Gerald ignored Stephen Thomas. "Rather arrogant, perhaps, Victoria." "Yes," Victoria said.
"There's no need for personal animosity," Professor Thanthavong said.
"I meant no animosity. I'm merely suggesting that if we gain this new knowledge, we can go home-with or without Nemo-and consider the expedition a success. If Nemo takes the transition algorithm, what of it? We'll have five hundred years to develop something equally impressive."
"I can't believe you're so anxious to give up and go home!" Victoria said.
J.D. leaned back in her seat. This was an important discussion, and she was an important part of any conclusion. She had to pay attention to it. She closed her eyes. Just for a moment.
Satoshi woke. Victoria snuggled against him, one arm beneath her cheek, the other draped around his waist. They had dozed, waiting for Stephen Thomas. The bed felt empty without their younger partner.
When J.D. fell asleep in the observers' circle, Victoria had decided not to awaken her. No one was ready to make a decision about Nemo and Arachne, so they ended the conference. Everyone, on the Chi and back on Starfarer, was as grateful for a few hours' rest.
Everyone, apparently, except Stephen Thomas.
I wonder where he is? Satoshi thought. Sleeping alone in his cabin?
Not likely.
Stephen Thomas liked to sleep with his partners. He liked to sleep in the middle, the way Merry used to.
Not that Stephen Thomas had taken Merry's place, or even tried. No one could ever do that. But after Merry's accident, only a few months after Stephen Thomas joined the family partnership, the triad had comforted them all.
I wonder if our family would have survived after Merry died, Satoshi wondered, if not for Stephen Thomas? I don't think it would have. I fell apart pretty badly, and so did Victoria.
The old ache and the numb shock returned. He hugged Victoria fiercely, desperately. The pain had barely diminished in the time since Merry's death. It hit less frequently, but it hit just as hard.
Victoria woke. She held him, stroking his smooth short hair, murmuring comfort in his ear.
"I love you," Satoshi whispered. "I don't know what I'd do without you and Stephen Thomas."
"I love you, too," she said. "And if I have anything to say about it, you'll never need to find out what you'd do without me. But where's Stephen Thomas?"
"Maybe he thought we were sleeping in his room tonight."
Victoria looked at Satoshi, askance. They seldom all slept in Stephen Thomas's room. He had a lot of good qualities, but neatness was not one of them. His room back on Starfarer was bad enough. The Chi's forays into free-fall turned his cubicle into a disaster area,
"I'll go see," Satoshi said.
He crossed Victoria's ' cabin and his own, pushing the connecting door the rest of the way open to create a single space. The door into Stephen Thomas's room stood ajar. Satoshi pushed it open. Stephen Thomas was not there. His patchwork quilt, a wedding gift from Merry's family, Jay rumpled across his bed.
He can't still be in his lab, Satoshi thought. Can he? Maybe he fell asleep there.
Satoshi pulled his own ratty bathrobe out of the storage net on the wall, put it on, and crossed to the laboratory section of the Chi.
At the doorway of Stephen Thomas's lab, Satoshi stopped. His partner tilted his chair to its limit, his hands behind his head and his feet braced against the lab table. Stephen Thomas gazed, frowning, at the magnified image of growing cells.
"Hi, Satoshi," Stephen Thomas said without turning around. He took his feet off the table and let his chair drop forward.
Satoshi put his hands on Stephen Thomas's shoulders.
"Coming to bed?"
Stephen Thomas shrugged.
If Stephen Thomas had asked him to go away, he would have complied. Stephen Thomas could be moody, and he could say, often bluntly, what he wanted. But he had been so quiet recently that Satoshi worried. They had been through a lot. Maybe it all was catching up with Stephen Thomas. Maybe he was still in shock because of Feral's death.
Or maybe turning into a diver was not as benign a procedure as Zev thought.
It troubled Satoshi that Stephen Thomas had chosen to let the changes proceed. They had begun by accident, by mistake. Satoshi wished the accident had never happened.
You don't have any right to tell him what to do with his body, he told himself sternly.
Don't I? he replied to himself I love him. I care what happens to him.
And I think this is crazy.
"I don't understand what's going on with these cells," Stephen Thomas said.
"Which ones are they?"
"From Europa's weed. Ordinary soil bacteria. Same as back on Earth, she said."
"But?"
"But not quite. They'll grow on dirt from Starfarer, if I sterilize it. Not otherwise. I must have missed something."
"It's late, you're tired. You're working too hard."
"I'm not working hard enough." Stephen Thomas slapped the lab table with a sharp, shocking strike. "Or I'd be able to figure this out. Everything I've done since we left home has been crap."
"Come to bed."
"I wouldn't be good company."
"Are you okay?"
"Twitchy. Achy. I'll probably thrash around. I'd keep you both awake."
"I don't care," Satoshi said.
Satoshi looked at Stephen Thomas for a long moment. He was as susceptible to his partner's extraordinary beauty as anyone. As everyone. He stroked Stephen Thomas's long blond hair. It had, as usual, come untied. It curled around his partner's face and tangled down over his shoulders.
"Is your hair going to change color?"
"Probably not," Stephen Thomas said. "No reason it should. Zev says I should cut it, to be a proper diver."
"You never cut it to work in zero g, why should you cut it now?"
"I'm not going to. Starfarer doesn't have a proper ocean, so I can't be a proper diver no matter what."
Most divers had dark eyes. So far, Stephen Thomas's eyes remained brilliant sapphire blue. Satoshi hoped they would not change. He started to ask. But if they were going to change, he did not want to know.
Satoshi slid his hand beneath the collar of his partner's shirt, a deliberately arousing touch. His fingers stroked the soft new fuzz of fine, transparent diver's fur.
Satoshi froze. He willed himself to leave his hand where it was. He could not tell if Stephen Thomas noticed his reaction.
Stephen Thomas put his hand on Satoshi's. The
swimming webs felt warm against Satoshi's skin. Satoshi shivered. Stephen Thomas tensed and closed his eyes.
"What's wrong?" Satoshi asked.
"I've just beat my body up pretty good the last few days," Stephen Thomas said.
"But Zev said-"
"I had a run-in with a silver slug, all right?" Stephen Thomas said angrily.
"What? How? When?"
"When I tried to get into the chancellor's house."
"Why?"
"Why the hell do you think? He killed Feral! I wanted . . . I don't know what I wanted. I don't know if I would've killed him. But the slugs make fucking good watchdogs. It just about squashed the crap out of me. For a while I thought it broke my pelvis."
"Are you sure-"
"It's just bruises."
"Good lord," Satoshi said. The lithoclasts guarding Blades were the size of rhinoceroses. "You could have been killed."
"I know. I won't do it again." He moved Satoshi's hand away, gently but firmly. "I want to sleep alone tonight." His voice was careful, neutral. Satoshi hesitated. "Okay," he said. He was upset and confused and he had no idea whether he was relieved or disappointed that Stephen Thomas would not come to bed with him. "See you in the morning."
He started out of the lab.
He could still feel the fur against his fingers.
"Satoshi!"
"Yeah?" He turned back.
"Don't tell Victoria," Stephen Thomas said, his voice intense. "About the slug."
/>
Satoshi frowned. "I hate it when you ask me to keep things from Victoria."
"I shouldn't have told either one of you, dammit! I knew it would just upset you both-"
"All right. All right! I won't tell her."
He left his younger partner alone.
He returned to Victoria. She lay on the sleeping surface of her cabin, one knee drawn up, the other leg extended, her fingers laced behind her head, her eyes half closed.
"He wants to sleep by himself tonight."
Her expression was her only question.
"He said he was achy, he said he'd thrash around. . . ." Satoshi was not lying. Not technically. "I don't know," he said.
"One of his moody spells," Victoria said. She had learned to overlook them, as Stephen Thomas preferred. "He'll be okay in the morning."
"Victoria," Satoshi said, "he's growingfur."
"I know. I saw." She grinned. "I think it's kind of sexy, don't you?"
She reached out to him. He grasped her long, slender fingers, lay beside her, and pulled the blanket over them both. Victoria hooked her foot over his leg, sliding her instep up his calf. She pulled him closer and kissed him, hard and hungrily. He opened his mouth for her tongue, and rolled over on his back, drawing her on top of him, abandoning himself to her, abandoning his worries and his fears.
And yet, making love with Victoria in the starlight, in the harsh reflected shine of Sirius, Satoshi missed the touch of Stephen Thomas's body, the strength of his hands, his voice.
After Satoshi left, Stephen Thomas stared at the cell cultures for a few more minutes. He did not want to move. His whole body hurt.
Just ignore it, he said to himself. You'd feel worse after a rough soccer game.
He was used to recovering quickly. He still did recover quickly: a few days ago he had had two black eyes and a livid cut across his forehead. Those bruises had vanished and the scar was fading.
The ache of the changing virus remained. And once in a while, completely unexpectedly, real pain ambushed him. Before he realized how badly the slug had bruised him, he had feared something was going wrong with the changes.
He wished he could just take to his bed and get his partners to bring him chicken soup. They would do it, too . . . except that then he would end up having to tell Victoria what had really happened. Admitting to Satoshi what a fool he had been was bad enough. He did not think he could stand to admit it to Victoria.
He swore out loud, shut down the lab, and went across the Chi to his cubicle. In the far cabin, Victoria and Satoshi murmured to each other. An ache radiated from the center of his pelvis. It spread in a wave. He quietly closed the door that joined his partners' cabins to his own.
He stripped off his clothes, untangled his quilt, and lay down on the sleeping surface. He pulled the quilt around his shoulders. It used to smell like Merry, but it did not anymore, even in his imagination.
He was wide awake. He flung off the quilt, turned over, stretched, and looked at himself.
His body proportions were similar to Zev's: he was slender, narrow-hipped; he had good shoulders. But Zev, like most divers, was rather short. Stephen Thomas liked being tall. He hoped that would not change.
So far, his toenails had not begun to change to semiretractile claws. He curled his toes. His feet were about the only part of him that did not hurt.
His skin changed from day to day. Not only its color. He had traded the maddening itch between his fingers, while the webbing formed, for a milder itch all over his body as the fine, nearly invisible hair grew in.
He liked the delicate pelt. He thought he would find it sexy on another person. He rubbed his hand down his forearm, down his side. He hoped Victoria and Satoshi would get to like it, too.
I wonder whether Merry would have liked it? Stephen Thomas thought. Probably. Merry was always the one who wanted to experiment.
The partnership had never quite perfected the com-
plex, erotic chaos of four people making love to each other in the same bed. They had needed more time. They had all been looking forward to trying sex in freefall. But they never got to try it as a foursome; Merry died before their first trip into space.
With a sharp pang of loneliness, Stephen Thomas wished he were sleeping with his partners. But all his reasons for sleeping alone remained. He hurt, he was restless, he would keep them awake. Besides, he liked to please them, and for the past couple of days his interest in sex had been very low.
That worried him. He explained his lack of interest to himself with the bruises, the persistent ache, the occasional intense pain.
He told the lights to turn off, curled up in his quilt, and hugged his knees to his chest. That eased him a little.
His mind spun around the strange behavior of his cell cultures, the disturbing encounter with Nerno's pond creatures.
Trying to take his mind off his work, Stephen Thomas thought about Feral. Feral liked change, just like Merry did. That was one of the reasons Stephen Thomas had been attracted to hirn. Feral had joined the expedition's revolt without hesitation. Hc had been excited when Stephen Thomas decided to finish turning into a diver. He had even been envious. Stephen Thomas smiled wryly to himself.
Some of these changes you wouldn't be envious of, my friend, he thought. But I bet you would've liked my new fur.
On impulse, he opened a private channel back to Starfarer. In response to his call, Gerald Hernminge appeared, his dark hair mussed. A wrinkle, the image of a crease in his pillow, was imprinted across his cheek.
"Did I wake you up?"
Gerald glanced sideways, realized he was transmitting his image, and snapped a command to Arachne. He faded out.
"What is it? Has there been a new development?"
"No," Stephen Thomas said. "Nerno's still quiet."
"Then why did you call me? Don't you ever sleep?"
No, Stephen Thomas thought, I don't, these days.
"I called you because I want to talk to you for a minute. Why'd you answer, if you were asleep?"
"Because I'm your bloody liaison!"
"But I marked the message private-"
Stephen Thomas stopped. No point in deliberately getting into an argument with Gerald. They argued enough anyway.
"It's about Feral."
"What about him?"
Gerald's image reappeared. He had combed his hair and put on a shirt. Except for the crease across his cheek, he looked wide awake and professional.
"His funeral. We should do something-"
Gerald stared at him. "You never cease to amaze me. You're in the midst of humanity's first alien contact-"
"It's only the first if you don't count Europa," Stephen Thomas said. "Europa isn't an alien."
"Europa's the first human to meet aliens-Look, Gerald, forget Europa, I want to talk about Feral."
"There's nothing we can do here and now."
"I know, but when I come back-"
"When we return to Earth, we'll turn his body over to his family."
""at? That might be years!"
"I sincerely hope not."
"Besides, he hasn't got any family."
"The proper authorities, in that case."
"But-"
"I'm sorry. There's nothing to be done. I haven't any authority to make any arrangements. It will have to wait till we go home."
Stephen Thomas started to object again, but Gerald interrupted.
"And now, if you don't mind, some of us would like to be fresh for the next conversation with Nemo."
He broke the connection.
"Shit," Stephen Thomas muttered to the air where Gerald's image had faded.
J.D. woke, disoriented. Stars and darkness surrounded her.
It was nearly morning. She was still in her couch in the observers' circle, but the couch had been extended flat. A blanket covered her.
Oh, no, she thought. I fell asleep during the conference. I was just going to close my eyes. . . .
Zev curled nearby, on his own
couch. He woke and drew in a deep gasp of air. Divers slept like orcas, napping till they needed another breath, waking, breathing, drifting back to sleep. Zev turned toward her, his dark eyes reflecting light like a cat's, his fine fur catching the starlight. He looked like a gilded statue, with eerie emerald eyes.
"Hi, Zev."
In silence, he left his couch and joined her in hers, snuggling close.
His webbed hand slid beneath her shirt and over her full breast. In a moment of embarrassment she started to draw away. But the sensors and the cameras and the microphones were all turned off. No one could watch them through the transparent walls of the circle. The Chi was quiet, Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas asleep together in their cabin.
J.D. hugged Zev closer, and kissed him. Her tongue touched his sharp, dangerous canine teeth. He nibbled at her lips, at her throat, at her collarbone, unbuttoning her shirt with his free hand. She pressed her hands down his muscular back, beneath his loose silk shorts. His body was hot against her, urgent with his insistent, ingenuous sexuality.
He wriggled out of his shorts. He straddled J.D.'s thighs while he unfastened her pants and pushed them down over her hips, then when she had kicked them to the floor he moved between her legs. Among divers, men as well as women produced a sexual lubricant. As J.D. and Zev played and caressed and teased each other, Zev grew slick just like J.D.
J.D. kissed Zev's shoulder. His fur felt soft and bright against her lips. She gasped as he stroked her inner thigh with his warm webbed fingers.
They moved with each other in the slow, luxurious rhythms of the sea, leading each other on. The rhythm quickened, grew desperate and joyful, and they loved each other beneath the alien stars.
J.D. FELT P14YSICALLY REFRESHED, IF STILL intellectually and emotionally overwhelmed by her time with Nemo. She and Zev had slept for several hours, first in the observers' chamber and then in J.D.'s cabin, holding each other. Zev nuzzled her throat, or kissed the cleft between her breasts, whenever he woke to breathe.
She left him napping in her bed. While she bathed and dressed, she reviewed the proceedings of last night's conference, including the few minutes after she had fallen asleep.
I don't believe I did that, she thought.
She told the onboard computer to
take away that display and show her the recordings of her colleagues' experiences with Nemo.
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