Zev took her hand between his, spreading his long fingers to enclose her hand between the translucent swimming webs. He looked up at her, his dark eyes bright with excitement.
"When you go back, I want to go with you," he said. "I want to meet Nemo." "We all want that," Victoria said, her voice intense. "I hope it happens." "I do, too," J.D. said.
Her colleagues had all been disappointed when Europa refused them permission to explore her starship. J.D. hoped the same thing would not happen with Nemo.
"Where's Stephen Thomas?" J.D. asked.
"In his lab." Satoshi sounded troubled. He ran his hand through his short black hair. "I've hardly seen him all day."
"I need to talk to him before I go back out." J.D. was disappointed that he had not joined the others to greet her. She held out the sample bag with the fragment of Nerno's thread. "And I have a sample for him. Didn't he see me pick it up?"
"Maybe he thought it was for me, eh?" Victoria said. She grinned. "I would like a piece of it. It looked like it had some interesting optical properties."
J.D. held out the sample bag to Victoria, embarrassed to admit how much she had wanted to give it to Stephen Thomas herself.
"Tell him not to chop it all up looking for microbes," Victoria said. "Why don't you give it to him, and freshen up, and we'll get ready for the conference and meet you in the observers' circle?" "Okay," J.D. said.
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 It broke J.D.'s heart to see him so withdrawn, so deep in shock.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."