Metaphase. Part 20

He was not sure of her age, but he knew she was old. Eighty, maybe.

Her father could have been a rice farmer, in Cambodia. A hundred years ago.

With a water buffalo.

Carrying the shovel, Stephen Thomas headed home. He had not meant to stay so long, and he wondered how things were going in the genetics department. He checked with Arachne, but found no messages from his students or from his boss.

Involved with Arachne, he stumbled on the rough trail. He dropped the link and put his attention to negotiating the path. He had forgotten how quickly darkness fell in late autumn on board Starfarer. Back in the campus cylinder, where it was spring, the twilights as well as the days were growing longer.

He could not get lost: the sun tube reflected starlight at night, and Arachne could always guide him back to the access if the sky clouded over.

As it was doing now. The clouds were thicker and darker than any Stephen Thomas had ever seen here. The temperature had fallen rapidly.

He kept going, following the trail in the darkness as best he could. He touched Arachne now and then to be sure he was headed in the right direction, but he could not stay in constant contact with the computer. He had to keep most of his attention on the trail.

The rain began, a few scattered drops that patted146 against the dry leaves of the young trees. A rumble of sound rolled over the land.

Thunder.

Stephen Thomas looked along the length of the wild cylinder, amazed to see lightning flicker across the clouds. A break in the sky cover exposed the sun tube, bright with stars, and the far-overhead clouds.

Lightning spiraled down the length of the wild side.

As thunder rumbled around him, Stephen Thomas cursed the lightning, the rain, and Arachne. The trail led up a small hill. He stopped, looking for a way around the base. He had no intention of becoming a human lightning rod. He asked for directions to an access hatch, so he could find shelter underground, but received no reply. The storm cut him off from the web, isolating him from any help. The wind rose, whipping fallen leaves past his ankles. The raindrops. .h.i.t the ground, coated themselves with dust, bounced back and splashed his legs, and turned into mud. His sore feet slid around in his wet sandals.

The clouds opened. Rain crashed down: the huge, heavy drops fell so fast the air felt like solid water.

A bolt of lightning blasted the earth nearby. The air reeked of ozone, broken cedar, smoke. The rain sizzled and hissed against flames; the fire died with a stench of wet ashes.

Rivulets coursed down the hillside and coalesced into a stream. Stephen Thomas followed the rippling water, looking for shelter. He was soaking wet, and cold, his long hair plastered against his face and straggling down his neck. He wiped rainwater from his eyes.

A lightning flash illuminated the land around him. His eyes and his mind retained a high-contrast picture. The stream was leading him into a gully: he was about to trade being a target of the lightning for being the prey of a wall of water. Even a diver might not survive a flash flood. He dropped the shovel and climbed the rough slope to higher ground, scrabbling up the rock, cursing, sc.r.a.ping his hands on stones.

Out of the reach of the gathering flood, he hunkered 147.under a scraggle of p.r.i.c.kly scotch broom. It gave some protection from the wind, but none at all from the rain. The crisp colorful fallen leaves had turned to a slick, sopping brown mat.

The rain stopped as it had begun: a deluge abruptly changing to a scatter of droplets, then nothing. Stephen Thomas looked up. The clouds had rained themselves away, and the stars bloomed brightly all along the sun- tube.

Rus.h.i.+ng brown water washed through the gully below him.

When Stephen Thomas stood up, the scotch broom swept him with another shower. He swore at it, looked around to get his bearings, and picked his way along the edge of the gully toward the trail, The electrical inter- ference with his link had disappeared, for all the difference it made now. He did send a general, irritated note to Arachne about the weather.

Arachne noted that the fire danger had ended.

Stephen Thomas hiked through a stand of bushy young trees that showered him with water and dead wet leaves. The trees ended abruptly at the edge of a meadow. The meadow stretched to the steep hill that formed the end of the cylinder. The ferry back to campus waited at the top of the hill, the axis of the cylinder.

When he reached the edge of the boggy field, Stephen Thomas saw someone halfway up the hill, descending in long strides through the low gravity.

Stephen Thomas stopped in the shadows of the trees. The person coming down the hill probably could not see him.

It was Griffith.

Griffith unnerved him. Stephen Thomas reminded himself that auras were a figment of his imagination. His perception of Griffith as lacking one meant absolutely nothing. As Victoria had pointed out, Florrie Brown told them all that Griffith was a narc before Stephen Thomas ever thought to look for his aura.

Griffith made him nervous because Griffith made148 everybody nervous. He had been the first suspect in Arachne's crash. He was innocent of that charge.

Griffith said he was an accountant for the General Accounting Office. Few believed he worked for the GAO, and n.o.body believed he was an accountant.

Like everyone else, Stephen Thomas believed he had worked against the expedition.

Stephen Thomas moved deeper into hiding among the trees.

Griffith crossed the meadow. He carried a makes.h.i.+ft bedroll. Stephen Thomas wondered why he had not taken a tent and sleeping bag from the storeroom.

It was communal property-but Griffith probably had even less conception of communal property than he had of governing by consensus.

What do I care if he gets wet on his camp-out? Stephen Thomas said to himself.

He stood very quiet as Griffith approached. He was only a few paces from the government agent, and he felt a spark of satisfaction in watching the man, un.o.bserved, from so close a distance.

Griffith stopped.

"Come out of there." He faced Stephen Thomas.

Stephen Thomas hesitated, then shrugged and stepped out from beneath the trees. What could Griffith do to him? Arachne knew he was out here. Stephen Thomas made sure the computer knew Griffith was out here,too.

"You look like h.e.l.l." Griffith sounded annoyed. "What are you doing in there?"

"Avoiding you," Stephen Thomas said.

Griffith's expression froze.

"What are you doing out here?" Stephen Thomas said.

"None of your d.a.m.ned business." Griffith started away, his shoulders stiff with anger.

"Hey," Stephen Thomas said.

Griffith's pace checked, but he kept going.

"How'd you know where I was?" Stephen Thomas called after him. 149.Griffith turned back. He looked Stephen Thomas up and down, critically, contemptuously.

"YOU could have been more obvious," he said. "But . . . only if you'd left your scat."

Victoria hesitated on the path to J.D.'s yard. It was later than she had thought. She had spent all day in Physics Hill, a.n.a.lyzing her journey into Nerno's interior. What a strange conglomeration she had come back with.

Neither she nor Avvaiyar knew quite what to make of it.

Delicate light poured through the tall windows of J.D.'s main room, and flowed over the wild garden. The huckleberry bushes rustled, their small oval leaves quivering, and something-an owl, a bat?-flew past on whispered wings.

Victoria knocked on the front door of J.D.'s house. Like most of the houses on Starfarer, it had been built and then covered with a hill. Its whole front was windows, except the door. Looking in someone's open win- dows was bad form.

Backlit by the cool glow, Zev opened the door.

"Hi, Victoria."

"Hi, Zev. Where've you been all day?"

"Professor Thanthavong told J.D. to rest."

"Is that Victoria?" J.D. asked.

"Hi," Victoria called.

Zev stood aside and let her in. She kicked off her shoes at the door.

Larger than life, the image of Nerno's chrysalis filled the center of the room, illuminating it. Victoria had kept the same image, much smaller, hovering nearby all day while she worked.

Nothing had changed.

The image overlapped the boxes that remained stacked in random piles in the main room. J.D. had not been here long enough to unpack all her belongings.

Victoria felt comfortable with J.D., and fond of her. It surprised her to remember how brief a time the alien contact specialist had been on board the stars.h.i.+p.150 J.D. sat in the windowseat, leaning against the side so she could look out the window or at Nerno's image. She had arranged a few things around her: some of her books, a reading light limpeted to the wall, the woven mat Satos.h.i.+ had given her at her welcoming party. The light was off; J.D.'s attention was on the image of Nemo.

Zev joined her, sitting right-angled to her in the center of the cus.h.i.+oned seat.

Victoria smiled. "You look comfy."

"I feel so strange," J.D. said. "Like I've had too much to drink. I was saying silly things to everybody I saw. I thought I'd better hide out till I felt like myself again."

"Your system's taking a bit of a shock," Victoria said. "I got so involved in a.n.a.lysis-I should have come by to see you earlier."

"I'm okay. Come sit down."

Victoria perched on the other side of the windowseat, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. Zev's body radiated heat.

Stephen Thomas will be like that, soon, Victoria thought.

Zev curled his feet over JDA; his claws gently dimpled her skin above the instep.

"I know the prep is working," J.D. said. "But I don't feel any change in my link."

"Arachne's not set up to dump more information to a person than the regular link can handle," Victoria said. "Not . . . not under normal circ.u.mstances."

The safeguards had not worked for Feral. It should have been impossible, but somehow Arachne had overloaded him. His blood pressure had soared, so fast and hard that it blasted open his arteries, his capillaries. The bleeding had simultaneously crushed his brain, and starved it.

J.D. was attempting something very risky.

"Please tell Nemo to be careful when you try this," Victoria said. She knew better than to ask J.D. to reconsider. 151."I will. Don't worry." Her gaze drifted to the image of the chrysalis.

"It's so quiet," she said. "I got used to the attendants always fluttering around. Did you notice, you could always hear them even if you couldn't see them?"

"No," Victoria said. "I guess I wasn't in the nest long enough."

They talked for a while about Victoria's a.n.a.lysis of Nerno's center. Zev sat between them. Despite his youth, his exuberance, he was content to listen and watch in silence and without trying to draw their attention to himself. He impressed Victoria more and more, the longer she knew him.

"Is it what you thought?" J.D. asked. "Neutronium?" Something had to give the planetoid its ma.s.s. normal asteroid its size would have negligible gravity.

person would be able to leap off its surface and orbit it before coming down again.

"I don't think so," Victoria said. "I think the gravity source . . . the power source . . . is even more dense."

"A black hole?" J.D. exclaimed.

"Economy quantum sized."

"Pick one up in any hardware store," J.D. said dryly.

"Right. Plus a nice iron sh.e.l.l for it to eat, a drip charge, and an electrostatic field generator. . . . But what the h.e.l.l do you do to it to make it carry you around the galaxy?"

"A mere trifle," J.D. said.

They fell silent. A pleasurable tension rose between them; the affection and possibility Victoria always felt around J.D. increased. She extended her hand to J.D. J.D. gazed at her, then enclosed Victoria's long dark fingers in her strong square hand.

"Is everything all right?" J.D. said. "I mean She gestured with her free hand, encompa.s.sing all of Starfarer.

"I wanted it all to be perfect," Victoria said softly. "We'd take off with a fanfare, and explore, and come back with . . . I didn't know what, but some treasure.152 Not a material treasure, an intellectual one." She rested her forehead against her knees. "Some fanfare. Some treasure." She looked up again; if she did not hide her face maybe she could keep from crying. "And I'm worried about my family back home, my great-grandmother especially. I wish you'd gotten to meet her. I wish she'd come on the expedition."

"She'll be all right," J.D. said, her voice rea.s.suring. "They won't blame our families for what we've done. Surely."

"Grangrana has no way of knowing if we're still alive," Victoria said.

"She'll be so worried. . . . And Satos.h.i.+'s parents. They're wonderful.

They'll stand up for us. But they'll be scared for us, too."

"What about Stephen Thomas? Doesn't he have family back home, too?"

"Just his dad. I mean, I guess he could find his mom if he really wanted to, but he never has. And Greg is . . . kind of self-centered. He knows all the right b.u.t.tons to push." She sighed. "I try to like him, I really do.

But it's hard to get worked up over worrying about him."

J.D. squeezed Victoria's hand.

"And I miss my cat!" Victoria said suddenly. "No matter what I said to Alzena, I couldn't persuade her to let me bring Halley along." Sometimes she dreamed of petting the sleek black cat; she would wake remembering the soft vibration of Halley's silent purr. Victoria laughed. "Isn't that ridiculous? Everything that's happened, and I think about missing my cat!"

"It's all right," J.D. said. "It's understandable."

"You don't need to hear all this!" Victoria said. "I meant to come and see how you're feeling, not to whine all over you." She let go of J.D.'s hand and pulled herself back, hugging her knees. In a moment she would leave.