J.D. sat crosslegged beside Nemo, the silk beneath her warm and soft. She could happily stay here for a week, just talking. She shifted her position, resting her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand, looking at Nemo, amazed and enthralled by the being. She watched, in silence, as Nemo guided the silk spinners. The disk had become an iridescent pouch, like several others lying at the edge of the chamber.
“Tell me about Civilization,” J.D. said.
“Beings exchange their knowledge,” Nemo replied.
The two spinners, one wormlike, one resembling a starfish crossed with a lace handkerchief, met nose to nose.
“But there’s more than that!” J.D. said. “How many worlds are there? How many people? How many kinds of people? What are they like? What kind of governments do they have? I want to know everything, Nemo, about Civilization and how it works, about the movements of the cosmic string — !”
The worm reared up, the starfish twisted. They touched. Each extruded a spurt of silk.
“The people of Civilization will want to describe themselves to you.”
“What do they do when they meet? How do they reconcile their differences?”
The bursts of thread caught together and tangled. As the creatures danced, Nemo urged them easily around the pouch. Their motions formed the silk into a fluted rim.
“They make peace, or the cosmic string withdraws.”
“That’s simple,” J.D. said dryly. “A little Draconian, but simple.”
When the silk worm and the starfish returned to their starting point, Nemo flicked them both off the edge and into the pouch.
“Tell me what you’re looking for,” Nemo said.
“We’re looking for answers,” J.D. said. “Answers... and more questions.”
“Tell me what answers you’re looking for.”
“We already found one — a big one. You. We built Starfarer to find out whether other civilizations exist. Or whether we were alone. Now we know that answer.”
“The answer to your question is self-evident,” Nemo said.
“Not to everyone. At least not to a lot of human beings. Their philosophy depends on their being alone in the universe.”
“Earth has passed through a decline,” Nemo said.
“I — what do you mean?”
“Europa and Androgeos knew of other beings.”
“After they were rescued, after they left Earth and joined Civilization —”
“When they lived on Earth, they spoke to others.”
“They had myths. They believed in gods and demigods and fantasy creatures. That doesn’t count as knowing about space-faring beings.”
“Yet their myths were more accurate than Earth’s current myths of solitude.”
“There are lots of different myths on Earth right now. But... you’re right. Europa and Androgeos came from a sophisticated culture. That’s probably why they fit in so well with Civilization.”
Nemo’s feet drummed softly on the floor, a complicated rhythm. Seven against five? J.D. could not quite tell.
“If we do go back to Earth — I’m not saying we’ll accept the exile, but if we do — there are lots of people who won’t believe we’ve met alien beings.”
“You’ll tell them you met alien beings,” Nemo said.
Several attendants scuttled and swooped nearer. Nemo rounded them up and herded them into the pouch.
“I’ll tell them, but they won’t believe me. They’ll say we faked the records. They’ll say it’s all a monstrous hoax.”
“You wouldn’t fake information.”
J.D. thought she heard shock in Nemo’s voice.
“But they’d say we did. So we could claim we succeeded. So we could claim they shouldn’t put us in jail because we were right all along. They’ll want proof that we’re right.”
She waited, but instead of replying, Nemo lifted the delicate pouch and placed its fluted edge against a silk-draped wall, where it stuck.
“You could prove we were right, Nemo,” J.D. said.
“If they saw me, they’d believe you’d met alien people.”
“They sure would.”
“If they saw me, they wouldn’t put us in jail.”
J.D. laughed. “They wouldn’t put you in jail, that’s for sure.” She stretched out her hands to Nemo. “It’s a lot to ask, I know, but five hundred years isn’t long to people like you and Europa. Wouldn’t you at least think of visiting the solar system? You could learn everything there is to know about human beings.”
“Your invitation’s tempting,” Nemo said.
“You’ll do it?” J.D. exclaimed, astonished.
“I’m sorry, I have another commitment.”
“I understand.” The thrill J.D. had felt dropped abruptly into disappointment, with sad amusement that people gave the same excuses everywhere. “Five hundred years is too long.”
“This time it is, I am sorry.”
J.D. rose and stretched.
“I’ve been here for hours,” she said. “I have to go back to the Chi for a while.”
“You are leaving.”
“I have to rest, and eat —” She shrugged. “Things that are easier back on the Chi.”
“I can offer you food,” Nemo said.
Nemo snaked out one long tentacle to the far side of the chamber. The curtain there was a mass of iridescent bubbles of silk. Nemo’s tentacle quivered across the surface.
It moved. The bubbles fluttered and bobbed and separated, the whole mass expanding, opening like a flower.
Each sphere was a living creature, depending from the curtain by three long slender limbs. The creatures had no heads, no other appendages, only a circular ring of spots.
Eyespots, J.D. thought, knowing she was making another assumption without much evidence.
Nemo chose one at the edge of the mass and stroked it. It released its hold on the silk and wrapped its legs around Nemo’s tentacle.
Nemo extended the creature toward her.
“A decorative food,” Nemo said.
J.D.’s helmet radio emitted a noise, not Nemo’s voice, but Victoria’s, a quick sound of protest more quickly cut off. J.D.’s friends worried when they thought she was in danger, but they were beginning to understand that facing the danger was her responsibility. They were beginning to understand that they had to let her do her job. Stephen Thomas had once offered to take her place, but he had only offered once: her reaction assured that. The other members of alien contact thought of her as mild-tempered, even meek, and she was. But when Stephen Thomas suggested that he go out instead of her, she lost her temper.
“The food will not hurt you.”
J.D. accepted Nemo’s offer.
It touched her lips. The jointed legs fluttered against her tongue; the abdomen disappeared like sea foam or cotton candy, bursting with a flood of strange flavor: sweet and gingery, spicy-hot enough to make her draw a startled breath. The air passing over her tongue dissolved the spicy taste into a cool musky flavor like perfume. She crunched the delicate legs, but when she swallowed even the legs had evanesced.
The evanescence dissolved straight into J.D.’s blood, straight to her brain.
J.D. broke out into a sweat, she flushed from collarbone to forehead, and her heart began to pound. As J.D. gasped for breath — and coughed violently in reaction to the air — Victoria’s voice rumbled from J.D.’s suit helmet, rising in pitch. A spot of heat appeared in the back of J.D.’s mind, a signal from Victoria. J.D. let it in.
“J.D., I’m coming after you!” Victoria said directly into her mind.
“Nemo, what’s happening?” J.D. said.
Trying not to sound panicked, she sent a message back to Victoria and the Chi: “No, don’t, not yet. I’m all right... I think I’m all right.”
“It’s the effect of decorative food,” Nemo said.
Nemo’s long tentacle manipulated another creature from the wall and carried it beneath Nemo’s mustache of shorter tentacles. The creature disappeared, with a faint crunch.
Veins in the gauzy fins over Nemo’s legs darkened, and the fins rippled rapidly. The long tentacles twined around each other, leaving the silk-spinners to their own direction. The tips of Nemo’s legs pattered erratically against the floor. Nemo’s eyelid opened completely, then closed, then opened again in J.D.’s direction.
J.D.’s flush passed, and her heartbeat steadied. Only a quiver of sexual excitement remained, pleasurable and comforting and startling.
“Some effect,” J.D. said.
“That’s the decoration.” Nemo’s fins returned to their normal color, and settled back into their usual gentle wave. Instead of replacing the spinners on the rim of the silken pouch, Nemo let them wander in patterns across the surface.
“Did you know how I’d react to it?” J.D. asked.
“Tell me how it felt.”
“Like ninety-proof champagne. Like excitement.”
“Yes,” Nemo said.
“How did you know?”
“Human biochemistry.”
“Is that how it feels to you?”
“If excitement feels the same to me as it does to you.”
“Is this what you live on all the time?”
“No one can live on decorative food,” Nemo said.
“What do you live on?”
“Starlight,” Nemo said. “Radiation.”
“Photosynthesis — ?”
The theory had always been that the metabolism of animals was too high to be sustained by sunlight alone, that fictional creations like giant, walking, talking plants could not exist — or at least that they could not walk very far, very fast, or think very much.
“The light of Sirius helps sustain me.”
That would explain the other crater-nests, the ones filled with smooth silver silk in parabolic shapes: solar collectors, focusing the starlight, converting it, and funneling it to its users.
Nemo touched the silk spinners and guided them to the rim of the pouch. They had created a pattern of scarlet and indigo.
J.D. wiped her forehead. Her hair was damp with sweat. The first effects of the decorative food had passed, but her hands were shaking. She wondered if the food acted with a wave effect, or if it was about to give her a flashback.
I’m hungry, she thought. I’m hungry and I’m exhausted and I have a bad case of sensory overload. And like Nemo said... nobody can live on decorative food.
“Nemo, I must go back to the Chi for a while. I have a lot to think about, and I’m tired — aren’t you?”
“No, I don’t tire.”
“You’re fortunate. Would you like to visit with someone else while I’m gone?”
“I will think, until you return.”
She took that as a polite refusal.
As she put on her spacesuit, she wondered how to persuade the alien being to let her colleagues come into its nest. They would be horribly disappointed if they could not.
Several of Nemo’s attendants whispered past her on tiny invisible feet, and clustered around the gossamer thread that had led her in. When they passed over it, it parted. They hunkered down over the pieces, drawing in the threads.
“May I have a piece of your silk?” J.D. asked Nemo, gesturing to one of the threads.
“Tell me what you’d do with it.”
“I’d give it to one of my colleagues to analyze. He studies genetics.”
“You may have it.”
J.D. pulled the sampling kit from the thigh pocket of her spacesuit and used the sterile tongs to pick up a thread. One of the attendants lunged, arching upward to snap with shiny jaws. Startled, J.D. snatched the sample away.
“It doesn’t want me to take it,” she said to Nemo.
“It doesn’t have much tolerance for change.”
The attendant flopped back to the floor, forgot about J.D., and headed for another loose bit of silk.
J.D. put her prize in a sample bag and sealed it.
“Thank you, Nemo,” she said. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
“I will wait.”
“Shall I leave my life-line here? Then I could follow it in when I come back.”
“One of my attendants will spin you to me,” Nemo said.
“But that’s so much trouble for you, when I could just follow the line.”
“The line is essential to you,” Nemo said.
“No, not really. It’s for safety, for backup.”
“J.D.,” Nemo said, and J.D. thought she heard a hesitation in the squidmoth’s voice, “the line is uncomfortable.”
“It — what?”
She thought about the line, snaking back and forth through Nemo’s body, pressing against, even cutting into, Nemo’s tissues and organs.
“I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed. “Nemo, why didn’t you say something before?” She blushed, mortified at having thoughtlessly caused Nemo pain.
“I want you to feel welcome,” Nemo said.
J.D. grasped the end of Nemo’s tentacle gently. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. “I won’t bring the line when I come back.”
“Thank you,” Nemo said.
As she left the bright sphere of light in the center of Nemo’s nest, the long tentacles slithered after her, touching her heels. She paused at the opening between two inner curtains, glanced back, and waved. Nemo’s mustache vibrated.
“Good-bye for now,” she said.
“J.D.”
She glanced back. “Yes, Nemo?”
“Tell me the questions you seek.”
J.D. smiled. “We won’t know what those are,” she said, “till we find them.”
o0o
Reeling in her lifeline, J.D. left Nemo’s chamber and entered the labyrinth. At the first switchback turn, the line had pressed against the edge of the curtain. When she released it, a dark welt formed. She touched it gently, sorry for the pain she had caused.
Motion fluttered against her fingers. She started and drew back her hand. Several palm-sized flat creatures, the same color as the curtain and camouflaged against it, had snugged up against the place where the cable had lain. Now, as J.D. watched, they flowed over the welt, covered it, and settled against the fabric. The welt vanished beneath a rough line of scar tissue.
J.D. left the labyrinth and hurried through the cathedral corridors, climbing toward the edge of the crater. Now she noticed more of the creatures who maintained the intricate environment that was Nemo. They crept up every wall, spinning, weaving, unweaving; they peered at her with eyespots or antenna from luxurious folds of drapery; they scuttled away before her so all she knew of them was the sound they made when they fled. And always she was aware of the larger creatures beyond the sides of the tunnels, shapes and shadows, the touch of a powerful limb tenting the wall or the ceiling.
Maybe I should think of Nemo as an ecosystem, she thought. Or maybe I need a whole new term.
She passed through the double sphincter that formed Nemo’s airlock, no longer frightened by the monster-organisms that closed in to change the shape of the tunnel.
She started up the long steep hammocks that led to the surface.
The closer she got to the outside, the more deeply the lifeline had cut into Nemo’s fabric. In places, she had to pull it — as gently as she could — from beneath the healing creatures.
At the last place where the lifeline had sunk in, just before J.D. emerged from the crater, a healing creature had fastened itself firmly to both sides of the welt. J.D. pulled on the lifeline, but not gently enough. The creature’s body ripped open. Pale fluid dripped out. The creature’s edges had melded into the wall.
The lifeline fell free.
J.D. stared at the dripping tissue. The dripping slowed, and the fluid solidified. Soon the edges had healed, the walls began to absorb the two halves of the creature, and more healers came to finish covering the welt. J.D. let the lifeline reel in, glad she had reached the last steep slope.
Victoria was waiting for her at the edge of the crater, her slender, compact body radiating energy and excitement. She gave J.D. a hand up the last long step, squeezing her fingers. Behind the gilt surface of her faceplate, she looked amazed, exhilarated, relieved.
A deluge of questions and comments and exclamations poured through J.D.’s earphones. It was as if everyone had waited as long as they possibly could, till she stepped out of the alien being’s home, and then could hold their curiosity no more. J.D. felt a surge of panic. Victoria must have seen it, because she squeezed J.D.’s hand again and opened a voice channel back to Starfarer.
“Come on, folks. J.D.’s had a long afternoon. You saw everything she did.”
The cacophony eased. Someone muttered, “Sorry,” and someone else said, “But it isn’t the same.” That sounded like Chandra, the sensory artist.
“Nevertheless,” Victoria said. “I’m closing down the PA for a while. We can all talk to J.D. when she’s had a chance to collect her thoughts.”
The monitor signals vanished, leaving J.D. in peace and silence.
“Thanks,” J.D. said. “You could have said, ‘Till J.D.’s had a chance to pee,’ but I’m glad you didn’t.”
Victoria chuckled.
“You were fantastic, J.D.” she said. “I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do all that you just did.”
J.D. smiled, exhausted but elated. No matter what happened now, she had begun to make friends with Nemo, with an alien being.
Too many things on the deep space expedition had gone badly up till now. She needed a success. They all did.
“Let’s go in,” Victoria said.
“Okay.”
They retraced their footprints through the dust of the planetoid’s rough surface, returning to the ungainly explorer craft, the Chi.
J.D. unplugged the end of her lifeline from the flank of the Chi and let it snap back into the reel. She unhooked the reel from her suit, and handed it to Victoria.
“From now on,” she said, “I’m working without a net.”
o0o
Outside the spacesuit locker, Zev and Satoshi waited for Victoria and J.D.
“You have a hell of a lot of guts,” Satoshi said.
J.D. knew he meant to offer her a compliment, but she also heard the note of caution in his voice.
“More guts than brains?” she said.
“Maybe,” he said. “But maybe... that’s what the alien contact specialist needs.” He grinned at her, and she smiled back.
“Thanks.”
Satoshi was the most restrained of the three members of the family partnership. Unlike Stephen Thomas, who said whatever he thought, Satoshi more often than not kept his opinions to himself. J.D. valued his rare comments, and rarer compliments.
Satoshi went to Victoria and brushed his fingertips against his partner’s very curly short black hair, smoothing it where her helmet had pressed against it.
J.D. rotated her shoulders and stretched. Zev came to her and hugged her tight. She stroked his fine pale hair, and laid her hand against his cheek.
The diver’s smooth mahogany skin radiated heat. Zev wore only light shorts and a sleeveless shirt, both too big for him, both borrowed from Stephen Thomas, who was nearly thirty centimeters taller than Zev. Zev owned almost no clothing, only a heavy wool suit, part of his disguise for boarding Starfarer. He would have abandoned clothing as quickly as he had abandoned his fraudulent identity, if J.D. had not told him it would be socially unacceptable. He never wore clothes back in Puget Sound.
Zev took her hand between his, spreading his long fingers to enclose her hand between the translucent swimming webs. He looked up at her, his dark eyes bright with excitement.
“When you go back, I want to go with you,” he said. “I want to meet Nemo.”
“We all want that,” Victoria said, her voice intense. “I hope it happens.”
“I do, too,” J.D. said.
Her colleagues had all been disappointed when Europa refused them permission to explore her starship. J.D. hoped the same thing would not happen with Nemo.
“Where’s Stephen Thomas?” J.D. asked.
“In his lab.” Satoshi sounded troubled. He ran his hand through his short black hair. “I’ve hardly seen him all day.”
“I need to talk to him before I go back out.” J.D. was disappointed that he had not joined the others to greet her. She held out the sample bag with the fragment of Nemo’s thread. “And I have a sample for him. Didn’t he see me pick it up?”
“Maybe he thought it was for me, eh?” Victoria said. She grinned. “I would like a piece of it. It looked like it had some interesting optical properties.”
J.D. held out the sample bag to Victoria, embarrassed to admit how much she had wanted to give it to Stephen Thomas herself.
“Tell him not to chop it all up looking for microbes,” Victoria said. “Why don’t you give it to him, and freshen up, and we’ll get ready for the conference and meet you in the observer’s circle?”
“Okay,” J.D. said.
A few minutes later she hurried from her tiny cabin and headed for the Chi’s labs. The labs were larger than the cabins, but still minuscule. J.D. stopped in the doorway of the genetics lab. Stephen Thomas sat at the work bench, staring into the microscope’s holographic image. The image rotated, then flipped over.
Another holographic projection, the image of Nemo’s crater, hovered in the air where he could glance up and see it.
“Stephen Thomas,” J.D. said.
“Hi, J.D.” Stephen Thomas straightened and turned, hooking his elbow over the chair back. “That was some expedition.”
He smiled at her.
“Thanks,” she said softly, keeping back everything else she might have wanted to say to him.
He looked drawn and distracted. He had been uncharacteristically silent since they left Starfarer. Of everyone, he was taking Feral’s death the hardest. It broke J.D.’s heart to see him so withdrawn, so deep in shock. Grief concentrated his beauty, rather than fading it, heightening the blue of his eyes and refining the planes of his classic features. He had pulled his long blond hair back and tied it very tight. His skin, so fair a few days ago, continued to darken. Except for the pale new scar on his forehead, his skin now was a smooth café au lait. Eventually he would be the same color as Zev: dark mahogany, deep brown with a reddish sheen.
“I brought you a sample.” J.D. held out the sample bag. “There’s not much of it, but it’s less abused than the other one.”
She had inadvertently pulled up a weed from Europa’s ship. If she had not been running away from an aurochs at the time, she probably would have stuck it back in the ground instead of shoving it into her pocket. On the other hand, if she had not been running away from an aurochs, she would not have pulled it up in the first place.
Stephen Thomas accepted the bag. J.D. expected him to react — with excitement, with disbelief that she had picked up no more than a discarded bit, with a profane expression of joy, with some unexpected impulse unique to Stephen Thomas Gregory. When she had given him the battered weed from Europa’s ship, he had kissed her forehead.
This time, he simply held the bag up to the light. The silk caught the illumination and carried it from one end to the other. The tips of the thread glowed blue-white; the length of it shone luminous indigo. Between Stephen Thomas’s fingers, the newly-formed swimming webs glowed pale amber.
“I wonder if Nemo’s microflora is as diverse as the web fauna,” Stephen Thomas said. “This’ll be contaminated... too bad you couldn’t collect it before you got out of your suit. People just emit bacteria like crazy. But it shouldn’t be too hard to separate the alien bugs...”
“I’m sorry.” J.D. blushed, both annoyed and embarrassed by the implied criticism. “I couldn’t just go in and start ripping up bits —”
He shrugged. “Can’t be helped.” He turned toward her again. “Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to have it.”
“If you say so,” J.D. said, and rushed to change the subject. “I want to enhance my internal link. Can I?”
“Sure, but why the fuck would you want to?”
“Weren’t you watching? Weren’t you even listening?”
“Of course I was watching. Why are you pissed off at me? Is everybody pissed off at me?”
“No, of course not, I’m sorry.” J.D. gestured at the floating image. “I want to communicate with Nemo on Nemo’s own terms. So I have to enhance my link. Can I start working on it now?”
“No, I don’t have any prep here.” He frowned. “You’ll have to ask Professor Thanthavong if she can mix some up for you in the biochem lab. The ready-made stuff was in the genetics building, so it’s under forty tons of rubble.”
“Oh,” J.D. said, disappointed. “Okay. I’ll talk to her.” As soon as I get some sleep, she said to herself. As soon as I can sound coherent. Though Professor Thanthavong was usually pleasant and invariably at least civil, J.D. always felt intimidated by the idea of walking up to a Nobel prize winner and talking to her as if she were an ordinary person. Miensaem Thanthavong was not ordinary.
“Just how much are you planning to enhance the link?” Stephen Thomas said.
“As much as I can.”
He knit his eyebrows. “You won’t like it. You’ll be a zombie whenever you use it. The synapses have to feed in somewhere, they’ll take over all your other senses.”
“I don’t care,” J.D. said. “It’s important.” Her link warmed in the back of her mind, notifying her of a message. “Excuse me a second.” Her eyelids fluttered. As she went into a communications fugue, she thought, most of us close off the rest of the world when we use our link, so what does it matter?
She accepted the message. Nemo’s characteristic signal touched her mind.
“Nemo! Is everything all right?”
“The attendants are prepared,” Nemo said.
“Does that mean — Are you willing to meet my colleagues? Can we visit you?”
“Yes, you may visit.”
J.D. opened her eyes. “That was Nemo! Come on!”
Without waiting to explain, J.D. ran out of the lab.