J.D. headed for the Chi. Zev strode along beside her, a bounce in his step.
“How long are we going to be gone?” he said. “What should I bring? Can I leave my suit in the closet?”
They left the amphitheater’s access tunnel, moving from cool shade to warm sun. Grass sprouted on the washed-out mud. In a warm and protected place a clump of scarlet tulips nodded softly in the breeze.
“J.D.?” Zev said uncertainly.
“Love, will you stay on Starfarer while I go?”
“No! Why?” He stopped. “J.D.!”
She kept going.
He caught up to her. “I’d like to go along.”
“You can join me soon. We might all go to the Farther worlds on Nautilus, together. But I want some time alone.”
He silently, stubbornly, accompanied her up the hill.
“There’s nothing there yet,” she said. “No place to swim, no air —”
“I know that,” he said stiffly.
She stopped trying to cajole him, stopped trying to make up reasons why he would not want to go.
“When you’re with me,” J.D. said, “my attention is always partly on you. No matter what else I’m doing, no matter what else I’m thinking about.”
Zev grinned, pleased but not yet mollified.
“When I go to Nautilus, I won’t have any attention to spare. I’ll be focused on the knowledge surface. I’ll hardly even be in my body. I’ll be...” She shrugged. “Somewhere else.”
“Then you shouldn’t be there all alone.” Zev’s voice was troubled. “What if something happens?”
“Nothing will happen. I was all alone before, and I was farther away.”
“A lot farther.”
On Nautilus, after Nemo died, she had been the only aware being in the Sirius system.
“And I was okay.”
“I can’t change your mind about this, can I?” Zev said.
She held his hand. They climbed the slope, their steps growing longer and more buoyant.
“No.”
“I’ll miss you,” he said, resigned. “Every minute.”
“I’ll miss you, too. I won’t be gone long.” She appreciated his maturity, his respect for what she asked of him.
They passed the border between the rotating cylinder and the starship’s stationary axis. The last trace of gravity vanished. They pushed off into free-fall.
“Do you think wings would work?” Zev said, as they eeled along from handhold to handhold.
“Hmm?” J.D.’s mind was on Nautilus, her attention distracted by a brief narrow touch to the knowledge surface.
“Just small ones.” Drifting down the corridor, he drew his right forefinger down the radial side of his left forearm. “Enough to pull you through the air. A few courses of feathers, or maybe another web...”
“You could build —”
“I didn’t mean build,” he said. “I meant grow.”
They reached the Chi’s dock.
Esther hovered in the hatchway. She turned herself right-side up in relation to J.D. and Zev.
“Ready to go?”
“I’m not waiting for —” J.D. did not know what to call Late any more. Was a nickname, however appropriate, proper for a Representative?
“The other passenger’s here already. Spacesuit and all. Came up in the elevator.”
J.D. laughed. “I said I was in a hurry, but I didn’t even think of the elevator.” She turned. “Zev...”
Esther ducked into the Chi, leaving them alone.
J.D. and Zev kissed, long and slow. J.D. broke away reluctantly.
“Goodbye,” Zev said. “Swim with sharks, J.D.”
J.D. grinned at Zev’s use of the divers’ blessing for good fortune and excitement. She touched off, leaping toward the Chi’s hatch.
o0o
After the meeting, Satoshi started putting together a committee to organize the delegation to the Farther worlds. He invited Europa to join them; the alien human accepted.
It would sure make things easier, Stephen Thomas thought, if the Minoans took us to Largerfarther on their ship.
Neither the transport nor the Chi had that much range. J.D. could take them on Nautilus, but a trip across a star system while living in an expedition tent did not sound like much fun. On the other hand, traveling on the Four Worlds spaceship, with its contingent of Largerfarthings and Smallerfarthings, would be quite an experience.
Crimson pleased Androgeos by inviting him to help prepare for the arrival of the Farther worlds’ archaeologists.
Victoria conferred with Infinity and Jenny Dupre about the stability of Starfarer’s ecosystem with relation to its orbit.
“Stephen Thomas.”
Professor Thanthavong sat beside him on the terrace.
“You were right,” she said.
“What?”
“The dendritic molecules. They’re extremely stable.”
“My preparations were okay.” He retreated from flowering relief, then gave up trying to keep control and laughed with pleasure.
“They were indeed. Mind you, I’m not entirely convinced the molecules carry genetic information —” She held up one hand to stop his protest. “But I am leaning in that direction.”
“I have some ideas about what’s going on,” Stephen Thomas said all in a rush. “What if the squidmoths use stable genetic molecules on purpose?”
She frowned, considering. “That would eliminate their potential for evolution. Would you do that?”
“Sure,” he said. “I can evolve any way I want.” He spread his fingers, stretching the new swimming webs. “And squidmoths have been around a lot longer than we have.”
“Of course,” Thanthavong said. “Of course! I don’t think of them as being technological creatures, but they are. More than we are. They’re just so different.”
“Maybe they don’t want to change,” he said.
“It is possible.”
“Can I come back to the lab now?” he asked. He waited, fighting his nerves, for her to answer. When she hesitated, he defended himself. “I wasn’t nuts to think the dendritic molecules might be genetic —”
“That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“And I didn’t screw up the preparations.”
“I’m worried about you,” she said. “Not squidmoth genetics and not the preparations. You.”
She peered at him closely, narrowing her eyes. Thanthavong was not short-sighted. Stephen Thomas felt like she was trying to see through his skin.
“You are more composed than last time we spoke.”
“Some things... changed,” he said. “It’s complicated.” He made himself go over their last conversation. “I sounded pretty crazy, didn’t I?” he said. “I guess I was. It’s better now.”
“Hmm,” Professor Thanthavong said.
A few terraces above, Stephen Thomas’s graduate students watched the conversation anxiously. Lehua decided it was safe — or decided to take the risk that it was not — and climbed down the grassy steps. Mitch and Bay trailed in the wake of her energy and her long, fine red hair.
A few paces away, Lehua hesitated.
“Come sit,” Professor Thanthavong said.
The students joined them, Lehua crosslegged, intent, Bay lying on his stomach and pillowing his chin on his fists, Mitch sprawling and fidgety, gazing across the amphitheater where Gerald and Fox spoke together, he intensely, she with agitation.
I wonder, Stephen Thomas thought, if Fox knows Gerald’s got no biocontrol. He’d tell her, wouldn’t he? Someone should warn her, but she’d never believe me.
“Stephen Thomas has some thoughts about squidmoths,” Professor Thanthavong said. “About stable genetic molecules.”
“It makes sense,” Stephen Thomas said, forgetting Fox and the acting chancellor. “If the squidmoths decided not to change, it’d explain why the molecule’s so complex. The hypothesis predicts heavy-duty repair enzymes. It predicts that if the molecule does change, it won’t work at all. Intentional stasis.”
“The squidmoths are constructs?” Lehua asked. “Like the Smallernearer?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Stephen Thomas said. “But it’s sure possible. Or they engineered themselves. Decided they liked the way they are. Maybe even changed the nature of their own genes.”
“I wonder how long they’ve been the same?” Mitch said. “Nemo was a million years old.”
“In a few generations, that turns into real time,” Bay said, straight-faced.
Stephen Thomas chuckled. They all burst into laughter.
Lehua jumped up. “Let’s go to the lab —” She stopped, remembering that Stephen Thomas had been banished. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Then she remembered no one was supposed to know he had been banished. “I’ll just go try to pull my foot out of my mouth —”
Stephen Thomas turned toward Professor Thanthavong.
“Let’s all go to the lab.” Thanthavong smiled at him. “Welcome home.”
o0o
The Chi touched the cratered surface of Nautilus. The exhaust spread silver-gray dust. As soon as the Chi powered down, J.D. jumped out of her couch. Beyond the transparent wall of the observer’s circle, a hundred meters across the barren plain, Kolya and Griffith left the expedition tent and loped toward them. J.D. and Esther went to the airlock. Late fluttered behind them, walking on his pincers and the corners of his suit. Nervous about travelling in such a small, primitive craft, he had worn the spacesuit during the trip.
While she was putting on her spacesuit, J.D. thought, I’ve got to find out how to build connectors like Civilization’s. Build, or is it grow? It would be much more convenient if the tent could attach its door to the Chi’s hatch, like Nemo’s webbing did.
Late rippled and slid into the airlock.
“You could let me out while you dress,” he said. “I could be on my way to the boat. I needn’t bother you any more.”
“Could you give me a hand?” Esther asked J.D. “No pun intended.” Her bandaged hands were awkward with the fastenings.
“Sure,” J.D. said.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” J.D. said to Late, ignoring his suggestion. “Back on the Four Worlds ship, when you introduced me to the Representative...”
“That’s long past,” Late said nervously.
“I heard my voice, and I heard your voice. But I didn’t hear his voice.”
“You heard... my voice.”
She waited for more explanation. Late lay like an overlarge rug in the small airlock, his edges lapped up against the walls, fluttering anxiously.
“You heard me,” he said. “I knew what the Representative wanted. He did not need to expend motion.”
“Weird hospitality!” Esther exclaimed.
“Not weird,” Late said with dignity, “to us.”
“Thanks for telling me the truth,” J.D. said.
She fastened Esther’s helmet, then put on her own. Late rumpled against one wall to give J.D. and Esther floor space. When they had wedged into the airlock, its cycle began. Kolya and Griffith waited outside the Chi.
“Are you all right?” Kolya spoke through the suit radios.
“We’re fine, we’re on our way,” J.D. said. Why didn’t he use the link? she wondered, then startled herself by realizing how comfortable she had become with direct communication.
The airlock opened. She stepped onto the ground of her home. Nautilus greeted her. She had expected the knowledge surface to feel the same. Instead, proximity gave her an impression of satisfaction, of welcome.
She fell toward her expanded link, stumbled slightly as she forgot about her body, caught herself, and backed off.
Just a little while longer, she thought. A little while longer and I’ll be alone, I’ll have some peace and quiet.
Late galumphed across the dusty plain toward the Representative’s boat. Esther and Kolya embraced, awkward in their spacesuits. Griffith waited at a distance.
“Thank you for your help, Mr. Griffith,” J.D. said. “Joining us must have been difficult for you. I’m grateful.”
“Yeah,” he said uncomfortably. “Well.” He shrugged, clenched his fingers, relaxed them. “I mean, thanks.”
“Look,” Esther said.
Across the plain, Late dove head-first into the Representative’s space boat. Broken bits of precious stone, the remnants of the Representative’s shattered leg-tips, tumbled out onto Nautilus’s surface. The rear of Late’s suit fluttered and flexed.
“Don’t do that,” J.D. called to him. She loped across the ancient dust. Her curious colleagues followed.
J.D. picked up one of the diamond shards and tossed it into the Representative’s boat.
Late threw it out again. J.D. picked it up. Late reared above her, blocking the boat’s opening.
“The pieces,” he said. “will bounce around and cut me. The edges are very sharp.”
“They’re valuable. The Representative might want them back.”
“He will not,” Late said, “want them back. I promise you. Don’t make me take them with me, please.”
He took the huge diamond. He rotated it, flashing rainbow starlight from its broken edge. “The value,” he said, twisting his forward edge toward Esther. “Of the stones. Would the value approach a fair compensation for the hurt we did to you?”
Kolya grasped her arm before she could reply.
“It would begin to approach,” he said. “But she could not accept it as a complete settlement. She would have to discuss the situation with a lawyer. Her lawyer would have to discuss the situation with... whatever your equivalent of a lawyer is.”
“A lawyer,” Late said, and, at J.D.’s surprised yelp of laughter, added, “We aren’t so different after all, I think.”
“What do you say?” J.D. stretched her link toward Europa, asking the Minoan’s advice. Europa replied with reassurance... and amusement.
“It’s a beginning,” Esther said. “As long as it doesn’t obligate Starfarer to anything.”
“Very well. Late, you may leave the rocks for Esther. In return, I’ll transmit your promise.” She indicated one of the LTMs clinging to her suit. “Esther’s claim against Smallerfarther isn’t settled yet.”
“I agree.” The edges of his spacesuit ruffled as he placed the fist-sized chunk of diamond at Esther’s feet. “I am the new elder of my line, and I regret the injury we caused. Please accept all these stones as a token — only a token — of our restitution.”
“Thank you,” Esther said.
“I must go,” Late said.
With no more ceremony, Late inchwormed into the open boat, flipped the rest of the jewels out of the chamber, and let the boat close around him.
Esther stood, bemused, in the midst of a scatter of precious stones.
Kolya, being practical, pulled a sample bag from the thigh pocket of his spacesuit.
“They’ll be easier to pick up now than after the boat’s exhaust covers them with dust.”
They collected the uncut jewels while the space boat knit its opening. A few spurts of gas, a shower of ice crystals, leaked from it, then it sealed around its developing atmosphere. J.D. imagined Late inside — had he flattened himself to the floor, or was he already metamorphosing into a new and different being, his spines extending to the walls, his body contracting into a ball of brindled fur, eyes appearing — ? And what had happened to the Representative, what did he look like now?
Esther and Kolya and Griffith boarded the Chi; J.D. entered the expedition tent. As soon as everyone was safe, the Smallerfarthing space boat powered up, spurted exhaust, and rose into the sky.
As J.D. took off her space suit, Esther projected her image into the tent.
“We’ll be off and leave you in peace,” she said. “Just give a shout when you want to come home.”
“Thanks,” J.D. said. She grinned. “I want to see the necklace you make with those stones.”
Esther held a chunk of raw diamond against her throat.
“Ugly, huh? But when EarthSpace tells me they’ve fired my ass, I won’t care too much. And if I get arrested, I can hire a lawyer.” She grinned ruefully. “Two lawyers. I’ve never hired a lawyer before, and now I need one in each star system. Is anybody on board a lawyer?”
“I don’t think so,” J.D. said. “Remember? Gerald said no one was qualified to defend Chancellor Blades.”
Victoria, back on Starfarer, joined the conversation. Her image constructed itself like a pointillist painting in the expedition tent. “That was a barrister,” she said. “What Esther needs here is a solicitor.”
“You guys aren’t serious, are you?” Esther said. “I mean, I’m not going to sue the Four Worlds.”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Infinity Mendez said, projecting his image near Victoria’s.
Satoshi joined the conversation. “You could let them sweat about it for a while.”
Esther laughed.
“We’re on our way,” she said. “Bye, J.D. Remember what I said about the starship-flying classes.”
Her image faded. Victoria waved, and disappeared; Satoshi did the same. Infinity’s image turned translucent.
“Infinity,” J.D. said. “How are things — ?”
“Still stable.” His image steadied. “There’s a good cushion of rock foam above the nest now. I rerouted most of the plumbing — left some water for the kid. We should be okay.”
“Thanks.”
He disappeared.
Outside, the Chi lifted off.
J.D. was alone.
She drank some water, used the bathroom, and settled herself comfortably into one of the two air-foam chairs. Like the furniture in her office, it was too soft and too low for her tastes.
I wonder, she thought, if Starfarer could spare one of the silver slugs for a while — No, two of them, a lithoblast and a lithoclast — to build a little rock-foam house and some furniture frames. I’ll have to ask Infinity... he’s been testy, lately, about people borrowing them... Can’t blame him, they’re guarding the chancellor, and the squidmoth, and doing all their regular work, too... Maybe when we go home I could buy a pair of silver slugs from EarthSpace.
When we go home. She was assuming that the cosmic string would soon return to the solar system. She was assuming Starfarer, and Nautilus, would gain complete freedom. She had no proof for the assumptions, yet she believed them.
Everything’s going to be all right, J.D. thought, with wonder. It’s going to be all right. We’ll be able to go home. We’ll be able to take the senators back. Ruth will be all right. We can hand Blades over to EarthSpace, and when it comes out what happened, he’ll come to justice. With whoever sent him. Whoever caused Feral’s death.
J.D. touched the knowledge surface. Its arcs and volumes rose around her like the cliffs and crevasses of an ancient glacier. Victoria’s algorithm had integrated itself into the fabric of Nemo’s ghost mind. The surface selected transition points, pinpointing the most complex kinks and knots of 61 Cygni’s resident cosmic string, solving their equations, seeking destinations farther and farther away.
The pattern of the destinations formed a tear-drop shape. The point aimed toward the center of the Milky Way, as if the knowledge surface sought a deliberate path.
Is it purposeful, J.D. wondered? Or chance, or an artifact of the string? Why would anyone want to go to the center of the Milky Way, where Nautilus could never survive?
Nemo had tried to explain where squidmoths came from: the far side of the galaxy, beyond the center, beyond the concealing clouds of dust and star-stuff.
Is the knowledge surface looking for a way to its home? she wondered. The way we always look first for a way back to Earth?
The surface did not answer her question. The pattern could be a coincidence. Besides, the path as yet traversed only a tiny fraction of the distance to the center of the galaxy. At this rate, J.D. would be long dead, Nautilus passed on to someone else, through several generations, before the starship could trace a route beyond this arm of the Milky Way.
She turned her attention inward, where the core of Nautilus existed as a heavy scent of energy. She found the echoes of Nemo’s tunnels, the vessels of Nemo’s web: too easy to equate them with the blood vessels of a human being. They were different. She found the chamber where Stephen Thomas had watched the attendants struggle and dismember each other in a pool of acid. All that was left now was a crust of crystals, a miasma of sublimating, corrosive oxides, a perception that prickled uncomfortably in her mind.
The chamber where the oxygen-producing creatures grew, where they breathed out gases tinged with hydrocarbons, lay empty and silent.
The air in the tent is clean, J.D. thought, recycled to purity, as flat as the guest water.
She missed the bite of Nemo’s atmosphere.
She found Esther’s reservoir of water ice spreading frozen tendrils through the starship’s body. It contained enough water for a passable small sea. But surface water, without an atmosphere, would boil away into space.
That’s going to be my problem, J.D. thought. Keeping enough air for a habitable environment. What does it take to terraform a starship? How much does it cost?
She could not use Earth’s credit, built up over the centuries by Europa’s efforts. Then both EarthSpace and the United States would have a real claim on Nautilus.
What about my own work? J.D. thought. I do wonder what the Four Worlds would think of my novel.
On a whim, she sent a copy of the novel’s text through her link toward Europa’s planetoid.
J.D. widened her perceptions to include Starfarer, in orbit around Nautilus. She could sense their tenuous bonds of gravity. She expanded her perceptions again to encompass the tiny local constellation of Starfarer, Nautilus, Europa’s starship, the Four Worlds ship. She extended again, taking in the Nearer worlds, once more to include the Farther worlds.
The ship carrying the archaeological party proceeded at a stately pace from Largerfarther toward Starfarer.
J.D. opened her perception as far as she could.
A yellow point marked the position of Earth’s sun. An ordinary star, it was bright because it was so close.
J.D. could see — could perceive — its planets. Pluto was a dark shadow. The Jovian planets looked like gaudy Christmas tree ornaments, decorated with colored stripes and bright rings and baubles. Mars was cold, silent, Earth a riot of green and blue and swirling weather patterns, circled grandly by the Moon. Venus twirled, mysterious beneath its veil of clouds, and Mercury hid at the edge of the brightness of the Sun.
J.D. wondered if she was seeing the solar system, or seeing Nemo’s memories of it.
If only I’d had more time with Nemo, she thought. If only I’d met 61 Cygni’s squidmoth...
But Nemo’s offspring possessed all Nemo’s memories.
Has it calmed down from its tantrum? J.D. thought. If Infinity is right, if it’s an adolescent, it’s probably got its temper back. Maybe it’s even outgrown the rebellion phase.
J.D. tapped into the LTM transmission from the surface of the wild side. The blue-white egg nest lay quiet and still, like a splash of spilled milk. Iridescent veins quivered just beneath the skin of the central bulge.
J.D. extended a tentative greeting.
Instead of backing off or erecting a barrier, the squidmoth larva responded with quiet curiosity.
This is more like it, J.D. thought. More like Nemo...
“I’m sorry I upset you before,” J.D. said.
“That was my previous instar,” the squidmoth said.
“Have you metamorphosed into a juvenile?”
“I have metamorphosed not into a juvenile.”
“Will you talk to me?”
“Tell me what you want to talk about.”
“I was looking at the solar system.” She pointed it out. “I can see the planets — or I can see Nemo’s memories of them. I don’t know which. Can I see so far? Can you see them?”
“I see them as you see them.”
“But do you see them as they are now, or do you see your memories of them? Did Nemo ever visit Earth’s system?”
“I understand the motion of the spheres, so there is no difference between seeing them and remembering them.”
“Sure there is,” J.D. said. “A human being would need a powerful telescope to see the Sun’s planets. Do you?”
“If I wished to see the planets as they are, not as they were, I would travel to the system.”
“I know I’d be seeing them as they were when their light left the system,” she said. “But am I seeing them or seeing your adult parent’s memories?”
“Yes.”
J.D. sighed, frustrated. As an experiment, she turned her attention to another star, one distant and dim. There, too, she detected the reflected light of planets. Her question remained, for Nemo or one of the ancestors whose memories Nemo possessed might have visited that star system as well.
But it was wonderful to look at distant stars, and see the signs of other worlds.
“You will go to your home system to see your planets,” the young squidmoth said.
“No,” she said. “I wish we could, but our solar system’s still empty of cosmic string. Once we go home, we have to stay. We don’t want to leave Civilization.” She wished she knew what had happened after Starfarer fled. Once Starfarer no longer loomed over the Mideast Sweep, had political tensions eased? Or had they tightened, had they broken?
“I’m so worried,” she admitted. “About Earth. About my home.”
The young squidmoth quaked suddenly in J.D.’s mind.
“Home!” it wailed. “Home!”
It flung her away, wrenching loose their connection. The LTM transmission shuddered. The milk-blue splash of the squidmoth nest darkened against the wild side’s skin as its protoplasm rushed to the central bulge. The membrane dried and cracked.
Iridescent veins solidified into cables. The surface thickened and contracted, forcing the protoplasm into the crater, toward the wild side’s interior. Hydrostatic pressure surged smashing stone.
J.D. cried out.
In pure silence, huge cracks opened. Chunks of moon rock shattered. Rock-foam matrix twisted and deformed. The spin flung shards against the inspection web. The bounced from the cables and vanished into space.
“Don’t!” J.D. shouted. “Don’t, you’ll destroy Starfarer, you’ll destroy yourself!”
“Home!” the squidmoth wailed. “I want to go home!”
Nemo had reproduced in the Sirius system, now empty of cosmic string. Starfarer could enter transition and return the squidmoth to Sirius.
But it could never leave, and its ecosystem would not survive.
“I’m sorry!” J.D. said. “We didn’t mean to isolate your siblings! We can’t take you home, Starfarer would die. Please, don’t —”
The larval squidmoth wrenched itself in its crater. Broken stone cascaded toward the campus cylinder.
J.D. made a precipitous decision.
“Will you trade your place for a home on Nautilus?”
“No!” Europa flared into sudden, intense presence. “If you don’t want the ship, give it to me — to us — to the Four Worlds!”
“You want me to live — in my parent’s shell!” A wave of agitation and disgust poured from the squidmoth to J.D.’s link. “You want me to live in a grave!”
“You’ll live in a grave anyway, if you breach the cylinder!”
“I don’t care about your grave.”
The squidmoth nest passed into darkness. Cut off from the light, the immature being clenched violently, then fell quiet.
Messages poured through Arachne and out to J.D., from J.D. to Arachne and Starfarer.
“Victoria! Are you all right? Infinity! Where are you?” She was afraid he might be in the wild side, directly in danger.
“I’m here,” Victoria said, “I’m right in my office, I’m all right — but what about you? What happened?”
“I’m with Esther,” Infinity said from his house. “The barrier’s holding so far. Can you get that guy to hold still?”
“I’m afraid — I’m afraid it’s reacting to something I said.”
Gerald projected his image into her tent. “Perhaps you’d best stop provoking it!” he said. “This happens each time you approach the creature!”
“You’re right,” J.D. said, chagrined. “I thought I’d made peace —”
Avvaiyar Prakesh projected her image from the astronomy department.
“Something else has happened,” she said, her expression grim. “Something as bad. Worse.”
“What?”
J.D. extended herself through the knowledge surface. Before Avvaiyar spoke again, she knew what had happened.
“Oh, no,” J.D. whispered.
“The string,” Avvaiyar said. “The cosmic string is receding from 61 Cygni.”
J.D.’s link fell silent. Gerald remained, his image reflecting his shock.
J.D. struggled with numb disbelief.
Quickercatcher projected his image into her tent. He cuddled with the rest of the quartet in the VIP suite of the U.S. Embassy, startled awake from his midday sleep.
“Why is this happening?” J.D. cried.
“I don’t know,” Quickercatcher said. Longestlooker’s sleek head emerged from the tangle of blankets and pillows.
The Largerfarthing scrambled out of the resting nest. Fasterdigger and Sharphearer stretched languorously. Fasterdigger arched his neck and whispered to Ruth Orazio, who snuggled against his side. As she woke, she pushed her hair back from her face. The bit of red fluff in her hair brushed her cheek.
“The question may be,” Longestlooker said, “why it didn’t happen before.”
Maybe she’s right, J.D. thought. Maybe we just outpaced the reaction of the string. And now... it’s caught up with us.
Longestlooker reared on her hind legs and scanned the room.
“What will you do?” she asked, moving her gaze from J.D., to Gerald, to Ruth. She dropped to all fours again.
“I don’t know.” J.D.’s voice was uneven with confusion and despair. Zev projected a tendril of his presence to her, sharing her distress, offering comfort.
“J.D.,” Gerald said gently. “Victoria. Please believe I feel no satisfaction in saying this...”
Maybe he truly did not, but this vindicated him. He had been right all along. If they had turned back as soon as they reached Tau Ceti, as soon as the alien museum self-destructed, no one would have died and the cosmic string would not have cut itself off from any system. J.D. would never have met Nemo, but Nemo’s offspring would all be free, instead of trapped in the Sirius system, lost in transition, or ensnared in a psychotic episode on an alien starship.
“We have no choice, now,” Gerald said. “For our own good, for the Four Worlds, for Civilization... we must go home.”
“There must be something else we can do — some other choice — !” J.D. appealed to Quickercatcher. “Tell us the truth, tell us the truth, Civilization must know how to control the string, tell us what we have to do!”
“I can’t,” Quickercatcher said, raising his chin, exposing his throat with regret. “I tell you as I would tell my siblings, no one knows how to change what’s happening.”
Infinity appeared again, looking grim.
“J.D., we’re in bad trouble on the wild side.”
J.D. opened her link completely — the physical world vanished — and gathered all the information she could grasp straight into her mind. Arachne’s neural traffic. The young squidmoth’s angry mutterings. Avvaiyar’s report on the string. The cracks in the wild side’s skin hurt like wounds in her own body.
Transmissions — perceptible but not comprehensible — flashed among the Four Worlds spaceships, the Four Worlds themselves.
J.D. called to Orchestra, to the Smallernearer, but neither had any comfort. Orchestra offered sympathy, and a calm disinterest in the workings of the string. The Smallernearer feared the loss of interstellar communication, the loss of contact with the distant sibling it had created.
The Smallerfarthings and the Largerfarthings were part of Civilization. When they imagined being cut off from it, they fell toward panic. Even Late, metamorphosing, climbed blearily above his fugue to react to the crisis.
“Can you help?” J.D. asked. “Don’t your people know these secrets?”
“We know what the Largerfarthings know,” he replied.
“That’s an ambiguous reply, at best,” J.D. said. “I’d like to talk to the eldest.”
“That’s impossible!”
Even Longestlooker reacted with shock to that proposal.
“We aren’t lying to you, J.D.,” she said. “I wish you’d believe that.”
“You won’t believe me when I tell you the truth!” J.D. said. “Maybe your superiors know something you don’t. Maybe Late’s superior knows. I want to talk to him — direct!”
“That’s impossible,” Late said again.
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“We do not know our achievements,” Late said. “He’s gone.”
“Gone? Dead?”
“Gone into rapture, with the eldest.”
J.D. opened her eyes. Instead of clearing, her vision blurred. Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face. She wiped them away on her sleeve.
“Victoria,” J.D. whispered.
Victoria touched J.D.’s link. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas joined the conversation.
“If we stay, we’ll be stranded, and the Four Worlds with us,” Victoria said. “We can risk another system. We’d be putting off the inevitable, but at least we’d be putting it off.”
“And maybe destroying our ecosystem,” Infinity said.
Satoshi spoke grimly. “Starfarer depends on both cylinders. If the wild side disintegrates, it’ll tear up the sail. The spin on this side will go wonky. We’ll have to evacuate. Unless we’re back home, we haven’t got anyplace to evacuate to.”
“How can you do this to us?” J.D. said to the immature squidmoth. “Your parent was my friend.”
The being responded with an incoherent shriek and another shudder that quaked the wild side.
“J.D. — !” Infinity protested.
She drew back, rejected and hurt.
Nemo’s gone, she said to herself. If you keep denying that, you’re going to destroy your other friends.
“We have to go home,” Victoria said.
“I know,” J.D. replied softly.
It was simple; it was obvious. Gerald was right. They had no choice.
“You could stay,” Stephen Thomas said.
“What?”
“On Nautilus. You could stay. You could be part of Civilization. Like Europa and Andro.”
“No!” Zev said, distressed. “Stay here all by herself?”
J.D. hesitated. Nautilus gave her freedom. If the string was reacting to Starfarer itself, she could safely stay behind.
If she wanted this freedom, she could go anywhere she wanted, except back to Earth. Except home.
“I...” She was tired of saying, I don’t know.
“J.D.?” Zev said, quiet and intense.
“I have to think for a while, Zev,” she said. “I love you.”
J.D. drew away from Zev, as gently but as quickly as she could, a whirlpool of grief annihilating her elation. Rudely, desperately, she cut off everyone who was trying to talk to her. Gerald’s image disappeared, and Infinity’s, and the colorful group of Largerfarthings.
What difference does it make what I think, or what I want? J.D. thought. It doesn’t matter anymore, we have no choice.
She could not understand how everything that had been going so well had reversed so suddenly and so completely,
She burst into tears. All alone, she cried.
o0o
Chandra was a little drunk. She sipped at a crystal snifter, then took a deep swallow, drinking far too quickly for good brandy. She would have a hell of a hangover in the morning. At least being drunk helped her forget the surge of pleasure and joy she had felt when Sharphearer touched her. She had nearly drowned in it, nearly surrendered to it.
She never surrendered to pleasure. The price was too high. There was always a price, always hidden, always too high.
“I’ll drink me a drunk worth recording,” she said to her empty living room. “There’s nothing else worth my time on this damned rock.” Starfarer was boring. They would not let her join the alien contact department. They let Zev, and he was not even a member of the expedition. “Maybe I should sleep with somebody in alien contact,” she muttered. “Maybe that would work.”
Arachne signaled her and displayed an image a handsbreadth above the thick wool carpet. The image whirled around her without moving, she was that drunk. Chandra almost sent it away. Arachne was supposed to signal to her if anything anomalous happened, but so far the computer had sent her nothing but weird tangled twists of its mind. Nothing she could record or use.
“Stupid damned computer.” She looked at the image to prove it was useless.
The wild side spun from shadow into the bright light of 61 Cygni. The immature squidmoth soaked in the brightness, moved in response to it, clenched and shuddered. The wild side quaked under the being’s convulsions.
Chandra brought the violent image closer, enlarged it, wrapped it around herself. Sober — feeling sober — she pushed through the woven light and out the carved wooden door, leaving it open behind her.
o0o
A bright spot burned in the back of J.D.’s mind with the pressure of her waiting messages. She let them form, voices and moving images floating around her: her colleagues in alien contact, Zev more and more agitated as her silence lengthened, the quartet bidding Crimson farewell, accepting her gift of a block of stone full of alien sculptures.
A new message arrived: Jenny Dupre, floating in the transparent zero-g chamber of the sailhouse. J.D. accepted it in real-time.
Easier to talk to an acquaintance, just now, she thought. Easier than talking to a friend. Or a lover.
She thought better of her decision as soon as Jenny spoke.
“We have a bad problem,” Jenny said.
“Just one?” J.D.’s voice was high and tense.
The schematic told the story. The string receded fast. Too fast for Starfarer’s sail to take the starship to it.
“They want us gone very badly,” Jenny said.
Or, J.D. thought, someone wants us stuck here.
“You’re going to have to be careful,” Jenny said. She traced a line across the schematic, showing J.D. where the stresses on the starship would be least.
She assumed J.D. would use Nautilus, and its gravity, to tow Starfarer into transition.
It’s a fair assumption, J.D. thought. What else would I do, what else could I do? Another decision taken out of my hands.
She urged Nautilus toward the transition point, changing the starship’s path gradually so gravity would pull Starfarer with it. So Nautilus would not rip itself away to freedom.
o0o
The Nearer worlds fell behind.
Europa took Victoria’s hand. “Goodbye,” she said. “I am so sorry.” She pressed her smooth cheek to Victoria’s, held her for a moment, then drew away. Her motion, in the zero-g docking room, made them drift apart. “Perhaps —”
“Don’t — !”
“Don’t say we’ll see you again,” Stephen Thomas said. “We all know that isn’t going to happen.” He stretched out his hand to Victoria; she grasped it and brought herself to a stop.
“Very well,” Europa said.
“Come home with us,” Victoria said suddenly. “Come back to Earth.”
“That’s absurd,” Androgeos said, holding the slab of alien sculptures to his chest. The plaster that protected it made dull white smears on his silk-smooth skin.
“I’ve thought of it,” Europa said. “It tempts me.”
“Europa!” Andro said.
“My dear,” she said, “you were so young when we left. You don’t remember what it’s like to be with your own kind. It’s all right, I envy you your ease with our hosts. But... I don’t entirely share it.”
“Will they... let you keep your home now?”
“Oh yes,” Europa said sadly. “They are very kind to their clients. But I had hoped... to become a full citizen.”
“It almost happened,” Victoria said. “Next time, we’ll know more. We’ll be accepted.”
“In a hundred years,” Stephen Thomas said.
“We’d better go,” Androgeos said.
“You won’t come with us, eh?” Victoria said to Europa.
“No. I have my place here, my job. I’ve done well for my home world in the past, I’ll do well in the future.” She smiled slightly. “I may even modify my opinion of symphonic music.”
“We could do even better —” Andro said.
“— with my algorithm. I know. It’s too bad, Andro, but that’s something Civilization is going to have to come and get.”
“You are admirably consistent,” he said. He glanced impatiently around. “Where’s Quickercatcher, where’s the quartet? We must leave soon.” His eyes went out of focus for a moment as he spoke through his link to the Largerfarthings.
“And where are my meerkats?” Europa said.
Infinity Mendez’s image appeared.
“They’re forming a commune in my closet,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll let you move the new kits.”
“You will have to take care of them for me,” Europa said.
Infinity let his image fade out.
“Here we come, we’re coming!” Quickercatcher’s musical voice trilled from the hall. He and his siblings burst into the waiting room, a tangle of legs, arms, tails, colorful fur. Fasterdigger floated with his arms stretched straight up, holding Ruth Orazio’s hands, drawing her through free-fall with him.
“We must go,” Europa said.
“We have decided,” Longestlooker said, “to stay.”
“Stay?” Androgeos said, baffled.
“On Starfarer,” Longestlooker said. “With the human people,” Quickercatcher said.
“No!” Androgeos released the block of fossils. It drifted and tumbled as he kicked off from the wall and sailed toward the quartet. “No, if you go, I’ll never see you again, you’ll die in exile!”
Stephen Thomas caught the block and wrestled with its inertia, bringing the stone and plaster block to a halt before it did any damage.
Andro bumped into Sharphearer, grasped her around the neck, pushed her and her siblings into a spin. The quartet snuffled with amusement and fondness.
“Hey, be careful!” Ruth Orazio released Fasterdigger’s hands and drifted toward the wall, out of Andro’s way.
“Androgeos, sweet friend, you and Europa wish to stay in Civilization, as Earth’s representatives,” Sharphearer said.
“And that is admirable,” Longestlooker said.
“But someone — someone from Civilization — must represent us to Earth,” Quickercatcher said.
Androgeos buried his face against Sharphearer’s fur. The Largerfarthing stroked his glossy hair and gently nuzzled his neck.
“It will be all right,” Sharphearer said. “You’ll be all right.”
“Of course I’ll be all right!” Andro said angrily. He drew back from Sharphearer, his face wet with tears, a few strands of Sharphearer’s fur stuck to his cheeks. “It’s you I’m worried about. You! It’s too dangerous! The squidmoth spawn is going to destroy the whole place!”
“Even a squidmoth,” Longestlooker said, “wouldn’t be so foolish as to destroy its own habitat.”
“What will you eat?” Androgeos said. “And —”
“Cotton candy,” Fasterdigger said, and trilled.
Androgeos glared at him, resenting the joke. “— Where will you sleep, who will you talk to?”
“Shh, shh,” Sharphearer said.
“May we bring our resting nest to your dock?” Longestlooker asked Victoria. “It will sustain us, until we change to accommodate your food.”
“May we go with you?” Quickercatcher asked. “We are willing — but you must welcome us.”
“I welcome you,” Victoria said, overwhelmed. “Of course I welcome you!”
All around, the images of other people formed, echoing Victoria’s welcome.
“I think I can promise,” Ruth said, “that you’ll be welcomed back on Earth, too. Welcomed with gratitude.”
o0o
The gravity of Nautilus held Starfarer in a stately array that approached the cosmic string. J.D. extended herself through the knowledge surface, trying to observe from such a distance that the anomalies and dangers disappeared. She failed. She was constantly aware of the frantic cries and struggles of the young squidmoth. It broke her heart. She should be able to calm it, but she knew she would only agitate it again.
The silver slugs congregated above it, filling in the cracks of its thrashing. At Infinity Mendez’ instruction, they also cut around the squidmoth nest. They left it attached to a lozenge of stone, as if isolating a tumor. As a last resort, Infinity would break the egg nest free and let it tumble into space.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said to J.D. “I don’t want to hurt the dumb kid. And we could end up with just as much damage. But it might turn out to be our only hope.”
“How did this happen?” J.D. said. “Our choices were unlimited... and now we don’t have any left.”
“I don’t know,” Infinity said sadly. “J.D.... can you accelerate faster?”
She touched the knowledge surface. Nautilus already was accelerating toward a knot of cosmic string — toward the place in space where its motion, and Starfarer’s, intersected. Then J.D. would have to do some careful and stressful maneuvering to suit Victoria’s algorithm.
“I can,” she said. “A little more.” It surprised her to discover that Nautilus did have limits. “But...” She showed him the schematic, the vectors, the numbers, for the maneuvers they would have to make at transition point.
“No,” he said. “Forget it. That’s too much stress.”
o0o
Infinity sat in his garden, deep in a communications fugue. Esther paced on the porch, feeling useless. Whenever she went inside, Europa’s meerkats chittered at her, warning her away from the naked, squirming kits.
She was tempted to take the ferry over to the wild side and try to talk some sense into the squidmoth, but if J.D. could not make it listen, how could she? Besides, Infinity had asked everyone to stay on campus. The wild side was too dangerous.
She looked at her hands. The bandage compound continued to work the diamond fibers out of her palms. One bit glittered at the surface of the organic bandage. She picked the shard out, put the diamond in a little hinged box, and slipped the box back into her pocket.
She could move her hands, even clench her fists, without feeling the fibers jab into her flesh.
I guess I’ll be of some use, she thought, if we have to evacuate, if we all have to cram on board the transport and the Chi — and the Largerfarthings’ resting nest? — to survive. But if that happens in transition, and we separate from Starfarer... we’ll never get out.
o0o
Chandra made her way across the inspection web, stepping gingerly on the lines. She moved from one support strut to the next, pausing at each to recover from dizziness. She held tight to her lifeline, sliding it along its overhead track.
Near the squidmoth, she spotted all the LTMs. They focused closely on the egg nest. She stayed out of view. No one cared if she got any good stuff out of this stupid expedition. If they thought she was in danger — as if she had not put herself in danger a hundred times before, so they could have their cheap safe thrills — they would probably come out and get her.
She needed the danger; she needed to wipe away the temptation to return to the Largerfarthings and fling herself into their midst.
The web shuddered beneath her feet. All her nerves throbbing, she clenched her hands around the web supports and opened herself to the quake, to the terror.
o0o
Victoria wondered if she and Stephen Thomas should leave, to give the Minoans and the quartet privacy for their goodbyes. Only a few moments remained, or the alien humans would be stranded.
Androgeos embraced each member of the quartet. They trilled and nuzzled him. As Europa hugged Longestlooker and stroked her deep black fur, Andro broke away from Sharphearer, bolted for the hatch, and disappeared.
He did not even stop for the fossils.
Stephen Thomas watched him go, shrugged, grinned, and took the fossil block through the hatchway and into the boat’s tunnel.
“Can’t let Crimson lose her exhibition,” he said.
As Stephen Thomas vanished, Gerald arrived.
“Europa...” Gerald said.
“I can’t stay any longer,” Europa said.
“But you will work for our reinstatement,” Gerald said.
“I’ve been working on Earth’s behalf for four millennia!” Europa cried. “That’s a hard habit to break, Gerald, even if I wished to. But I swear to you, there isn’t any person, any establishment, with the ability to judge Earth’s case.”
“Tell them,” Gerald said, “tell everyone, about the algorithm. And remind them that the longer we work on it — the better it becomes — the more power we’ll have when we’re finally let out of exile.”
Europa narrowed her eyes, startled by his vehemence.
“Don’t use my work to threaten Civilization!” Victoria said, equally shocked.
“There’s no threat, only observation. Your algorithm means wealth and power to Earth, as soon as we can use it freely. When we return, we’ll have considerable effect on the structure of Civilization.”
Distressed, Europa pushed off toward her boat. Victoria touched her briefly as she floated by.
“I wish...” she said.
“Yes,” Europa said, as she disappeared. “I wish, too.”
Stephen Thomas returned from stowing the fossils. The hatch closed.
“That was inexcusable,” Victoria said to Gerald. “Now they’ll be certain we’re violent barbarians!”
“I made no threat,” Gerald said again, as calm as a well-fed shark.
The Largerfarthings huddled together. Longestlooker opened her mouth and closed her jaws with a sharp snap. Sharphearer ducked her chin, and raised it again thoughtfully.
Are they having second thoughts? Victoria wondered. I’m having some second thoughts of my own.
“Look,” Stephen Thomas said.
Arachne created a puddle of light in the center of the room. Europa’s boat fell away from Starfarer’s axis and accelerated toward the miniature world of her starship.
The Four Worlds ship emitted a space boat, larger, more convoluted, more mechanical, than the boat of the Representative.
“That is ours,” Longestlooker said.
“Our support while we visit you,” said Quickercatcher.
They both sounded quite calm.
Victoria gave Stephen Thomas a grateful glance. He had defused the tension, without even knowing its source.
The Largerfarthings’ boat scudded to the axis of Starfarer, entered a dock, and fastened its umbilical tunnel to the hatch.
“You’re welcome to stay in the embassy as long as you like,” Ruth Orazio said to the quartet. “I enjoy having you as my guests.”
Fasterdigger clasped her hand gently. “We enjoy being your guests.”
Starfarer plunged toward transition.
o0o
Are we going to make it? J.D. wondered. The cosmic string was only a few minutes away, but it was accelerating. Nautilus still closed in on it, but even Nautilus had limits, and Starfarer had limits to its strength.
The young squidmoth cried incoherently in J.D.’s mind. She gasped, huddled deeper into the soft chair, and shivered.
Zev projected his image into the tent.
“I want to be with you,” he said. “This way, if not for real. Don’t sent me away, J.D., please, not again.”
“I won’t,” she said. “I’m sorry if I hurt you, love. I wish I’d let you stay.”
He grinned. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said, ‘Swim with sharks.’”
J.D. laughed.
“Can I help?” he asked.
“You are. Just by being here.”
He moved closer. J.D. imagined that the warmth of his body emanated from the cool image at her side.
o0o
Gerald had gone — probably to tell Chancellor Blades everything that had happened, Victoria thought angrily. Not that Blades could do anything about it. Still...
The quartet took Ruth Orazio into their resting nest to show her around. Victoria and Stephen Thomas remained alone in quiet zero g.
They drifted closer, touched, embraced.
“You’ve got a right to be pissed off,” Stephen Thomas said when she told him what had happened.
“He’s got a bloody nerve,” she said.
“But we knew that already,” Stephen Thomas said. “Eh?”
Victoria laughed, shakily.
“Hey.” Stephen Thomas hugged her, opened his hand, stroked his webbed fingers across her short curly hair. “Longestlooker’s right. Everything’s going to be okay.”
She held him, comforted by the familiarity of his body. Despite her distress, his changes tantalized her.
“I wish I could do something,” she said. “I feel so damned helpless.”
o0o
In the sailhouse, Satoshi felt less helpless but more frustrated. He had spent the last hours working with Jenny Dupre. They struggled futilely with some arrangement of sail and starship that would keep the young squidmoth shaded and lethargic.
Every possibility they projected put far too much tension on the starship’s abused structure.
“It’s useless,” Jenny said to Satoshi.
They had no more time. Transition approached. The sail had to be furled before Starfarer reached the cosmic string.
Deep in a communications fugue, Jenny stretched herself far out into the sail lines and contracted them, as easily as she would draw her hands to her chest.
The sail shimmered, folded, spiraled into a slender silver rope.
Satoshi detached himself from Arachne and followed Jenny out of the fugue.
“We might as well have taken a sail patch to the wild side,” she said in disgust, “and covered the squidmoth over like a blanket.”
“Hmm,” Satoshi said thoughtfully. “Not over, under.”
“Ah. I’ve never been on the outside of the cylinder, I always forget that the stone isn’t the ground. It’s the sky.”
“Everybody forgets, when they haven’t been out for a while.” Satoshi knit his eyebrows, imagining the mechanics of her suggestion. “Your idea could have worked, if the kid weren’t throwing rocks.”
Each time the young squidmoth wrenched itself in its crater, more chunks of Starfarer’s skin exploded downward, ricocheting from the inspection web, flying off into space or toward the campus cylinder.
What’s going to happen, Satoshi thought, if it starts throwing bigger pieces?
o0o
J.D. gazed fondly at Zev’s image as Nautilus plunged toward transition point. The gravity of Nautilus drew Starfarer along.
She was tempted to stay behind. She faced the reasons against it: few supplies, no assurance that Europa would help her if she remained. No assurance that the Four Worlds would keep their connection to the cosmic string — and if they did not, she would feel responsible.
If she stayed, she would be cut off from her friends until and unless the cosmic string returned to Earth, or until the isolation defeated her and she joined Starfarer in its exile.
And the reasons for returning: if Nautilus accompanied Starfarer, her starship would be one more thing of value sequestered in the solar system.
If someone in Civilization does have control over the string, J.D. thought, would this be enough to make them rescind our exile? Nautilus, and Victoria’s algorithm, and the lure of the fossils they think are so old?
If I go home, she thought, I’ll be stranded. In an empty star system, Nautilus is like a racehorse attached to a farm wagon.
She had no illusions that EarthSpace would provision her or help her terraform Nautilus, unless she ceded them her rights.
What difference does it make? she said to herself. I’ll probably be dead before the string returns. In a hundred years, nothing will matter to me anymore.
It seemed to J.D. that the drawbacks and the advantages — too many of one, too few of the other — of either course balanced each other out. The only unbalanced factor in the equation was Zev.
She could lead Starfarer to the transition point, overshoot the point with Nautilus, and leave Starfarer in position to return home.
But she could not have the perfect freedom of Nautilus, and Zev as well.
o0o
Crimson poked through the gravel on the riverbank, upstream from the Fighters’ fossil site.
She was glad the quartet had decided to stay. She thought at least one of their reasons was her fossils, her performance. She liked digging with the Largerfarthings, and she wished she had been able to go on the real alien excavation.
“Some other century, maybe,” she said aloud.
Arachne’s observations of the young squidmoth whispered in the back of her mind. She ignored them, refusing to spend the next few hours in fruitless worry.
A pale, jagged, anomalous shard of rock stood out stark against the dark rounded pebbles. Crimson pounced on it, grabbed it, and shouted with pleasure.
A strangely-articulated appendage lay perfectly preserved in the stone.
Once she had found the first bit of sandstone, the rest visually jumped out at her. This was the ruin of her second fossil bed, the site that had been wrecked in the flood. She thought of this site as the final resting place of the other ones, the creatures she had created by de-evolving Nemo.
She found the remains of the slab, tumbled up against the cliff, out of context, its provenance damaged, but the fossils nearly complete.
She wondered what Quickercatcher would say when he saw this dig.
o0o
A tangle glowed in J.D.’s mind, traced out by the knowledge surface and Victoria’s algorithm.
The algorithm filled a chasm in the knowledge surface with its bright sharp peaks and spirals, blending its edges in multiple dimensions. It pointed the way home.
Starfarer dragged behind her, tethered to Nautilus by the tenuous bonds of gravity. The young squidmoth had fallen quiet, gathering itself for another tantrum. The lithoblasts struggled to repair the damage it had done; the lithoclasts ate away beneath its nest, preparing to cut it free.
But if Nemo’s offspring were cast loose in transition, it would die.
If it was not cast loose, Starfarer might be lost.
Europa’s planetoid fell behind, spinning slowly.
“Stay, J.D.,” Europa said through her link. “You can —”
The transition point blossomed before J.D. She opened her eyes. She pulled away from the knowledge surface just long enough to feel the stiffness of her body, long enough to see Zev, gazing at her, wondering, waiting.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Nautilus surrounded her again, and together they plunged through space.
She still had time to change her course, to pass around the eye of transition.
o0o
Victoria and Stephen Thomas floated through the transparent tunnel leading to the sailhouse.
Victoria had been anxious to view transition as intimately as she could. But she was distracted, worried. Gerald Hemminge’s words weighed on her mind. She hated to think that their farewell to Civilization was a threat.
Stephen Thomas squeezed her hand. Her fingertips rested against the warm silk of his swimming webs. They entered the sailhouse, where Satoshi and Jenny drifted among the stars.
“There’s nothing more to do,” Satoshi said. “Only wait, and hope.”
“There’s one thing...” Victoria said.
o0o
“Goodbye, Europa,” J.D. said. “Goodbye, Androgeos. Take care of Alzena. I’m...”
She let her message trail off. Her eyes stung and she was tired of apologizing.
Nautilus brushed through the knot of cosmic string and plunged out of existence.
All J.D.’s perceptions of the Four Worlds vanished, cut off by the boundary between normal space and transition.
The knowledge surface resonated. J.D. was all alone, more alone than she had ever been before. She listened, she watched.
The buzz and hum of energy echoed in her ears. Energy and gravity sparked and cried and spun.
Other starships pass, she said to herself. Other ships from Civilization, coming from other destinations. Will I see them?
o0o
Victoria finished explaining.
Stephen Thomas laughed. “Gerald will have a heart attack.”
Victoria protested. “This is serious!”
“Sure it is. Gerald will still have a heart attack.”
“That shouldn’t affect my decision.” Then she giggled. “And it won’t. Not much, anyway.”
“It’s right,” Satoshi said.
“It is,” Stephen Thomas said.
Victoria let her eyelids flutter, sending a message through Arachne toward J.D.
J.D. did not respond.
“Look,” Satoshi said.
A great gentle glow of rainbow light washed over them: the transition spectrum.
Nautilus had vanished.
Victoria caught her breath. It scared her to think of J.D. all alone in a place that Victoria could not fully explain or describe.
“That’s us, in a few more minutes,” Jenny said. “If you’re going to make a decision, you’re going to have to make it soon.”
“What do you think?” Victoria asked. She wanted the opinion of someone outside her family.
“I agree,” Jenny said. “I agree with Satoshi and Stephen Thomas. Otherwise your work will end up with people like Blades, like the people who tried to kill us, who killed Feral.”
Victoria made her decision. She had already made it, but she was glad to have support and confirmation.
She touched Arachne. Opening Arachne to the Four Worlds, Victoria released her transition algorithm to Europa and Androgeos, to the Farther worlds and the Nearer ones, to Civilization.
“No!” Gerald shouted, his disembodied voice echoing through Arachne’s transmissions.
Victoria winced. At the same time, joy rushed toward her from Quickercatcher and his siblings. They dove, entranced, into the complexity of Arachne.
“How could you?” Gerald cried. “All your work, gone! You’re a traitor to Earth, a traitor to your own kind!”
Europa’s voice whispered beneath Gerald’s anger.
“Thank you, Victoria,” she said softly. “Oh, my dear, thank you.”
Victoria had no time to answer.
Starfarer plunged into transition.
At the moment of change, the young squidmoth erupted into a frenzy.
o0o
Rock pelted Chandra. A chunk ripped away, carrying her lifeline attachment. The lifeline dropped past her feet and hung beneath her, useless. Chandra clung tight to the web supports. If she fell, she would be flung out into transition forever and no one would ever find her.
Her enhanced nerves throbbed and pulsed; blood engorged the veins that nourished them. She wished she could take off her spacesuit and expose herself to transition raw, naked.
More stones pelted her, clanking and bouncing from her helmet and her suit.
Above her, the young squidmoth thrashed and groaned, transmitting exultation and pain. The milk-white cover of its nest, dried in a pattern like frost on a window, cracked and flaked and fell away. Chips of glass and shards of stone showered down. The broken crust revealed a ropy, leathery brown hide, twisting, pulsing, nothing at all like Nemo’s delicate iridescent scales.
Beyond the edge of the egg nest, a silver slug pressed itself down from a deep crack in the skin. Chandra expected it to spew rock foam into the crack to fill and stabilize it. Instead, it pressed its snout into the end of the crack, spewed thick solvent onto the broken rock, and slurped up the remains before they boiled away into the vacuum. The crack widened.
The slug was not a smooth-coated silver lithoblast, but a silver-moiré lithoclast.
Chandra watched, enchanted by terror.
The lithoclast was cutting the squidmoth loose.
And Chandra along with it.
o0o
“J.D. is going to kill me,” Infinity said, “if I send Nemo’s kid off into transition.
“If you don’t,” Esther said grimly, “Starfarer will come out of transition in pieces.”
“Yeah.” He tried to see better what was going on, but several of the LTMs had been knocked loose and lost. He had only an incomplete picture of the squidmoth nest.
Overcoming the lithoclasts’s resistance, Infinity urged the silver slugs to cut Starfarer’s skin faster than the lithoblasts could repair it.
o0o
Starfarer appeared in transition, chasing Nautilus through the strange multi-dimensional space. J.D. observed it through the knowledge surface, but could not reach Starfarer directly through her link to Arachne.
She brought herself closer, anxious about her friends. The starship was whole, its cylinders spinning evenly.
The squidmoth nest rotated into view.
It had created a crater worse, more damaging, than the crash of the nuclear missile. Silver slugs ringed it, eating at the stone, undercutting the nest, struggling to eject the squidmoth youth from the wild side.
“Oh, no,” J.D. whispered. “Oh, no, please...”
But Starfarer had no choice.
The young squidmoth struggled in its nest, flinging itself back and forth in a panic. The egg nest had peeled away, revealing the being itself. Its ropy skin clenched and spasmed. A long and multiply-articulated appendage stretched down from its center,
All Nemo’s incarnations, from juvenile through chrysalis to winged adult, had been beautiful. The offspring, to J.D.’s eyes, was ugly. As it spun out of sight, she tried to make herself see it as beautiful, but she could not.
As it spun out of view, she noticed the spacesuited figure standing beneath it.
o0o
Stephen Thomas floated in the sailhouse, his body as relaxed as if he had been in the sea. Victoria and Satoshi and Jenny Dupre drifted nearby.
While they were distracted by transition, he let himself settle into Arachne. He had tried to persuade himself that his partners were safe, that the computer could not be hunting them.
But he was frightened by their vulnerability, terrified by the danger.
He opened himself to Arachne.
o0o
Chandra stretched herself upward, trying to reach the squidmoth. Its leg, its antenna, whatever it was, flailed wildly. She ducked. It knocked against her, scraping the fabric of her suit, leaving a deep scuff.
She flattened herself against one of the web supports, holding tight. drawing in every sensation, savoring the terror.
o0o
“Infinity, look!” Esther said, incredulous.
A person stood beneath the writhing alien being as it humped its back and struggled in its crater. Another articulated limb unfolded from the convolutions of the body, caught itself into a tense arch, and whipped against the inspection web. The cable snapped. The thick wire sprang apart, coiling and twisting.
“Get out of there!” Infinity shouted, out loud and into Arachne. “Who the hell is it?”
“It’s Chandra, of course,” Esther said. “Who else would it be?”
“What’s she doing?”
“Showing up J.D.?” Esther said. “Trying to get the critter to leave, when J.D. couldn’t?”
“Trying to get herself killed, is more like it.”
“Or collecting something unique?
“There’s nothing we can do,” Infinity said. “There’s no time to get out there and drag her off —” His eyelids flickered and he vanished into a communications fugue. Esther joined him. Arachne was slow and sluggish, all its capacity focussed on transition. Esther saw what Infinity was doing. She took control of a second lithoblast and urged it over the crevasse.
o0o
The squidmoth crater spun into J.D.’s view. The being had twisted more of its body into sight.
Its back humped again. One gnarled end slowly pulled free. It reached through the broken cable, probing blindly, purposefully, with the articulated antenna. It stretched and arched, drawn outward, downward, by the force of the cylinder’s spin. Two upside-down silver slugs crawled toward it, toward the person clinging below it.
J.D. did not know what to hope for. That the squidmoth would free itself before Infinity Mendez had to cut dangerously deep into the cylinder to expel it, or that it would stay where it was, hang on, and come out of transition safely with Starfarer. But she could not see the end of their course yet, the spot that would lead the starships back into the solar system.
Maybe I could catch it, she thought. Wait for it to come free, and offer it sanctuary on Nautilus. Maybe it would spend some time in a grave... to save its own life.
o0o
Arachne focused intently on Starfarer, on keeping it stable through transition, working to compensate for the struggles of the squidmoth.
Stephen Thomas waited, and watched.
A malevolent presence rewarded his patience.
o0o
The squidmoth wrenched itself a final time, cracking rock and web supports, knocking Chandra against the cables. She held desperately to the wires. Transition blossomed around her. The squidmoth screamed and cried. Chandra could not tell what sensations came to her through vibration, what came through her link, what came through the suit radio; she could not even distinguish those sensations from what she saw. The nerve clusters covering her body took it all in, gulping the experience like water.
The squidmoth arched its body, whipped its head and antennae back and forth, and exploded free of the wild side.
o0o
The squidmoth flung itself free. It tumbled away from Starfarer, twisting and spinning, a cross between a giant leech and a grasshopper, a horrible creature.
J.D. slowed Nautilus, determined to do her best to save the being no matter how she felt about it.
The squidmoth stretched itself, engaged itself with the fabric of transition, and slowed its rapid tumble.
It sailed toward her, immense and terrifying, the most alien presence she had ever experienced.
It carried Victoria’s transition algorithm like a newborn child.
J.D. gasped.
And then the other squidmoths streamed toward her.
Many were juveniles, like Nemo, riding the starships they had inherited from the other ones. Others were larval, like those J.D. had left behind in the system of their birth — she touched the knowledge surface and found that the cosmic string had returned to Sirius. Perhaps some of the larvae were Nemo’s offspring.
They collected around the wild side squidmoth like a swarm, one after another freeing itself from its starship and clustering together. J.D. lost count as the hundreds passed to the thousands. The mass grew until it exceeded the length of Starfarer. The wild side squidmoth, and Victoria’s algorithm, vanished into the center of the roiling melee.
Nautilus fell abruptly out of transition.
o0o
Stephen Thomas watched in awe as a malignant presence reassembled from Arachne’s fabric. It patterned itself on a carcinogenic blueprint that similarly self-assembled from individually banal subsections. It fascinated Stephen Thomas even as it repelled him. It was an extraordinary creation, twisted toward the service of evil, no longer under the control of any intelligence.
It forayed past the connected nodes of Victoria and Satoshi, blindly seeking the connections Stephen Thomas had severed. Lost, it wandered toward Satoshi’s node.
Stephen Thomas shouted at it, distracted it with a probe of anger, prepared himself to fight it.
Without turning, without even moving, it reoriented itself.
It snatched him by the throat.
o0o
Infinity pushed the slug to its limits, crawled it down the shuddering web struts, slid it around and beneath the web itself, and slipped under Chandra where she lay clutching the wires. Esther’s slug approached from the minus-spin side, giving the artist a surface to lean against. Chandra’s breath labored against Infinity’s slug. The lithoblast curled its edges around the cables, securing itself. If it lost its grip, it would fall away into space. It might take Chandra with it.
“It’s all right,” Infinity said to Chandra. “It’s all right, let’s move back to solid ground.” The squidmoth nest hung suspended from the wild side cylinder by a few arches of rock foam. He freed the other lithoblasts from their inhibitions. They moved toward the crevasse to fill it in.
o0o
J.D. gasped at the abrupt change.
Nautilus moved peacefully into the solar system, a system empty of any connection to Civilization.
J.D. started to cry.
She huddled in the soft chair. In her home system, she was more alone than she had ever been before.
The last thing she wanted to do was send a message to Earth. But she sought the planet out. She had subconsciously feared that Starfarer’s departure might have precipitated war, though Starfarer’s presence in orbit had been a major point of contention.
She found Earth spinning as peacefully as Nautilus, no clouds of nuclear dust streaking its white swirls of cloud, no patches of biochemical warfare blighting its surface.
She wiped her eyes. If no one had been watching for her transition spectrum, it would be a while before anyone would notice she had returned. She would wait, wait for Starfarer, and all together they would try to explain what had happened. She was desperately grateful for the quartet’s decision to return with them. Now that the young squidmoth had fled, the quartet was Starfarer’s only physical proof that alien beings existed.
A wash of rainbow light burst over her.
Starfarer dropped out of transition and into normal space.
Zev threw his image instantly into the expedition tent.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Did you see what happened?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I don’t understand it.”
Victoria followed Zev, her image forming nearby. “We made it,” she said.
“Not by much,” Satoshi said. “A close call.”
“What about Chandra?”
The artist’s voice expanded around her. “I’m right here,” she said, aggressive and self-confident. “I got stuff no one else could ever get!”
J.D. laughed with relief, with disbelief.
o0o
Simultaneously relieved by their safe transition and depressed by their forced return to Earth, Victoria touched Satoshi’s wrist, and stroked her hand down Stephen Thomas’s arm.
His skin was cold.
“Stephen Thomas!”
She cried out to him, directly through her link.
Victoria’s distress drew J.D. into Arachne. Zev rushed in behind her. J.D. following her link to the gnarled and poisonous clump that immobilized Stephen Thomas. He struggled vainly, trapped, his strength nearly exhausted. Victoria and Satoshi rushed to help him — they did not look like themselves, but their neural nodes concentrated their personalities; they were unmistakable. Victoria glowed with energy and anger; Satoshi was calmer, a burnished presence of strength.
Tendrils of the computer tumor stretched toward Victoria’s node, toward Satoshi’s.
“He’s protecting us,” Satoshi said. “He was right...”
“Who asked him to protect us — to risk himself — all alone — !”
J.D. struggled to approach him, but the carcinoma whipped out savagely with sticky, burning tendrils.
J.D. felt a curious and unfamiliar presence. The quartet appeared, trailing knowledge from their first exploration of Arachne.
Quickercatcher laid his chin on J.D.’s shoulder and gazed at the malignancy.
“We don’t know our way around yet,” Quickercatcher said softly, “but that does not look right.”
“Stephen Thomas is in trouble,” J.D. said. She lunged forward and grabbed one of the twisting tentacles of the carcinoma. It slashed at her fingers. A rush of pain jolted up her arm. She held on desperately. Victoria plunged down beside her and thrust both hands deep into the grotesque mass.
She gasped. Satoshi was right beside her, pushing into the entrapping medusa. Zev jumped in, letting the medusa grab him, then kicking at it with his clawed feet, using its own strength against it.
Quickercatcher bounded forward, snapping at the medusa with sharp teeth, stabbing with his clawed front feet. His siblings leaped into the fray, teasing and misdirecting the attention of the medusa. J.D. ripped tendrils away from Stephen Thomas’s arms. Victoria dragged desperately at one that encircled his chest and squeezed the air from his lungs. Satoshi wrestled with twisted whips of fiber, yanking them away from his partner’s throat. Stephen Thomas gasped for breath; he struggled to escape tendrils that tried to penetrate his flesh.
Longestlooker snapped one free, and Fasterdigger crunched one between sharp teeth. Sharphearer dove to the center of the medusa and bit at a bright bit of light. J.D. followed, and ripped the connecting nerve free.
The medusa contracted, protecting itself, pumping energy to repair its damage. It shrieked with rage, trying to frighten them away.
It relinquished its hold on Stephen Thomas and scuttled toward J.D., toward Quickercatcher, seeking escape.
“We’ve got to stop it,” J.D. said. “Otherwise it’ll spread —”
“Do what Infinity did with the chancellor’s house,” Zev said. “Only prettier. Turn it into a pearl.”
Infinity’s slugs had laid rock foam over the house in which Chancellor Blades had taken refuge.
J.D. set Arachne to covering over the medusa and its blueprint, enclosing them before they could disassemble into harmless, invisible parts. In her mind, J.D. imagined a layer like mother of pearl covering the malignancy, encapsulating it, another layer — not outside, but inside — putting more pressure on it, squeezing its life.
The medusa moaned.
“That is very clever,” Quickercatcher said.
“Very pretty,” said Sharphearer.
“It is more fun,” Fasterdigger said, his usual diffidence replaced by bright excitement, “to rip it into tiny pieces.”
“They’d all grow into new ones.”
“Oh, good!” Sharphearer said.
“There’s not much interesting prey,” Longestlooker explained, “on board the Four Worlds’ ship.”
The surface of the pearl increased in depth, intensified in luster, as Arachne created layer after layer, moving inward.
Arachne squeezed the tumor to nothingness.
In the sailhouse, Stephen Thomas shuddered and gasped for breath, opened his eyes, and clutched at Victoria and Satoshi.
“Jesus,” he whispered when he could speak again, “Jesus god, I’ve never been so scared in my life. Are you all right, did you —”
“We’re fine,” Satoshi said. “You’re okay. It’s going to be okay.”
Exhausted, J.D. embraced Zev, embraced the quartet. Within Arachne, she could hug all five people at the same time.
J.D. twined her link with Zev’s.
“Even better than a shark,” Zev said.
J.D. laughed shakily.
Back in the expedition tent, J.D. trembled with exhaustion. She pushed herself to her feet. Even in the low gravity her knees felt weak. She touched the knowledge surface, comforted by its solidity.
At that moment, the swarm of squidmoths fell out of transition.
The mass roiled and quaked as larval squidmoths like leeches with long spindly legs, and juvenile squidmoths like hermit crabs dragged from their shells, their abdomens naked and ugly, crawled over and under each other, each seeking to reach the center.
Victoria’s transition algorithm reflected through the mass, the only thing of beauty about it.
“Human people have helped us,” the squidmoths said.
The squidmoths’ collective voice reminded J.D. of Nemo. Her perception of their ugliness receded.
J.D. drew a deep breath. “How did we help you?”
The composite being displayed a map of the Milky Way. No dust clouds obscured any part of the beautiful, massive spiral.
“We have explored for a long time,” the being said, “watching and learning and knowing until the time approached for us to return home. But we had come too far. We did not have enough time to span the distance.”
“You needed Victoria’s algorithm,” J.D. said.
“It had to exist,” the metasquidmoth said, “but it was necessary for us to wait for someone to imagine it.”
“Welcome to our solar system,” J.D. said. “I’m sorry you’ll have to wait so long before you can continue on your journey — but maybe a hundred years — even five hundred — isn’t very long for you.” The squidmoths were so old, and they had been effectively exiled too; perhaps they would not mind waiting for the string to return.
“It’s time, now, for us to return home, to evolve once more.”
“Damn!” Stephen Thomas said in triumph. “I was right, you don’t evolve — unless you choose to!”
“We choose to evolve,” the metasquidmoth agreed.
“Why did you follow us?” Victoria asked. “You’re stranded now!”
“We were stranded before — before you — on this side of the galaxy. Thanks to human people, thanks to you, we are free.”
A transition spectrum, a brilliant, powerful rainbow flux, illuminated the knowledge surface, flared from the solar mirrors of Starfarer, scintillated through the wavery plastic window of the expedition tent.
A single being fell out of transition, glowing with light and energy; the new squidmoth plunged into the swarm and disappeared, drawing with it a great tangled skein of cosmic string.
Quivering within the knots of string, poised on the edge of transition, the metasquidmoth turned its attention to J.D.
“Will you come with us?”
Nemo’s friendship echoed in its voice.
“I... How far are you going? How long is your journey?”
“We must travel... perhaps a thousand years, perhaps ten thousand. A short trip.”
J.D. laughed. A short trip — only in relation to a million millennia!
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t, I don’t live that long, thank you, but I couldn’t leave my friends for that long.”
“Goodbye.”
The metasquidmoth vanished.
Speechless, J.D. stared into the transition rainbow.
The cosmic string remained.
The solar system, J.D. thought, is full of cosmic string!
“J.D.!” Quickercatcher exclaimed. The quartet trilled with surprise and happiness.
“Fuck it, we’re free!” Stephen Thomas shouted.
The exile’s lifted, J.D. thought. Or... is it? Was there any exile, or did the squidmoths — the other ones — plan it all this way?
“Now what?” Victoria said, a little shaky.
“We have a lot to face,” Satoshi said, “now that we’ve come home.”
Victoria chuckled wryly.
“A lot of things I don’t want to face,” J.D. said.
Like giving up Nautilus to EarthSpace, she thought.
She thought back to the gathering of squidmoths, each leaving a starship behind to spin off into transition, like jewels washing out of a riverbank.
She wondered if she could find the starships again.
“Now we know where the other ones leave their starships,” J.D. said.
She spoke to Zev, to Victoria and Stephen Thomas and Satoshi; she included Esther and Infinity and Kolya.
“What would you say to a prospecting expedition?”
The End