Metaphase. Part 43

Infinity sat back on his heels. The meerkat walked a few steps on her hind feet, then dropped to all fours and jumped into the center of the towels.

Someone knocked on the front door. "Are you ready?" Kolya asked.

Infinity quickly slid the closet door most of the way shut, hiding the meerkat.

"We're ready."

He and Esther joined Kolya on the front porch.

"This is getting to be a tradition," Esther said, "watching transition from outside-" She cut herself off when she saw Griffith. "Oh . . . are you coming?"

"I'm checked out on the suits," Griffith said, defensive.

"I invited him to come with us," Kolya said. "He's allied himself with the expedition. We should accept that."

Infinity shrugged. "Whatever you want."

"Do you feel better today?" Esther said to Kolya. "You look better." She hugged him, then drew back, startled.

Kolya reeked with the smell of tobacco. Not the sour smell of his sweat, when the nicotine fits had hit him, but the fresh sharp smell of smoke.

"You said you ran out of cigarettes," Infinity said.

"I did," Kolya said, embarra.s.sed. "But . . . I found another source.

Tobacco grows wild. My friend Petrovich discovered it." He gestured toward Griffith.

"But you'd almost quit!" Infinity glared at Griffith. "Some friend you are!"

"Mind your own d.a.m.n business," Griffith said.310 "It is MY- 11 "No, it isn't," Kolya said gently. "I appreciate your concern, my friend.

And you're right, I'd be better off if I'd quit. But I was miserable and sick, and now I'm not miserable and sick. Let's leave it at that."

He set off across Infinity's garden, heading for the access hatch on the other side of the field. Griffith followed him, hurrying to keep up.

Infinity glared after them. Esther took his hand. "Come on," she said.

"He's right. It isn't any of our business."

Without replying, Infinity walked with her through the garden. They avoided the corner where his cactus grew. He was afraid the floods had drowned it.

The path was full of water. A nearby stream had escaped its banks and turned the meadow around it into a pond. The access hatch was underwater.' Kolya and Griffith hesitated at the pond's edge.

"We'll have to find a hatch on higher ground," Kolya said.

"Can't you make the water level go down?" Griffith said to Infinity.

"No."

"But-"

"I can't, " Infinity said. "There was too much snow. It melted too fast.

There's no place else for the water to go. It's flooded the rivers, too."

"You should evacuate some of the water into s.p.a.ce."

"We already lost some when your d.a.m.ned missile hit!"

"It wasn't my missile!"

"Starfarer's a closed ecosystem. If we lose much water, it'll turn into a desert."

"Okay, but doesn't this place have reservoirs? Can't you fill them? Or let the ocean get deeper?"

"All of that's happening," Infinity gave up trying to keep the note of irritation from his voice. "What do you want me to do, bail?"

"Petrovich," Kolya said to Griffith, "the rivers drain 311.into reservoirs and the ocean. As you can see, they're working as fast as they can."

Griffith shrugged. "Lousy planning, then."

"I'm going over to the wild side," Infinity said. "The rest of you can do what you want."

He walked away with his hands shoved into his pockets, his shoulders hunched. After a moment, Esther caught up to him.

"That Griffith can be a pain," she said.

Infinity did not reply.

"Okay, what's wrong?" She splashed through a puddle. "It is Kolya's business whether he smokes."

"I planted it," Infinity said.

"Huh?"

"I planted the tobacco!"

He stopped. Esther stopped, astonished.

"I planted it. There's not that much. I never thought anybody'd use it-I never thought anybody'd find it."

"Why?"

"Because . . . it ought to be there. It belonged in the ecosystem, and it wasn't there. And it was part of the tradition-I know this doesn't make any sense. . . ."

Esther slipped her arm around his waist and hugged him.

"Sure it does," she said.

When J.D. reached Nemo's chamber, the squidmoth was wrestling weakly with another egg case, drawing it slowly inward. J.D. hurried to Nemo's side and helped position the egg case for its journey through Nemo's body.

With each new egg case, Nerno's deterioration continued. The edges of the wings shredded iridescent scales throughout the chamber. They swirled like the snow back on Starfarer, but in drifts of color. Nemo's tentacle twitched spasmodically. The squidmoth's whole body was shrinking in on itself, collapsing in folds of312 VONDA N. MONTYRE.skin and scales. The articulation of the wings, where they joined the body, stood out in sharp relief.

J.D. picked up the last egg case. She took it to Nemo, but hesitated before setting it down.

"Enough, Nemo," she whispered, not using her link. "Isn't it enough?"

She drew a deep breath and knelt down to present the egg case.

Nemo did not respond.

"Nemo-!" she cried, afraid Nemo had died without saying goodbye.

"It is done," the squidmoth said. "The last must go to waste. I have nothing left to give it."

Weak with relief, J.D. looked blankly at the egg case. She was exhausted, too, not from work but from worry. Her mind moved, slowly understanding what Nemo had said.

She put the egg case out of reach of the tentacle, and returned to Nemo's side. The squidmoth's eyes opened and blinked. Instead of their usual faceted glitter, they were dull and dry.

"What happens now?" J.D. said.

"Your help has left us time to talk."

If I leave here this instant, J.D. thought, I can still get back beforeStarfarer enters transition.

Ifl go back . . .

As soon as she realized she would have to decide, she knew she had already made the decision. Nemo had asked her to stay; she would stay.

She sat on the ragged silken floor.

She wondered how long she would be here all alone.

Nemo's wings folded in on themselves, a controlled collapse of the long articulations. The membranes covered Nerno's wrinkled, shriveled body like a shroud.

"I enhanced my link," J.D. said. "Maybe I can communicate the way you do, now. Will you try again? Can you?"

"I can," Nemo said.

Faint patterns appeared in JDA mind.

Nemo poured information into her brain. 313.The world disappeared.

J.D. gasped. She knew she had not shut her eyesbut she could not see, and she could not feel whether her eyes were open or closed. She could not smell the caustic air of Nerno's nest, and she could not hear the glide and scratch of Nerno's attendants. She was blind, and deaf, and her senses of smell and taste and touch and proprioception vanished.

Before she could panic, a point appeared. The simplest geometric shape.

She rotated around it.

It turned into a line. She had been looking at it from its end, no, from within it, an infinite line made of infinite points, each one discrete.

A fractal line of fractional dimension, neither the dimensionless shape of a pure point nor the one-dimensional unity of a perfect line.

She rotated around the line, and the shape metamorphosed again. It twisted and moved, all in the same plane, filling up more and more s.p.a.ce despite having no width, existing in the conceptual realm between a one- dimensional line and a two-dimensional plane.

Nemo rotated her around the plane. She found herself in a landscape of jagged peaks and valleys as the plane torsioned itself into three dimensions, no longer two-dimensional, not yet a solid, but somewhere in between.

s.p.a.ce rotated again. J.D. caught her breath with delight and antic.i.p.ation. She plunged toward the shape Nemo had created.

Now she knew how her mathematician friend had rotated a sphere around a plane.

It was easy. Nemo led her through the dimensions in imperceptible steps.

Sometimes she could not see the differences, but could hear or smell or feel them. Nemo gave her a shape that tasted of citrus in a snowstorm beside a cras.h.i.+ng sea.

J.D. lost count of the dimensions, the sensations. She needed more senses than a human being possessed. She disappeared into the maze of the squidmoth's communication.

She disappeared, but she did not feel lost. ne314 mazes of Europa and Androgeos had confused her. In Nemo's maze, she found herself. the place that represented her in Nemo's universe. She foundNemo. She found the bright new edges-she wondered if a shape of infinite dimension had edges-that represented Nerno's highest art form, the extension of knowledge and understanding.

As it had appeared, the communication faded with inexorable serenity. Her sight and sound returned; her body came back to her.

Nemo lay before J.D., trembling wings bound in a coc.o.o.n of dappled silk.

A few attendants fell in a scatter around the motionless body, their gill-legs contracted against their undersides, each trailing a loose silk thread.

"Nerno-T'

She received no answer. She reached out, carefully, tentatively-the world disappeared again-through her link and through her memory of Nerno's communication, but the squidmoth remained silent, draped in the new coc.o.o.n.

J.D. felt as if her brain had been taken out through her ears, whirled around her head a few times, and reinserted. She waited for the dizziness to subside. As it faded, she expected her new ability to think multidimensionally to fade as well.

To her astonishment, the memories remained clear.

"I wish to give you a gift," Nemo said.

"A gift-!"

She almost demurred; she almost told Nemo that the gift of knowledge exceeded any physical gift the squidmoth might offer.

And then she thought, J.D., are you nuts?

She stroked Nemo's long tentacle. The wings' quivering eased.

"I'll accept your gift with great pleasure," she said.

"You aren't curious about the nature of my gift."

"I'm extremely curious."