Metaphase. Part 14

"Why not?"

"Because Nerno's a civilized being."

Chandra shrugged. "And we're half-evolved exiles. Why should Nemo care what happens to us? Europa didn't care if she stranded us in orbit around Sirius and we never got home."

"Nemo only eats insubstantial food," J.D. said.

"Who said anything about eating? Besides, Nerno's metamorphosing. Lots of critters eat one thing during one stage of their lives-I don't know, leaves or gra.s.s or flower nectar-that eat other stuff, other times."

"This is a subject worth discussing," Victoria said, "but let's not be morbid about it."

"I'm not morbid."

Stephen Thomas looked at her askance. "Have you taken a look at your own work lately?"

"Screw you, Stephen Thomas Gregory. And how are you going to feel if J.D.

comes back full of maggots?"

"That's her job," Stephen Thomas said easily.

"Stephen Thomas!" Professor Thanthavong exclaimed.

J.D. laughed. "I asked for that one, Professor-Stephen Thomas is quoting me. But, Chandra . . . there's a principle of astronomy that says you aren't likely to be in the right place at the right time to observe an event of cosmological significance. Considering Nerno's age, the principle applies. It'd be a tremendous coincidence if I arrived just in time to feed Nerno's offspring."

"Unless it isn't a coincidence at all."

"What-? Oh. I see what you mean."

"Nemo chooses when to become an adult. So maybe squidmoths hang around waiting till there's somebody just right, and then . . ."

"I think,77 J.D. said, "that you've been watching too many old monster movies."

"Maybe you've written too many sentimental sci-fi novels!"

"Sentimental!" J.D. exclaimed, affronted. 99."Yeah, in the end everything comes out right for everybody. " Chandra made a noise of disgust.

J.D. almost laughed and almost cried.

I think I'm too tired to be having this conversation, she said to herself.

"Er," Gerald said, at a loss and trying to make the best of it, "perhaps it would be better to postpone literary discussion until a later time?

Now, we shall break into smaller groups and meet separately. That way our colleagues won't be quite so overwhelmed."

Hearing the murmurs of agreement, J.D. gave Gerald a grateful glance.

With that, the tight sphere of people broke up into smaller cl.u.s.ters, sorted broadly by occupation: physical sciences around Victoria, social sciences with Satos.h.i.+, biological sciences with Stephen Thomas. The group around Stephen Thomas included Florrie Brown. When she joined him, he took her frail hand and kissed it gallantly. She smiled, and J.D.

realized that beneath her remarkably quaint heavy black eye make-up, beneath the pink and green and white braids drifting around her mostly shaved head, Florrie Brown was beautiful.

Professor Thanthavong joined J.D. briefly.

"Are you certain about changing your link?" she asked.

"Yes," J.D. said. "I want to enhance it. There still may be time to use it."

"Very well," Thanthavong said. "I've made the preparation. See me when you're ready."

"Thank you," J.D. said, as Thanthavong touched the wall, pushed off, and floated toward Stephen Thomas's discussion section.

Stephen Thomas led his group out of the waiting room, heading down into Starfarer's main cylinder and out of zero g.

The group was much smaller than it should have been. Many of the scientists of the multinational faculty100 had been recalled by their governments, protesting the threat of change in Starfarer's purpose. So they had all been left behind when Starfarer fled.

Stephen Thomas was glad Florrie Brown had joined his group. He liked her; he only wished she and Victoria had not started out on the wrong foot.

Besides Stephen Thomas, the scientists included Professor Thanthavong, a couple of biochemists and a botanist, and a dozen graduate students: Lehua, Bay, Mitch, Fox- "Fox, what are you doing here?"

Fox was one of Satos.h.i.+'s graduate students.

"Satos.h.i.+ isn't talking to me."

""at?" he asked, incredulous.

Both Satos.h.i.+ and Stephen Thomas had good reason to be annoyed with Fox. She was only twenty, too young to apply for a place on the deep s.p.a.ce expedition. She had refused to return to Earth. Stephen Thomas and Satos.h.i.+ had been in the genetics building, trying to persuade her to get on the transport and go home, when the missile hit Starfarer and brought the hillside down around them. But the missile might have hit anywhere. Stephen Thomas found it impossible to blame Fox for staying behind, and he a.s.sumed Satos.h.i.+ felt the same. So what, if they got charged with kidnapping when they got back home? Their prosecution for hijacking the stars.h.i.+p would probably take precedence anyway.

Unless kidnapping the niece of the president of the United States took priority over everything.

"Satos.h.i.+ thinks it's my fault you're turning into a diver!" Fox said.

"Oh, bulls.h.i.+t."

"Don't make me leave," she said.

He shrugged. "Doesn't make any difference to me."

Stephen Thomas was tired and distracted. Most of his body had stopped aching for the moment, but his toes hurt fiercely. He wanted a hot bath.

He thought it might help.

Thanthavong watched him with concern. "Come 101.along, Stephen Thomas. Questions can wait till we're back on solid ground,"

"It doesn't matter," he said. Everyone was used to his b.i.t.c.hing about zero g, but he had spent so much time in weightlessness recently that he had overcome his aversion to it. Or . . . his body was preparing him for living in water.

He followed Thanthavong obediently. He was in the habit of complying with her requests. Like everyone else, he admired her to the point of awe.

When the changing virus infected him, and she prepared to treat him against it, saying no to her was one of the hardest things he had ever done.

They made their way to the long hill that formed one end of Starfarer's campus cylinder. The hill, with its winding switchback paths, led down from the axis to the cylinder floor, the living surface. The air was sharp and cool with rain. Overhead, puffy clouds softened the sharp bright line of the sun tube and, beyond the tube, the cold glitter of lakes and streams on the far side of the cylinder. Starfarer's small shallow ocean, gray and foggy, circled the opposite end of the cylinder.

Stephen Thomas kept waiting to feel some primeval call to the sea, but it did not happen.

You aren't turning into a fish, he said to himself, repeating Zev's distressed protest to a joke about what was happening to Stephen Thomas.

You aren't turning into a fish. You aren't going to get pulled to the sea to sp.a.w.n.

At a hairpin turn of the trail, halfway to the floor of the cylinder, benches cl.u.s.tered in a small circle. The false gravity was about half of Starfarer's regular seventenths g. One could sit without bouncing into the air.

Thanthavong took a seat and motioned the others to join her. Stephen Thomas limped to a nearby bench, lowered himself gratefully, and stretched his long legs. He curled his toes, pressing them against the soles of his sandals, straightening them quickly when the ache turned to a raw jolt of pain.102 Everybody else joined the circle and watched with antic.i.p.ation as Stephen Thomas slipped his carryingcase strap off over his head and held the case in his lap. The grad students had been waiting for something new to work on. J.D. had brought Stephen Thomas a crumpled plant from Europa's s.h.i.+p, but the plant was, as Europa said, of Earth origin. Though the bacteria a.s.sociated with it were still acting strange, they matched ordinary Earth species. He was glad he finally had something for his students.

"Stephen Thomas?"

He opened the sample case. He had not transmitted any of this information, or discussed it on the public access. Europa and Androgeos had made him more cautious-more sneaky-than he had ever been before.

"The optical fiber J.D. picked up is just a polymer. Organic. Similar to silk, a little stronger." He shrugged. "Most of its interesting qualities are optical. But it was shed into a living ecosystem. Good and nonsterile.

Particles in the range from viral to amoebic. I made some slides, and . .

He pulled the cus.h.i.+oned isolation chamber out of the case and held it up, letting light flow through the windows ofthe sample vials.

Tiny cell colonies traced one inoculation stab.

He had not expected-not dared to hope for-the growth to appear so quickly.

He had been afraid to hope for any growth at all.

Most of the tubes of growth medium remained clear. No surprise: he had no way-yet-of knowing what to feed an alien cell.

But something, some alien equivalent of a bacterium, was an autotroph: an organism that could grow and replicate using only simple sugars, oxygen, water. . . .

He offered the isolation chamber to Thanthavong.

"No," she said. "No. You carry it. I'm afraid my hand . . . might not be steady enough."

They had met the alien humans. They had encoun- 103.tered an alien species of intelligence. But this microscopic quant.i.ty of life was the first alien cell they could look at, grow, and study.

"Maybe some of the other microbes feed on the autotroph," Lehua said.

"Right." With a little luck, he could end up with a self-sustaining mixed colony of alien microbes.

"Did you have enough to do any tests?" Thanthavong asked.

"Just one." He paused. "Whatever Nemo's ecosystem uses to make whatever it uses for genes . . . it isn't DNA."

J.D. and Zev found themselves among a diverse group of faculty and staff, including most of the artists, Jenny Dupre, and Senator Orazio.

J.D. wished she did not have to meet with them all so soon after getting back. She was tired, and sad. Still, she understood why her colleagues were here waiting for her. She would have been with them, if she had not been a member of the alien contact department.

"There's no question of letting the alien into Arachne," Jenny Dupre said.

"I don't think so," J.D. said sadly. "And I'm beginning to think that's a mistake."

"The web's still too fragile to risk it!"

J.D. (lid not blame Jenny for her concern. She had nearly died in Arachne's crash, the crash that killed Feral. If Feral's death was murder rather than accident, as Jenny believed, then Jenny had probably been the target.

Nevertheless, the more J.D. thought about it, the more she disagreed with keeping Nemo out.

She wanted to be back with Nemo.

She was still moving through microgravity, so she tried to keep her eyes from closing as she went into a communications fugue. She did not want to crash into a wall while she was not looking.104 VONDA N. MONTYRE.She touched Arachne, sending a gentle message to the squidmoth. Nemo made no reply.

J.D. forced her attention back to the group she was with, to their questions and curiosity.

All she could do now was wait.

0.

M.

CHAPTER 6.

STEPHEN THOMAS LEANED HIS HEAD against the isolation box and drew his hands from the manipulators. For the moment, he had done all he could do, inoculating growth medium with Samples of alien cells and sacrificing a few of the precious organisms for microscope slides. Within a day, if the alien bacteria continued to grow at their current rate, he would have enough cultures to give samples to his colleagues.

He stretched his body against the hot stiffness of his bruises. He wished he were home in bed. He stepped back from the box, and his feet flashed quick pain up his legs.106 "Christ on a crutch," he muttered, "that's enough, all right?"

He shut down the isolation box. The lab was quiet and empty. After the conference, he had sent everyone home. He wanted his students to be fresh when he had something for them to work on.

He grabbed one of the scanning microscope preparations and an inoculated isolation tube of culture medium, and carried them down the hall to Professor Thanthavong's office.

He met J.D. and Zev in the hallway. Zev led J.D., watching her worriedly.

A small holographic display, the LTM transmission from Nerno's chamber, tagged along behind them.

"Hi, Stephen Thomas." J.D.'s voice was pitched half an octave higher than normal. Her eyes were bright and very dark, the pupils dilated to the edge of the blue-gray irises.

"Hi," he said. "Are you drunk?"

"I told you, I don't drink."

"Oh, right." She had even turned down a sip of celebratory French champagne, the day Starfarer's sail first deployed. G.o.d, but that felt like a long time ago.