Metaphase
Page 2
J.D. continued onward. When the guide thread quivered, when she thought she heard the scrabble and scuffle of small feet on the silken floor, she forced herself to maintain her deliberate pace. Whatever or whoever she was following, she did not want to scare it again.
Why are the squidmoths taking the risk of welcoming us? J.D. asked herself. We're outcasts, and our invitation to interstellar space has been withdrawn. Europa fled so she and Androgeos wouldn't be cut off along with us. The same thing might happen to the squidmoths.
Europa had spoken of the squidmoths with contempt and dismissal. Were they so isolated, so lonely, that they would take such a risk just to talk?
The light grew brighter, and the tunnel surface more convoluted, with strands and sheets of silk stretching and overlapping in all directions. The tunnel abruptly ended, several meters up the side of a huge chamber. J.D. stood at the top of the slope, gazing out at a visual cacophony of glowing lines and overlapping, curving, rippled membranes. She felt as if she had walked into a sculpture made of light.
The light-bearing cables focused here. The silk carried the light of Sirius from the surface of the planetoid to the center of the web, softening its harshness while its brilliance remained, shedding a bit of its energy burden on its way into the depths. J.D. had reached a focus of the illumination.
"This is amazing." Satoshi's voice was soft, but excited. He was a geographer: his work involved mathematical analyses of the interaction of people with the environments they created for themselves. J.D. suspected that Satoshi would be studying alien beings who created every detail of their surroundings.
The slope was steeper than the previous descents. J.D. climbed down the soft rumpled silk. The guide thread disappeared into the most concentrated light.
J.D. steadied herself, grasping a glowing, wrist-thick strand. Her suit registered warmth, but her glove protected her from the sensation. This was like swimming with the orcas in a wet suit: removed, alienated.
Interleaved silk curtains curved around the concentration of light. J.D. moved carefully between the soft, bright sheets of fabric, hoping she was not entering a maze. The mazes of Europa and Androgeos had been quite enough.
The guide thread led her in a switchback pattern of arcs: between two curtains, to the edge of one, around the edge, along the next closest arc to the center. The lifeline unreeled behind her, creasing the end of each successive curtain.
J.D. rounded a final curtain and stepped out into an irregular area formed by the overlapping draperies.
A tiny creature, trailing a glossy black thread, riffled across the floor and vanished beneath a sheer membrane. The membrane fluttered, then smoothed itself against a massive form.
J.D. saw the squidmoth.
"My god," Satoshi said, in amazement.
Victoria's response was feeling, rather than words: a deep, astonished joy flowed from Victoria, through Arachne, to touch J.D.'s internal link.
"J.D., it's wonderful!" Zev said.
Stephen Thomas said nothing.
Strangely enough, J.D. had no doubt that she had come into the presence of one of the intelligent beings who inhabited this starship. Back on Europa's ship, in familiar, Earthlike surroundings, J.D. had wondered if she should try to converse with everything: the ground cover that surrounded the landing platform, the aurochs that had chased her up a hillside, the meerkats who had watched her flee. When she finally encountered Europa
and Androgeos, who were very nearly ordinary human beings, she was shocked beyond words.
"Hello," J.D. said to the squidmoth. She stopped, and waited.
The squidmoth said nothing.
It Jay in the focus of the light-conducting curtains, bathed in a bright and gentle illumination. Light that would have driven off an ordinary ocean creature heightened the vivid peacock iridescence of its skin. And yet its shape did hint at an origin in the sea.
The alien's body was at least three meters long, and probably much bigger. It lay cushioned and cradled and partly concealed within and beneath the folded layers of silken web. Its glossy, leathery body flattened at each side into membraneous fins, where the guide-thread creature had vanished. The edges of the fins rippled gently, exposing feathery undersides and delicate jointed appendages. Vestigial legs? Gills, and legs that would be functional in very low gravity, or underwater? J.D. resisted making assumptions. The squidmoth did not look like it walked anywhere, ever, for its fluted lower body disappeared into the wrinkled floor. It looked like it had grown from the chamber, as if it were the intricate exposed root of some life form even larger and more complicated.
J.D. took a step toward it, cautious, moving slowly, keeping her hands in plain view.
She wondered if the being even understood hands. The squidmoth itself had tentacles, a number of short, thick ones and three long, slender ones.
The long tentacles lay in a coiled and tangled mass before the being. A creature the size of JDA hand scuttled down the curtain beside the squidmoth. Scaled skirts hid its legs; its carapace bore an explosion of feathery plates.
The end of one of the squidmoth's long tentacles writhed free, rising like a snake, probing the air. The tentacle caressed and guided the creature toward a large silken pouch that lay crumpled on the floor. Finally, the creature burrowed beneath the edge of the pouch, and inside.
"Thank you for the invitation to visit you," J.D. said. The skin above the squidmoth's tentacles shifted and wrinkled. The leathery, peacock-blue skin split-J.D. started-and opened. A narrow flap of skin wrinkled upward, and the squidmoth gazed out at her through a row of glittery, faceted eyes. The wrinkled skin circled the bulge above the being's tentacles. J.D. tried not to assign familiar body parts to a creature built on a completely different body plan from any she was familiar with. For all she knew, she was approaching the being from behind, the tentacles were its feet, the vestigial, segmented legs were its hands, and the eyes sparkling at her from beneath the mobile brow were sensors of smell or hearing or some sense she did not even possess.
But she found it very hard not to think of the bulge as the squidmoth's head, the tentacles as its organs of manipulation.
Slow down, she told herself; she was giddy with joy and apprehension. Hold on. Remember how embarrassed you were, when you were a kid and you finally looked up horseshoe crabs in the field guide: the long pointy thing was the tail, not its sensors or its whiskers.
J.D. took another hesitant step toward the alien being.
"Hello," she said again.
A voice transmission whispered into J.D.'s suit radio.
,, Do not fear me," said the same flat voice that had invited Starj~rer to visit it.
"I don't," J.D. said. "Yes, I do. A little. Can you hear me?" She was broadcasting through her suit radio, but broadcasting might not be necessary if the squidmoth could hear her through her spacesuit.
Do squids have ears? she asked herself. She had no idea; even if they did, that would not mean the alien being followed any similar specifications.
"My vibratory sense responds to very low frequencies."
"Then you don't hear me-but you receive my radio transmissions." "I receive your transmissions."
J.D. moved a few steps closer to the squidmoth, fascinated. She wanted to ask a hundred questions at once. Remembering how disinclined Europa and Androgeos had been to answer any questions at all, she decided to take things slowly.
She understood the "squid" part of the being's name, but not why Europa had called the being a squidmoth. Moth, because of its vestigial legs? Then why not form the second part of its name from some sea-living arthropod, a crab or a shrimp or a lobster?
The being's eyelid opened widest in the direction facing J.D. Beneath it, several small round faceted eyes peered steadily at her. More of its eyes-J.D. could not help but think of them as eyes-glittered through the half-closed edges of the eyelid. J.D. deliberately moved to the side as she approached the being. Instead of shifting its position, the squidmoth rippled its
eyelid open farther toward the back of its head. It must have vision in a complete circle.
"How do you communicate with other sq-" J.D. caught herself in time-"with others of your kind?"
"I communicate with all intelligences as I communicate with you."
Its tentacles moved. The row of short tentacles quivered, and their tips oscillated in a wave that began at one side before it ended on the other, so that two different waves moved along its shorter proboscises. The squidmoth looked like it had a thick, rubbery mustache.
The tips of the three long tentacles rose like the heads of snakes. One moved absently to the pouch on the floor, guiding a small silk-spinning creature across its surface to lay new threads in a bright pattern.
J.D. was nearly ten meters from the squidmoth. Its tentacles shifted and untangled, coiled and writhed.
She thought she had stopped well out of its reach.
She was wrong.
The tentacles whipped toward her. J.D. gasped and jumped back, surprised and frightened. The tentacles
stopped short. They were not yet fully extended; they could reach her. Trembling, J.D. forced herself to stand still.
A month ago, a week ago, she would have been surprised, but she would not have been scared. Meeting Europa and Androgeos had profoundly changed J.D.'s assumptions about what the citizens of an interstellar civilization would be like.
Did you expect them to be perfect? she asked herself, with a tinge of sarcasm. She answered her own question: Yes. I did.
She took a deep breath and moved a step closer to the squidmoth.
"I'm sorry," she said. "You frightened me."
The ends of the tentacles rose, weaving like mesmerized cobras. J.D. held her ground. The tentacles bore no obvious sensory organs: no eyes or orifices, no hands or fingers. Instead, the tips looked soft, furry, feathery, cloaked in a corona of iridescent purple fur.
Sensory cilia? J.D. wondered.
"I frightened you by moving toward you."
The squidmoth's voice remained flat, expressionless, and uninflected.
"You frightened me by moving without warning me," she said, treating its statement as a question. "You frightened me by coming so close, so fast." The tentacles drew back.
Great, J.D. thought. Now I've offended it.
"You prefer more distance."
"I prefer more warning. What do your tentacles do?"
"They touch."
"My hands do that for me." She extended her arms, spreading her gloved fingers.
"I know that."
"Do you know everything about us?" She could not help but think, What's the point of my coming here, what's the point of the deep space expedition, if Civilization already knows more than they ever wanted to know about us?
J.D. had spent her adult life preparing to be the first human to meet aliens. But she was not the first. Europa and Androgeos had preceded her, by thirty-seven hundred years, and that distressed her more than she wanted to admit.
"No, but I want to," the squidmoth said.
J.D. smiled. She still had some knowledge to offer the alien being.
"We're even, then."
"You want to know everything about you."
"That, too. But I meant I'd like to know everything about you."
She hesitated, wondering how forthright she could be in what she said. In all the years she had thought about making contact with an alien intelligence, she had never thought that the first time she stepped into a room with it, it would be able to converse in English. Back on board Starfarer, J.D. kept programs and diagrams, introductions to humans based on physics, on math, on biology, on art. She had thought about communicating with a being that conversed by color, by smell. Her colleagues had done similar work, even before she joined the department a few weeks back, experimenting and speculating on the difficulties of communication. Some people believed alien beings would be so different from humans that they would never be able to communicate at all.
She could speak with the being, but she might not always understand it.
They could easily misinterpret each other.
"Androgeos said you were . . . reclusive."
"Androgeos never visited me," the squidmoth said.
Lacking the clue of voice inflection, J.D. could not tell whether the squidmoth spoke with regret, with relief, or to offer a neutral point of information.
J.D. felt very calm. Her rush of fear had subsided, leaving enough adrenaline behind to make her hyperaware, sensitive, as if all her nerves extended beyond her skin.
"I'm very grateful for your invitation, and very glad
to visit you," J.D. said. "We haven't made proper introductions. My name is J.D. Sauvage."
"I have no verbal name," the squidmoth said.
"Call it Nemo!" Zev's voice whispered in her ear.
"Shh, Zev!" Victoria said.
"Tell me what that meant," the squidmoth said.
"One of my colleagues suggested that I give youthat I offer you a name," J.D. said. "The name of a famous fictional character."
"I will be Nemo," the squidmoth said.
"I'm glad to meet you, Nemo," J.D. said. "May I come closer?"
In response, the squidmoth drew its long tentacles toward itself. They twisted and tangled, their tips coming together and parting. J.D. followed, till she was barely two strides away. Even this close, she could see no reason for comparing the alien being to a moth. Up close, it did not look all that much like a squid.
It was exquisitely, strangely beautiful. Bits of every iridescent color flecked its peacock skin. Its slender jointed legs splayed out into tiny pointed feet, alternately concealed and exposed by the rippling gills.
For all her resolution, J.D. had begun to analyze the being in familiar terms.
"I would like to touch you," the squidmoth said. Its long tentacles, untangling themselves smoothly, coiled before it, their tips waving as if in a gentle breeze. Its mustache of short proboscises continued to ripple. Again, J.D. hesitated, and she realized just how deeply the alien humans' duplicity had changed her.
Dammit, she said to herself, you may not be able to trust everybody out here completely; you may not be able to be as open as you'd hoped. But you cannot be afraid all the time.
"Very well," she said coolly.
The being extended one long tentacle toward her. The tip hesitated at her foot, then curved over her toes and down around her instep, meeting the floor where her boot sank into the thick soft silk. A second tentacle moved toward her, arching up till it reached the level of
her face. The fine hair of the tip brushed her helmet, with a sound as soft as dust.
"This is not your body."
"It's my space suit," J.D. said. "It carries my air."
"You may breathe this air."
"I know. But the suit also protects me from unfamiliar infections-and protects you from contamination."
"Nothing here will infect you."
"Androgeos said the same thing-but he wouldn't tell me how he was so sure. You'll forgive my fears, I hope. I trusted Androgeos, but my encounter with him was . . . unfortunate, in many ways." Androgeos had tried to steal Victoria's new work on cosmic string. He had tried to take away all Earth had to offer to claim respect within the interstellar community.
"Androgeos is young, and zealous."
"Young! He's thirty-seven hundred years old!"
The squidmoth's tentacle brushed back and forth across J.D.'s faceplate.
The pattern of the rippling of its proboscises had changed: from a single wave-form, moving regularly across its mustache, to a double pattern, two waves starting one at each side, clashing in the middle, adding to each other, canceling.
Could I have perturbed it? J.D. wondered. But the question of contamination must be the first one everybody wants the answer to, and the first question these people must have solved. They've been interacting with each other for millennia.
Maybe I made it mad because I don't want to put my life co
mpletely in its hands.
"Androgeos is young," the squidmoth said again.
J.D. wondered if she heard a tinge of amusement or irony in its voice. Surely not; it was her imagination.
Strangely enough, Androgeos had struck her as young. He was physically young, while Europa had chosen a more mature physical presence.
"Androgeos acts young sometimes," J.D. said.
"We have nothing to fear from each other's symbiotic microbes," the squidmoth said, and waited.
J.D. hesitated. The potential danger was very low.
She and Nemo were products of completely different evolutionary backgrounds. It would make more sense to worry about catching Dutch Elm disease from a tree.
J.D. reached for the seal on her helmet.
"J.D.-" Victoria said, and then fell silent.
J.D. had walked out onto Europa's planetoid, unprotected. She had hesitated then, too, but she had made the decision to trust the alien humans. In several respects, Europa and Androgeos were not trustworthy at all. But when they assured J.D. she was in no danger of catching, or transmitting, a human or environmental pathogen, they had told her the truth. They had probably eliminated every disease in their environment; they were probably in more danger from Starfarer than Starfarer wits from them. And all Stephen Thomas's tests had come out negative.
It would make no sense at all, besides, to throw Earth 4 lifeline in the form of cosmic string, and then wage biological war on whoever responded. The interstellar community had been keeping an eye on the solar system for generations; if they had wanted to eliminate humanity they could have done it long since, easily, without ever being detected.
The only difference between walking unprotected onto Europa's planetoid and taking off her spacesuit in the squidmoth's presence was that here, her surroundings were strange, and there, they had been familiar. And, perhaps, that then she had not known what her hosts would look like, and now, she was in the presence of a supremely alien being.