Metaphase. Part 24

He put his foot in her lap. She rubbed it, ma.s.saging.178 his sole and stroking her fingertips up the sharp strong tendons. She bent down and nipped his toe gently. Satos.h.i.+ yelped in surprise.

"I'm starved!" Victoria said. "Is there anything to eat?"

"Not much," Satos.h.i.+ said. "I made some rice."

Victoria had never warmed to the Hawaiian custom of having white rice with practically every meal.

She jumped up and opened the refrigerator.

"Don't-"

"Wasn't there a tomato in here someplace?" Victoria said. "I could broil it."

She picked it up. It collapsed in her hand.

She made a sound of disgust.

All the vegetables were wilted, the leftovers moldy. The housekeeper had kept the kitchen clean, too, and before Feral came to stay with them they had kept very few perishables around. They never had time to cook, and none of them was very good at it. They had ordered most of their meals from the central cafeteria.

"This is awful," Victoria said.

"I know."

"Why didn't you throw it out?"

"Because I don't know if the recycler's coming. There's a big empty hole in Arachne where the schedule ought to be. I figured the stuff wouldn't smell too bad if we kept it cold."

"Oh," Victoria said. She put the squishy tomato back in the refrigerator.

"We've got to do something with it. Do you know how to make a compost heap?"

"In theory."

"Maybe we'd better try it. But I've got to have some breakfast. I'm going over to the cafeteria, want to come?"

"Sure. Shall I get Stephen Thomas?"

"Do you know where he is? All I've seen of him since yesterday is his muddy tracks in the bathtub."

Satos.h.i.+ hesitated. "He's sleeping in Feral's room."

"In Feral's room? Is somebody with him? Why didn't he use his own room?" 179."He's alone."

Victoria stared at him in disbelief.

She strode down the hallway to the spare room. The guest room. The room that should have been Merry's, but never was. She could not think of it as Feral's. He had been a guest, an acquaintance, a pa.s.sing fancy for Stephen Thomas. Not a member of the family, not even a friend. Not yet.

I don't make friends in two weeks, Victoria thought. Even Stephen Thomas doesn't make friends in two weeks.

She opened the door without knocking, went to the window and pulled the curtains open, and in the flood of light sat on her heels at the edge of the futon.

When she saw Stephen Thomas she drew away sharply, lost her balance, and sprawled backward. She caught herself and knelt beside him.

He lay with one hand over his face, his fingers spread, the translucent webs spread between them. The webs had grown all the way to the second knuckle on each finger. Even his hands had grown. The fine gold pelt surrounded his arm and shoulder like the auras he claimed to see. He had always been so fair: now his skin was deep amber, far darker than his gold hair.

"Stephen Thomas!"

He drew his hand down from his face, opened his eyes, and looked at her blankly. Concern overcame her moment's incoherent, absurd relief that the color of his eyes had not changed. His blank look scared her.

The changing's gone wrong, she thought in terror. He's changed- She loved him and she found him exasperating, often both at the same time.

If the change were to obliterate his personality . . .

He blinked, and he was suddenly Stephen Thomas again.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "What time is it?"

"It's about eight." She answered the answerable question first. A flare of sheer relief heated her irritation. "What are you doing in here?"180 "Trying to sleep," he said, and spread his strange, changed, webbed hand over his face again.

"Wake up!" The fear he had given her only made her angrier.

"All iight, I'm awake."

Satos.h.i.+ appeared in the doorway, worried.

"Why are you sleeping in here? Why not in your room? Why not with us? Where have you been?"

"Take it easy," Satos.h.i.+ said. After a moment Victoria realized he was talking to her, not to Stephen Thomas.

"I don't much feel like taking it easy right this second," she said to Satos.h.i.+. "I want to know-"

"Which question should I answer first?" Stephen Thomas said.

"I don't care!"

"I'm sleeping here because I wanted to. I never did, you know . . . or maybe you don't know."

"It didn't make any difference to me if you did or didn't," Victoria said, "when Feral was alive. But now . . ."

"Where I've been is in the wild cylinder. In a thunderstorm-"

"A thunderstorm!" That was impossible.

"Digging a grave."

"A grave . . . T' Victoria said. "You can't meanYou took his body, all by yourself?"

Victoria's distress was as strong as her anger. She could not bear to think of Stephen Thomas all alone with his grief, burying his friend, and she wanted to have been there, so she too could say goodbye to Feral.

"What about the rest of us?" she cried. "What about his friends, what about J.D.T'.

"Gerald said forget about a funeral," Stephen Thomas said. "He wanted Feral just to lie there forever in the morgue! I couldn't stand it. Besides, n.o.body else thought about him."

"Stop it, Stephen Thomas, that isn't fair," Satos.h.i.+ said.

"But n.o.body did anything. n.o.body else had even 181.opened his files to see what Feral wanted, if something happened."

He pushed himself up on his elbows. The gold glow covered his chest and belly. His face and his neck remained bare. Victoria wondered where his necklace was; she had seldom seen him without it. At the center of his collarbone, slightly thicker, slightly darker hair formed a thin line that streaked down his body, stopped just above his navel and started against just below it, and disappeared beneath the bedclothes.

Victoria sat on the edge of the futon. Satos.h.i.+ joined them, sitting crosslegged on the foot of the bed.

"We didn't have time," Victoria said. "When did we have time?"

"Yesterday," Stephen Thomas said. "Last night. And not just us. Anybody could have looked for his will, the whole time we were gone. n.o.body did."

"It's awful that he died." Victoria felt unfairly put on the defensive.

"It's a tragedy. In the cla.s.sic sense of the word. If he'd done as I asked-"

"He couldn't! I knew he couldn't. Why didn't you?"

"How could you know? You're trying to beat me up with twenty-twenty hindsight."

"I'm not trying to beat you up at all. I'm trying to tell you where I was and what I was doing and why I was doing it."

"And why I'm responsible for Feral's death."

"No," he said. "No, I'm not blaming you. But I'm not letting you blame him, either. He knew the risks, he chose to take them, he couldn't do anything else."

She said, again, doggedly, "If he'd done as I asked-"

"We'd still be back at Tau Ceti," Satos.h.i.+ said.

"But we could always take another run at the transition point."

"A hundred light-years behind Europa and Androgeos," Stephen Thomas said.

"We never would have caught them. We might even have gotten stranded back there."182 "I thought you wanted to stay back there," Victoria said. "To try to colonize the planet."

"What if I did? I didn't block consensus. Feral was trying to help you do what you wanted. Uphold Starfarer's charter. Catch the alien s.h.i.+p-"

"And a lot of good it did us!"

"Don't try to tell me Feral died for nothing!" Stephen Thomas shouted.

"I don't want to hear that Feral died for nothing!"

He threw off the blankets and lunged out of bed, sleek and lithe as an otter. Victoria stood up, unwilling to let him flee the discussion.

"Ow! s.h.i.+t!" Stephen Thomas yelped in pain and sat down hard.

He grabbed his toes and rocked back and forth, his teeth clenched.

Victoria stared at him. Satos.h.i.+ hurried to his side, reached toward him, hesitated, then put one arm around his shoulders.

"What-T'

"Nothing. Nothing at all," Stephen Thomas said. "It's just that all my f.u.c.king toenails are falling out."

His little toenail had disappeared; the next largest hung by a thread of connective tissue. His toes were as bruised as if he had dropped a rock on his feet. He wiggled his big toenail, and the next two in turn, each successively looser. Victoria felt a little sick. Stephen Thomas took the hanging toenail between his thumb and forefinger.

"Don't-" Satos.h.i.+ said.

Stephen Thomas pulled the toenail off.

Stephen Thomas put the toenail, s.h.i.+ny with the transparent polish he used, on the narrow shelf at the headboard of the futon frame. Then he bent over his bruised toe and poked at it, oblivious to Satos.h.i.+, who sat back away from him, and to Victoria. She felt ill and angry at the same time. He was so good at deflecting arguments-not defusing them, as Satos.h.i.+ did, but deflecting anger away from himself and setting up a situation where anger was no longer appropriate, no longer acceptable, and the argument could never be resolved. 183.Beneath the toenail, the bruised end of his toe had begun to form a valley, a cavity, where a claw would grow. It would interest her, in an intellectual way, if the foot the claw was growing on belonged to a body with which Victoria was less intimately familiar.

Even angry with Stephen Thomas, Victoria felt the attraction of his powerful s.e.xuality.

"Are you done grieving now?" She forced her voice to remain so neutral that her tone came out cold, and hard.

Stephen Thomas's shoulders stiffened. He stared at his foot, then glanced at Satos.h.i.+, then turned to Victoria.

,,No," he said. "No, I don't think I am."

"I know you liked him! But you barely knew him. I knew him better than you did-"

"You knew him longer than I did. Not better."

"Next I suppose you'll say the same thing about Merry."

Stephen Thomas looked confused. "What does Merry have to do with this?"

"Nothing. Except that Merry was our partner and Feral was our acquaintance, and it seems to me that you're grieving a lot harder for Feral."

Stephen Thomas stood up slowly, gingerly, balancing precariously on his abused feet, and walked out of the room.

Victoria wanted to scream, or apologize, or crywhat she really wanted was for Stephen Thomas never to have received the changing virus, and for Feral and Merry never to have died.

She followed Stephen Thomas as far as the doorway. He was halfway down the hall to his room. In the dim light the new gold pelt was invisible, but it made his outline fuzzy.

He disappeared into his room.

Victoria glanced back at Satos.h.i.+, expecting him to tell her what she deserved to hear: that she had been far too hard on Stephen Thomas.

"I shouldn't criticize him for his feelings," she said,184 before Satos.h.i.+ could speak. "Your feelings are your feelings. He can't help being so open. . . ."

"I hate what's happening to him," Satos.h.i.+ said abruptly.