“Good-bye for now,” she said.
“J.D.”
She glanced back. “Yes, Nemo?”
“Tell me the questions you seek.”
J.D. smiled. “We won’t know what those are,” she said, “till we find them.”
o0o
Reeling in her lifeline, J.D. left Nemo’s chamber and entered the labyrinth. At the first switchback turn, the line had pressed against the edge of the curtain. When she released it, a dark welt formed. She touched it gently, sorry for the pain she had caused.
Motion fluttered against her fingers. She started and drew back her hand. Several palm-sized flat creatures, the same color as the curtain and camouflaged against it, had snugged up against the place where the cable had lain. Now, as J.D. watched, they flowed over the welt, covered it, and settled against the fabric. The welt vanished beneath a rough line of scar tissue.
J.D. left the labyrinth and hurried through the cathedral corridors, climbing toward the edge of the crater. Now she noticed more of the creatures who maintained the intricate environment that was Nemo. They crept up every wall, spinning, weaving, unweaving; they peered at her with eyespots or antenna from luxurious folds of drapery; they scuttled away before her so all she knew of them was the sound they made when they fled. And always she was aware of the larger creatures beyond the sides of the tunnels, shapes and shadows, the touch of a powerful limb tenting the wall or the ceiling.
Maybe I should think of Nemo as an ecosystem, she thought. Or maybe I need a whole new term.
She passed through the double sphincter that formed Nemo’s airlock, no longer frightened by the monster-organisms that closed in to change the shape of the tunnel.
She started up the long steep hammocks that led to the surface.
The closer she got to the outside, the more deeply the lifeline had cut into Nemo’s fabric. In places, she had to pull it — as gently as she could — from beneath the healing creatures.
At the last place where the lifeline had sunk in, just before J.D. emerged from the crater, a healing creature had fastened itself firmly to both sides of the welt. J.D. pulled on the lifeline, but not gently enough. The creature’s body ripped open. Pale fluid dripped out. The creature’s edges had melded into the wall.
The lifeline fell free.
J.D. stared at the dripping tissue. The dripping slowed, and the fluid solidified. Soon the edges had healed, the walls began to absorb the two halves of the creature, and more healers came to finish covering the welt. J.D. let the lifeline reel in, glad she had reached the last steep slope.
Victoria was waiting for her at the edge of the crater, her slender, compact body radiating energy and excitement. She gave J.D. a hand up the last long step, squeezing her fingers. Behind the gilt surface of her faceplate, she looked amazed, exhilarated, relieved.
A deluge of questions and comments and exclamations poured through J.D.’s earphones. It was as if everyone had waited as long as they possibly could, till she stepped out of the alien being’s home, and then could hold their curiosity no more. J.D. felt a surge of panic. Victoria must have seen it, because she squeezed J.D.’s hand again and opened a voice channel back to Starfarer.
“Come on, folks. J.D.’s had a long afternoon. You saw everything she did.”
The cacophony eased. Someone muttered, “Sorry,” and someone else said, “But it isn’t the same.” That sounded like Chandra, the sensory artist.
“Nevertheless,” Victoria said. “I’m closing down the PA for a while. We can all talk to J.D. when she’s had a chance to collect her thoughts.”
The monitor signals vanished, leaving J.D. in peace and silence.
“Thanks,” J.D. said. “You could have said, ‘Till J.D.’s had a chance to pee,’ but I’m glad you didn’t.”
Victoria chuckled.
“You were fantastic, J.D.” she said. “I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do all that you just did.”
J.D. smiled, exhausted but elated. No matter what happened now, she had begun to make friends with Nemo, with an alien being.
Too many things on the deep space expedition had gone badly up till now. She needed a success. They all did.
“Let’s go in,” Victoria said.
“Okay.”
They retraced their footprints through the dust of the planetoid’s rough surface, returning to the ungainly explorer craft, the Chi.
J.D. unplugged the end of her lifeline from the flank of the Chi and let it snap back into the reel. She unhooked the reel from her suit, and handed it to Victoria.
“From now on,” she said, “I’m working without a net.”
o0o
Outside the spacesuit locker, Zev and Satoshi waited for Victoria and J.D.
“You have a hell of a lot of guts,” Satoshi said.
J.D. knew he meant to offer her a compliment, but she also heard the note of caution in his voice.
“More guts than brains?” she said.
“Maybe,” he said. “But maybe... that’s what the alien contact specialist needs.” He grinned at her, and she smiled back.
“Thanks.”
Satoshi was the most restrained of the three members of the family partnership. Unlike Stephen Thomas, who said whatever he thought, Satoshi more often than not kept his opinions to himself. J.D. valued his rare comments, and rarer compliments.
Satoshi went to Victoria and brushed his fingertips against his partner’s very curly short black hair, smoothing it where her helmet had pressed against it.
J.D. rotated her shoulders and stretched. Zev came to her and hugged her tight. She stroked his fine pale hair, and laid her hand against his cheek.
The diver’s smooth mahogany skin radiated heat. Zev wore only light shorts and a sleeveless shirt, both too big for him, both borrowed from Stephen Thomas, who was nearly thirty centimeters taller than Zev. Zev owned almost no clothing, only a heavy wool suit, part of his disguise for boarding Starfarer. He would have abandoned clothing as quickly as he had abandoned his fraudulent identity, if J.D. had not told him it would be socially unacceptable. He never wore clothes back in Puget Sound.
Zev took her hand between his, spreading his long fingers to enclose her hand between the translucent swimming webs. He looked up at her, his dark eyes bright with excitement.
“When you go back, I want to go with you,” he said. “I want to meet Nemo.”
“We all want that,” Victoria said, her voice intense. “I hope it happens.”
“I do, too,” J.D. said.
Her colleagues had all been disappointed when Europa refused them permission to explore her starship. J.D. hoped the same thing would not happen with Nemo.
“Where’s Stephen Thomas?” J.D. asked.
“In his lab.” Satoshi sounded troubled. He ran his hand through his short black hair. “I’ve hardly seen him all day.”
“I need to talk to him before I go back out.” J.D. was disappointed that he had not joined the others to greet her. She held out the sample bag with the fragment of Nemo’s thread. “And I have a sample for him. Didn’t he see me pick it up?”
“Maybe he thought it was for me, eh?” Victoria said. She grinned. “I would like a piece of it. It looked like it had some interesting optical properties.”
J.D. held out the sample bag to Victoria, embarrassed to admit how much she had wanted to give it to Stephen Thomas herself.
“Tell him not to chop it all up looking for microbes,” Victoria said. “Why don’t you give it to him, and freshen up, and we’ll get ready for the conference and meet you in the observer’s circle?”
“Okay,” J.D. said.
A few minutes later she hurried from her tiny cabin and headed for the Chi’s labs. The labs were larger than the cabins, but still minuscule. J.D. stopped in the doorway of the genetics lab. Stephen Thomas sat at the work bench, staring into the microscope’s holographic image. The image rotated, then flipped over.
Another holographic projection, the image of Nemo’s c
rater, hovered in the air where he could glance up and see it.
“Stephen Thomas,” J.D. said.
“Hi, J.D.” Stephen Thomas straightened and turned, hooking his elbow over the chair back. “That was some expedition.”
He smiled at her.
“Thanks,” she said softly, keeping back everything else she might have wanted to say to him.
He looked drawn and distracted. He had been uncharacteristically silent since they left Starfarer. Of everyone, he was taking Feral’s death the hardest. It broke J.D.’s heart to see him so withdrawn, so deep in shock. Grief concentrated his beauty, rather than fading it, heightening the blue of his eyes and refining the planes of his classic features. He had pulled his long blond hair back and tied it very tight. His skin, so fair a few days ago, continued to darken. Except for the pale new scar on his forehead, his skin now was a smooth café au lait. Eventually he would be the same color as Zev: dark mahogany, deep brown with a reddish sheen.
“I brought you a sample.” J.D. held out the sample bag. “There’s not much of it, but it’s less abused than the other one.”
She had inadvertently pulled up a weed from Europa’s ship. If she had not been running away from an aurochs at the time, she probably would have stuck it back in the ground instead of shoving it into her pocket. On the other hand, if she had not been running away from an aurochs, she would not have pulled it up in the first place.
Stephen Thomas accepted the bag. J.D. expected him to react — with excitement, with disbelief that she had picked up no more than a discarded bit, with a profane expression of joy, with some unexpected impulse unique to Stephen Thomas Gregory. When she had given him the battered weed from Europa’s ship, he had kissed her forehead.
This time, he simply held the bag up to the light. The silk caught the illumination and carried it from one end to the other. The tips of the thread glowed blue-white; the length of it shone luminous indigo. Between Stephen Thomas’s fingers, the newly-formed swimming webs glowed pale amber.
“I wonder if Nemo’s microflora is as diverse as the web fauna,” Stephen Thomas said. “This’ll be contaminated... too bad you couldn’t collect it before you got out of your suit. People just emit bacteria like crazy. But it shouldn’t be too hard to separate the alien bugs...”
“I’m sorry.” J.D. blushed, both annoyed and embarrassed by the implied criticism. “I couldn’t just go in and start ripping up bits —”
He shrugged. “Can’t be helped.” He turned toward her again. “Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to have it.”
“If you say so,” J.D. said, and rushed to change the subject. “I want to enhance my internal link. Can I?”
“Sure, but why the fuck would you want to?”
“Weren’t you watching? Weren’t you even listening?”
“Of course I was watching. Why are you pissed off at me? Is everybody pissed off at me?”
“No, of course not, I’m sorry.” J.D. gestured at the floating image. “I want to communicate with Nemo on Nemo’s own terms. So I have to enhance my link. Can I start working on it now?”
“No, I don’t have any prep here.” He frowned. “You’ll have to ask Professor Thanthavong if she can mix some up for you in the biochem lab. The ready-made stuff was in the genetics building, so it’s under forty tons of rubble.”
“Oh,” J.D. said, disappointed. “Okay. I’ll talk to her.” As soon as I get some sleep, she said to herself. As soon as I can sound coherent. Though Professor Thanthavong was usually pleasant and invariably at least civil, J.D. always felt intimidated by the idea of walking up to a Nobel prize winner and talking to her as if she were an ordinary person. Miensaem Thanthavong was not ordinary.
“Just how much are you planning to enhance the link?” Stephen Thomas said.
“As much as I can.”
He knit his eyebrows. “You won’t like it. You’ll be a zombie whenever you use it. The synapses have to feed in somewhere, they’ll take over all your other senses.”
“I don’t care,” J.D. said. “It’s important.” Her link warmed in the back of her mind, notifying her of a message. “Excuse me a second.” Her eyelids fluttered. As she went into a communications fugue, she thought, most of us close off the rest of the world when we use our link, so what does it matter?
She accepted the message. Nemo’s characteristic signal touched her mind.
“Nemo! Is everything all right?”
“The attendants are prepared,” Nemo said.
“Does that mean — Are you willing to meet my colleagues? Can we visit you?”
“Yes, you may visit.”
J.D. opened her eyes. “That was Nemo! Come on!”
Without waiting to explain, J.D. ran out of the lab.
Chapter 3
J.D. tweaked her metabolic enhancer again. It flooded her body with extra adrenaline, hiding her exhaustion. She led the way to the edge of Nemo’s crater.
“It looks different,” Victoria said.
“It is,” J.D. said.
The surface had changed, and the entrance. The tunnels were rewoven, reformed. If J.D. had left her line in the nest, it would not simply have cut into the edges of Nemo’s curtains. It would have grown into the fabric of the nest itself, like gravel in a wound.
Satoshi knelt at the edge of the crater and peered down the new slope.
“There’s our guide,” he said. “One of the lifeliners.”
They followed the creature’s thread downward. The lifeliner ambled before them, no longer trying to hide.
“The route’s easier,” J.D. said, with wonder. “Nemo remade all the tunnels.” They were higher, the slopes shallower. She never had to stoop. She let her eyelids flicker, touched her internal link, and sent a quick message of thanks to Nemo.
“I rebuild all the time,” Nemo said.
J.D. hurried between the pearly gray curtains. Without the lifeliner, without its thread through the labyrinth, she would be lost.
“It’s beautiful,” Zev said. “It’s like anemones.”
“Anemones?” J.D. said. “How do you mean?”
“On the curtains.”
“Look at it in the ultraviolet,” Stephen Thomas said. “It’s like flowers. Jungle.”
J.D.’s suit obediently displayed Nemo’s web in the UV.
The web exploded.
Intricate patterns whirled into alien plants and surged with violent blossoms. Auroras chased themselves in spirals that expanded to cover every surface, then diminished to a single point, and vanished.
Dazzled, J.D. took a step forward and ran into a silken wall. Victoria grabbed her arm and steadied her.
“Whoa, careful.”
She stopped and closed her eyes and canceled the suit display. When she looked again, the storm of color had vanished and the path lay clear before her again, winding between the curtains and their invisible decorations, their camouflage.
“Wow,” she said softly. “That’s something.”
“It sure is,” Victoria said.
“Can you see it?” Satoshi asked Stephen Thomas. “I mean, like Zev? Without the suit display?”
“Yeah,” Stephen Thomas said. “I can see it.”
The path spiraled deeper into the crater. They reached the airlock. As the shadows outside bore down on the walls, Satoshi cupped his hands against the translucent tunnel.
“Damn, I wish I could see them!”
The pocket filled with air; sound returned.
The interior end of the airlock relaxed and opened. They continued to the central chamber. The maze of curtains around Nemo remained, but the chamber extended farther upward, and the curtains reached to its ceiling. In single file, the members of the alien contact department followed the lifeline through Nemo’s maze.
The gossamer thread ended. J.D. entered Nemo’s chamber. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and Zev came in behind her.
“Hello, Nemo.” J.D. unfastened her helmet. The thick, smelly air displaced the
tasteless air of her support system.
Nemo’s eyelid rose; the faceted eyes glittered. Nemo’s central tentacle snaked out and grasped J.D.’s wrist. She gripped it, her fingers closing around silky fur. The tentacle felt hot, like the tail of a cat basking in the sun.
“These are my friends, my colleagues,” J.D. said to Nemo.
“Welcome,” Nemo said.
“Thank you,” J.D. said.
The others took off their helmets. J.D. had warned them of the exhaust-fume smell, and they had seen the LTM analyses. Stephen Thomas wrinkled his nose in distaste, and Zev sneezed.
“Tell me if you thought new things,” Nemo said.
“I sure did,” J.D. said. “We all did.” She and her companions removed their spacesuits and left them at the edge of the inner chamber. J.D. approached the squidmoth. “How are you? Did you think new things, too?”
“I thought of some old things,” Nemo said.
“I want to introduce my friends,” J.D. said. “Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, who’s the head of the alien contact department, and a physicist. She discovered how to use the cosmic string to enter transition.”
“I am glad to meet you, Victoria,” Nemo said.
The long central tentacle snaked out and hovered. Victoria extended her hand, and Nemo laid the soft tip of the tentacle in her palm. She shivered.
“I’m glad to meet you, too, Nemo,” Victoria said through her internal link.
“Here’s Satoshi Lono. He’s a geographer. He studies how communities interact with their environments. And Stephen Thomas Gregory, who studies genetics. And this is my friend Zev. Zev is a diver.”
Nemo went through the new greeting ritual with each of J.D.’s colleagues in turn.
“You’re the ichthyocentaur,” Nemo said to Zev.
“That’s what Europa called me,” Zev said. “But the word means I’m part fish. I’m not.”
“You are different from J.D.,” Nemo said.
“Of course. I’m a diver, and J.D.’s still a regular human being.”
J.D. was touched that he used the word “still.” She would probably always regret turning down the chance to become a diver that Zev’s mother had offered her.
The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus Page 68
