Metaphase Read online

  She gestured to one of the displays, the report Stephen Thomas had made on the alien microbes.

  "This is good work," she said.

  "More questions than answers," Stephen Thomas said.

  "That's why it's good work. You got a lot accomplished while you were gone." She paused. "You weren't able to collect more samples," she said, a question rather than a comment.

  "I was tempted," Stephen Thomas said. "But I didn't want to screw J.D. up with Nemo."

  "Ah."

  "But maybe

  "Out with it, Stephen Thomas."

  "I tried taking a culture off my shirt. The stuff I wiped up from the pool. Nothing's growing. Yet. Maybe it will."

  "We can hope."

  "Yeah.

  "These other experiments you're doing," she said. "With the soil bacteria from Europa's ship."

  "I haven't figured those out yet. Any ideas?"

  "Their DNA fingerprints are very close to normal. About what you'd expect if they diverged four thousand years ago."

  "They look the same," Stephen Thomas agreed. "But the buggers act different."

  "Have you sequenced them?"

  "Not yet. I was resequencing bacteria from J.D. From all of us in alien contact."

  "You suspect contamination?" she said sharply.

  "No. I was double-checking. It's strange, though. You'd expect some exchange between us and the alien humans. Nothing pathological. The normal skin microbes and so forth."

  "But you found none."

  "No. Europa told the truth about something, anyway. "

  "Or we're blessed with unusually robust microbial flora," Thanthavong said dryly. "Your students could have done the sequencing."

  "I didn't have the heart to make the kids stop watching the reports." "Graduate students expect to work," Thanthavong said. "You're perhaps a bit too indulgent of yours. The sequencing should be done soon."

  "Do we have a machine to use?"

  "Biochem's is at your disposal."

  "Good. Thanks." He had not been looking forward to the commute up the hill to use the sequencer in the Chi. "I'll go-"

  "Go get some sleep, Stephen Thomas! I said 'soon,' not 'instantly.' Leave instructions for your students to do it. You look worn out."

  "Yeah. Okay. I'll see you tomorrow. Today. Later." His time sense was completely skewed.

  Stephen Thomas went outside. He paused in the

  dawn air, enjoying the coolness. The daytime temperatures on Starfarer had been warm for spring. He touched Arachne and left a message for his students, obeying Professor Thanthavong as far as that went.

  But he did not go home to bed. He had something to do. If he did it now, while everyone was still caught up in the reports from the Nemo expedition, no one would stop him. If he waited, he might not be able to carry out the task at all.

  Infinity Mendez dozed on his futon, drifting in and out of sleep, telling himself he should get up and go to work. Beside him, Esther Klein slept soundly, her snore a soft buzz.

  By this time of the morning, Infinity had usually been up for a couple of hours. He liked to be outside in the gray foggy dawn while the light tubes slowly brightened. But he and Esther had sat up late talking to J.D. Sauvage.

  Every so often, Infinity stopped and said to himself, We've met an alien being. No matter what happens now, we did what we said we were going to. Like just about everyone else on board, Infinity would have liked to tag along with J.D. He wished he could lie here all day, cuddle with his lover, replay the transmissions from the Chi, and wait to see what happened next.

  But anticipating what happened next meant anticipating the death of Nemo. Come on, he said to himself, suddenly restless. Get up, you have things to do.

  Esther curled on her side, facing him, her knees drawn up beneath his legs, her small square hand draped down between his thighs.

  Light washed the room. Starfarer's light always came from high noon, straight overhead, from the light tubes along the axis of the campus's cylindrical body.

  Infinity had gotten used to the unchanging direction of the light before the campus was even finished. He

  had belonged to the construction crew that built the starship. Infinity knew Starfarer from the outside in. Having helped build its shell, he now helped maintain its ecosystem.

  Infinity covered Esther's hand with his own. She snuggled closer, still asleep. Moving away from her warm touch, Infinity slid out from under the covers, drew the blanket up around Esther's shoulders, and looked for his clothes.

  It's sure harder to keep track of things without the artificial stupids, Infinity thought. They should have been released by now. . . .

  Chancellor Blades had impounded them, but he could not control them anymore.

  Maybe Gerald's been too busy to let them loose, Infinity thought. He smiled to himself. Big job, being acting chancellor of a bunch of revolutionaries. Probably Gerald had just not got around to the task. When Chancellor Blades impounded the machines, he got everyone's attention. The ASes did the kind of work nobody noticed till it did not get done. It was annoying to order dinner and get nothing; to find dirty clothes still lying around instead of washed and pressed and returned to the shelf.

  What a lot of people did not realize was how important the ASes were to the health of Starfarer. The faculty thought of the ASes and mobile Als as conveniences. But the machines also watched and maintained and repaired the complex structure of the starship.

  Infinity threw on his jeans and sandals and his leather vest, combed the tangles out of his long black hair, and left the coolness of his house. Outside, in his garden, bees buzzed loudly and birds called and chirped and rustled the bushes. The morning was warm for spring. The afternoon would be uncomfortably hot.

  The quality of the light made him uneasy. Arachne filtered it so the radiation of Sirius resembled the light of the sun; still, its white harshness remained. It worried him. He belonged to the staff, not the faculty, so under

  normal circumstances his responsibility was low and his authority negligible. Alzena Dadkha, the director of the ecology department, should have been in charge.

  But Alzena was gone. Unable to reconcile her conflicting loyalties to her family on Earth with her responsibility to the deep space expedition, she had fled with Europa and Androgeos. Europa had taken pity on A]zena's despair.

  Infinity touched Arachne through his link, asking for access to the interior spectrum. The computer gave it without hesitation.

  A bee whizzed past him, flying fast with an angry buzz.

  Whether Arachne would or would not permit him to alter the light filters made no difference at all. The filters pegged out at their limits. He could have less light, or more. But he could not get a spectrum any closer to real sunlight than he already had.

  The bee circled wildly. The frantic buzz stopped short. Infinity frowned. The fat honeybees were usually as placid as cows. He worked around them all the time, moved the hives, collected the honey. He had never even been stung.

  He moved cautiously toward the last place he had heard the bee, expecting to find it nuzzling the center of a flower for pollen and nectar. But the flowers were still in the breathless morning.

  A faint sound, not even a buzz, caught Infinity's attention. He found the bee lying on the ground, upside down, its wings battering uselessly against the earth. Its short life span ended in a burst of angry energy; its motion stopped and its legs curled up against its body.

  I'd probably run around yelling, too, Infinity thought, if I realized I was about to die. But bees don't usually act like that. . . .

  In the driest comer of his garden, he stooped to look at a barrel cactus. For a while it had flourished in this microenvironment. Something about it troubled him: the spongy feel of its skin when he carefully slipped his finger between its hairy spines.

  Infinity's mother came from the American southwest, but she had fled to Brazil, a refugee, before Infinity was born. Infinity had never grown a cactus before, never
lived where cactuses grew wild. His memories from childhood, before he came into space, were spotty and disjointed, of eroded land struggling to re-establish itself as forest, of displaced people grieving for land they had loved and disconnected from the new land where they now scraped out a living.

  Information on cactuses was only one of the many things Arachne had lost when the system crashed. He wondered if anybody had hard references, if Alzena had left anything in her office when she fled. With plants, hands-on experience was best. But references were better than nothing.

  He remembered what Esther had told him about her potted cactus. She only realized it had died when her cat knocked it over and it had no roots. He pushed gently at the barrel cactus. Was it releasing its grasp on the soil? Or was the soil just loose? He could not tell.

  Better to leave it alone and keep watch on it. If he worried at it, he might damage it.

  He hcaded for the administration building, trying again, as he walkcd, to ask Arachne for information about the artificials.

  Arachne replied, but the reply contained no information.

  It's like they don't even exist, he thought. What if Blades destroyed them, or threw them out into space? That would be crazy . . . but a lot of crazy stuff has been happening recently.

  A holographic triptych, a replay of J.D.'s alien encounters, occupied the center of Chandra's large living room, hovering above the thick Berber carpet.

  While most people on board Starfarer lived austerely, Chandra lived in a house full of stuff. When she decided to join the deep space expedition's art department, she had ordered a lot of expensive furniture and sent it on ahead. Other people built their own furniture of bamboo and rock foam and canvas. They covered the floor with woven mats. Chandra saw no reason to limit herself to local materials and amateur labor. She made plenty of money; she could afford to indulge herself. Back on Earth, her name on a new production guaranteed attention, reviews, and more royalties than she could spend.

  Crimson Ng sat companionably beside Chandra. She watched the replays of Nerno's nest, toying idly with a model bone, part of her newest sculpture. Crimson held the bone up between her and the holographic replays. When she moved the bone, Chandra could see the muscles, the skin, the soft sleek pelt of the animal in Crimson's imagination.

  The remains of dinner littered the mosaic table. Chandra had also imported a supply of exotic food; she had been afraid that the meals on board Starfarer would be pedestrian. She had been right. And now, the campus was in such disarray that the central cafeteria could not produce even pedestrian meals.

  "Did you get enough dinner?" she asked Crimson.

  "I sure did. It was great."

  One of the displays repeated J.D.'s first meeting with the squidmoth. Chandra sprawled naked on her leather couch. She could take in her surroundings with her whole body, if she chose, but there was absolutely no point in recording J.D.'s experience secondhand.

  Chandra felt jealous of J.D.: not simply envious, wishing to have the experience herself, but flat out jealous.

  I should have been there instead of her, Chandra thought. Holographic recordings. Big deal.

  Visual and audio recordings could never convey exactly what J.D. had experienced, the way a sensory artist could.

  I should have been there, Chandra said to herself. I can see and feel and taste and hear and smell everything, and everybody could experience it again, through me.

  No one else on board resented the alien contact specialist's position. They were all perfectly happy to back her up, to support her, to be good obedient members of the team.

  Fine for them. Chandra always worked alone.

  She had barely recorded a thing since coming on board Starfarer, since giving her life up to this pastoral, small-town campus. Starfarer was as boring as a village back home, despite being a stone cylinder four light-years from Earth. As soon as it was too late to change her mind, Chandra had realized her mistake.

  The other experience she would have wanted to capture had also passed her by: transition. When Starfarer fled Earth, she had been connected by hard link to a backup computer, storing a full load of sensory recordings. If Arachne had been up, she could have been ready for transition, and for Starfarer's arrival at Tau Ceti. But she had missed that chance. The Tau Ceti to Sirius transition had been just as bad. Arachne crashed again,

  Feral died, and Stephen Thomas and J.D. caught Blades at sabotage.

  I should have been part of the hunt, too, Chandra thought. But J.D. didn't even consider trusting me.

  Chandra's body still had not recorded transition. She needed a calm, controlled approach to the transition point, not the chaotic flights they had made so far, with the computer web crashing around them.

  When J.D.'s recorded image took off her spacesuit and let,Nemo touch her, Chandra groaned in exasperation. The swollen nerve clusters all over Chandra's body throbbed and engorged with anticipation.

  "Why didn't you take off your clothes, you stupid bitch?" Chandra shouted. She flung herself against the back of the couch.

  "Chandra!" Crimson exclaimed. But at least she spared a little of her attention from the replay, and from her sculpted bone.

  "She should've," Chandra said irritably. "She's seen

  too many old sci fi movies. She thinks aliens want to have sex with human beings, and she's scared."

  "That's silly. Would you've taken your clothes off?"

  "You bet I would."

  "Wouldn't you be embarrassed?"

  "No. Why should P I let people experience my body from the inside out.

  Damn! They should've let me go along! Or at least made her make a sensory recording."

  "Now I understand," Crimson said.

  "What?"

  "Why you kept trying to scare J.D. into not going back."

  Chandra shrugged. "It was worth a try."

  "No, it wasn't. If you wanted to be in the alien contact department, why didn't you apply there instead of the art department?"

  "I joined Starfarer at the last minute, it was too late," she said belligerently.

  Crimson gave her a skeptical glance.

  "I didn't think they'd take me-all right? But I knew I could get in the art department. Will you stop playing with that?"

  "I'm not playing." Crimson did not press the point of Chandra's Starfarer affiliation, or her ambitions. "I'm figuring out what it ought to look like. I have to hold it and carry it around and change it till I get the model right. I can't fossilize it till I get it right."

  But she put the strange model bone aside and knelt on the couch beside Chandra, gazing at her with concern.

  "It would have made more sense for them to let me go than for them to let Zev tag along," Chandra said. "It isn't fair! He'd never've gotten up here if I hadn't smuggled him on board."

  "I'd like to go on the Chi, too, you know," Crimson said. "Everybody would. But J.D.'s the alien contact specialist."

  "So she's first."

  "You've done a lot of other things first. And recorded them for us."

  "I've recorded a lot of things best," Chandra said. "But not first. I don't think there's anything left on Earth to do and be, first. That's why I came out here!"

  "I don't care if you're first or not."

  "I'm glad you like my stuff," Chandra said. "Nobody else on this heap pays it any attention. Maybe three whole people have accessed it in the past two weeks."

  "You are in a bad mood," Crimson said, out of patience. Then she laughed. "What's so funny?"

  "Chandra, who's had a chance in the last two weeks to spend any time-" Chandra thought Crimson was about to say "to spend any time playing." Bristling, she readied a retort.

  11

  -on anything but the real world?"

  Chandra cut off the sharp words she had planned when she heard what Crimson really said. Finding another reply took her a moment.

  "Yeah," Chandra said, reluctant to be placated. "I guess you're right."

  On the crater repla
y, J.D. scrabbled her way up a steep silky slope. The LTMs had caught a glimpse of several of Nemo's attendants, but the recording pitched and yawed till Chandra closed her strange all-over-gray eyes.

  "It's making me seasick! They'll have to edit that to death!"

  "Shh, look, there's another one of those spider things. I want to watch it."

  The creature left off creating a shimmery sheet of new white silk, rappelled to the floor, and snaked off on half a dozen ropy limbs. It looked like a cross between a brittle star, with long whiplash tentacle-legs, and a crustacean, with a shrimplike head and a ring of eyes. Crimson stroked her model bone again. She examined it intently, turned it over, put it down, glanced at the image of Nemo's attendant.

  "It's too conventional," Crimson said.

  "Huh? My stuff?"

  "No, mine. The fossils. They're all on an ordinary vertebrate body plan." "Oh, right. Six-legged, winged, fanged, twelve-eyed vertebrates."

  "Even if I did that all at once, they'd be too much like us."

  Chandra sat crosslegged on the sofa, enjoying the soft warmth of the leather, and the way the leather stuck to her skin.

  "You sure pissed Gerald off when you told Europa you're a paleontologist," she said. "I think you really got her to believe we'd found alien bones on the moon."

  "Gerald just doesn't get it," Crimson said. "I am a paleontologist." Chandra laughed. "I like the way you never go out of character." "Seriously. My degree's in paleontology. But it got so I couldn't do field work. When the Mideast Sweep started expanding again."

  Chandra sobered and looked at Crimson, tilting her head thoughtfully to one side. She was not sure if Crimson was pulling her leg or not. "Androgeos took one of my fossils," Crimson said.

  "What? Why'd you let him get away with it?"

  "Because that's what they're for." Crimson laughed with delight. "I hope I get to find out what he thinks of it."

  ,,He probably got the twelve-eyed fanged one. He'll just think it was one of our ordinary ancestors."

  Crimson laughed again, then fell silent.

  Gazing into Chandra's eyes-most people did not gaze into Chandra's featureless silver-gray eyes-Crimson touched Chandra's wrist, stroking the bright blue rope of vein that throbbed just beneath her translucent tan skin. Crimson's hands were rough from sculpting, from digging in Starfarer's coarse new ground to bury her fossils in an artificial but convincing stratigraphy. Her fingers circled gently in the sensitive hollow of Chandra's palm.