Metaphase. Part 33

"Yeah," Stephen Thomas said. "It hangs out like that all the time. But I guess . . . it won't for long. Does it . . . T' He took a deep breath. "I guess you don't know if it falls off, or withers away, or He stopped, confused. "But Victoria said-"

"It won't do either," Zev said. "I don't think it will. It will just go inside."

Though Zev had no idea what stages Stephen Thomas would have to go through to become a diver, he knew-he was an example of-the result. He explained to Stephen Thomas about internal genitals, and then he showed him.

"It's more streamlined," he said. "All aquatic mammals are like this."

"So are a lot of terrestrial mammals," Stephen Thomas said. "But not ordinary humans. It never occurred to me. . . ."

Now, at least, some of the pain made sense. If his body was creating a place for internal genitals . . .238 "You're a lot different than I thought," Zev said. "I knew you kept your s.c.r.o.t.u.m outside-that's so silly, you have to work so hard not to be fertile-but I didn't know you kept everything outside." He shrugged cheerfully. "I didn't know men humans looked so different from women humans. Divers don't."

Stephen Thomas let himself slide into the water until it covered him completely. He wondered how long he could stay submerged. He wondered if he could breathe underwater yet. He tried to take a breath.

He jerked upright, choking and coughing and gasping for air, just like last time.

Zev watched him, bemused.

"What are you doing?"

Stephen Thomas flung his wet hair out of his face. "Trying to breathe underwater."

"Why?"

"To see if I could. Maybe I don't want to come up."

"You shouldn't breathe underwater unless you have to," Zev said.

"Why not?"

"Your lungs get full of water. It's hard work, and it isn't very good for you. It's just to save your life if you get stuck. You get enough oxygen to keep your brain from dying till somebody finds you. You can get pneu- monia if you're not careful."

"Great." He coughed and snorted and got rid of the rest of the water.

"Anyway," Zev said, "you should stick your p.e.n.i.s out when you want to pee. Especially if you're living on land, otherwise you'll get all itchy."

"What about s.e.x?"

"Then it sticks out by itself," Zev said solemnly. "Of course."

"Right. Of course." G.o.d, Stephen Thomas thought, I'm blus.h.i.+ng. "Why did it hurt Victoria when we tried to make love in the water?"

"I don't-" Zev cut off what he was going to say, and thought for a minute instead. "Did you try too soon? Were you ready?" 239."Of course she was ready," Stephen Thomas said, irritated. "What kind of a jerk do you think I am?" It annoyed him to have to ask for advice in the first place, but to have Zev act like a teenage s.e.x therapist- "Were you ready?"

"Obviously," Stephen Thomas said sarcastically. But then he went back in his mind and listened to what Zev had just said. "What do you mean by 'ready'?"

"She-"

"Not for Victoria. For me. How would you know if you were ready?"

"I'd be slick, of course," Zev said.

"Oh," Stephen Thomas said. "Oh.

"That doesn't happen to men humans?"

"No.,, "And it didn't happen for you?"

"Not as of this morning."

"You're still changing," Zev said. He patted Stephen Thomas on the arm.

"It'll be better when you're done." He c.o.c.ked his head, thoughtfully.

"You'll have to learn how to retract and extend. I never thought of that."

He jumped up and stood knee-deep in the water. "Come on. Come swimming."

Stephen Thomas pushed himself to his feet. "I can't right now, Zev."

Zev glanced over his shoulder, wistfully, down the river. "Are you okay?

Can you get where you're going by yourself?"

"Sure."

Zev grinned and waved and pushed off backwards. The current caught him. He vanished into the tumble of white water.

Stephen Thomas waded out onto the dry rocks. They were uncomfortably hot.

He slid his feet quickly into his sandals and shook himself off. Droplets scattered from his body. In the bright light, his pelt was white-gold against his darkening skin.

He eased into his shorts, tempted to return to the cool solace of the river. He needed time to think and240 reflect . . . or he needed to be distracted from too much thinking and reflecting.

As he climbed the path, Crimson Ng strode down it, pulling a wheelbarrow.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi. Current project?"

"A new one." Crimson let him look into the wheelbarrow. He expected to see the bones of one of her heavy-boned, long-fanged predators.

The rough slab of stone contained alien shapes, the fossilized soft bodies of creatures never in any vertebrate line. Tentacles writhed and tangled. Eons ago, some violent accident had crushed the feathered legs.

"It looks like-"

"I devolved Nemo," she said. "And invented the rest of the ecosystem."

She gazed past Stephen Thomas to the riverbank, barely aware of his presence. "It's ready to go in the ground. Want to help?"

"No," he said, aware that she was offering him a courtesy. "Thanks. I have to stop by the lab, and then I promised Fsther a stint with the ASes."

"Yeah,' Crimson said. "Right. I should do that, too." She grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and hurried past, instantly oblivious to everything but her work.

The cells from Nemo's s.h.i.+p thrived in growth medium. Stephen Thomas set to work parceling cultures out for the other departments.

Stephen Thomas tried not to worry about the weird changes in his body; he tried not to dwell on them. It was hard, when what felt like the world's worst sunburn was peeling and itching in his crotch. He could not forget the raw red flesh. Zev's explanation helped, but not much.

He kept imagining that his genitals had drawn up inside his body.

Imagining, h.e.l.l! he thought. 241.He knew if he scratched himself, it would just start hurting.

I'd rather have the pain than the d.a.m.ned itching, he thought. But when he remembered the pain, he changed his mind.

He surrounded himself with images: Nerno's chamber, a recording of the cell growth, a micrograph of the huge dendritic molecules. He brought the cell growth image closer, and speeded up its replay.

The cells grew in a snowflake-shaped colony, stretched out in a network of interconnecting processes. The pattern was clearer in two dimensions than in three. In three, the concentric layers obscured and confused the lacy structure.

He let the cell colony recede and studied the strange three-dimensional polymers that he suspected of being the alien cell's genetic material.

He could not figure them out. The magical beauty of DNA was that its structure implied its means of replication: simple, elegant, self-evident.

The double-stranded molecule split; the dividing cell recreated the missing half of each strand, using the strand itself as a map for its mirror image.

Dendritic molecules, though, were both more complicated and, ordinarily, simpler: structurally more complicated, but with less room for variation within the structure. He could figure out how they could form. But he couldnot figure out how they replicated. If they replicated. And he could not yet see a straightforward way of getting genetic information into or out of them.

You have plenty of time, he said to himself. What do you have to show for visits to two alien s.h.i.+ps? One ordinary bit of living bunch-gra.s.s, and a couple of species of alien bacteria. s.h.i.+t, all you have is time. You can afford to dissect a sample atom by atom, if that looks promising.

Stephen Thomas composed a note telling his colleagues that their alien cells were ready. He closed his eyes and linked with Arachne.

The computer opened up to him, serene and limit-242 less, apparently unscarred and undaunted by the system crashes that had crippled it. Arachne's confidence could mislead him into believing nothing had changed. The truth was that the crashes had left invisible pockets of emptiness, as undetectable and as treacherous as snowcovered creva.s.ses in a glacier.

Stephen Thomas sent out his message, then, on impulse, asked Arachne to show him Feral's files.

Feral had specialized in reporting on the s.p.a.ce program. Both Victoria and Satos.h.i.+ held him in high regard as a writer, but Stephen Thomas had read few of his articles. Stephen Thomas had liked Feral for himself.

Feral had left a lot of work on the system. A collection of his finished pieces, written back on Earth. Some slice of life reportage. A long series he called "Life Log." The last installment reported Feral's trip from Earth to the transport to Starfarer. It ended with the communications cutoff before the missile attack. After that, his work lay unfinished, stored in private files.

Someone should put it together and publish it for him, Stephen Thomas thought. If we can get to it.

The names of the files were intriguing. His final "Life Log."

"Resonances: Starfarer. " "Stephen Thomas."

Stephen Thomas asked Arachne to let him into the files. Receiving a polite refusal, he shrugged. He had not expected it to be that easy.

Feral had recorded no will, no next of kin, which could mean that the files were locked forever. But Stephen Thomas was not ready to give up.

He tried the obvious sorts of pa.s.swords: Feral's name, his birthdate.

Stephen Thomas even tried his own name.

Nothing worked.

I'll figure it out, Feral, Stephen Thomas thought.

Reluctantly, he put the locked files away and withdrew from Arachne. He had promised some time to Esther Mein and the artificials. He had better get going.

Mitch sauntered in, looking ridiculously happy.

"Sorry I'm late," he said cheerfully and without a 243.shred of regret. He dragged a chair up beside Stephen Thomas and straddled it.

Stephen Thomas thought, this does not sound like unrequited love anymore.

I wonder . . . ?

"Listen, Mitch-" Stephen Thomas said. "Yesterday. When Fox was here. It all came right out of thin air."

"I know. She told me. And at your house last night, she just wanted to talk to somebody. She sure picked the wrong person." Mitch chuckled. "Boy, is she mad at Florrie."

"That's probably the only thing Fox and I agree on right now," Stephen Thomas said. It hurt that Florrie had junked the connection they had made-that he thought they had made-so readily.

"She's pretty embarra.s.sed, too. I think she's afraid everybody will take your side."

"There aren't any sides! s.h.i.+t, people aren't taking sides! Are they?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. Maybe a little bit."

"Thank you for your incisive a.n.a.lysis. Is Fox okay? Are you?"

"Yeah. She was upset last night, but He shrugged, and grinned, awkward, pleased with himself. "I just sort of patted her till she fell asleep. I sat up with her all night. It was kind of "Romantic?"

Mitch started to answer. He stopped. He laughed with a high, delighted, nasal bark.

"It was cold, is what it was, and along around dawn it got kind of damp.

How come it's so cold at night and so hot during the day? I kept thinking I should wake her up and get her home. And then I wondered how come she could sleep and I couldn't."

"Maybe you should've waked her up long enough to ask to share her jacket."

Stephen Thomas thought, It's still unrequited, but at least this is a little more promising for Mitch than it was before.

"I just hope . . ." Mitch's voice trailed off.

"That you won't get pneumonia?"244 Mitch laughed again. "That from now on, she won't forget my name every time she sees me."

"I don't think you have to worry about that anymore," Stephen Thomas said.

Victoria jammed her shovel deep in the heavy, clayey dirt. Starfarer had not been in existence long enough to develop much good topsoil. Spring rain saturated the ground, and the abnormal heat of the day supersaturated the air with humidity. She turned over a spade full of dirt and broke it up into clumps.