The lifeliner's thread vanished into the oily, organic sheen floating on the pool. The light was so bright, the surface so obscured with rainbow brilliance, that Stephen Thomas could not see to the bottom.
Nemo likes water as scungy as the air, Stephen Thomas thought. If I'm supposed to dive in after the lifeliner, forget it.
He lifted the thread. Its end emerged, broken, from the water.
Broken or dissolved, Stephen Thomas thought.
"Hey, critter," he said aloud.
The water shivered at his feet. He stooped down, expecting the lifeliner to answer his summons.
The surface splashed upward, spraying him with the scummy soup. He shouted in shock and flung himself back, His feet slipped into the water. "Shit!" He jerked his feet back and scrambled for the entrance. He reached safety. He pulled off his shirt. The front and the arms were stained-he was glad that for once lie had worn a long-sleeved shirt and long pants-but the back was clean. He used it to wipe the liquid from his face and hands.
The pale blue silk of his shirt discolored to brown.
"Jesus, Nemo, what's-oh, fuck!"
His sandals were smoking. He snatched them off and threw them into the corridor and rubbed his feet on the remnants of his shirt.
"What's going on down here?"
"Genetics."
"Survival of the fittest?" I knew there was a good
reason to study molecular genetics, he thought. "You told me you'd warn me of dangerous places."
"But you asked to observe, not interact," Nemo said.
"I didn't mean to fall in your damned pond."
Stephen Thomas got the distinct impression that the squidmoth was laughing at him. Scowling, he sat crosslegged well above the waterline, rested his elbows on his knees, and leaned his chin on his fists.
The caustic liquid had not discolored the skin of his feet, or of his hands, even the delicate new swimming webs, so he supposed his face was not disfigured either.
The splashing creature had submerged, unseen. But the surface roiled slowly, as if gentle whirlpools drifted across it, now and then colliding, mixing, separating.
From the safety of the entrance, Stephen Thomas could not see what was going on. He rose and went cautiously nearer the edge. He bent just far enough to peer into the pool.
The lifeliner burrowed into the bottom until nothing showed but its two scorpion tails. Dark blue filaments, slender at the root, wide and flat in the center, and tapered at the ends, grew from the bottom like kelp. They stretched toward the center of the pond. Just above the root, each bore a cluster of scarlet flowers.
A tantalizing array of entities crawled and swam and burrowed among and below the kelp. Stephen Thomas wished he had a protective suit. He was not going swimming unprotected in Nerno's pool. He doubted even his spacesuit would help. It might keep out the noxious liquid and gases the pool was emitting . . . then fail catastrophically as soon as he entered vacuum. Another unfamiliar creature ploughed toward the lifeliner. It was shaped like a sowbug, but the size of Stephen Thomas's cupped hands. Several rows of spines ran down its back. They wavered, pressed backward as the creature crossed the muddy bottom.
The spined sowbug lunged forward, straight between the lifeliner's extended scorpion tails. Silk burst from the tails, erupting onto the spines, and the tails flailed at the attacker. But the sowbug fastened on. Silt spewed up, obscuring the fight. Trails of yellow blood filmed the water. The lifeliner humped up out of its burrow, flexing its body spasmodically. One tail crushed a patch of spines. The sowbug shuddered, then clenched.
The lifeliner relaxed and grew still. As Stephen Thomas watched, the sowbug bore down on it. It fell apart in battered pieces, leaking guts and golden blood.
Stephen Thomas backed away from the pond. He felt sick. His vision blurred. He stumbled out into the corridor, fighting for breath.
Don't throw up, he told himself. Not here, not now. Whatever you've seen, whatever it signifies, don't let it affect you.
He grabbed his shirt and his sandals and fled from the soft vicious sounds of struggle.
J.D. and Zev remained with Nemo.
One of the armor-scaled creatures flowed up to Zev's bare foot and extended its frilly mantle, rippling out to touch him. Zev watched it curiously. Then, fearless, he picked it up and turned it over to look at it. Its feathery appendages waved frantically, and a stream of fluid spurted from its underside. Zev laughed. An old hand at catching creatures who used water jets and ink and even tiny poison darts for defense and escape, he had been holding it at an angle. The liquid jet missed him and spattered, pungent and oily, on the floor. Zev put the creature down, and it zipped off under one of the silk-sheet walls.
Zev crossed the distance to Nemo. He knelt down and touched Nerno's sleek side, stroking the iridescent skin. Nemo blinked slowly. The long eyelid closed. Nemo reminded J.D. for all the world like a huge mutant cat being petted. The long tentacles moved languorously, tapping against the silk floor, the spinners, Zev's leg.
Nemo plucked one of the honey ants and gave it to Zev, plucked another and handed it to J.D. J.D. ate hers
slowly, preparing for the rush and dizziness. Zev popped his into his mouth and crunched it.
"Oh, I like that," he said out loud, his voice breathy. He returned to using his link. "Thanks, Nerno! I wonder if you'd like beer."
Nerno's long eyelid opened; the glittery eyes peered out. The long tentacles Surrounded Zev, touching and stroking him.
"I eat only insubstantial food," Nemo said.
Zev sat quiet and interested as Nerno's tentacles explored him.
The tentacles touched and probed his body through the thin fabric of his shorts and shirt. Zev, not in the least uncomfortable, stroked Nerno's back and played his fingers along the shorter proboscises that formed Nerno's mustache.
Nemo touched Zev's face with the tip of one long tentacle.
"You have had your children."
"Me?" Zev said, startled, yet flattered. "No, I've never been asked to father a child. Not yet."
Nerno's short tentacles wuffled in a complex wave.
"You're a juvenile."
"I'm grown!"
Nemo pulled the tentacle sharply back. Zev leaned toward the squidmoth and touched the purple fur.
"I didn't mean to frighten you," Zev said.
"Zev's an adult," J.D. said. "But divers wait till they're older, usually, before they reproduce."
"Humans change to divers," Nemo said.
J.D. was having trouble following Nerno's reasoning, though the insubstantial food made her feel intense as well as dizzy, able to make great leaps of intuition. Unfortunately, figuring out what Nemo meant, or what Nemo wanted to know, was too great a leap even for J.D.
"Divers started out as human beings. But we changed ourselves. My grandparents did."
"Divers are not the adult form of human beings."
"No," J.D. said. "I mean, that's right. Humans can change to divers and divers can change to humans, but we usually don't."
"I was never an ordinary human being," Zev said. "And we breed true. Diver genes are dominant. If J.D. and I had children, they'd be divers."
"There's another difference between Zev and me," J.D. said. "Zev is male and I'm female."
She was glad to have a relatively neutral way of bringing up the subject of sex and gender. Though Nemo had not balked at any of J.D.'s questions so far, she had felt shy of asking about the reproductive strategies of squidmoths. And though J.D. assured herself that a squidmoth would be shy of completely different subjects than the ones human beings found difficult and delicate, she did not find broaching the question of sex any easier. "Europa is a female and Androgeos is a male," Nemo said.
"Yes. Exactly."
"This is significant for your reproduction."