Metaphase Read online

  A few minutes later she hurried from her tiny cabin and headed for the Chi's labs. The labs were larger than the cabins, but still minuscule. J.D. stopped in the doorway of the genetics lab. Stephen Thomas sat at the work bench, staring into the microscope's holographic image. The image rotated, then flipped over.

  Another holographic projection, the image of Nerno's crater, hovered in the air where he could glance up and see it.

  "Stephen Thomas," J.D. said.

  "Hi, J.D." Stephen Thomas straightened and turned, hooking his elbow over the chair back. "That was some expedition."

  He smiled at her.

  "Thanks," she said softly, keeping back everything else she might have wanted to say to him.

  He looked drawn and distracted. He had been uncharacteristically silent since they left Starfarer. Of everyone, he was taking Feral's death the hardest. It broke J.D.'s heart to see him so withdrawn, so deep in shock. Grief concentrated his beauty, rather than fading it, heightening the blue of his eyes and refining the planes of his classic features. He had pulled his long blond hair back and tied it very tight. His skin, so fair a few days ago, continued to darken. Except for the pale new scar on his forehead, his skin now was a smooth cafd au lait. Eventually he would be the same color as Zev: dark mahogany, deep brown with a reddish sheen.

  "I brought you a sample." J.D. held out the sample bag. "There's not much of it, but it's less abused than the other one."

  She had inadvertently pulled up a weed from Europa's ship. If she had not been running away from an aurochs at the time, she probably would have stuck it back in the ground instead of shoving it into her pocket. On the other hand, if she had not been running away from an aurochs, she would not have pulled it up in the first place.

  Stephen Thomas accepted the bag. J.D. expected

  him to react-with excitement, with disbelief that she had picked up no more than a discarded bit, with a profane expression of joy, with some unexpected impulse unique to Stephen Thomas Gregory. When she had given him the battered weed from Europa's ship, he had kissed her forehead.

  This time, he simply held the bag up to the light. The silk caught the illumination and carried it from one end to the other. The tips of the thread glowed bluc-white; the length of it shone luminous indigo. Between Stephen Thomas's fingers, the newly-formed swimming webs glowed pale amber.

  "I wonder if Nerno's microflora is as diverse as the web fauna," Stephen Thomas said. "This'll be contaminated. . . . Too bad you couldn't collect it before you got out of your suit. People just emit bacteria like crazy. But it shouldn't be too hard to separate the alien bugs . . ."

  "I'm sorry." J.D. blushed, both annoyed and embarrassed by the implied criticism. "I couldn't just go in and start ripping up bits-"

  He shrugged. "Can't be helped." He turned toward her again. "Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm glad to have it."

  " If you say so," J.D. said, and rushed to change the subject. "I want to enhance my internal link. Can IT'

  "Sure, but why the fuck would you want to?"

  "Weren't you watching? Weren't you even listening?"

  "Of course I was watching. Why are you pissed off at me? Is everybody pissed off at me?"

  "No, of course not, I'm sorry." J.D. gestured at the floating image. "I want to communicate with Nemo on Nerno's own terms. So I have to enhance my link. Can I start working on it now?"

  "No, I don't have any prep here." He frowned. "You'll have to ask Professor T'hanthavong if she can mix some up for you in the biochem lab. The readymade stuff was in the genetics building, so it's under forty tons of rubble."

  "Oh," J.D. said, disappointed. "Okay. I'll talk to her." As soon as I get some sleep, she said to herself. As soon as I can sound coherent. Though Professor Thanthavong was usually pleasant and invariably at least civil, J.D. always felt intimidated by the idea of walking up to a Nobel laureate and talking to her as if she were an ordinary person. Miensaem Thanthavong was not ordinary.

  "Just how much are you planning to enhance the link?" Stephen Thomas said. "As much as I can."

  He knit his eyebrows. "You won't like it. You'll be a zombie whenever you use it. The synapses have to feed in somewhere, they'll take over all your other senses."

  "I don't care," J.D. said. "It's important." Her link warmed in the back of her mind, notifying her of a message. "Excuse me it second." Her eyelids fluttered. As she went into a communications fugue, she thought, Most of us close off the rest of the world when we use our link, so what does it matter?

  She accepted the message. Nemo's characteristic signal touched her mind. "Nemo! Is everything all right?"

  "The attendants are prepared," Nemo said.

  "Does that mean- Are you willing to meet my colleagues? Can we visit you?" "Yes, you may visit."

  J.D. opened her eyes. "That was Nemo! Come on!"

  Without waiting to explain, J.D. ran out of the lab.

  J.D. TWEAKED HER METABOLIC ENHANCER again. It flooded her body with extra adrenaline, hiding her exhaustion. She led the way to the edge of Nerno's crater.

  "It looks different," Victoria said.

  "It is," J.D. said.

  The surface had changed, and the entrance. The tunnels were rewoven, reformed. If J.D. had left her line in the nest, it would not simply have cut into the edges of Nerno's curtains. It would have grown into the fabric of the nest

  . . itself, like gravel in a wound.

  Satoshi knelt at the edge of the crater and peered down the new slope.

  "There's our guide," he said. "One of the lifeliners." They followed the creature's thread downward. The lifeliner ambled before them, no longer trying to hide.

  "The route's easier," J.D. said, with wonder. "Nemo remade all the tunnels." They were higher, the slopes shallower. She never had to stoop. She let her eyelids flicker, touched her internal link, and sent a quick message of thanks to Nemo.

  "I rebuild all the time," Nemo said.

  J.D. hurried between the pearly gray curtains. Without the lifeliner, without its thread through the labyrinth, she would be lost.

  "It's beautiful," Zev said. "It's like anemones."

  "Anemones?" J.D. said. "How do you mean?"

  "On the curtains."

  "Look at it in the ultraviolet," Stephen Thomas said. "It's like flowers. Jungle."

  J.D.'s suit obediently displayed Nerno's web in the UV.

  The web exploded.

  Intricate patterns whirled into alien plants and surged with violent blossoms. Auroras chased themselves in spirals that expanded to-cover every surface, then diminished to a single point, and vanished.

  Dazzled, J.D. took a step forward and ran into a silken wall. Victoria grabbed her arm and steadied her.

  "Whoa, careful."

  She stopped and closed her eyes and canceled the suit display. When she looked again, the storm of color had vanished and the path lay clear before her again, winding between the curtains and their invisible decorations, their camouflage.

  "Wow," she said softly. "That's something."

  "It sure is," Victoria said.

  "Can you see it?" Satoshi asked Stephen Thomas. "I mean, like Zev? Without the suit display?"

  "Yeah," Stephen Thomas said. "I can see it."

  The path spiraled deeper into the crater. They reached the airlock. As the shadows outside bore down on the walls, Satoshi cupped his hands against the translucent tunnel. "Damn, I wish I could see them!"

  The pocket filled with air; sound returned.

  The interior end of the airlock relaxed and opened. They continued to the central chamber. The maze of curtains around Nemo remained, but the chamber extended farther upward, and the curtains reached to its ceiling. In single file, the members of the alien contact department followed the lifeline through Nerno's maze.

  The gossamer thread ended. J.D. entered Nerno's chamber. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and Zev came in behind her.

  "Hello, Nemo." J.D. unfastened her helmet. The thick, smelly air disp
laced the tasteless air of her support system.

  Nemo's eyelid rose; the faceted eyes glittered. Nerno's central tentacle snaked out and grasped J.D.'s wrist. She gripped it, her fingers closing around silky fur. The tentacle felt hot, like the tail of a cat basking in the sun.

  "These are my friends, my colleagues," J.D. said to Nemo.

  "Welcome," Nemo said.

  "Thank you," J.D. said.

  The others took off their helmets. J.D. had warned them of the exhaust-fume smell, and they had seen the LTM analyses. Stephen Thomas wrinkled his nose in distaste, and Zev sneezed.

  "Tell me if you thought new things." Nemo said.

  "I sure did," J.D. said. "We all did." She and her companions removed their spacesuits and left them at the edge of the inner chamber. J.D. approached the squidmoth. "How are you? Did you think new things, too?"

  "I thought of some old things," Nemo said.

  "I want to introduce my friends," J.D. said. "Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, who's the head of the alien contact department, and a physicist. She discovered how to use the cosmic string to enter transition."

  "I am glad to meet you, Victoria," Nemo said.

  The long central tentacle snaked out and hovered. Victoria extended her hand, and Nemo laid the soft tip of the tentacle in her palm. She shivered.

  "I'm glad to meet you, too, Nemo," Victoria said through her internal link.

  "Here's Satoshi Lono. He's a geographer. He studies how communities interact with their environments. And Stephen Thomas Gregory, who studies genetics. And this is my friend Zev. Zev is a diver."

  Nemo went through the new greeting ritual with each of J.D.'s colleagues in turn.

  "You're the ichthyocentaur," Nerno said to Zev.

  "That's what Europa called me," Zev said. "But the word means I'm part fish. I'm not."

  "You are different from J.D.," Nemo said.

  "Of course. I'm a diver, and J.D.'s still a regular human being."

  J.D. was touched that he used the word "still." She would probably always regret turning down the chance to become a diver that Zev's mother had offered her.

  "And Stephen Thomas is different from you all," Nemo said.

  "I'm changing into a diver," Stephen Thomas said. "I'm about half and half at this point."

  "Maybe someday J.D. will decide to change, too," Zev said.

  A spinner crept from a fold. Nerno's tentacle snapped out and grabbed it and teased it into spinning and urged it in a tight circle and started to weave another pouch.

  "Can we look around?" Stephen Thomas said.

  "You would like to see other parts of me."

  "Yes.,,

  "The attendants will take you to what you wish to see.,,

  Three lifeliners crept into the chamber.

  The lifeliners led Victoria, Satoshi, and Stephen Thomas out of Nemo's chamber through the same path. At the first split in the path, two went one way and one went another.

  "See you guys later," Stephen Thomas said. He strolled after the spinning creature and disappeared between two curtains.

  Victoria started to call after him.

  "He'll be all right," Satoshi said.

  Victoria stepped back, took a shallow breath of the fetid air, and blew it out abruptly.

  "I know," she said. "But I'd feel easier if our guides didn't look so much like scorpions."

  Intellectually she understood all the reasons for believing they were safe with Nemo. Emotionally, she had a harder time. She was very glad Nemo had not offered them all decorative food.

  I wonder how you turn it down if you don't want it? she said to herself. Maybe you say, Thank you very much, but I don't care to be decorated. Satoshi grinned. "They do look like scorpions, don't they? Not as mean, though, or they'd be beating the hell out of each other right now."

  The other two lifeliners scuttled down the path. At the next fork in the corridor, they diverged.

  Satoshi grabbed Victoria in a quick, fierce hug, then hurried after his lifeliner.

  Victoria descended through twisting tunnels, curving tubes of watered silk that spiraled steeply downward. The color-shot patterns quivered beneath her footsteps, and the lifeliner scuttled drunkenly along the shifting floor.

  Victoria jumped, experimentally, cautious because of the low gravity. She hit the ceiling, pressing into the warm, slightly sticky fabric. She broke away from it with a faint ripping sound, bounced to the floor, and rebounded. By the time she came to a sprawling halt she

  was laughing at the position she was in, and even at her fear.

  Above her, the ceiling darkened where she had hit it. A shape passed over the bruise. The silk dimpled from the other side as one of Nerno's attendants stepped lightly across the upper curve of the tunnel. It was like being underwater during rain. The brief shadow of the cloud, the quick touch of raindrops sweeping delicately across the surface. The shadow faded; the bruise disappeared.

  Victoria continued down the tunnel.

  The air grew sharp and clear. Ozone tinged it. When she touched her hair, static electricity crackled.

  And the gravity grew stronger.

  At first she thought she was imagining the gradual effect, but it was real. It makes sense, she thought. Grade-school physics. I knew there had to be something inside Nerno's ship at least as dense as neutronium. And I'm getting closer to it.

  The LTM sensors registered a slight increase in the radiation level.

  Nothing dangerous yet. Victoria knew she should not stay long, but curiosity drew her on.

  The lifeliner scrambled onward and downward, leading her toward a lambent glow.

  Victoria followed the creature around a bend in the tunnel.

  The creature stopped. The tunnel ended its spiral and curved abruptly straight down.

  Victoria glanced back. Her escape route was open and clear. She crossed the last few meters to the sharp curve of the tunnel, passing the lifeliner.

  A thick panel of transparent webbing covered the end. She knelt on the floor and gazed down through the clear surface. It was like looking into a well, a well lit from below, or through a pane of old, wavery glass.

  A shining sphere lay in the center of Nerno's planetoid. A curving pattern of pale cables suspended it and held it in place-held the planetoid in the proper relationship to it. Here and there, more of Nemo's creatures crept about. They looked like the lifeliners, but they had much heavier carapaces, shorter spinners, legs nearly invisible. They picked their way across the suspension cables. In front of them, the white cables flexed in response to the spinners' motion and the faint occasional vibration of Nerno's sphere. Behind them, they left dark metallic rope of twisted wire.

  Victoria ignored the faint scratching noise behind her. She wished she could see into the sphere, but she knew it was protecting her from radiation and energy flux that would kill her, and all her colleagues, and probably Nemo as well. The sphere hid the engine that powered Nemo's voyaging.

  The lifeliner scratched persistently at the floor. Victoria finally noticed the sound and glanced over her shoulder.

  The creature huddled over a tangled tracery of silk. It scratched again, ran a little way up the tunnel, stopped, and ran back toward her. It did not turn; it ran both directions with equal ease. Wherever it moved, it trailed a line of silk. Its scorpion tails twitched, fore and aft. ,,Okay," Victoria said. "You're right. It's time to get out of here."

  She rose, glanced one last longing time into the center of Nemo's starship, and followed the lifeliner back toward the surface.

  "Thank you for showing me," she said aloud to the creature and silently to Nemo, using her internal link.

  "You are welcome," Nemo said.

  Satoshi followed the small scuttly creature spinning black silk before him. He wanted to get close to the lifeliner, to pick it up and inspect it, to subject it to the electronic gaze of the LTM clinging to his shirt. J.D. had asked him to be careful, and he approved of her caution. But he wanted to see and understand every face
t of the environment surrounding him.

  The wide, low corridor narrowed, the deep-fissured

  walls smoothed, and the firm, springy floor dropped into a slope. Satoshi climbed downward. The light began to fade. The slope ended in a tall, cylindrical chamber hung with heavy, fibrous curtains and pierced with two more tunnels slanting up and out, like the one through which he had descended.

  The lifeliner stopped and huddled against the wall.

  Satoshi sat on his heels beside the creature. The lifeliner rubbed against the wall, severing the silk.

  "Is this the end of the road?" Satoshi said softly.

  He walked around the edge of the chamber, touching the long bright swaths of drapery.

  They open, he thought.

  He looked up.

  Long-lidded glittery eyes looked back.

  Satoshi started and spun around.

  At the top of each set of curtains, a creature clung to the vaulted ceiling. If Satoshi had not met Nemo, he might not have recognized them as creatures, or the circular fissure as their eye-slits. The creatures hugged the wall, arching long legs overhead till they touched at the center of the ceiling. The legs pressed upward and outward like an arch, holding the creatures in place.

  The mouth parts of the creatures, tremendously enlarged, formed the curtains.

  One of the sets of curtains suddenly billowed wetly outward. A blast of oily, pungent air swept over Satoshi, knocking him down and slapping him to the floor. The pressure pushed the hot fumes up his nose. He sneezed convulsively, three times, four.

  The curtains fell back and the tempest vanished.

  Satoshi lay flat, catching his breath, breathing shallowly. His eyes and throat stung. A second set of curtains quivered. He ducked and buried his head beneath his arms as the curtains billowed and a second blast crashed over him.

  He looked up and around just in time to see the third set of curtains quiver. He watched long enough to see them open, pulling apart in the center, remaining closed at top and bottom. Beyond the curtains, acid

  dripped down color-striped stone, dissolving it, releasing roiling clouds of gas.

  He ducked again as the hot, polluted air filled the chamber and billowed out through the tunnels. The curtains fell closed with a wet slap.