Metaphase
Page 3
Her only reason to refuse was fear: xenophobia.
Recognizing such a reaction troubled J.D. deeply.
Too many bad alien-invasion movies, she said to herself, and then, Bad joke.
She unfastened her helmet. She took it off.
She drew a deep breath.
J.D. started to cough. The air was pungent, musty, reeking of hydrocarbons. It stung her eyes. She breathed shallowly, tempted to seal herself back up with
her own clean air supply. The high oxygen content of Nemo's atmosphere made her giddy.
Once she got used to it, it was about the same as back home in one of the more polluted regions. Spending so much time in the wilderness had spoiled her and weakened her resistance to fouled air.
J.D. unfastened her suit and climbed out of it. She put it carefully on the floor. The LTMs clambered around so they could still see and record her actions. She hoped their resolution was insufficient to capture the trembling of her hands.
Nemo's voice, tinny and indistinct, droned from the helmet. In order to converse, J.D. would either have to wear the helmet without the suit, which struck her as ridiculous, or communicate with Nemo through her direct link. Ordinarily she used the direct link only to communicate with Arachne.
J.D. reached out, cautiously, tentatively, into her link. She could talk with her colleagues via the direct electronic transmission, if she wished, but she usually did not do so. Like many people, she found it discomforting. She did not like the sensation of other people's voices in her head. It took a considerable effort of will to overcome her reluctance and speak directly to Nemo.
"Can you hear me?" she asked.
"I can hear you." Nemo's voice whispered in her mind.
The tentacles of the squidmoth hovered nearby, raising and lowering themselves from the silken floor, twisting and turning as they waited. J.D. faced the squidmoth, moved a step closer, and held out one hand.
The tentacle brushed her palm lightly with its tip. The sensory hairs, soft as fur, quivered against her skin.
J.D. closed her hand gently around the tip of the tentacle. Its motion stilled. Nemo waited, saying nothing. She opened her hand.
The tentacle moved up her arm, curling around her wrist like a snake. Its skin, beyond the fur, felt like suede. Its warmth surprised her. The squidmoth must have a body temperature well above hers, if its appendages felt so warm to the touch. She had unconsciously expected the slick wet coldness of a real squid, the sharp pull of predatory suckers.
Nemo touched her sleeve, exploring it, probing beneath the cuff.
"This is clothing," J.D. said, touching her shirt, her pants. "It's the custom of human beings to wear it most of the time."
Maybe I should strip down, J.D. thought, but I'm not quite ready for that yet.
Nemo touched her palm, her sleeve, her palm again, testing the differences between skin and fabric.
The tip of one tentacle brushed her throat, her lips. She closed her eyes. Fur caressed her eyelids. A second tentacle curled around her waist, gently embracing her. The tip probed at her, tracing the texture of her shirt, touching each button, following the curve of her heavy breasts and coiling softly down her arm. The third tentacle wound around her leg, then its tip traveled up her spine, touching the bump of each vertebra through her shirt.
She opened her eyes. Her lashes brushed against the sensory cilia.
"You detect sensations with these hairs," Nemo said.
"No." She smiled. The squidmoth was trying to make the same kinds of assumptions about her that she was making about it. "That is, I can feel your tentacle, but my eyelashes are for protecting my eyes. Um--do you call this a tentacle?" She brushed her fingers across the soft peacock skin.
"In English, I call it a tentacle."
This time J.D. thought she heard a flash of humor in Nerno's voice. Again, she told herself she must be imagining it.
"I meant, is 'tentacle' an accurate translation of what you call it in your language? What do you call it in yourlanguage?"
"I have no language."
"I don't understand," J.D. said.
"Our communication does not consist of sounds."
"I know, you told me: you use transmissions. But what do you transmit? Words? Visual images? Sensations?"
"A surface of meaning and perception."
J.D. frowned. "A neural visual image?"
"Position, and change of position, within a multidimensional surface of meaning, intensity, rapport between the speakers."
"Multidimensional? More than three dimensions?"
"Many more."
J.D. tried to imagine a more-than-three-dimensional surface; she tried to imagine being shown a more-thanthree-dimensional surface in her mind. An acquaintance of hers claimed to be able to imagine rotating a sphere around a plane, but she had never been able to explain to J.D. how to do it.
"It sounds beautiful," J.D. said.
The squidmoth tentacles twined and curled before her; their tips touched her cheek, her breast, her hand.
"It is beautiful," it said.
"Do you have art forms associated with your communication? The way humans have singing and stories and poetry?"
"It is an art form in itself, whenever a talented one extends the limits and forms new regions and new shapes."
"May I . . . Will you show it to me?"
Without warning, a flash of perception tantalized her brain. She heard sugar dissolving, smelled the pink clouds of a brilliant sunset, sensed the position of a billion raindrops like muscle fibers. She saw a melody of Nerno's vision. Each sensation had its own particular place, its own connections with all the others. More information poured into her. But her internal link acted like the narrow end of a funnel. Nerno's transmission filled the funnel to the brim, and spilled out into nothingness.
J.D. gasped acrid air. She sneezed, and began to cough. Nerno's transmission faded away, and J.D. found herself sitting sprawled on the floor. She buried her
nose in the crook of her elbow, breathing through the fabric of her shirt, forcing herself to take shallow breaths, until her coughing stopped. She wiped her teary eyes.
Nemo lay placidly before her, short tentacles ruffling slightly, long tentacles guiding a frilled, wormy little creature as it spun silver thread in concentric circles.
The radio in her helmet rumbled with a faint hollow sound. J.D. sent an "I'm okay" message back to Victoria and the Chi. The rumbling ceased. J.D. pulled herself together and sat crosslegged near Nemo.
"I didn't understand what you sent me," J.D. said to Nemo. "But you're right, it was beautiful."
"You cannot absorb enough information to gather the complete communication surface," Nemo said.
"Internal links aren't one of our natural senses," J.D. said sadly.
"They're pretty limited."
"it is too bad," Nemo said.
"But any of us can use them to talk to you," J.D. said quickly. "And my colleagues would like to meet you. Would that be possible?"
"I want to become acquainted with one human being, first," Nemo said. "I want my attendants to become familiar with you."
"Your . . . attendants?"
Nemo's fragile legs drummed on the floor. J.D. felt the vibration, and heard a faint thrumming.
She heard the same sound she had heard farther out in the webbing, tiny feet scratching against soft silk. Several small creatures scuttled from beneath the curtains, moving on many legs, and another slithered down a steep slope. They gathered around Nemo, crawling up the iridescent skin. Their dull colors changed and brightened. Like chameleons, they blended into their background. If she watched carefully she could make out their shapes, malleable and indistinct, reaching out with long pincered fingers to groom Nemo's skin. One clambered up the feathery gill-leg, and vanished beneath the fluted fin.
"The attendants are not used to the presence of other beings."
"Oh," J.D. said. She did her best to be diplomatic. "How long will it take?" She wondere
d if she would get a useful answer; she did not even know if Nemo reckoned time in long spans, or short ones.
"I don't know, I've never received a guest before," Nemo said.
"Never?"
"We're solitary beings," Nemo said.
"Does it-does it bother you to have me in your crater?"
"I enjoy unique experiences." Nemo guided the circling creature around the edge of the disk of silk.
"Would you like to visit Starfarer? I don't know if you're mobile or not-" And I have no idea what you might be sensitive about, either, she thought, doubting the brilliance of her spontaneous suggestion. I only know that human beings are most sensitive about what's hardest, or impossible, to change. "You-you or any of your people-would be welcome on board Starfarer, if you cared to visit."
The squidmoth's mustache ruffled, from left to right, then back again. "You inhabit the inside of Starfarer, " Nemo said.
"Yes.,,
"I wouldn't fit inside Starfarer, " Nemo said.
"Oh." She glanced at Nerno's iridescent back, the tail section disappearing into the floor. "How much of you is out of sight?" Anything that could fit inside the crater would fit inside Starfarer, though the logistics could be difficult.
"You see all of me."
"I don't understand," J.D. said.
Nerno's long tentacles touched the silk, the walls.
"All you see is me," the squidmoth said.
"The whole crater?"
"Everything," Nemo said.
"The whole ship?"
"What you call the ship."
That stopped her. She wiped one more unexamined assumption away, embarrassed to have made it without even noticing, and revised her perception of the squidmoth. J.D. had assumed Nemo was her counterpart, the individual who volunteered, or was chosen, to meet an alien being.
She had assumed each of the silky craters held a being like Nemo, each in its own web.
"You're all alone here?"
"I am myself," Nemo said without inflection.
Great question, J.D., she thought. What would you say if somebody asked if you were all alone in your own body? "No, I'm here with a bunch of white blood cells and a liver"? But-no wonder Europa and Androgeos said squidmoths were reclusive! '
She looked around with an even finer appreciation of her environment and all the other species living here, helping to repair and remake the structure, adapted or co-opted to a perfect interaction. . . .
Were they symbionts, or did they correspond to blood cells, or organs?
She was still trying to put names from her own frame of reference, from her own linear language, into a system that corresponded more closely to Nerno's multidimensional communication.
"Who do you communicate with?" she asked abruptly.
"I communicate with whoever speaks to me."
"I meant . . . if you're the only one of your people in the Sirius system, how do you communicate with others? We haven't found any way of sending electronic signals through transition. Can you-T'
She stopped her excited rush of questions and waited impatiently for Nerno's reply. She imagined the anticipation of her colleagues pressing against her link to Arachne.
If Nemo knew how to communicate through transition, the deep space expedition would be able to tell Earth that it had met alien beings. That could change everything.
If we could let them know back on Earth, J.D. thought, that an interstellar civilization really exists . . .
J.D. knew it was Utopian to believe human beings would come to their senses, and end their interminable and dreadful power games, if they knew of a civilization beyond themselves. She knew it was Utopian . . . but she believed it anyway.
And if Starfarer could send back word that it had met other intelligences, the members of the expedition might be forgiven for taking Starfarer out of the solar system against EarthSpace orders.
If they could signal through transition, at the very least they could let their friends and relatives know they had survived the missile attack.
"I am mobile," Nemo said, "like all my people."
"Oh," J.D. said, as suddenly disappointed as she had been elated. "Then you can't signal through transition?"
"No.,,
"Can anyone?"
"No one I know of."
"You go visiting."
"I go visiting," Nemo agreed.
J.D. sighed. It had been a long shot. Cosmic string theory allowed only large masses to enter transition. No one-no one human-had figured how to chitchat across the transition threshold. Apparently no one nonhuman had made such a discovery, either.
Talking about cosmic string reminded her of something she had put off discussing for too long.
"I understand your wanting to get used to meeting people," she said to Nemo. "But if you want to meet any other human beings, you have to do it soon. Starfarer has to move out of the star system before the cosmic string withdraws. If it does withdraw-you'll have to move, too, or you'll get stranded."
"I will not allow myself to be stranded," Nemo said.
"Good . . . I was afraid . . ." She shrugged. She was ambivalent about bringing up the subject. "I'm surprised you'll talk to us. Aren't you afraid of being contaminated by us? You've talked to me more than Europa and Androgeos did altogether, I think."
"They were disappointed that you failed the test." "But it was a mistake! We weren't armed with nuclear weapons. Or with anything else, for that matter. Nemo, we were attacked in our own system. We dragged the missile through transition because it hit us."
"That is a shame," Nemo said.
"And the only thing that will keep us from being attacked again, if we go home, is proof that Civilization exists."
"Your own people would kill you because you failed," Nemo said.
Another silk-spinner crept out of a fold in the wall and joined the silk worm in the new circle of fabric. The second spinner scrambled across the disk, leaving a radial trail of thread that secured the delicate, tight spiral.
"They wouldn't kill us, but they'd put us in jail." Nemo's attention to the handwork exasperated her.
Is there any way to get Civilization to listen to us9 she thought.
"Maybe you should neither go on, nor go home, but allow yourself to be stranded," Nemo said.
"We've thought about it," J,D. said. The ecosystem could support far more people than the ship carried; it could support them indefinitely. "We could turn Starfarer into a generation ship, and form our own little isolated world. . . ." The whole idea depressed her. It meant abandoning Earth. She could not imagine anything more selfish. "I'd rather go back and get put in jail!" she cried aloud, and her voice broke. She struggled to calm herself.
"I did not understand that," Nemo said.
J.D. repeated herself. Her electronic voice sounded so calm, so rational. "Imprisonment is preferable to freedom." Nemo's eyelid opened all the way around, and the tentacles extended to J.D. and touched her forehead, her shoulder. The silk-spinners, deprived of guidance, wandered across the fabric and trailed threads that left flaws in its surface.
Nerno's tentacles drew away from J.D. and returned to the spinners.
"No! But ... we didn't come out here to found a colony. That's against everything we agreed on, everything we dreamed of! We came out here hoping to join an interstellar community. We came out here to meet you! And now you tell us we have to go back, or abandon Earth, because of a mistake-!" "Five hundred years isn't so long," Nemo said.
"Not to you! You and Europa and Androgeos will still be here when five hundred years have passed. But I'll be dead. Everyone on board Starfarer will be dead. And if we go back to Earth with nothing but the news that we've failed . . . I'm afraid human beings won't survive at all."
"Many civilizations have destroyed themselves."
J.D. looked away from Nerno's brilliant, colorful form, with two long tentacles shepherding the spinners, the third waving delicately in the air. "I'd hoped . . ." She started to take a deep breath,
felt the tickle of acrid gases in the back of her throat, and instead blew her breath out in frustration. "I hoped you might tell me that no civilizations are ever lost. That somehow we always manage to pull ourselves out of destruction." "Civilizations are lost all the time, J.D."
"I meant . . . a whole world's civilization." The culture she lived in had reached out for the stars, and had attained them, however temporarily. Why should that be proof against extinction?
Nerno's tentacle brushed her toe, her shoulder.
"So did L" the squidmoth said.
CHAPTER 2
J.D. SAT CROSSLEGGFD BESIDE NEMO, THE SILK beneath her warm and soft. She could happily stay here for a week, just talking. She shifted her position, resting her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand, looking at Nemo, amazed and enthralled by the being. She watched, in silence, as Nemo guided the silk-spinners. The disk had become an iridescent pouch, like several others lying at the edge of the chamber.
"Tell me about Civilization," J.D. said.
"Beings exchange their knowledge," Nemo replied.
The two spinners, one wormlike, one
resembling a starfish crossed with a lace handkerchief, met nose to nose. "But there's more than that!" J.D. said. "How many worlds are there? How many people? How many kinds of people? What are they like? What kind of governments do they have? I want to know everything, Nemo, about Civilization and how it works, about the movements of the cosmic string-!"
The worm reared up, the starfish twisted. They touched. Each extruded a spurt of silk.
"The people of Civilization will want to describe themselves to you." "What do they do when they meet? How do they reconcile their differences?"
The bursts of thread caught together and tangled. As the creature.s danced, Nemo urged them easily around the pouch. Their motions formed the silk into a fluted rim.
"They make peace, or the cosmic string withdraws."
"That's simple," J.D. said dryly. "A little Draconian, but simple."
When the silk worm and the starfish returned to their starting point,
Nemo flicked them both off the edge and into the pouch.
"Tell me what you're looking for," Nemo said.
"We're looking for answers," J.D. said. "Answers . . . and more questions."