J.D.’s imagination created a scene that bore no relation to the inside of a computer or to the inside of an organic system. She had wondered what she would see when her attention left the main room of the partnership’s house, whether she would enter a phantom world of hugely magnified digital gates or pulsing translucent neural tissue.
Instead, she closed her eyes and found herself upon the exterior of Starfarer’s campus cylinder.
The first time, the only time, she had walked on the outside of Starfarer, she had nearly been killed. Her mind had recreated a setting of imminent danger. She shivered.
The metaphor was, unfortunately, perfectly appropriate.
She sat on the inspection net, her feet dangling, the starship looming overhead, a curving low stone ceiling. Starfarer’s spin pressed her outward, downward, toward the stars that sped past her feet. If she slid between the strands of the net, unfastened her safety line, and let go, she would be flung off into space.
But she was not wearing a safety line; she was not even wearing a spacesuit. In her imagination, she could live and breathe in the vacuum of space.
She walked around and looked around, without any constraints, wondering what, exactly, she was supposed to be looking for. Stephen Thomas had not been able to tell her what form her perception would take, how her mind would interpret the information or the search. He had said, Look for something unusual. Follow it. Follow it fast. And then get out.
Stephen Thomas and Avvaiyar and Satoshi and Professor Thanthavong were somewhere nearby, perhaps — probably — all seeing entirely different surroundings, all waiting for the same undefinable event. Victoria had gone out to the sailhouse to help Iphigenie, if she could. Feral had gone with her, still trying to persuade her to let him join the antibody chase. He was not an official member of the expedition; she refused to allow him to expose himself to danger.
J.D. wished Victoria had relented about Feral. The hunt could use more help. Stephen Thomas said he could finish only the five antibody interfaces before Starfarer reached the cosmic string. Maybe that was true. Maybe he had only finished as many interfaces as he had trustworthy people to use them. He would have trusted Feral.
Standing, J.D. balanced on the cable. Starfarer loomed above her. If she stretched, she could reach the surface with her fingertips.
The cable vibrated against the soles of J.D.’s feet. She followed the wave-form, moving along the length of the starship, parallel to its axis of rotation.
The last time she was out here, Starfarer had plunged into transition. She wished she could have stopped everything and simply watched it, experienced it. That had not been possible, and it would not be possible this time, either.
The rotation brought her into the valley between the campus cylinder and its twin, the wild cylinder; the motion plunged her toward the endless quivering silver sky that lay beyond the valley. Between the starship and its sail, the crystal bead of the sailhouse hung as if suspended by invisible tethers. The framework that secured it to the starship, that held the cylinders in their parallel orientation, blended in and disappeared against the moving background of the sail.
Reflected light from the sail’s surface dazzled her. She closed her eyes and turned away.
J.D. felt a shiver through her body, through her mind, through the rocks above her and the cables beneath her feet. She waited, wishing she knew exactly what she was waiting for. Should she try to follow the tremor, chasing invisible vibrations?
She opened her eyes again. The rotation of the cylinder had brought her back out among the stars. Soon it would spin her into the light of Tau Ceti.
The blaze of the sail’s reflection had died away. Sparks gathered at J.D.’s feet. At first she thought they were illusory, an artifact of moving from brightness to darkness. But they were real, as real as anything in this mind-created world. The sparks flowed in thread-thin streams past her feet, running like water along the cables of the inspection net, spiraling like vines up the net’s supporting rods, skipping from point to point on the rough stone overhead.
J.D. followed the flow of the sparks, running like a tightrope walker along the springy cables. The glittery line was so tenuous that she feared she would lose sight of it, but every time it dissipated, like a stream spreading into a wide flat meadow, it recreated itself farther on.
When Stephen Thomas spoke of seeing auras, this was the sight he described. J.D. wondered if his perceptions had influenced her, helping her create a reality like the one he saw. Perhaps she had created it this way in an attempt to understand him.
It did not matter how she saw what she was seeing. She did see it.
Griffith was right. The web was going to crash again. And Stephen Thomas was right about the method. Somewhere within Starfarer, someone had released a foreign chemical signal. Arachne, detecting it, formed antibodies to it from the store of precursors Stephen Thomas had marked.
The marked antibodies, which she perceived as sparks, could be tracked to the source of the chemical signal.
If she could reach it before Arachne crashed and threw her back out into the real world.
The sparks scattered around the curve of Starfarer’s skin. J.D. chased them, breathing as hard as if she were surrounded by air instead of nothingness. They congregated in a rising whirlpool, a flickering whirlwind, and vanished through the portal of an inspection hatch. J.D. climbed up into it and cycled through the airlock, wondering, as she did, why she had to use the airlock if her imagined reality thought the starship was flying in air, why she could not dissolve through the starship’s skin like the sparks.
The airlock hatch opened. She hurried out. In the distance, the end of the spark trail vanished around a curve. She ran after it, chasing the sparks through the tunnel.
The sides of the corridor roughened. They no longer looked manufactured, but natural. J.D. felt as if she were running through a cave. The passage bore the sour tang of limestone, though there was not a natural piece of sedimentary rock to be found anywhere within the starship. She reminded herself that she was making it all up; her surroundings were metaphor.
She had survived in space, unprotected by a suit; now she ran through dark underground tunnels, able to see without any illumination. She caught up to the spark trail. It glowed, an actinic yellow streak only a few molecules wide. It skittered along, now on the floor, now the wall, now the ceiling, occasionally fading out, only to reemerge as a trace of light a few meters away. J.D. followed the sparks through the darkness that was not truly dark.
The tremors around her strengthened. When she touched the wall, she could feel the starship quake and quiver.
She could not stop to figure it all out. She ran as fast as she could through the dream-world. When the sparks fluttered from the stony wall to the rippled surface of an underground lake, she dived in after them without hesitation.
The frigid water embraced her, sliding around her like a caress. She swam, naked, pushed along by her powerful legs, her feet with their webbed, clawed toes. She had made herself a diver.
She swept through the water, feeling no resistance to her sleek-furred body. The metabolic enhancer kicked in and she followed the sparking signal of concentrated antibodies at an exhilarating speed.
The lake narrowed to a river, a great mass of water compressed into a steep cleft. The water rose and billowed into rapids. Waves crashed with a rushing roar, tumbling her through the channel. In real life, without her artificial lung, without a life vest, she would be dead: drowned or crushed against boulders that tumbled and rumbled beneath her, drumming the rhythm of their own inexorable stone dance.
The rapids crashed over a shelf in the riverbed and dragged and pushed her underwater. The pressure forced her to the bottom; her hands brushed naked bedrock scoured into long smooth ripples by the current. The water was icy green. She struggled against its weight, against its crashing chaos. She leaped upward across the current. The translucent green gave way to roiling white. She broke the surface and gasped for half a breath before another wave slapped her in the face and sent her downstream again, tumbling and choking. But she had escaped the hole. The antibody sparks skipped along the edges of columnar basalt.
The river washed her, exhausted, into an eddy. The flow, opposing the main current, carried her in a half-circle toward shore. Staggering, she waded onto the beach. In real life, even a diver might not have survived that transition.
The sparks flickered from sand grain to pebble. J.D. boosted her metabolic enhancer to its limit, to her body’s limit. Suddenly she was dry.
Her feet dug into the wet cold gravelly sand, sank into the dry coarse sand just above the high-water mark, scuffed through the powder-fine sand at the highest edge of the beach. She clambered onto the trail and plunged after the antibodies again.
She moved across a landscape of black basalt, an ancient lava flow, tubes and caves of hollow stone that pounded like drums in response to her steps. Long tendrils of basalt stretched out from a distant rise, like tree roots, like the sprawling tentacles of a beached octopus.
The antibodies congregated, glowing, on one of the tendrils.
The tendrils began to move.
J.D. became aware of the passage of time. The danger increased with each second. She pushed herself into a run, wishing she had remained water-borne. She was an excellent long distance swimmer, a poor runner, and her imagination had not extended to changing that.
The rock tubes writhed beside and around and over her, lifting from their substrate of black rock, twining together in labyrinthine patterns. This stone octopus had far more than its share of tentacles.
The tentacles looped and knitted together overhead. J.D. found herself running through another tunnel, like the access veins in the skin of Starfarer. The antibodies had collected in puffy, shining streaks along the walls and ceiling. They traced the outlines of some of the lava tentacles, though all the tentacles had melded to form a glossy, textured surface. The antibodies flowed like the tributaries of tiny streams, running together all in one direction.
J.D. knew she should get out, but she was so close, the antibodies were so thick here, such perfect markers, that she kept going. The flowing sparks continued to cluster and clot, till they formed glittering arteries around her, pulsing rivulets of flowing organic gold.
She rounded a turn in the maze of tunnels, and entered a central chamber.
Stephen Thomas plunged out of a tunnel on the other side of the cavern and ran toward her.
Between them, all the lines of antibodies flowed together, forming an organic mass of translucent spark-shot gold, pulsing and throbbing and drawing the heat out of its surroundings. J.D. shivered.
“Got you, you fucker!” Stephen Thomas shouted.
“Oh, my god,” J.D. said.
She recognized the node.
It belonged to Chancellor Blades.
Stephen Thomas recognized it, too.
“Son of a bitch!” Stephen Thomas’s voice was full of anger and betrayal. “You treacherous bastard!”
He was blushing, embarrassed and humiliated in a way J.D. had never seen him. He kicked the neural node as hard as he could, a practiced martial-arts side-kick with all the impact projected through his heel. The blow hit full force with a crushing thud. The force shuddered through the node’s golden body. The footprint turned silver, then darkened to blood-red.
Stephen Thomas drew back his foot to kick the node again. J.D. grabbed his arm and jerked him away. He staggered.
“We don’t have time for this!” J.D. had to raise her voice to be heard. The sounds around her were increasing: the pulse of pumps, mechanical and organic, the flood and flow of nutrients, the dissolution of outworn connections, the high-strung harp note of new connections made. And underneath it all, the sinister baritone hum.
Stephen Thomas stared at her, as astonished by her actions as she had been by his embarrassment.
“We’ve found what we needed! We’ve got to get out of here!” Even as she shouted at him, she was sending a message to the others, to Satoshi and Thanthavong and Avvaiyar, to anyone still connected with the web: Get out fast, the web’s going to crash! We found it. We found it, get out fast.
Stephen Thomas pulled himself away from anger, from revenge. He nodded once, sharply, and opened a door with a fan-shaped top. The door had appeared from nowhere — or had it always been there, and J.D. had not noticed it? Stephen Thomas stood aside for her to pass through before him.
They stepped out into the main room of the partnership’s house.
o0o
In the sailhouse, Victoria doggedly brought the sensors into tune.
Feral hovered nearby, making her nervous.
It’s okay, she told herself. Let him stay here where you can keep an eye on him.
Her attention left the control strands for an instant, and when she caught them up again, she had a sail-shimmer to damp down.
He drifted to her side. “Let me help.”
Victoria eased the sail into equilibrium. When it lay quiet in her mind, she gave Feral another moment. The sensors balanced on the edge of harmony
“No. You’re a guest.” She spoke with odd pauses between her words, turning her mind’s eye from Feral to Iphigenie to the sail. “I want you out of the web and out of danger until we get things resolved.”
“But —”
“I can’t talk to you now!” As soon as she spoke, she regretted her tone.
The sensors moaned a minor fugue.
She put her attention entirely on the sails, the approach, the limited transition point. Iphigenie crouched over the hard-link, working furiously but slowly. Lacking a direct connection, she could not hope to keep up with the changes.
“Jenny —” Victoria said.
“No,” Iphigenie said, her voice high and tight. “I won’t. I can do it this way.”
I’ll have to do this myself, Victoria thought. She immersed herself in the songs, wrestling them toward perfection.
The last discord remained, stubbornly resistant, growing louder with every effort Victoria made to fix it. Starfarer plunged toward transition, a fraction of a fraction of a degree off its true course.
“We’re going to miss!” Victoria said. “Jenny, please, I need you in the web.”
“No!”
This isn’t going to work, Victoria thought. We’re going to have to come around and try again. Then maybe we’ll catch up to the alien ship, or maybe we won’t, maybe it will have moved on, maybe it will always remain beyond our reach.
Maybe it doesn’t even exist.
She snarled with despair and dived back into the symphony, trying to find the source of the error. She felt as if she were swimming against the current of a multicolored, multidimensional stream of musical notes. If she had not been so angry and baffled and aggravated, she might have found it funny, but the sound, growing painfully loud, overwhelmed her senses.
“Let me buffer you,” Feral said to Iphigenie. “You can port your orders through me. Whatever happens, you’ll be cushioned.”
It took Victoria a moment to disentangle Feral’s words from the screaming music; it took her another moment to realize that Iphigenie’s hesitation meant acceptance rather than refusal.
“All right,” Iphigenie said.
Her eyelids flickered.
“Feral,” Victoria cried, “stay out of the web!”
The sensor chords sank to a whisper of perfect harmony.
Starfarer’s magnetic claws stretched out to the cosmic string, touched it, grasped it. They began feeding on its limitless stores of energy, using the remnants of the creation of the universe to bring the starship toward transition potential.
“Get out fast, the web’s going to crash!”
An emergency message, with J.D.’s voice and personality, flashed through the web to everyone involved in it.
“We found it. We found it, get out fast. We found it!”
Victoria responded by reflex to the urgency in J.D.’s voice. She pulled back from the web, from the warning of danger.
But Feral and Iphigenie remained hooked in. Iphigenie’s shields blocked the warning, or Feral took a terrible risk to prove himself to Victoria, or they both pushed past the limits in order to finish the approach.
“Feral! Iphigenie! Get out of the web!”
She stroked toward them, grabbing at the air. Weightlessness, for once, defeated her. She floundered, out of reach of any solid object.
Light reflecting from the silver sail silhouetted the figures of her two friends, holding hands. As Victoria struggled toward them, calling their names, the sail began to furl, majestically folding and twisting into its storage configuration. Feral and Iphigenie had been dark shapes against brightness; now they were pale shapes against space and stars.
The symphony ended.
The web crashed.
o0o
J.D. felt a moment of disorientation. In her imagination she had been standing, but her physical body was sitting. Her perceptions from within Arachne and the real world flowed together.
She opened her eyes. Zev sat cross-legged in front of her, peering closely at her, worried. When he realized she had returned, he smiled. He touched her face, brushing the back of his fingers against her skin. She covered his hand with hers, pressing his warmth to her cheek.
Satoshi sat on her left, Thanthavong on her right, Avvaiyar and Stephen Thomas across from her.
The neural node map by which they had all been orienting themselves hung in the center, a complex, nearly transparent tracing of interconnections. It reminded J.D. of the labyrinthine alien message. But the path to its center had disappeared; Arachne had already attacked the oncogene, destroyed it, dispersed its components.
Stephen Thomas leaped to his feet and lunged for the hard link in the corner of the room. He snatched his recording module out of the machine.
“Got you, you bastard,” he snarled. “Proof.”
The node map trembled and dissolved.
J.D. flinched, physically, as her connection with Arachne dissolved in a small hot point of pain. She was not in direct communication with the link, but its constant, reassuring potential vanished from her perception.
Inside the partnership’s house, the lights went out.
Outside, the light from the sun tubes faded. Starfarer plunged into darkness.
o0o
Starfarer entered transition.
The web stretched and frayed and exploded.
Iphigenie cried out.
Feral convulsed, his back arching, spasming, his arms and legs shuddering. He made a single sound, a desperate, groaning gasp.
The holographic map dissolved and vanished. In response to Arachne’s crash, to the absence of instructions, the sailhouse walls went to safety default. They darkened to opacity, shutting out the intense, hypnotic sight beyond and cutting off the light.
Victoria’s momentum took her to Feral’s side. She grabbed him, as if she could physically drag him away from the web crash.
His body went limp.
“Feral!” She pleaded for a response. “Feral — ?”
Without thinking, forgetting that the only free artificials were the silver slugs outside, she tried to call a health center AI. She reached out for Arachne and tripped into the mental hole of the computer’s absence. She jerked back, startled, disoriented in the darkness.
“Is he all right?”
The sailhouse walls luminesced, filling the chamber with a cool green illumination. Iphigenie took Feral’s slack hand.
Victoria felt for his pulse. She found nothing. His skin was clammy and cold, his eyes white crescents beneath half-open lids. Blood smeared his face: his nose and ears bled. Opaque scarlet droplets quivered in the air.
“He’ll be all right,” Iphigenie said. “It’s just shock—”
“He isn’t breathing! Use the hard link and get us some help.” Victoria searched her memory for the zero-g update to CPR training. Breathe for the patient. Compress the chest: one hand on the patient’s back, one on the sternum, push hands together hard. She had to alternate between breathing and compression. Awkward. But Iphigenie was making one attempt after another to find someone, something, who could respond.
o0o
J.D. felt her way outside into the garden. The spicy, sweet fragrance of carnations surrounded her. Zev joined her, snuggling in the crook of her arm.
“I wish I were out there to see transition again,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “But, J.D., there is time. There will be another time. Now we can travel wherever we like.”
“I hope so. I hope you’re right.”
Power from the auxiliary systems began to flow. Light shone, soft, from the floor-to-ceiling windows behind them, laying shadows to the carnation-covered bank that surrounded the yard.
The door crashed open. J.D. jumped in fright. Stephen Thomas sprinted past her.
“Stephen Thomas, what’s the matter?”
He disappeared into the night.
“It’s pitch dark out there,” J.D. said. “He’s going to trip and kill himself.
“No, he isn’t,” Zev said. “He can see. Like I can.”
Without replying, J.D. returned to the house.
“What happened? Where did Stephen Thomas go?”
Satoshi dug through a drawer, pulling out crumpled papers, a pocketknife, a couple of pencil stubs, the sort of thing one always intends to throw away, but keeps for just one more use. The litter bounced to the floor.
“I know there’s a flashlight in here someplace —”
J.D. looked from Thanthavong to Avvaiyar. Avvaiyar turned away; Thanthavong had drawn in on herself. J.D. hardly ever thought about or noticed how elderly she was; but right now the senior geneticist looked old, and frail.
“It’s Feral,” Thanthavong said. “He was caught in the web crash. Out in the sailhouse. It’s bad.”
“Oh, no!”
“Here’s the damned thing.” Satoshi turned on the flashlight. It threw an intense beam across the room, cutting through the somber emergency light. “Let’s go.”
“I can go faster,” Zev said. “Should I follow Stephen Thomas?”
“Yes,” J.D. said. “Go on. Go. Hurry.”
o0o
Stephen Thomas slumped beside the stretcher where Feral lay.
If I’d just been with him, he thought, I might have been able to...
If I’d just had more time, I might have figured out how to boost the antibodies so the web didn’t crash...
If I’d just been able to think of a way to prove who did it, without letting it crash again...
If I hadn’t given him more access to the web, he wouldn’t have been there at all...
He searched for the strength to rise. His forearms rested on his thighs; his hands hung, limp, between his knees. He stared at his hands, hardly seeing the red, irritated skin between his fingers, hardly feeling the itching, barely aware of the ache in all his joints. The pain of the changes blended with and disappeared into the pain of loss, the pain of his grief.
Though Stephen Thomas was aware of the other people in the room, his partners nearby, J.D. and Zev, Professor Thanthavong and Avvaiyar, he felt completely alone.
Feral noticed things no one else noticed, and asked questions other people were afraid to ask. It was unfair, it was ridiculous, it was impossible, that he should be dead.
Victoria came over to Stephen Thomas and laid her hand on his head, stroking his long fair hair.
“I’m so sorry, love. I tried...” Her voice shook. She fell silent.
“How could this happen?” Stephen Thomas cried. “Last time nobody even got hurt! Not like this, not permanently.”
“It crashed harder. Faster. The designer knew the antibodies would give Arachne some protection.”
Stephen Thomas gripped Feral’s cold hand. A harder, faster crash, but a shallower one, one intended to disrupt the starship’s course without causing any more damage to its systems. One intended to force it to return home. Oh, and incidentally, only incidentally, to destroy any human being caught in the web.
“He was still alive when you got him here.”
“His body was. Just barely.” Victoria hesitated. “He was gone, Stephen Thomas. Everything that made him who he was, everything that made him unique...”
“Please, stop,” he whispered.
She started to cry. Stephen Thomas put his arms around her. Satoshi knelt beside him and hugged them both.
Stephen Thomas held his partners in his arms, dry-eyed, overwhelmed with rage and despair.
Every academic skill I have is a joke, he thought bitterly. I can create life from chemicals. I can turn myself into something that’s not really a human being anymore... but the best thing I can do for someone I love is to concur in his death. Even now, I could make him live. I could repair the arteries that burst, regrow his heart, regenerate his brain.
And then I’d have an infant in an adult body, a child with a quarter of his life already used up. I’d have a new person, but I’d want to turn him into a replica of someone I once knew.
He pushed away the whole perverse idea, disgusted with himself for resenting Victoria because she was strong enough, ethical enough, to let Feral die.
“Oh, god,” he said. “I’m going to kill Blades.”
“No,” Satoshi said.
Stephen Thomas glared at his partner. “I expected you to say, ‘I told you so’! When did you get to be his defender? What should we do? Let him stay chancellor? Declare him king?”
“We should make certain he can’t do this again. Then we should decide what justice is, and carry it out. Justice. Not revenge.”
“You can have the justice. I’ll settle for revenge.”
Satoshi grabbed him by the shoulders. “Listen to yourself! We can’t let ourselves turn into barbarians!”
“I don’t care!” Stephen Thomas shouted. “I don’t —”
“I’m sorry,” Satoshi said. “I’m sorry. I know how you felt about him, how he felt about you.”
“He was our friend, too,” Victoria said.
Across the room, Avvaiyar made a sound of surprise. Everyone felt the quick light touch as Arachne began to revive. The crash had been quick and hard, but shallow.
The change made Stephen Thomas almost too angry to speak. “That was quick,” he said. “The fucking computer twitches for a couple of minutes and comes right back to life. The inferior human being dies.”
“Take advantage of it,” Victoria said, “Put the transcript in the web. As soon as Arachne comes back to strength, everybody will see it. And then we’ll decide what to do.”
“The chancellor must lose his access to the web,” Thanthavong said.
Stephen Thomas rose, moving out of Satoshi’s arms, cold to his comfort.
“I can take care of that,” he said.
“No,” she said. “This is a task that should be done impersonally. Not in blind fury. Show Arachne the evidence. Arachne will do it.”
Stephen Thomas stopped, knowing she was right, unwilling to admit it.
“You have another job to do, Stephen Thomas, you and your teammates,” Thanthavong said. “Starfarer will complete its transition soon. We don’t know what’s on the other side. The alien contact team should be ready. For anything.”
Victoria glanced gratefully at Thanthavong. She had been afraid to make the same demand of him.
In his mind, Stephen Thomas retreated to the same place he had gone when Merry died, when the partnership trembled on the verge of dissolution, stripped of its center and its stability. He made himself solid. He walled part of himself off behind windows, placing himself above and to one side of his physical body. Sound came through the windows. A little light came through. Nothing else. No warmth, no fragrances, no breezes. And no pain. He watched Victoria from his new, distant vantage point, wondering what she had feared he might do.
“We’d better go out to the Chi, then,” he said. He did feel something, he still could feel something: a mild surprise that his voice sounded so calm.
He surprised Victoria, too. She took his hands and looked into his eyes.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes,” he said.
If he had not fallen apart when Merry died, he would not fall apart now.
“Yes,” Stephen Thomas said again. “There’s nothing I can do to help Feral.” And though he knew it was true, he knew he would always question his own actions in the events leading to Feral’s death.
“All right,” Victoria said. “If we’re going to do it, we’d better do it.”
She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and left the health center to go up to the Chi’s dock. Satoshi followed, but Stephen Thomas hesitated before Professor Thanthavong.
“You won’t let Blades back into the web,” he said.
“No. You can be sure of that.”
“Thank you.”
“My friend —”
He tensed, and she stopped.
“What?” Stephen Thomas said.
“Never mind. It will wait. Good luck.”
o0o
Infinity Mendez felt no sense of movement or direction, except the ordinary, inescapable spinning of the cylinder.
Transition looked nothing like space. He had not known what to expect out here, and because of Arachne’s crash there were no visual records of their first encounter with it. Infinity had — he thought — brought no expectations. So he surprised himself by wanting, by searching for, evidence of their tremendous relative speed through space.
“Where are we?” he asked Esther, who sat nearby on the inspection net. Kolya sat apart from them, gazing outward, transfixed.
“Beats me,” Esther said.
“Don’t you understand —” He waved his hand out, down —”this?”
“No.”
“I thought you would.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a pilot.”
“Don’t have my rating for this stuff,” Esther said, a laugh in her voice. “Maybe Victoria MacKenzie understands it. She’s probably the only one on board who does.”
Above lay the rumpled rock of the missile crater, nearly repaired, if not quite restored to its original state.
“The silver slugs are waking up,” Infinity said.
The silver slugs huddled in crevices, their skins reflecting an occasional glimmer of transition’s unusual light. When the web crashed, they all shut down, fastening themselves securely to Starfarer’s skin, waiting for instructions. Now that the computer was returning to life, the slugs flexed and stretched and prepared themselves for work. They were oblivious to transition, concerned only with their obligation to maintain the starship.
The drive to keep Starfarer repaired was programmed into the slugs like an instinct. Except for the hours during which the administration had shut them down — Infinity still did not understand the reasoning behind that — they had worked constantly since Arachne returned from its first crash.
They would continue to work, because the ship had not yet regained its full structural strength. Infinity believed, and hoped, that it had achieved enough stability to survive transition, and the inevitable stresses of the sail’s deployment at the other end of their voyage.
There was no point in dwelling on the other possibilities. He had done his best; the silver slugs had worked to their limits. People sometimes thought he was fatalistic. Whatever happened now, happened. Infinity thought that the best one could do was approach it with composure.
“Do you see the same things as I do?” Esther asked.
“Sure,” Infinity said, his voice low. “Why wouldn’t I?” Then, “How would I know if I didn’t?”
“That’s what I mean.” She replied in the same soft tone, as if their conversation might disturb Kolya. They both knew better. Either he had his transceiver turned on, and could hear them no matter whether they whispered or shouted, or he had it turned off and could not hear them at all. Infinity suspected that the cosmonaut had it turned off, that he was experiencing transition in his own private way; and perhaps he was listening for the music of the spheres.
Back in the Tau Ceti system, before they made the change, Kolya had flatly refused to go back inside. He had been out here during their first transition. He wanted to see it again. Infinity was curious about it, too; he had been underground, looking at the damage, seeking the source of the water leaks, and finding Griffith zipped up, helpless, in a survival pouch. Neither one of them had seen anything of that journey.
It was foolish, even dangerous, to remain perched outside on the starship’s skin during an experimental flight. But if something catastrophic happened to Starfarer, it probably would be no safer inside. So Infinity and Esther remained outside with Kolya, and watched transition unprotected.
“So,” Esther said, “what do you see?”
They tried to describe to each other what they saw. They could not make their perceptions match; they could not even make them touch at occasional points. Either they were seeing two entirely different things, or they were using two entirely different ways to try to describe them. It was as if they were communicating in different, mutually incomprehensible, languages, languages evolved from different roots.
In frustration, Infinity raised his head and stared into the missile crater. The slugs had come out of their nooks; they nearly covered the irregularly concave surface of the damaged area, seeking out the spaces that should be solid, filling them in around the open places that should carry water, nutrients, information. One slug crawled across the skin, leaving behind an opalescent trail of optical fibers.
Infinity squeezed his eyes closed, looked down, and opened them again.
Transition was gone.
Normal space spread out around him, and the new star system lay clearly in view, Sirius A bright, intense, gilded and damped by the gold shielding of Infinity’s faceplate; Sirius B dim and distant.
A few more degrees of spin took Sirius A out of sight.
Infinity started at Esther’s yelp of astonishment.
A graceful blue crescent blinked into existence, accompanied by a wash of light.
“Did you see that?” Esther exclaimed. “It just appeared!”
“A trick of the starlight...” Kolya said.
“It must be an optical illusion,” Infinity said. “It was there and we just didn’t see it.”
Infinity admired the planet for a moment, but abruptly, as he adjusted to the return to normal space, as his eyes acclimated to the light, he made out what he was looking at. He drew in his breath, shocked and stunned.
What lay in orbit behind Starfarer was a small blue planet, illuminated on one limb, three quarters full and one quarter dark.
It moved fast. Faster than the starship.
It was heading straight for Starfarer.
o0o
Starfarer plunged through space.
The planet rushed toward the starship from behind.
J.D. flinched back in her couch. Satoshi caught his breath. Victoria muttered a short, sharp oath. Stephen Thomas, uncharacteristically, said nothing. He lay easy and relaxed within his safety straps, watching.
“Where did it come from?” Satoshi exclaimed.
Distances and sizes are impossible to estimate in space, J.D. thought desperately. That thing must be large, and far away. It must be.
All Chi’s warning reactions began to scream.
“We know!” Victoria said.
The sounds stopped.
Zev let himself free of his couch and drifted to the window to cup his hands around his face and look out at the strange little world.
A holographic chart showed the sphere to be only a few tens of kilometers in diameter. But it was bigger than Starfarer, and its entire bulk would crash into the starship.
The stellar sail untwisted, grand, majestic, and slow. J.D. knew — without doing the math, she knew — that the sail could not deploy fast enough, could not change the starship’s course radically enough, to avoid the crash.
A blue haze rimmed the illuminated arc of the worldlet, and clouds glowed white in starlight. But clouds were impossible: the planetoid was surely too small to have a permanent atmosphere.
Perhaps it had volcanoes; perhaps one had erupted so recently that the gas and particles had not yet escaped its gravity to fly off into space.
“Not enough time,” Victoria said. “Not enough delta-v.”
“What is that thing?” Satoshi asked, fascinated despite the fact that it was going to kill them. “What the hell is it?”
Iphigenie appeared, in image, among them.
“There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “Even if I were in the web. I can’t move the ship fast enough. I’m sorry. If the sail were powerful enough to move us that fast, Starfarer would disintegrate under the force.”
“I know,” Victoria said. “I’m sorry, too, Jenny.”
“That’s no natural object,” Satoshi said.
A chaotic mass of information roiled in front of him; he picked bits out, brought them forward, and inspected them, let them fade back into the confusion.
“It’s no bigger than a medium-sized asteroid, but it’s got an atmosphere. Oxygen, water, land —”
“We should have gone home,” Gerald said from his liaison post. “As I told you. I hope you’re satisfied!”
“I’m just delighted,” Victoria snarled. “And your last words can be ‘I told you so’!”
“Victoria, is the Chi ready to take off?” Professor Thanthavong asked.
“We can’t —”
“If you crash, too —”
“ — we go clean,” Stephen Thomas said.
“We have time. A few minutes to get everyone into the Chi or the transport or at least into suits or survival pouches. Afterwards, there may be enough of the starship to salvage...”
“I...”
J.D. felt a visceral reaction against taking off with the Chi, leaving Starfarer behind. When the starship crashed, there would be nothing left of it, only the people in the Chi and in the transport — could everyone on board fit inside the two small ships? She doubted it. The transport had been over-full when Starfarer dragged it into transition, with several hundred people remaining on the starship.
“It isn’t going to work,” Victoria said.
“We’ve got to try!” Thanthavong said. “Are you a survivor, or not? I thought you were!”
“Not like this,” Stephen Thomas said, very softly.
“We are all trying not to panic, Victoria,” Thanthavong said. “Don’t make it harder.”
“All right,” Victoria said. There was no life or hope in her voice. “We’ll get as many people on board as we possibly can.”
It doesn’t matter what we do now, J.D. thought. It doesn’t matter a bit.
She opened her safety straps and floated over to Zev’s side.
“It’s pretty,” Zev said. “It looks like it has seas.”
“It does have seas,” Satoshi said. “It has air. It has a very strong magnetic field, and the gravity of a small planet.”
“What!” Victoria exclaimed.
“We’re broadcasting our greeting, aren’t we?” J.D. said, turning back toward her colleagues with a sudden twinge of hope. “If the alien ship is still in this system, maybe it will hear us. Maybe the alien people will understand that we’re in trouble. Maybe they’ll come help us.”
“We’re broadcasting what we agreed on. Our introduction, and a copy of their maze.”
“But we’ve had no reply,” J.D. said sadly.
“No reply. And there’s no sign of the alien ship.”
“It’s moving,” Zev said.
J.D. joined Zev. She put her arm around him. His fur felt soft and sleek and warm. He snuggled close.
“Of course it is, Zev,” she said.
“It’s moving away.”
“It just —”
She stopped. The planetoid appeared to be curving in its course, moving aside from collision.
“What’s going on?” J.D. said. She touched Arachne and got back a reply that confirmed what Zev had perceived. As the alien contact team and everyone aboard the starship watched, amazed, the planetoid accelerated. A gradual motion drew it aside from Starfarer. In complete astonishment, J.D. watched it as it moved away, slowed, and paced the starship. Messages flashed back and forth between Starfarer, Arachne, and the Chi, letting people know that they were not going to die today. At least not in the next few minutes.
o0o
Before the spin on the cylinder had pulled Infinity and Esther and Kolya out of sight of the planet, Infinity was clambering across the inspection net to the airlock, his colleagues close behind. They hurried toward the airlock, not because they had any illusions about being safer inside. Outside, they were helpless. Inside, they might be able to do some good.
Infinity hooked in with Arachne, hoping for information that would negate his fears. Instead, he received confirmation of them. The planetoid plunged toward the starship.
The airlock cycled. Infinity faced the others. Kolya and Esther looked as shocked as he felt.
They did not speak. There was nothing to say. This was the one possibility that might, in the normal progress of their voyage, destroy the ship. During the blind moment between transition and normal space-time, Starfarer could crash into an asteroid.
But it wasn’t supposed to happen, Infinity thought. We knew there’s a vanishingly small chance that it could. But nobody thought it ever would...
And that’s the weirdest-looking asteroid...
They heard Thanthavong’s plans for the Chi and the transport; they heard Victoria’s reluctant acquiescence.
“But where am I supposed to fly it?” Esther said. “Earth-type planets orbiting Sirius? No way.”
And by the time the airlock door opened, the emergency had ended.
Infinity’s hands shook with the rush and sudden ebb of adrenaline. He took off his helmet, shook his hair free, opened his suit, and let it collapse on the floor.
Esther flung herself between Infinity and Kolya, catching one man in each arm, hugging them close. Infinity, in his turn, held her gratefully and put his free arm around Kolya. He thought the cosmonaut was going to pull away; instead, he put his arms around his younger colleagues and embraced them, looming over them.
“I have never been so scared in my whole life,” Esther said. “I thought the missile carrier was scary! That was nothing.”
“Yeah,” Infinity said. That was about all he could get out.
“I would not like to repeat the experience,” Kolya said.
They broke apart self-consciously. Kolya and Esther did not meet each other’s eyes. They were from completely different backgrounds and cultures, but each was a pilot. Pilots were supposed to take every emergency calmly, and coolly, and never reveal their fear. Not even afterwards.
“Strange...” Kolya said. “When I tested fighter planes, when I was the first to use a new spacecraft, I came much closer to death. Seconds from it, instead of minutes. The experiences frightened me. But they were exhilarating. The first thing I wanted to do was fly the plane again. Put the spacecraft through the same routine. Make it work. Get it right. This time it’s different. I don’t feel exhilarated. Only relieved. Grateful.” He shrugged. “Perhaps it’s age.”
“You’ve got control, when you test-fly,” Esther said.
“Yes — ?” Kolya said, not understanding her point.
“It’s the control that gives you the rush. Knowing you were the one who pulled things together. Here, we couldn’t do anything.”
Kolya considered what she had said. “I believe that may be part of it.”
“Everybody was going to die,” Infinity said. “That’s what I was thinking. It wouldn’t have been so bad, if it was only me or a few people. Somehow it felt worse that it was going to be everybody.”
They made their way up through the skin of Starfarer. Infinity switched his attention back and forth between his own surroundings and the incredible miniature planet pacing Starfarer. The ecosystem amazed him and intrigued him. He wondered if he would get a chance to visit it, to talk to the person who designed or directed it. And he wondered if an artificial ecosphere might draw Alzena from her apathy.
o0o
J.D. touched Arachne.
“Professor Thanthavong, is everyone all right?”
“Yes,” Thanthavong said. “And we’re still... trying not to panic.”
“Yes.” She managed a shaky laugh. “I know how that feels.”
Gerald Hemminge interrupted. “You’re supposed to talk through me,” he said. “I am your liaison, after all.”
After a long silence, and at a loss for anything else to say, J.D. answered him.
“I’m sorry, Gerald,” she said. “We’ll try to follow the protocol from now on.”
The blue planetoid hovered nearby.
“You know what it’s doing?” Victoria gestured toward it. “It’s moving to draw Starfarer into orbit.”
“How is it possible, Victoria?” J.D. asked.
“I don’t know.” Victoria sounded stunned. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe we’re all undergoing mass hallucination. We’re seeing it. But I can’t explain it. What’s that thing using for propulsion? What is it?”
“It’s the alien ship,” J.D. said.
All her teammates stared at her.
“That’s the most reasonable explanation, isn’t it? We came here looking for a ship: for whatever the craft was that left the spectral signature. We expected... I don’t know, some kind of mechanical spaceship, a pointy rocketship—”
“A flying saucer,” Satoshi said.
“Or a big cigar-shaped blimp thing.” She spread her hands, making sketches in the air. “But it won’t be anything like that. Why would alien people want to fly around in a tin can? We sure don’t. Starfarer doesn’t look like any classical spaceship.”
“So they’ve replicated a natural environment,” Satoshi said. “And they’ve done it even more accurately than we have.”
“But they were way ahead of us,” Victoria said.
“And now they’re beside us, and when we got here they were behind us.”
“Maybe they stopped off to sightsee,” Satoshi said dryly. “But J.D.’s idea makes a lot of sense.”
“Strange as it is, it’s the simplest explanation I can think of,” J.D. said.
“Then why don’t they answer us!” Victoria exclaimed.
“Let’s go see,” J.D. said.
Victoria gazed thoughtfully at the natural-looking, wholly unnatural object.
“Very well,” she said.
Politely, but more so all their other colleagues would know what they were doing, they informed Gerald Hemminge of their plans.
The Chi pushed free of Starfarer, and accelerated toward the planetoid.
“The conditions down there are Earthlike,” Satoshi said. “The air’s about twenty-two percent oxygen, the rest nitrogen with traces of the usual stuff. Lots of water. Shirtsleeves environment at the middle latitudes, thirty degrees Celsius.”
“Shirtsleeves for you, my dear,” Victoria said. “Sounds like air conditioner weather to me.”
Satoshi smiled, then sobered.
“Where’s the heat coming from?” J.D. said. They were too far from either of the stars in the system to receive much warmth from starlight.
“Underground.”
“Neutronium?” Victoria said.
That made sense to J.D. A chunk of a neutron star, to provide the necessary mass, to create enough gravity to hold the air and the water, to tap for energy. A thick shell of rock and dirt, perhaps even of metal, to absorb extra energy, store it, reradiate it as heat, and protect the inhabitants from the interior radiation. Plants evolved to photosynthesize in the infrared as well as the visual spectrum, when the planetoid left the vicinity of a star.
Results: a mini-planet, no native sun required.
“If you agree, Victoria, I’d like to transmit our regular broadcast toward the...” She waved one hand in the direction of the planetoid, unsure what to call it. “The same transmission we’re sending back to Starfarer.”
Victoria shrugged. “No objection. I don’t see how they’d be able to decipher it, without compatible equipment.”
“You’re right,” J.D. said. “Of course. But. Still.”
“Go ahead and try it.”
J.D. made the necessary request. The Chi was still so close to Starfarer that she could work through Arachne. The web behaved normally: as if it could read its users’ minds. Until it finished healing, Arachne was dedicating most of its attention to communications between the starship and its scout, but as far as J.D. could tell, the second crash had left the web with no tangible damage. That did not seem fair.
Feral would have gotten a kick out of this, J.D. thought. He might even have persuaded Victoria to let him come along. She glanced over at Stephen Thomas, wondering what he was thinking. The cut on his forehead had healed, his black eyes had faded. He looked as beautiful, and as calm, and as cold, as a classical marble statue, not permitting himself to react to Feral’s death; not permitting himself to react to anything.
She turned away and squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself not to cry.
“Professor Thanthavong,” Stephen Thomas said, his words abrupt. He had remained calm through the threat of imminent destruction and the shock of their deliverance, but he had not spoken since the emergency ended. He ignored J.D.’s promise about liaison protocol.
“I am here, Stephen Thomas.”
“Did Arachne look at the evidence?” His voice was cold. “Is Blades out of the web yet?”
“He no longer has access to Arachne,” Thanthavong said. “You may ease your mind on that concern.”
“What are you going to do about him?”
“I? Nothing. I did propose that he remain sequestered until we convene a meeting. Then he may, of course, speak in his own defense. He has agreed to my suggestion.”
“When’s the meeting?”
“You and J.D. are the witnesses against him. The meeting can’t take place until you return.”
“Good lord, look,” Satoshi said. “They’re transmitting.”
J.D. leaned forward so quickly that she bounced against her safety straps. She grabbed the arms of her couch.
“It’s the maze again,” Victoria said.
The complicated twining of light and shadow formed before them, three-dimensional, transparent on its outside surface, paths marked with fragile brush-strokes that became more and more solid as they neared the center. J.D. could see the relationship between this maze and the original, two-dimensional one, as if the two-dimensional shadow had traced a true course through the three dimensions.
“Maybe they can look at your broadcast,” Victoria said to J.D. “What they’re sending us is coming straight through. It didn’t need any more processing than a transmission from Starfarer.”
J.D. looked directly at the camera that observed the alien contact team.
“We’d like to talk to you, face to face,” J.D. said.
Stephen Thomas gestured with his chin toward the three-dimensional maze.
“Maybe that is their face,” he said, bitter and mocking. “Maybe they’re already trying to talk to us.”
“I’m aware of that possibility, Stephen Thomas,” J.D. said. It distressed her to hear him speak in such a tone. “That’s why I think we should meet in person.”
Her calm dismay silenced him. J.D. felt anything but calm.
“They may have figured out our broadcast system in a couple of days,” Victoria said, “but it seems unlikely they could have picked up enough English to understand what you just —”
The image projector produced a rich, full voice.
“We would like to meet you face to face, too.”