"At least everybody knows where I am." Victoria smiled wryly.
"I'm right here," J.D. said. "I'm going back inside in a minute."
Satoshi appeared, surrounded by the complex equipment of the observatory. "How mad is Nemo?"
J.D. swallowed another bite of sandwich.
"Nemo's not mad at all, as far as I can tell." She glanced at the image Arachne created of Nemo's planetoid. Several of the craters bulged with distended silk.
"You aren't in any danger?" Victoria asked.
"I'm sure not."
Esther Mein's image appeared. "I can bring help with the transport. It's ready."
"Thanks, Esther. But it isn't necessary. Really. I better get back."
"How much longer?" Victoria asked.
"I just can't say."
"You're cutting it awfully close!"
"I can't help it."
"But what are you doing?" Zev asked.
"I guess . . . I'm acting as midwife. I have to go, Zev, I love you. Keep an eye on those other craters. I think . . ." She smiled. "I don't know for sure. But I think you should watch them."
She rushed back through the tortuous silken path. The curtains continued to deteriorate. J.D. followed a trail of her own footprints, bruises in the silk, back to Nemo's chamber.
Infinity patted the nest of towels on the floor of the closet. In the comer, the meerkat stood in sentry position, her paws crossed on her rounded belly. She fixed
him with a suspicious gaze through her mask of black fur.
"Oh, my god," Esther said behind him.
"Don't scare her," Infinity said.
"I can't believe Europa left her behind! What a rotten thing to do." She knelt beside Infinity and tried to pet the meerkat. The meerkat snapped at her. Esther snatched back her hand.
"I think we better leave her alone."
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, embarrassed. "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 damn business," Griffith said.
"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 space."
"We already lost some when your damned 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
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 of 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 before Starfarer 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.
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 space despite having no width, existing in the conceptual realm between a onedimensional 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.
Space rotated again. J.D. caught her breath with delight and anticipation. 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 crashing 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. ne
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 found Nemo. 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 cocoon 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 cocoon.
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."
"You aren't afraid of the nature of my gift."
"No. I'm not afraid. I trust you."
"You're not concerned that my gift will change you." She hesitated. She wanted to say that if she were afraid of change, she would never have come to space. But . . . if she were not afraid, she would have accepted the divers' offer regardless of the other consequences. She still wished she had accepted.
I won't make the same mistake twice, she said to herself.
"I'm not so frightened that I'll turn it down."
"I give you myself," Nemo said.
"I . . . I don't understand." Then, with joy, she said, "Do you mean you're going to live-? Nemo, that's wonderful!"
"No, I'll die."
"Then . . . I really don't understand."
"I give you the inorganic parts of myself that I leave behind."
What Nemo was trying to tell her came clear.
"The part of you that I called your ship," she said softly.
"I give you my ship," Nemo replied.
She tried to speak, but she was too stunned. She could hardly breathe. Nerno's ship-!
The tentacle writhed weakly from her limp hands, touched its way up her body, and brushed her face, her hand, with its furred tip. It left a trace of iridescent dust.
"You say nothing."
"Because I'm speechless," J.D. said. "It's a response humans have to being this surprised."
"You accept my gift."
"Yes, Nemo. Oh, yes, I accept. Thank you." Her hands were trembling. "But-how will I fly it? Do I have time to learn before . . . before "Before I die."
"Yes," she whispered.
"My life has been long and full, and I don't regret its passing," Nemo said.
"But I'll grieve for you," J.D. said. "I'll wish I'd had more time to know you."
"My offspring will know all that I know." "They'll be just like you?"
"Each will develop separately, and each will possess my knowledge and the juvenile parent's knowledge."
"But they won't be you."
"Each will be unique," Nemo said.
"I'll look forward to meeting your children," J.D. said. "But I'll still miss you." She hardly had time to consider the idea that Nerno's children would be born with all the knowledge a squidmoth could collect in a long, dedicated life. Nemo would have been born already steeped in ancestral knowledge . . . for how many millennia, how many generations?
"Is there anything you don't know?" J.D. asked softly, in awe.
"The shape of my knowledge is so incomplete," Nemo said, "that my children and their children will never finish it."
She let Nerno's communication shape appear in her mind. The squidmoth was right. Now that she looked, now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see where it ought to extend a great distance in many dimensions. She could see where it fell short. How strange: the first time she looked at it, entered it, she had perceived it as infinite.
"If I only knew the details of the surface
"You will extend my knowledge, as my offspring will."
J.D. managed to smile. "Does that make me your daughter?"
"I like that idea," Nemo said.
Nerno's tentacle caressed her again: her cheek, her hair. It quivered and collapsed, sliding down her arm to coil unevenly on the floor.
The wings shed more of their iridescent scales. Small creatures like ants crossed with periwinkles, like minuscule hermit crabs, carried the scales away. Their paths formed lines of iridescent, unreadable hieroglyphics. J.D. shivered suddenly. If the new generation of attendants was going to dismember Nemo . . . she could
not watch it. Yet she could not leave Nemo to die alone, either.
"Nemo, what's going to happen?" she asked again. "How will I learn to fly your ship? What about your real children? Shouldn't you leave it to one of them?"
"My children can't make use of what I'll leave behind."
"How will I make use of it? I should have asked Esther to come over and help, but there's no time now."
Th
e tentacle crept up, slowly, painfully, and grasped her wrist. She fell silent.
"You have the means to learn."
Nemo led her into the internal reality.
J.D. cried out.
She was the ship. She was Nemo. She felt the weakness in Nemo's organic body, and the unlimited strength and power of the inorganic body that would remain. Nemo led her to the proper set of intersecting surfaces. To move from place to place was as easy as walking, as easy as thought. She could see the path into transition, the long, looping route through it.
"We need to go 1here, " she said, pointing.
She could even see a different direction toward transition, toward 61 Cygni, but she was cut off from it by a depthless chasm. She could get no closer. It might be the direction Starfarer would take. Though its shapes and curves echoed Victoria's transition algorithm, she could not quite fit the shapes together.
Nerno's path into transition was intricate, convoluted, beautiful.
It was a maze, but Nemo showed her the route that allowed her to pass.
They returned to the real world.
"It's a long distance," Nemo said, "and I fear you will be lonely."
"I've never minded being lonely," J.D. said. "Not too much, anyway. But I will mind this time. I'll miss you." She opened her eyes, but shut them quickly. In her mind, Nemo was an ethereal presence. The crumpled, spent body that lay before her, its long eyelid completely closed, its battered wings shrouded, only reminded her how little time they had left. She squeezed her burning eyes shut; her throat ached with the effort of holding back her tears.
Stephen Thomas tried to ignore the discomfort of the changes. As long as he stayed still, he could imagine nothing was wrong. But every motion reminded him of what was happening to his body.
Starfarer neared transition point. J.D. had checked in once, then fallen silent again. Victoria and Satoshi had tasks to perform during the next few hours, but Stephen Thomas had no official responsibilities.
During Starfarer's first entry into transition, he had been unconscious in the ruined genetics department. As the second transition point approached, he had helped track Arachne's crashes to the neural node of Chancellor Blades.
I want to see transition, Stephen Thomas thought. I want to be where I can experience it.
With the thought, he jumped to his feet.
Metaphase Page 30
