The path led along the bank of the river, then across a bridge. Stephen Thomas sat on the bridge’s edge, staring down into the gentle ripples. At dawn, fog rose from the water, swirling above the current. As the sun tube brightened, the air warmed and the fog dissipated
Maybe I’ll go for a swim, Stephen Thomas thought. Zev was right, it does make me feel better.
He wished all his problems could be solved by going for a swim.
After leaving the party, he had spent all night in his lab. He was unwilling to go home till he felt he could face his partners with equanimity. He could have gone back to the guest house, and slept in the room Feral had used as an office. But the room had lost any feeling of Feral’s presence.
His vision sparkled at the edges with exhaustion. He doubted he would be able to go to sleep till he could take a look at the results of the experiment he had begun last night. It should give him some clues about squidmoth genetics; it should at least give him evidence that the dendritic molecules were the chemicals of squidmoth inheritance.
He yawned and stretched, glad of the fresh air and bright light. They would refresh him before he went back to the lab.
Last time he had crossed this bridge, it had been covered with rushing water. He had run through the current, splashing, exhilarated by the newness of his body, elated by his mastery of it, driven by his anger at Europa and Androgeos and their secret supercharged bacteria, appalled at what he had discovered lurking through Arachne.
He still did not know exactly what it was. Chancellor Blades was cut off from Arachne, his neural node withered and resorbed. But something, something dangerous, remained.
He touched the web tentatively. All his recent interactions with it had been superficial and wary, and he had found nothing. Nothing dangerous, nothing to confirm his experience. No proof. If his suspicions were true, his surveillance had warned off the anomalous presence.
The river flowed peacefully under the bridge. It had receded to its normal level.
Stephen Thomas stared upstream, letting himself dissolve in the transparent ripples, opening himself to Arachne’s web. He offered the web his trust and his innocence.
He waited. He wandered, but there was a direction to his wandering. He found himself in sight of Feral’s guest node. No longer sustained by Feral’s attention, it had begun to dim and contract from disuse. The files of Feral’s work would remain, unchanged, mummified in the archives.
Stephen Thomas could find no echo of the presence that had stalked him during transition. Arachne denied that such a presence could exist, or, if it existed, that it could pass unnoticed through the web.
Maybe not now, Stephen Thomas thought, keeping the idea to himself. But when Arachne’s resources are all focused in one direction, getting Starfarer into transition... that would make an opening for anything to get through.
“Stephen Thomas!”
He drew himself from the web and made his eyes focus on distant spots of riotous color. He had stared unseeing into the river gorge for several minutes, forgetting to close his eyes while he linked himself with Arachne. His eyes felt dry and scratchy. He blinked rapidly.
At the fossil site, upstream around the next bend, Crimson directed the first interspecies archaeological dig. Stephen Thomas corrected himself: The first interstellar interspecies performance art, complete with sculpted fossils and an intricately designed provenance.
Quickercatcher cantered down the beach toward Stephen Thomas. The Largerfarthings were as graceful in gravity as in free-fall. Quickercatcher folded his arms loosely on his back and ran on his front and rear legs, his long body moving sinuously. The decorations braided into his fur bounced against his neck and sides. Small soft sparks glittered around him, like fireworks in fog, but Stephen Thomas refused to see the Largerfarthing’s aura; it faded away.
Stephen Thomas waved to Quickercatcher. He reacted to the Largerfarthings the same way J.D. did, the same way most of the people on board reacted. He loved them without reason.
What is it about these folks? Stephen Thomas wondered.
“I found a tooth, come see!” Quickercatcher looped around, ran back the way he had come, and disappeared around the river bend.
If the Largerfarthings had changed themselves to be able to breath Earth’s air, to be able to exist in an alien environment, then they might have changed themselves to be appealing to human beings. Stephen Thomas tried to shrug away the idea. He did not want to be manipulated for Civilization’s plan. He wanted to like the Largerfarthings for themselves. He did like them for themselves, no matter what the reason.
Stephen Thomas left the bridge, climbed down the steep trail, walked along the river beach, and followed Quickercatcher to Crimson’s stage.
Quickercatcher’s mauve fur stood out against the dark rock of the river channel. Longestlooker and Fasterdigger blended in, but Quickercatcher and Sharphearer, with her piebald fluorescent fur, looked like a party waiting to happen. The sight of the quartet dissolved the sadness and confusion Stephen Thomas had been feeling.
They stood in a semi-circle around Crimson, who knelt on the beach brushing layers, grain by grain, from a slab of rock of no volcanic origin.
Amazing how easy it is to accept Crimson’s fossils — and their ridiculous provenance — as real, he thought.
Even though he knew they were fake, even though he had seen her with her wheelbarrow full of artwork on the river beach, he found himself thinking of the fossils as a billion years old.
Coincidences aside, it was an aesthetically pleasing story. Granted, some of the provenance of the fossils had been lost by the original mass-driver excavation. The alternative was that the fossils would never have been found, for who in their right mind would look for fossils on Earth’s moon?
Stephen Thomas wondered what the Four Worlds people would say when fossils from a completely different evolutionary system turned up. Crimson’s second group of creatures, devolved from Nemo, looked even older and much, much stranger than the remains of the Fighters.
Once the second site turned up — a second site dug from Earth’s moon, which should not have fossils at all! — the Four Worlds people would appreciate the performance. They would have to get the joke.
All four members of the quartet, and Androgeos, stood around the cramped slab watching Crimson prepare the fossil for extraction. She used a dentist’s pick and a soft brush.
Stephen Thomas had never been to a dentist who used a steel pick instead of microbial techniques. He had once asked Crimson where she got dentist’s picks, if she bought them from some company that manufactured them specially for paleontologists. She had laughed. When she laughed, when she smiled, Stephen Thomas understood why Satoshi had fallen in love with her. She had told him that even paleontologists do not use dentists’ picks. She had found the tools at an antique store, and decided to try antique excavation methods.
The techniques worked. The Largerfarthings were fascinated.
A ruffle of green and gold above the site startled him. He focused on the motion: the Representative’s Representative hugged the volcanic riverbank. He looked like a mat of lichen, until he arched his back and the spines rose up, then settled down. His leading edge draped directly over the sandstone. He, too, concentrated on the site excavation.
LTMs perched nearby, recording everything.
One of the Largerfarthings’ tiny dioramas stood in a crevice of the riverbank: several tiny wooden figures danced with a bead, a blade of grass, and a feather.
“There, see?” Quickercatcher pointed at the new fossil. “It was my turn to dig, and I found it.”
Crimson glanced up. “Hi,” she said. She gave Stephen Thomas a quick smile, and went back to her work.
“Hi, Crimson.”
“I prepared the surface,” Fasterdigger said proudly, without any hint of jealousy that his sibling, rather than he, had found the fossil.
“And then Crimson digs it out, of course,” Longestlooker said.
“The star’s prerogative,” Stephen Thomas said. “Enjoying the performance?”
Quickercatcher nudged Stephen Thomas’s arm with his soft, warm nose.
That’s one reason why they look so benign, Stephen Thomas thought. Their noses are more like... like a horse’s, I guess, covered with fur. Instead of like a dog’s, or a lion’s. They look less like a carnivore. Despite the teeth.
“You’re all so funny,” Quickercatcher said. “I do like human beings. I’ve always liked human beings.” He glanced fondly at Androgeos, who knelt on the gravel beach in his pleated silken kilt, one arm thrown around Fasterdigger’s forward shoulders.
They both watched, rapt, as Crimson brushed gently at the projecting fossil fang.
“Are you finding anything else there?” Androgeos asked.
“The rest of the jaw, I think,” Crimson said.
“I mean — artifacts.”
“They’re all artifacts,” Stephen Thomas said. “And Crimson only works in organic forms.”
Androgeos ignored him, refusing to listen to the Earth humans’ deception.
Crimson sat back on her heels. “Look, look here, Quickercatcher. Let’s get an LTM to probe this, I think your fang is still attached to the jawbone.”
Quickercatcher snaked forward and arched his neck to look over Crimson’s shoulder. An LTM scuttled to the work surface and crouched over it.
An enlarged holographic image appeared nearby. A bit of fang projected. A sound trace outlined the jaw beneath it, with a proposed reconstruction in false color that progressed from blue to red as the probability of its accuracy decreased. The missing bits were mostly blue, with a few tantalizing sections of bright scarlet.
Androgeos and the other Largerfarthings gazed at the image, then craned their necks to see the real fossil tooth. Even Late exerted himself to orient toward the image.
Crimson smiled at Quickercatcher. “This is a good find.”
Quickercatcher nuzzled Crimson’s shoulder, for all the world like an embarrassed kid. Crimson stroked Quickercatcher’s angora fur.
“I imagine,” Androgeos said, “a starship, one of the other ones’ starships. It’s so long abandoned that its inhabitants have died.”
Fasterdigger’s double-thumbed hand draped over Androgeos’s shoulder, now and then twirling a curl of the Minoan’s glossy black hair between forethumb and forefinger, or hindthumb and hindfinger. Androgeos’s usual sulky look had vanished, to be replaced by curiosity and eagerness.
“Their bodies have turned to stone. The starship crashes on Earth’s moon. Molten lava covers it over, and there the remnants wait. For us.” He paused in his myth-making.
Shit, Stephen Thomas thought cynically, he just hopes we’ll lead him to the other ones. But it’s a nice change to see him looking like an ordinary human being with ordinary human feelings, instead of...
“Then your mass driver chews it into pieces and flings it into space. It becomes Starfarer. Starship, to starship.”
When Androgeos demanded Victoria’s algorithm, the Minoan had looked like an arrogant demi-god, questing and rapacious, concerned only with his own perquisites and desires. More Achaian than the ideas Stephen Thomas had of ancient Minoans. But then, of course, one had to balance the kindly-looking snake goddess with the Labyrinth and the minotaur.
“That isn’t how it happened,” Crimson said. “There’s no evidence of a crash. There’s no gravitational anomaly, so where’s the starship? The strata aren’t disturbed. The bones aren’t broken. And I haven’t found any of their technology. Nor any inscriptions.”
“You will. You must.”
“I don’t think so.” She sighed. “It’s too bad. We won’t have suitable markers for them, when we lay them to rest again.”
“When you — what?”
“When we go back to Earth. We’ll re-inter them, of course. It’s the only respectful thing to do.”
“You’d do better to leave them in Civilization. Where we can learn more about them.”
“Of course that’s impossible,” Crimson said without hesitating.
“We’ll see,” Androgeos said, more like his usual self.
“On Earth, we learned a long time ago to respect people’s remains.”
“There’s too much to learn from them!”
“Tell that to the folks who grew these fangs.” Crimson traced the curve of the fang in the hologram.
“But they’re extinct.”
“Are you sure?” Crimson asked. “Are you certain they are who you think they are?”
She turned to Stephen Thomas. “Want to help?”
“No, thanks,” he said. “Some other time.”
“You always say that.”
He smiled. “I’d rather watch than perform.”
Pebbles, falling, clicked across the gravel beach. Stephen Thomas glanced over his shoulder toward the bridge and the footpath. Chandra, the sensory artist, climbed down the trail.
“Hi,” Chandra said.
“Haven’t seen much of you lately,” Crimson said.
She shrugged. “Nothing to do. Starfarer is boring.”
Stephen Thomas would have laughed at her if he had not known she was desperately serious.
Her eyes were silver gray, a uniform color over the whole exposed eyeball. Her unfocused gaze was as acute as normal vision, and she could save and store everything she saw. Her face and hands and her bare arms pulsed with gnarled nerve clusters.
The sensory artist sought unique experiences. She made no secret that she wanted J.D.’s job. She would never get it. She barely got along — barely communicated — with human people. She was open to sensation, but only her own. J.D. had succeeded with Nemo, with the quartet, Stephen Thomas thought, because she was so open to others.
That’s probably why she and Feral —
Stephen Thomas cut off the thought. It was too painful.
Sharphearer approached Chandra cautiously. The Largerfarthing passed Stephen Thomas, her ears swiveled forward, her muscles so taut she was walking on tiptoe.
“Who are you?” she asked. “You’re different. You’re almost as different as Stephen Thomas and Zev.”
“I’m more different,” Chandra said. “And I can do more things.”
She moved forward. She and Sharphearer regarded each other warily.
“Sharphearer, this is Chandra,” Stephen Thomas said. “She’s an artist, back on earth.”
“I’m famous,” Chandra said. “I’m more famous than Crimson.”
Crimson sat back on her heels and scrubbed her sweaty forehead with her sleeve.
“Artists are always more famous than scientists,” she said.
“It’s only fair, though,” Longestlooker said reasonably. “Scientists have only to imagine what’s already there, and discover it. Artists...” Longestlooker’s voice took on a note of awe, and she spoke completely without irony. “Artists have to invent what they discover.”
Chandra held her hand out to Sharphearer. Sharphearer stretched her long arm past her forward shoulder till her double-thumbed hand rested on Chandra’s palm. She placed her fingers on the nerve clusters.
When Sharphearer touched her, Chandra froze. Her strange eyes widened. The nerve clusters, activating, darkened and pulsed.
Sharphearer gazed into Chandra’s strange eyes as if she were recording every detail of Chandra’s being as Chandra was recording Sharphearer’s. She extended her other arm; her wide hand approached the gnarled nerve cluster on Chandra’s forehead. She touched it. Chandra leaned into the pressure, closing her eyes. Her expression relaxed into pleasure and happiness.
Sharphearer trilled, a soft sweet purring growl.
With an incoherent shout, Chandra leaped back out of reach, her eyes wide open, shocked. Sharphearer, startled, leaped two meters backwards. Stephen Thomas jumped out of the way, and even so Sharphearer’s powerful tail whipped against his leg.
Chandra stumbled around and fled, scrambling up the rocky path to the top of the river canyon. Stones clattered down and scattered across the river beach, vanishing among the gravel.
Sharphearer stood on tiptoe, all five toes on each foot extended, her ears clasping her skull, and her hair flattened close to her sides. Instead of resembling an electrified powder-puff, she looked as sleek and muscular and dangerous as Longestlooker.
Crimson, Androgeos, and Sharphearer’s siblings clattered toward them. Pebbles scraped together and splashed into the river. Chandra vanished over the riverbank. Stopping beside Stephen Thomas, Crimson frowned after her.
“What did I do wrong?” Sharphearer said.
Stephen Thomas hurried to her, limping. His leg stung.
“What happened?” Longestlooker asked. “Did you frighten her?”
Sharphearer raised her head and lifted her chin. Her goatee fanned out.
“Not on purpose,” she said.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have touched her without her permission,” Androgeos said.
“It’s all right,” Stephen Thomas said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. She wouldn’t have held out her hand if she hadn’t expected you to touch it.”
“It is all right,” Longestlooker said.
Sharphearer lowered her head and relaxed onto the pads of her feet. Her ears swiveled up and forward. She shook herself. Her particolored day-glow fur puffed out again.
“Why did she run away like that?”
“She’s an artist,” Quickercatcher said.
“You probably did something she liked,” Crimson muttered.
Not hearing what Crimson said, or finding it too alien to respond to, Androgeos and the quartet grouped together, soothing Sharphearer, fluffing her fur. Androgeos was as solicitous and gentle as any of the siblings. Even Late raised his forward edge and wriggled his spines in sympathy.
Crimson stood apart from them. She glanced up the trail, where Chandra had disappeared. Stephen Thomas stood beside her.
“What did you mean by that?” Stephen Thomas asked.
“She’s so damn strange.” Crimson shrugged. “Have you used her recordings? She never does anything that’s fun or pleasant. It’s always uncomfortable, or painful —” She fell silent.
Crimson was right. Chandra’s sensory recordings struck him as being morbid. Her walk through the natural cathedral of a Northwest forest ended with the freezing pain of a devil’s club thorn. She had gone out into Starfarer’s anomalous snowstorm and taken off her clothes; she probably would have died of hypothermia if Satoshi had not found her and brought her inside. Stephen Thomas was still aggravated at her for that escapade, because Satoshi had damn near ended up with hypothermia himself.
Crimson’s eyes filled with tears. Stephen Thomas had a brief, uncharitable, inexcusable urge to flee before she started to cry.
“I just thought...” Crimson said, “I tried... Oh, shit, I’m lonely and — Why would I want to get involved with an artist?” She dashed the tears from her eyes and grinned at him sardonically. “And what would a famous artist want with a paleontologist? Dirt under her nails...”
“Her loss,” Stephen Thomas said.
He smiled sympathetically. He had gotten to know her when she and Satoshi were seeing each other. He liked her. He liked her temper and the way she could get lost in whatever she was doing. Most of all he liked the glow she had brought back to the light of Satoshi’s spirit, that had faded when Merry died.
“You did okay with a geographer,” he said.
Crimson smiled. “True. It was... a surprise. It was nice.”
“For Satoshi, too.”
“But it was temporary. You take good care of him, huh?”
“I’ll do my best,” he said. Then, more certainly, “Yes.”
On the other side of the fossil dig, Longestlooker stroked Sharphearer’s neck one final time. Androgeos held the Largerfarthing behind her forward shoulders. Her calm had returned. The group broke apart and rejoined Crimson and Stephen Thomas.
“Should we go after Chandra?” Longestlooker asked Stephen Thomas and Crimson.
“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Crimson said. “Give her a chance to simmer down.”
“We can keep digging?” Sharphearer said hopefully.
“Sure.”
Crimson led them toward the fossil bed. She glanced over her shoulder at Stephen Thomas.
“See you.”
He raised one hand in acknowledgement — and quickly folded his fingers into a loose fist when he felt the tension of the swimming webs. Crimson made nothing of the changes in him, but Stephen Thomas still experienced abrupt shocks of alienness.
He climbed the path to the top of the riverbank.
He had planned to go straight to the lab and disappear in his work, but his conversation with Crimson had changed his mind. He and Satoshi and Victoria had to talk. He owed them explanations for the way he had been behaving, for the reasons he was afraid to come home.
And he could not keep his suspicions about why Feral had died to himself anymore. It was too dangerous. He owed his partners a warning.
o0o
Victoria lay wakeful in her dim bedroom. Outside, beyond the shadows of the porch, the sun tubes brightened to morning. Satoshi slept soundly, his head pillowed between her shoulder and her breast, one arm flung across her waist. She opened her hand and brushed her fingertips against his smooth black hair.
Victoria clenched her fist and opened it again. Her hand prickled uncomfortably. Her arm had gone to sleep.
If I could just go to sleep, she said to herself. She had lain awake all night.
Maybe I should give up, she thought. Get up and go over to my office.
She stayed where she was, with the warmth of Satoshi’s body pressed against her.
Light lay like gold on the wild garden beyond the deep front porch. A breeze whispered through the open French doors, carrying the scent of carnations and the tang of the distant sea. Most of Victoria’s flowers had wilted and died after the snowstorm; a miniature delta of Starfarer’s thin topsoil washed across the path, carried by the snowmelt. The horseshoe-shaped hill that covered the house and enclosed the yard had protected one slope of carnations. Their buds opened like popcorn, releasing their spicy scent.
That was a hopeful sign. No one yet knew how much damage the snowstorm had caused. The campus was littered with broken branches and snow-burned seedlings. In the orange grove, the fruit fell, brown and rotting, and the blossoms shriveled. Starfarer would have few oranges this season, and probably none at all next year.
Stephen Thomas appeared at the French doors. He hesitated, backlighted, his face in darkness. Victoria could see only the familiar shape of his body, changed now by the gilt aura of his pelt on his arms and legs.
Stephen Thomas always claimed he could see auras — though he had said recently that he had decided auras were bullshit. Not that he could no longer see them... just that he no longer wanted to look.
“Hi,” Stephen Thomas said.
“Hi.”
“Can I come in?”
“Yes!” she said so quickly he flinched. Out of long habit they both fell silent and glanced at Satoshi, wondering if they had awakened him. He was never at his best when awakened from a deep sleep. Then they exchanged a look of understanding and rueful amusement. They should wake Satoshi; it was important for all three of them to talk.
“Of course you can come in,” Victoria said, whispering. “Please do. Satoshi, wake up —”
“Wait,” Stephen Thomas said. “I want to talk to you for a minute. Then both of you.”
He stepped over the threshold. He crossed to her wide bed, and sat at its foot. Victoria untangled herself from Satoshi and joined Stephen Thomas, sitting crosslegged beside him.
“I miss you,” Stephen Thomas said.
“I miss you, too. So does Satoshi. You looked so handsome last night.”
“I got tired of Gerald giving me a hard time about my clothes.” He smiled wryly. “I thought I’d show him up for a change. I couldn’t wear my shoes. Spoiled the effect.”
Victoria smiled back. “But why did you leave so soon?”
He did not answer her directly. “All my life,” he said. “I thought I’d have fun. I thought I’d have sex. But I thought I’d be alone. I thought nothing would last.”
“You can’t turn us into something like that!”
“I know it! I’m not trying to, I don’t want to.”
“I don’t understand what you do want,” Victoria said. “If you’d tell me, I’d try to give it to you.”
“I never thought I’d feel about anyone the way I feel about our family,” Stephen Thomas said.
His dark hands, with their amber webs, lay on his knees. Victoria and Stephen Thomas had been dark and fair; now they were two shades of dark: café au lait, and mahogany.
His body radiated heat that caressed her like warm silk.
When’s the last time we touched? she wondered. When we all went down to the sea and tried to make love? He petted me with his swimming webs... But then Satoshi and I saw some of the changes Stephen Thomas is going through... and he saw some of them for the first time himself.
He had on loose running shorts and a sleeveless silk t-shirt, the same kind of clothes he usually wore. She had not seen him naked since the disastrous encounter in the sea, when the skin of his penis was sloughing off and his genitals were drawing into his body. Victoria shivered at the memory.
At her start, Stephen Thomas jerked his head up and drew away. Victoria took his hand and held it tight.
“No,” she said, “no, please, I was just remembering... Are you — ?”
“I’m done changing,” Stephen Thomas said. “You saw me in the middle. I’ll show you. Later. I was a mess, I didn’t know any of that would happen. Neither did Zev. I mean, he knows what diver men are like, but he didn’t know what ordinary men are like. He didn’t know to warn me.”
“Oh, love,” Victoria said. “You must have been so uncomfortable.”
“I’m okay now. I wish...”
“What?”
“You and Satoshi didn’t think it was so disgusting.”
“Disgusting!” Victoria flung her arms around him. Startled, he fell back onto the bed. She kissed him fiercely, hungrily. He opened his mouth for her tongue, and held her hips when she straddled his thighs. She slid her hand under his shirt, tracing his familiar long hard muscles beneath the soft new pelt. She felt him respond. A powerful current of curiosity increased her excitement. She pulled at the waistband of his shorts, expecting him to move, to raise his hips and help her free him of his clothing.
Instead, he shuddered violently and turned away.
Shocked, Victoria sat back.
“What’s — Did I hurt you?”
They parted; she knelt beside him, confused.
“No,” he said. “It’s just that I’m afraid...”
He hesitated.
“We can go slow,” Victoria said. “You’re — It’s your first time in your new body.”
She had almost said he was a virgin again, but the idea of Stephen Thomas as a virgin was funny and she did not want him to think she was laughing at him.
“Do you want me to —”
She put her hand on his leg, slid her palm hard up his inner thigh, slipped her fingertips beneath the leg of his shorts.
“This hasn’t got anything to do with sex!” Drawing away from her, he sat up and pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs.
“Oh,” Victoria said. “What, then?”
The silver mutualist held his hair back from his face, but one lock had fallen free. Victoria stroked it and smoothed it into place. The silver worm loosened, coiled around the vagrant lock, and tightened.
Victoria let her hand rest on Stephen Thomas’s cheek. He shivered. She took her hand away.
“I think we should separate for a while. So you guys will be safe.”
“Safe? From what? What are you talking about?”
“There’s something in Arachne, and it’s hunting me.”
“What? Nonsense. We’ve checked the system —”
“It can only come out during transition,” Stephen Thomas said. “When Arachne doesn’t have any attention to spare.”
“That doesn’t make sense! Come home, we can work —”
“I can’t come home,” he said stubbornly. “I’m afraid for you.”
“That is the stupidest, most transparent, idiotic excuse —” Victoria was furious, hurt, and confused. “If you want to leave us —”
“I don’t, dammit, there’s nothing I want less!”
“— why can’t you just say so?”
“If I come home, you and Satoshi will be in danger.”
“But the last transition was perfect,” Victoria said. During Starfarer’s first two transitions, Arachne had crashed. Only during the third had everything gone smoothly.
“I felt it. It tried to beat my brain to shit.”
Her eyelids flickered as she touched Arachne.
“All our connections are intact!” she said. She could not see how any damage could occur to Stephen Thomas’s neural node without some damage to Arachne’s intricate linkages between the partners.
“I was using Feral’s account.”
“What in the world could you do with Feral’s account?” Feral had been a guest; his access had been hemmed in, limited.
“Pretend to be Feral.”
He smiled a plaintively charming smile.
His charm annoyed her sometimes, especially when it made her feel as if she were his older sister instead of his lover. Trying to keep the annoyance from her voice, she made its edge razor-fine.
“Feral! Why?”
“To find out what happened to him. Why he died.”
“It was an accident.”
“Like hell it was. He was murdered, and the murder was premeditated. It just hit the wrong target.”
Victoria regretted Feral’s death and she felt some responsibility for it. If Feral had done as she had asked, he would never have been in the web when it crashed.
“It would be so much easier if there was a reason,” she said. “But there wasn’t. We have to accept that.”
“I got Feral his account. It was linked to mine. When I went in to find out why the system was crashing, I became a threat. If Blades had stopped me —”
“And J.D.”
“And J.D. If he’d stopped us, we wouldn’t have been able to prove he caused the crashes.”
“But it was Feral who got killed.”
“He was in the way.”
“What about J.D.?”
“Her node wasn’t finished yet. Maybe he couldn’t get to her deep enough. Maybe he made a mistake, like he did with me and Feral. Maybe he underestimated her.” His laugh was quick and sharp. “She caught up to Blades before I did.”
Victoria looked away. She sympathized with Stephen Thomas. The complicated rationale might ease his grief at his friend’s useless death. But she could not accept it if it meant he would leave.
“Victoria, I don’t know all the answers. But when I was in Arachne pretending to be Feral... something tried to kill me.”
“Not you — Feral. It must have been an echo — a memory of what happened to Feral. If we wipe his records —”
“No!” Stephen Thomas said angrily. “We can’t wipe out his work.”
“We can make a back-up.”
“If we wipe out his node, we’ll never know what’s wrong with Arachne.”
Victoria blew out her breath in frustration. Stephen Thomas was obsessed by Feral, by Feral’s senseless death.
“Love, I liked him, too. But we’ve got to get on with our lives. Besides, I don’t see how this connects with your being afraid to make love with me, eh?”
He looked out the French window, into brilliant daylight. Alzena’s songbirds shrilled and cried, confused by the direction of the light.
“I’m afraid if I love you,” Stephen Thomas said, “the same thing will happen to you that happened to Feral. I think anybody connected with me is in danger.”
“But that’s crazy!”
She blurted out her reaction without thinking.
“Crazy?” he shouted. “I’m trying to protect you, and you think I’m crazy?”
“Listen to me,” Victoria said. “Good god, Stephen Thomas, listen to yourself! No one’s going to die from fucking you! You didn’t even sleep with Feral!”
“But he was connected to me. You and me and Satoshi, we’re so connected our nodes look like a pile of spaghetti!”
“Nobody’s going to die because they love you!” she said.
“What about Merry?”
“What has Merry got to do with any of this?” Victoria cried. Merry had nothing to do with Arachne. Merry had never made it into space.
Her vision blurred. After a year, she still could not think of her elder partner without grief. Her heart skipped, as if it had emptied and clenched on nothingness.
“Merry loved me,” Stephen Thomas said. His expression went bleak. Hurt and confusion filled his startling sapphire eyes. “And Merry’s dead.”
“Merry didn’t die from loving you, Merry died because of the damned stupid motorcycle!” Victoria’s voice broke and the hot tears spilled down her cheeks. She fumbled toward Stephen Thomas, desperate for the comfort of his touch.
“I can’t do this anymore!” Stephen Thomas lunged to his feet and stood there trembling, out of her reach, looking down at her, his face set. “Fuck it, I can’t!”
He ran through the open window, across the yard, and vanished beyond the gateway.
Victoria cried uncontrollably. Fighting to stop only made it worse.
Satoshi enfolded her in his arms.
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice gruff with sleep. “It’s okay.”
“I didn’t —”
She hiccupped, and swallowed; she wrapped her arms around him and held him. Her tears pooled up on her cheek where she pressed her face against Satoshi’s shoulder; they dribbled down his chest. He leaned his head against her hair and rocked her.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” she said.
“Nonsense,” he said.
He was right; it was nonsense, like everything that had just happened, like her whole conversation with Stephen Thomas —
“I was already awake,” he said.
“Then why —”
“Because he said he wanted to talk to you alone... Because you needed to talk... Because...”
He stopped.
“I don’t know,” he said miserably.
o0o
The trail from the partnership’s garden ended at a main footpath, one of the walkways that spiraled around Starfarer’s interior.
Stephen Thomas stopped running.
He was baffled. Baffled by Victoria’s reaction and baffled by his own. He would be lucky if Victoria ever spoke to him again, or Satoshi either once he found out what had happened.
He was not entirely sure Satoshi had been speaking to him anyway.
Stephen Thomas could not believe what he had just done. He had pushed Victoria away. He had fled instead of comforting her, as he had comforted Victoria and Satoshi since Merry’s death.
“All you had to do was hold her, you stupid son of a bitch,” Stephen Thomas muttered. “And you couldn’t even do that. What the fuck is the matter with you?”
He felt flayed, slashed.
Stephen Thomas created a mental glass wall to protect his consciousness from his emotions. It was all that had kept him from collapsing when Merry died, and again after Feral’s murder.
When Victoria started to cry, the glass wall had exploded. Instead of protecting him from his grief and anger, instead of walling him off and allowing him to function, it had shattered around him, causing more damage than it had ever blocked out. Its destruction had opened him to a visceral surge of terrifying anger and resentment. All he could think of — No, he had not thought at all. He had simply fled.
The glass wall lay in bright bloody shards at his feet.
He had failed Victoria several times over. Besides being unable to console her about Merry, he had disappointed her — and himself; he ached with need for her touch and Satoshi’s. And he had failed to explain what had happened in Arachne. He had been so inarticulate about his fear that Victoria did not believe she was in danger.
Maybe she’s right, he thought. Oh, god, it would be so much easier if she were right.
But the consequences, if he was right and Victoria was wrong, meant Victoria and Satoshi were in peril.
If he could not persuade his partners of the danger, he would have to protect them another way. But the only way he could think of to safeguard them would take time.
If a psychotic pattern in the computer web was hunting him, and the people most closely connected to him, then he had to break the connections. He had to do it before Starfarer entered transition again.
No one knew when that might be. Starfarer might remain in the Four Worlds for months. But Stephen Thomas could not risk a delay.
He turned his attention to his neural node. Dendrites, tendrils, spread out from it in all directions, touching other nodes, other neural connections. A tangle of interlaced fibers filled the space between his and Victoria’s and Satoshi’s nodes. In some places several filaments had lost their identity and merged into one.
Stephen Thomas urged his node to disengage. The pattern resisted him. He persuaded it.
The change began.
Each time a connection separated, it left behind a ghost of itself, like a phantom limb. His node drew away from the reflected presences of his partners.
The distance ached.
o0o
The glass wall was full of cracks and missing pieces. One good blow would shatter it again. But for the moment it would hold.
As long as I don’t try to talk to anyone I love, Stephen Thomas said to himself, it will hold.
He set off across campus toward his lab. If he submerged himself in work, he could wipe away the emotional tangle his thoughts kept falling into.
Stephen Thomas had succeeded in growing alien cells retrieved from Nautilus. While he was visiting the Four Worlds’ ship, his students had made a lot of progress. Mitch and Lehua and Bay had perpetuated the cells, harvested them, and done a rough separation of their components. Last night, after the party, Stephen Thomas had begun an analysis of what he believed to be squidmoth genetic material.
He had some ideas about how the molecules coded for biological chemicals. He had been worrying the problem around in his mind. The molecules were roughly spherical, but rough was the operative word. They looked less like beach balls and more like dust mice: rough and fuzzy, loose ends of molecules sticking out all over. The roughness would be the key, the variation that produced thousands of different results from a single type of substrate.
Professor Thanthavong had some other ideas about how squidmoth genetics worked.
And she could be right, Stephen Thomas thought, I could be off on the wrong track entirely. But I don’t think so. I think those big molecules are what served Nemo and Nemo’s attendants the way DNA serves us.
The dendritic molecule was complicated in appearance but relatively simple in structure. The same could be said for DNA. But DNA was like a string of alphabet beads with only four letters, arranged one by one in three-letter words. The dendritic molecules in the Nautilus samples resembled a clump of beads strung together with a web of connections, tangles, and loose ends. The ends, he believed, would form the blueprints for biological polymers, the way DNA’s sequence created a code.
What baffled him was how to limit the degrees of freedom. DNA was a string, one-dimensional, readable in only one direction. Dendritic molecules presented a surface that was at least two-dimensional, possibly three-dimensional, probably a fractional, fractal dimension.
I’d know more, he thought, if my time hadn’t been so damned busted up since we hightailed it out of the solar system...
If I hadn’t felt so crappy during the changes...
If Arachne hadn’t crashed... Even if the artificial stupids hadn’t crashed!
If it hadn’t been for all the meetings — god, if I never go to another meeting — !
If Feral hadn’t died...
Stephen Thomas smiled sadly to himself. The truth was that if Feral were alive, Stephen Thomas would happily fragment his time to hell and gone.
o0o
The rubble of the genetics department had been cleared, dissolved away and recycled by the lithoclasts, the silver slugs that were so important to the operation of Starfarer. The nuclear missile had struck the outside of the cylinder directly below the genetics department, creating an earthquake inside.
Stephen Thomas brushed his fingertips across the new scar on his forehead. He and Satoshi had been inside the genetics department when the missile hit. They were lucky they had not been crushed.
The new genetics building had begun to grow, but no slugs were crawling on the foundation. The small ones might be out of sight, and even the medium-sized ones could be working behind the bits of wall and the fibrous complex of framework. But the big slugs were the size of rhinoceroses, and they were nowhere to be seen. The rebuilding of the genetics department was on hold.
Maybe Infinity Mendez needs all the slugs on the outside of the cylinders, Stephen Thomas thought. Or maybe they’re all off fixing snow damage.
Or guarding Chancellor Blades.
He continued along the trail to the biochemistry department, where Starfarer’s geneticists were camping out. Stephen Thomas missed his old office, with its sagging rattan chairs, all his intramural athletic trophies, and enough floor space for a sleeping mat. His temporary cubbyhole was too small to let him stretch out for a nap during all-night lab sessions.
Like the genetics department, the biochem building lay inside one of Starfarer’s rolling hills. Stephen Thomas strode into the cool shadow of the main corridor. He added tracks to the other footprints before he realized the old towel at the entrance was for wiping the mud off shoes.
Too late now, he thought. Good god, the place is a mess.
Everybody on board Starfarer took the artificial stupids for granted. They kept things clean, they kept things in order. They were practically invisible. He noticed their absence more than their presence. The chancellor had disabled them. Stephen Thomas wondered when they would be back in service.
We worked on them hard enough, he thought, grimacing at the memory of the artificials’ rotting brains.
A touch to Arachne assured him that the ASes were regrowing their brains as quickly as possible.
Stephen Thomas reached the doorway of his temporary lab. All three of his graduate students, Lehua, Mitch, and Bay, sat around a lab table, staring at a holographic projection.
“Think it’s a mistake?” Lehua asked morosely. She wrapped her fingers in her red-gold hair and twisted and tugged at one long lock. The nervous gesture clashed with her usual composure and youthful elegance.
“Maybe it’s...” Bay’s voice fell apprehensively. “Maybe it’s contaminated.”
“Bullshit,” Stephen Thomas said.
All three students started at his voice and looked at him without speaking.
Unsettled, Stephen Thomas joined them.
Lehua gestured toward the display with her free hand.
On the graph, straight, perfect vertical lines marked several high molecular weights.
Biological molecules never gave precise results. The natural variation of goopy, sloppy organic systems smeared the peaks out.
“There’s no variation,” Bay said.
“It’s perfect.” Mitch wrapped his gangly long legs around each other and wrapped his arms around his knees.
“But they can’t be,” Lehua said. Her hair snarled in her fingers.
“The peaks for the squidmoth molecules are as sharp as the calibration beads,” Bay said. He pointed out the calibration lines.
“Did Arachne run the data through clean-up for you to look at?” Stephen Thomas felt more apprehensive than he allowed himself to sound.
“Of course not,” Lehua said. “That’s the first thing we checked.”
Jesus, Stephen Thomas thought, maybe I screwed up. Maybe I ran the tests on a handful of calibration beads. It was late. I was tired. I was distracted — everyone was distracted. And none of that’s any excuse.
“Okay,” Stephen Thomas said, more cheerfully than he felt. “We know one thing about squidmoth genetics.”
“And what is that?” Professor Thanthavong said from behind him.
Stephen Thomas faced his boss. “It’s neater than ours,” he said.
Oh, fuck, she’s going to tell me to drop the dendritic molecules, he said.
“I don’t think that’s terribly likely,” the professor said. “Where have you been? I left you several messages.”
“I got... involved with something in Arachne.”
He recalled, with embarrassment, that he had blurted out to Professor Thanthavong his fears that anyone who loved him was in danger. She had told him to pull himself together. He could not explain to her that he was late because he had been separating his neural node from those of his partners.
“Genetic molecules must have some potential for change,” she said. “For evolution. Do you agree?”
“Sure,” he said. “But...” The trouble was, he could see where she was going and he could not think of a good reply.
“But this polymer — if the sample contains any alien polymer! — is uniform within each class and from cell to cell, from widely distributed samples. It came from a being that spent a million years living beneath cosmic rays, unprotected by a significant depth of atmosphere.”
“So it’d have to be tough,” Stephen Thomas said.
She looked at him askance. He shut up.
“Let us discuss this in my office,” she said gently.
In silence, feeling contentious, he followed her out of the lab and down the hall.
He respected and admired the Nobel laureate as a colleague above all others. She expected a lot of the people in her department, but she made fair demands. And she seldom pulled rank. He had argued with her any number of times, on technical questions, theoretical ones. Sometimes he won the argument, sometimes she did. She had never cut off a discussion this way.
They reached her office and went inside.
“Please sit down.”
She took the rattan chair facing him, rather than the place of authority behind her desk. The self-conscious choice made Stephen Thomas even more uneasy.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “The dendritic molecules are Nemo’s analog of DNA, or they aren’t. We’ll figure it out. We need some time, we’ve only started.”
“The matter is that I’m concerned about you.”
He froze. He did not want to have this discussion. With anyone. Particularly with Professor Thanthavong.
“There’s nothing to be concerned about.”
She gazed at him in silence.
“I spend as much time here as I can!” he said. “The alien contact department —”
She made a sharp, annoyed sound. “Am I that unreasonable?” she said. “Do I expect you to be in two places at once? To give up your position in alien contact? No.”
It was Stephen Thomas’s turn to fall silent.
“Were you here all night?” she asked gently.
“Yeah.”
“You have a great deal on your mind,” she said. “I see you grieving, holding yourself together so hard I can see fingernail scratches in your skin —”
“I’m all right!” he said.
“I would like you to take some time to yourself.”
“And I’d like to work!”
“I’m sorry, I can’t permit it.”
It’s all I’ve got, he said to himself, and barely kept himself from saying it aloud. It’s all I’ve got left...
“I’m frightened, Stephen Thomas,” she said. “You’re obsessed with the dendritic molecules —”
“You wouldn’t say that if you agreed with me about them!”
She smiled. “Perhaps not. But it doesn’t matter whether I agree with you or not. It doesn’t matter to the molecules or to the biological system what either one of us believes. All that matters is what’s true.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You will be right, or I will be right — or possibly we’ll both be right or wrong.”
“You don’t have to be frightened for me,” he said. “I appreciate it, but I’m okay.”
“I’m not frightened for you,” she said.
“You said —”
“I’m frightened of you.”
“You’re — what?”
“You are young, you think you’re invulnerable. Invulnerable to exhaustion, to change, to grief. You are not. You’re in desperate danger of making a serious mistake.”
Stephen Thomas sat back in the chair, hurt and astonished. One of Professor Thanthavong’s few non-negotiable rules was that of safety. She had spent so much of her career working with dangerous diseases that she would not accept sloppy lab procedure.
She was warning him. If he had already made a mistake that involved contamination, the warning was too late.
“I’m not going to walk in the lab and drop alien cells on somebody’s foot!” he said angrily.
“I can give you some slack,” she said. “All you want — all I can make you take. Now. After something goes wrong — then I cannot give anyone slack.”
“Goddammit, you’re talking as if I’ve already fucked up!” Stephen Thomas said.
If he had contaminated the cell preparation, he was finished as Professor Thanthavong’s colleague.
“I said nothing of the sort.”
“So the alien cell preps look different!” he said desperately. “So what? They’re supposed to look different. They’re alien!”
At the same time, he thought — all the while trying to fight off the thought — My life is falling apart around me, my partners probably never want to speak to me again, and I’m jealous of J.D. and Feral. Why shouldn’t my technical skills turn completely to shit?
He stood up so fast the rattan chair fell over and bounced.
“You dragged me out of the lab in front of my students —”
“I asked you to meet with me —”
“— and you’ve decided I’m too stupid to know my own limits —”
“I tried to avoid embarrassing —”
“— and you’re afraid to let me test my hypothesis —
“Your hypothesis — !”
Professor Thanthavong sat back in her chair.
“— because you’re afraid I’ll be right and you’ll be wrong!”
His outburst ended. He glared at the Nobel laureate.
The silence lengthened.
Thanthavong took a deep breath.
“I am very angry,” she said quietly. “I think it best that we do not speak for a time.”
“Fine with me,” Stephen Thomas said. “I have work to do.”
“You may say you have Alien Contact work to do. But you may not work in a laboratory in my department until we have spoken again.”
Furious, hurt, and humiliated, Stephen Thomas picked up the rattan chair and set it back on its feet. When it creaked in protest at the pressure he put on it, he snatched his hand away.
He strode stiffly out of the office, out of the building.