-I never thought anybody'd find it."

"Why?"

"Because . . . it ought to be there. It belonged in the ecosystem, and it wasn't there. And it was part of the tradition-I know this doesn't make any sense. . . ."

Esther slipped her arm around his waist and hugged him.

"Sure it does," she said.

When J.D. reached Nemo's chamber, the squidmoth was wrestling weakly with another egg case, drawing it slowly inward. J.D. hurried to Nemo's side and helped position the egg case for its journey through Nemo's body.

With each new egg case, Nerno's deterioration continued. The edges of the wings shredded iridescent scales throughout the chamber. They swirled like the snow back on Starfarer, but in drifts of color. Nemo's tentacle twitched spasmodically. The squidmoth's whole body was shrinking in on itself, collapsing in folds of skin and scales. The articulation of the wings, where they joined the body, stood out in sharp relief.

J.D. picked up the last egg case. She took it to Nemo, but hesitated before setting it down.

"Enough, Nemo," she whispered, not using her link. "Isn't it enough?"

She drew a deep breath and knelt down to present the egg case.

Nemo did not respond.

"Nemo-!" she cried, afraid Nemo had died without saying goodbye.

"It is done," the squidmoth said. "The last must go to waste. I have nothing left to give it."

Weak with relief, J.D. looked blankly at the egg case. She was exhausted, too, not from work but from worry. Her mind moved, slowly understanding what Nemo had said.

She put the egg case out of reach of the tentacle, and returned to Nemo's side. The squidmoth's eyes opened and blinked. Instead of their usual faceted glitter, they were dull and dry.

"What happens now?" J.D. said.

"Your help has left us time to talk."

If I leave here this instant, J.D. thought, I can still get back before Starfarer enters transition.

Ifl go back . . .

As soon as she realized she would have to decide, she knew she had already made the decision. Nemo had asked her to stay; she would stay.

She sat on the ragged silken floor.

She wondered how long she would be here all alone.

Nemo's wings folded in on themselves, a controlled collapse of the long articulations. The membranes covered Nerno's wrinkled, shriveled body like a shroud.

"I enhanced my link," J.D. said. "Maybe I can communicate the way you do, now. Will you try again? Can you?"

"I can," Nemo said.

Faint patterns appeared in JDA mind.

Nemo poured information into her brain.

The world disappeared.

J.D. gasped. She knew she had not shut her eyesbut she could not see, and she could not feel whether her eyes were open or closed. She could not smell the caustic air of Nerno's nest, and she could not hear the glide and scratch of Nerno's attendants. She was blind, and deaf, and her senses of smell and taste and touch and proprioception vanished.

Before she could panic, a point appeared. The simplest geometric shape. She rotated around it.

It turned into a line. She had been looking at it from its end, no, from within it, an infinite line made of infinite points, each one discrete.

A fractal line of fractional dimension, neither the dimensionless shape of a pure point nor the one-dimensional unity of a perfect line.

She rotated around the line, and the shape metamorphosed again. It twisted and moved, all in the same plane, filling up more and more space despite having no width, existing in the conceptual realm between a onedimensional line and a two-dimensional plane.

Nemo rotated her around the plane. She found herself in a landscape of jagged peaks and valleys as the plane torsioned itself into three dimensions, no longer two-dimensional, not yet a solid, but somewhere in between.

Space rotated again. J.D. caught her breath with delight and anticipation. She plunged toward the shape Nemo had created.

Now she knew how her mathematician friend had rotated a sphere around a plane.

It was easy. Nemo led her through the dimensions in imperceptible steps. Sometimes she could not see the differences, but could hear or smell or feel them. Nemo gave her a shape that tasted of citrus in a snowstorm beside a crashing sea.

J.D. lost count of the dimensions, the sensations. She needed more senses than a human being possessed. She disappeared into the maze of the squidmoth's communication.

She disappeared, but she did not feel lost. ne

mazes of Europa and Androgeos had confused her. In Nemo's maze, she found herself. the place that represented her in Nemo's universe. She found Nemo. She found the bright new edges-she wondered if a shape of infinite dimension had edges-that represented Nerno's highest art form, the extension of knowledge and understanding.

As it had appeared, the communication faded with inexorable serenity. Her sight and sound returned; her body came back to her.

Nemo lay before J.D., trembling wings bound in a cocoon of dappled silk.

A few attendants fell in a scatter around the motionless body, their gill-legs contracted against their undersides, each trailing a loose silk thread.

"Nerno-T'

She received no answer. She reached out, carefully, tentatively-the world disappeared again-through her link and through her memory of Nerno's communication, but the squidmoth remained silent, draped in the new cocoon.

J.D. felt as if her brain had been taken out through her ears, whirled around her head a few times, and reinserted. She waited for the dizziness to subside. As it faded, she expected her new ability to think multidimensionally to fade as well.

To her astonishment, the memories remained clear.

"I wish to give you a gift," Nemo said.

"A gift-!"

She almost demurred; she almost told Nemo that the gift of knowledge exceeded any physical gift the squidmoth might offer.

And then she thought, J.D., are you nuts?

She stroked Nemo's long tentacle. The wings' quivering eased.

"I'll accept your gift with great pleasure," she said.

"You aren't curious about the nature of my gift."

"I'm extremely curious."

"You aren't afraid of the nature of my gift."

"No. I'm not afraid. I trust you."

"You're not concerned that my gift will change you." She hesitated. She wanted to say that if she were afraid of change, she would never have come to space. But . . . if she were not afraid, she would have accepted the divers' offer regardless of the other consequences. She still wished she had accepted.

I won't make the same mistake twice, she said to herself.

"I'm not so frightened that I'll turn it down."

"I give you myself," Nemo said.

"I . . . I don't understand." Then, with joy, she said, "Do you mean you're going to live-? Nemo, that's wonderful!"

"No, I'll die."

"Then . . . I really don't understand."

"I give you the inorganic parts of myself that I leave behind."

What Nemo was trying to tell her came clear.

"The part of you that I called your ship," she said softly.

"I give you my ship," Nemo replied.

She tried to speak, but she was too stunned. She could hardly breathe. Nerno's ship-!

The tentacle writhed weakly from her limp hands, touched its way up her body, and brushed her face, her hand, with its furred tip. It left a trace of iridescent dust.

"You say nothing."

"Because I'm speechless," J.D. said. "It's a response humans have to being this surprised."

"You accept my gift."

"Yes, Nemo. Oh, yes, I accept. Thank you." Her hands were trembling. "But-how will I fly it? Do I have time to learn before . . . before "Before I die."

"Yes," she whispered.

"My life has been long and full, and I don't regret its passing," Nemo said.

"But I'll grieve for you," J.D. said. "I'll wish I'd had more time to know you."

"My offspring will know all that I know." "They'll be just like you?"

"Each will develop separately, and each will possess my knowledge and the juvenile parent's knowledge."

"But they won't be you."

"Each will be unique," Nemo said.

"I'll look forward to meeting your children," J.D. said. "But I'll still miss you." She hardly had time to consider the idea that Nerno's children would be born with all the knowledge a squidmoth could collect in a long, dedicated life. Nemo would have been born already steeped in ancestral knowledge . . . for how many millennia, how many generations?

"Is there anything you don't know?" J.D. asked softly, in awe.

"The shape of my knowledge is so incomplete," Nemo said, "that my children and their children will never finish it."

She let Nerno's communication shape appear in her mind. The squidmoth was right. Now that she looked, now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see where it ought to extend a great distance in many dimensions. She could see where it fell short. How strange: the first time she looked at it, entered it, she had perceived it as infinite.

"If I only knew the details of the surface

"You will extend my knowledge, as my offspring will."

J.D. managed to smile. "Does that make me your daughter?"

"I like that idea," Nemo said.

Nerno's tentacle caressed her again: her cheek, her hair. It quivered and collapsed, sliding down her arm to coil unevenly on the floor.

The wings shed more of their iridescent scales. Small creatures like ants crossed with periwinkles, like minuscule hermit crabs, carried the scales away. Their paths formed lines of iridescent, unreadable hieroglyphics. J.D. shivered suddenly. If the new generation of attendants was going to dismember Nemo . . . she could

not watch it. Yet she could not leave Nemo to die alone, either.

"Nemo, what's going to happen?" she asked again. "How will I learn to fly your ship? What about your real children? Shouldn't you leave it to one of them?"

"My children can't make use of what I'll leave behind."

"How will I make use of it? I should have asked Esther to come over and help, but there's no time now."

The tentacle crept up, slowly, painfully, and grasped her wrist. She fell silent.

"You have the means to learn."

Nemo led her into the internal reality.

J.D. cried out.

She was the ship. She was Nemo. She felt the weakness in Nemo's organic body, and the unlimited strength and power of the inorganic body that would remain. Nemo led her to the proper set of intersecting surfaces. To move from place to place was as easy as walking, as easy as thought. She could see the path into transition, the long, looping route through it.

"We need to go 1here, " she said, pointing.

She could even see a different direction toward transition, toward 61 Cygni, but she was cut off from it by a depthless chasm. She could get no closer. It might be the direction Starfarer would take. Though its shapes and curves echoed Victoria's transition algorithm, she could not quite fit the shapes together.

Nerno's path into transition was intricate, convoluted, beautiful.

It was a maze, but Nemo showed her the route that allowed her to pass.

They returned to the real world.

"It's a long distance," Nemo said, "and I fear you will be lonely."

"I've never minded being lonely," J.D. said. "Not too much, anyway. But I will mind this time. I'll miss you." She opened her eyes, but shut them quickly. In her mind, Nemo was an ethereal presence. The crumpled, spent body that lay before her, its long eyelid completely closed, its battered wings shrouded, only reminded her how little time they had left. She squeezed her burning eyes shut; her throat ached with the effort of holding back her tears.

Stephen Thomas tried to ignore the discomfort of the changes. As long as he stayed still, he could imagine nothing was wrong. But every motion reminded him of what was happening to his body.

Starfarer neared transition point. J.D. had checked in once, then fallen silent again. Victoria and Satoshi had tasks to perform during the next few hours, but Stephen Thomas had no official responsibilities.

During Starfarer's first entry into transition, he had been unconscious in the ruined genetics department. As the second transition point approached, he had helped track Arachne's crashes to the neural node of Chancellor Blades.

I want to see transition, Stephen Thomas thought. I want to be where I can experience it.

With the thought, he jumped to his feet.

The constriction of his genitals froze him. Nauseated, he sank cautiously into his chair.

"Fucking hell," he muttered. He had no control over muscles that were, for Zev, completely voluntary; he could not take the last step that would change him from ordinary human to diver.

He folded his arms on his desk, put his head down, closed his eyes, and opened his link to Arachne.

The biofeedback routines reacted as if he had ordered a refresher course in an ordinary subject-beard repression, fertility control. He told Arachne to help him learn the use of muscles that an ordinary human man did not possess.

Having no restrictions against what he asked, Arachne proceeded. The web sought out new neural pathways that Stephen Thomas did now possess, and reinforced their connections.

As Arachne worked, Stephen Thomas's perception

of his body grew remote. His conscious mind stayed free and alert. Both bored and apprehensive, he sought something to occupy his attention.

J.D. remained isolated. Stephen Thomas almost sent a message to his partners, then reconsidered. They were busy, and he did not know what to say to them. Nor did he know if they wanted to speak to him.

He tapped into Arachne's reports on transition approach, surrounding himself with a holographic representation and using his link to listen in on the telemetry.

Nerno's ship followed Starfarer, silent; the cosmic string coiled invisibly before the starship. Arachne felt solid and steady.

This is what Feral was doing in the last few minutes of his life, Stephen Thomas thought.

He backed away from Arachne, spoke Feral's passwords, and re-entered his communications fugue under Feral's guest account.

An unusual resonance probed toward him. It snatched itself back. He grabbed for it, but it eluded him so swiftly that it left him doubting its existence.

Suspicious and disturbed, he watched, and listened, and waited for transition.

Victoria linked easily with Arachne. Her view of Starfarer from the transparent sailhouse merged with Arachne's view of the state of the starship. For once, finally, all the systems hovered within reasonable ranges and the sail aligned the cylinders with transition point. No military vessels chased them, firing orders and nuclear missiles; no saboteur-Victoria believed-hovered in the background waiting to crash Arachne at the worst possible moment; and the cosmic string, though it was withdrawing from Sirius, moved without twisting, and at a constant acceleration. The starship had nearly caught up to it.

Jenny glanced up from the hard link, then down again. She typed something, hunt-and-peck. Nobody

ever typed anything; the keyboard was an anachronism, a third-backup redundancy.

Arachne formed a display in the air above the keyboard, mirroring the report in the back of Victoria's mind.

Awaiyar's image appeared between Victoria and Jenny. She had been participating in Starfarer's transition approach, but physically she was in her observatory.

"You know what I wish?" she asked.

"What's that?"

"That we'd find a nexus. A crossroads. The real freeway interchange, the one we thought we'd found at Tau Ceti. An intersection too important to disrupt just because troublesome human beings are using it. They would never blow up a major transportation system because of a couple of infidel joy-riders."

Victoria chuckled, but the image was apt.

"That's all right with me," she said. "If I could jump from freeway interchange to freeway interchange, shouting at Civilization at the top of my lungs till they listened-that's what I'd do."

She turned her attention to the image of Nemo's ship. The rock sphere had budded out a dozen silken bubbles.

"Hadn't you better try to call J.D.T' Jenny asked.

"I don't think so. She's very even-tempered, eh? But if you interfere with her job she can get quite sharp about it."

"She's cutting it too close."

"I know it," Victoria said, trying to keep her voice steady.

She yearned to call out to J.D. and persuade her, command her, to come back to safety. It took all her strength to keep her silence.

"She isn't coming back," Victoria said. "Jenny, she won't leave Nemo. If that means going into transition on an alien ship . . . that's what J.D. will do."

"How far behind us will she be?"

"I don't know!" Victoria lowered her voice. "She might be gone . . . a long time."

"You know, Victoria . . ." Awaiyar's image hung rock solid in the air; Jenny and Victoria, in zero g, hovered and drifted. "You could-"

"I know!" Victoria exclaimed. "Don't think I haven't considered it. But . . . if I send J.D. the algorithm, it'll be in Nemo's memory. In whatever Nerno's ship uses for a computer web. That would be like turning it over to Civilization."

"No strings attached," Avvaiyar said wryly.

What would J.D. want her to do?

Victoria had only a few minutes left. She had no time to call a meeting to discuss the question with Starfarer's faculty and staff. She hardly had time even to confer with any of her colleagues.

Admit it, she said to herself. You're afraid to ask for advice; you're afraid someone will close off your options. Satoshi would say you must send it; Gerald and the senators would say you must not. And Stephen Thomas . . . it shocked her to realize she had no idea what Stephen Thomas would say.

Victoria took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly. Arachne lay calm around her. Starfarer fell toward its transition point. The stellar sail began to furl.

"Awaiyar," she said. "Jenny "Yes," Avvaiyar said gravely.

"I agree," Jenny said. "I thought you'd come to that decision,"

J.D. felt the quiet power of Nerno's body. She could see, and sense, how to move it, how to guide it, as easy and as natural as walking. She had no more idea of how it powered itself than a child would have of the intricate energy cycle within her own body. J.D.'s adult mind wondered about gravity waves or mass exchanges of subatomic particles. But Nerno's method of propulsion remained speculation, a mystery.

She could reach out through Nerno's senses and recreate the shape of the universe around her. The sur-

face of the planetoid formed her skin; the egg sacs pressed against her, laden with potential.

In the distance, perilously close to the loop of cosmic string, Starfarer plunged toward transition. The last silver flicker of its sail furled and darkened.

"Goodbye!" J.D. cried.

Starfarer disappeared.

J.D. squeezed her eyes shut, reflexively, as the bright transition spectrum flooded through the system. The starship left nothing else behind.

She opened her eyes, breaking her connection with the world outside Nerno's chamber. The silken curtains drooped and shredded like old cobwebs. The whisper and crunch of the symbionts' mouths and mandibles surrounded her.

"They're gone, Nemo," she whispered.

"Look," Nemo said, "my offspring are free."

Together, J.D. and Nemo watched the surface of the planetoid.

The bulge of one of the silken craters had grown spherical. It expanded, huge and taut, like a quivering soap bubble. Its diameter was much larger than the crater, but it clung to the crater's mouth as if it were being blown up like a balloon.

It detached.

It sank: the planetoid had too little atmosphere to buoy it. But then, as it bounced once, the small opening left in its bottom fluttered. A spurt of glowing gas propelled it from the surface of the worldlet.

J.D. laughed with delight.

The balloon rocketed, silent and free, into space.

In quick succession, Nemo's planetoid released half a dozen of the translucent powered balloons. Malleable surfaces covered obscure, tantalizing shapes. They shrank to blips of light. She-Nemo-had done everything for them that she could. They were on their own. She wished them well, but she would never-

J.D. brought herself abruptly back to herself. She might see them someday in the future. She was not Nemo. She was not preparing to die.

J.D. reached out to Nerno to offer her congratulations.

She encountered emptiness.

She reached desperately toward the squidmoth's mind. She found a small dim spark in blackness. It flared, welcoming her, and Nerno's soft tentacle twitched feebly in her hand.

Everything grew still around her.

The spark moved. It expanded, spreading itself over the surface of the shape of Nerno's knowledge. But as it expanded, it faded, too. The tenuous light vanished so gradually that J.D. could not be certain of the moment of its disappearance.

"Oh, Nerno . . . Goodbye."

The knowledge surface changed. It grew cold, and solidified. As Nerno's personality dissolved, the surface lost an uncountable number of its infinite dimensions. J.D. reached out as if to stop it, and then drew back, knowing she could have no effect.

Nemo was gone.

J.D. felt more alone than she had ever felt before, in a largely solitary life. She was alone, more alone than any human being ever had been. Nerno's children, for all their potential, were no more than a few cells each, zygotes clinging to great yolk sacs of knowledge, not even embryos. J.D. was the only sentient creature in the star system.

She shivered.

All around her, the tattered silk came alive with scavengers. The sound of destruction filled the chamber with a soft, inescapable vibration of rending threads. A new sound added itself to the tapestry: the viscous slide of dissolving support cables. Beneath her, the floor sagged.

Nerno's tentacle twitched. J.D. flinched in surprise, in a brief flash of joy as quickly wiped out by shock. She dropped Nemo's tentacle.

Two of the symbionts struggled with each other, vying for possession of Nerno's tentacle by lashing at each

other with the clusters of scorpion-tails that projected from their armored shells.

The leftover egg case, the one that remained unfertilized, writhed against the floor. Unseen creatures moved within it. The silk tore, with a long, ripping scream: claws on prehensile limbs thrust out, snapping. The fate of Nemo's organic body was the same as what would happen to her own body when she died and was buried in the earth or allowed to sink into the sea. It was all perfectly natural.

But she could not watch it.

J.D. stroked her hand once across Nemo's long eyelid, pressing the squidmoth's eyes closed. She rose to her feet. Shaky and stiff, she fled Nemo's ruined web.

J.D. CLIMBED FAST, NO LONGER CAREFUL

about damage. The nest was coming apart around her. Panic chased her. She had to get back to the Chi. How stupid to leave her space suit behind, how complacent-!

The web tunnels shivered as J.D. ascended. More unfamiliar creatures, symbionts and attendants and scavengers, worked and worried at the silk and at each other. Optical fibers hung loose along the walls, some broken and dimmed, some still glowing, their ends bright as white flame.

No longer would Nemo convert the light of Sirius to useful energy, process

rock and extract nutrients, and create the webbing that nurtured the ecosystem. The symbionts would deplete the webbing, the attendants would feed on the symbionts, and the scavengers would feed on the leftovers, till nothing remained of the squidmoth but inorganic matter, dust, a few desiccated bacteria.

Nerno's body was dying.

The tunnel to the Chi billowed down against J.D.'s face. The weight of the heavy sides counteracted the air pressure, collapsing the tube.

The air escaped, osmosing silently through failing walls. Panting for breath, J.D. fought her way past the folds of the silken shroud, making slow progress toward the explorer. If the tube's mouth fell away from the airlock . . .

Remember those stories where somebody had to cross ten or twenty meters of hard vacuum without a suit . . . ? she thought. Maybe you'll find out if it's possible. . . .

Not an experiment she wanted to try.

Blinded by the collapsing tunnel, she ran into the side of the Chi and bumped her knee and her nose. She yelped in pain and flung the silk upward, trying to get beneath it to reach the tunnel's opening.

Several of Nerno's creatures hugged the seam between the tunnel and the Chi. They extruded a gluey, fibrous substance that stuck the organic fabric to the inorganic hull. But the creatures had exhausted themselves. Escaping air hissed around a broken seal.

J.D. held her breath and plunged into the airlock.

"Seal!" She spoke through her link, conserving her air.

The Chi obeyed. The hatch slid, but caught on a swath of silk that tangled around J.D.'s foot. She grabbed the fabric, ripped it, freed the opening. The webbing parted in her hands like old cobwebs.

The hatch closed in silence, its motion barely vibrating the deck. The air was too thin to carry sound. As the hatch seated, J.D. thought she saw a patch of black space and bright stars, unshielded by silk or air or glass.

A heavy warm draft from the Chi poured in around her. Tired in every way a person could be tired, J.D. lay on the floor. She breathed long and slow and deep. Once more she thanked good fortune and habit that she had not allowed her metabolic enhancer to atrophy.

The inner hatch slid open. J.D. stayed where she was, resting, gathering her energy.

She had no vital tasks. Nemo's shell was headed for Europa's transition point. J.D. could control the shell, but she feared interfering with Nerno's navigation till she had caught up to Starfarer. She wondered how long that would take.

Claws scuttled on metal.

J.D. bolted upright.

Several of Nemo's symbionts scuttled across the floor, scrabbling at the hatch with clawed, feathery legs.

J.D. gazed at them fondly.

Rising to her knees, she gathered up the creatures in the scrap of soft frail webbing.

Flecks of iridescence covered J.D.'s hands. The tiny scales from Nemo's wings gilded her, and when she rose, a scatter of the glitter shimmered to the floor.

Transition surrounded Starfarer.

Arachne continued, strong and steady, indifferent to the border Starfarer had crossed, leaving normal space behind. Victoria let out her breath and unclenched her teeth.

"The web's intact," she said.

Jenny stared out into transition. Tears pooled in her eyes, collected at her upper and lower eyelids, and drifted into the air in droplets when she blinked.

"It's over," she said softly. "It's finally done. We're safe."

"I hope so," Victoria said.

And then they smiled at each other, and Jenny laughed, her laughter warring with her tears. She sniffled and coughed and pulled a handkerchief out of her

pocket and waved it over the floating teardrops to catch them, and blew her nose.

"Safe!" Jenny said. "Halfway through transition and going where we've been told not to. For all we know they'll blast us out of the sky when we get there."

"That's not allowed," Victoria said. "Their only weapon is coercion." "Unless they get desperate enough to break the rules to stop us. I think Civilization works by peer pressure."

"You don't mean that as a compliment, do you?"

"I do not. There's nothing more brutal. People will do anything to get other people to do what they think is allowed. Or right. Or holy. Especially holy. The end always justifies the means."

Victoria said nothing. She did not want to think about ends justifying the means; the charge hit too close to her own doubts and fears.

This wits the third time Starfarer had crossed into transition, the first time Arachne had been able to record, and the first time Victoria had been able to watch. On the journey from Earth to Tau Ceti, she had been helping Satoshi drag Stephen Thomas out of the genetics building. On the journey from Tau Ceti to Sirius, she had been trying, and failing, to save Feral's life.

The recordings did not do transition justice. They showed nothing but a formless gray fog. Transition was much more than that.

Victoria wondered if she would be able to describe it afterward. She wondered if Arachne would be able to reproduce a view of it.

The sailhouse hung suspended and isolated in a silver flurry of sparks. Now and then a streak of color or a shape coalesced from the storm, then disappeared. Victoria could not tell whether she was seeing something real, or if her mind was creating pictures from random intersections of the matrix around her.

"It's like the maze," she said. "We kept thinking we saw a pattern in it, but there wasn't any. Just a maze."

She felt isolated, alone out here with Jenny. They could not even see Starfarer's main cylinder through the silver storm.

The isolation J.D. must be feeling struck Victoria hard.

"Goodbye," J.D. had said, and nothing else, in that last second before Starfarer disappeared.

It sounded so final.

In the Chi's small bio lab, J.D. placed the creatures in sample cases, one to an aquarium so they would not eat each other. She divided the shred of webbing among them.

They probably would not survive. They had not evolved to survive Nemo's death for long; they were part of the body that was dying. Maybe Stephen Thomas or Professor Thanthavong could figure out how to keep them alive. If she could save the symbionts until she caught up to Starfarer.

I wonder how long that will be? J.D. wondered. How long will I be here alone?

Nemo must have been able to calculate transition duration-or would the time even matter to someone who lived for millennia, who lived a life almost entirely of the mind?

J.D. reached for the knowledge surface of Nemo's shell. She found it-and again her expanded link took over all her senses, disorienting her, leaving her suspended in nothingness-and cast around for the answer she needed.

It overwhelmed her. She skittered along the surface, unable to penetrate its depths, distracted on every side by hints and shadows of Nemo's experience.

She came back to herself, still with no idea how long it would take her to reach the 61 Cygni system. Worse, she had no idea how to find the information in the maze of the knowledge surface.

Maybe Nemo didn't care how long it took, she thought. Besides . . . is it an answer I want to know?

The Chi was well-stocked, but its stores were finite.

If transition duration lasted weeks, or months, she could find herself in a lot of trouble. The Chi possessed a few organic systems, but it had never been designed to support a human being during a long separation from Starfarer.

She chuckled ruefully. If she had let Victoria give Androgeos the new transition algorithm, no doubt Nemo would have snagged the information, too.

"Outsmarted yourself this time, didn't you?" she said softly, trying not to feel how scared she was.

She wished she had sent a better, more comforting farewell to her friends. "Goodbye"? That told them nothing; it might even frighten them. They had no idea how long it would take her to traverse the space between Sirius and 61 Cygni, either. Only that it would take her longer than it took Starfarer.

Leaving Nerno's symbionts to explore the hard edges of their new homes,

J.D. headed for the observers' circle.

She caught her breath in surprise and apprehension.

The sinuous, beautiful shape of Victoria's algorithm twisted itself into being in the center of the circle.

J.D. took her place in the circle. The transition algorithm hovered at the focus, Victoria's final message, her final gift.

Nerno's shell plunged toward transition point. J.D. had only a few minutes to decide what to do.

With apprehension, she closed her eyes and opened her link completely, sliding onto the knowledge surface, stretching to connect it with the Chi's onboard computer. The real world vanished as J.D. approached the chasm in the knowledge surface and compared it to the algorithm.

They do match, she thought. Not a perfect fit . . .

She asked herself a question: What happens if the fit isn't good enough?

Do I end up on the other side of the galaxy?

Gently she moved the algorithm, rotated it, and translated it into the chasm.

The algorithm joined the knowledge surface, rough,

raw beauty touching elegance refined and polished by time. The algorithm was a crystalline chunk of ice on the cracked surface of an ancient, flowing glacier. The crystal's edges melted; it sank in; the points of attachment melded. The surface and the algorithm remained distinct.

If Nemo were still alive, the fit would have been precise. So much detail was lost when Nerno's personality slipped away. J.D. withdrew from the surface. Now all she could do was wait.

When her senses returned to her, she gazed through the wall of the observers' circle, toward Nerno's crater. The flattened access tunnel lay between the Chi and the nest, like a shed and discarded snakeskin.

The wings and sails of Nerno's nest shuddered.

Nerno's convoluted tapestry collapsed, like ice cliffs avalanching. One side tore free of the rock. Limp and silent, it flopped inward. It dragged the access tunnel from the Chi's hatch, to the crater, and over the edge.