"I had a run-in with a silver slug, all right?" Stephen Thomas said angrily.
"What? How? When?"
"When I tried to get into the chancellor's house."
"Why?"
"Why the hell do you think? He killed Feral! I wanted . . . I don't know what I wanted. I don't know if I would've killed him. But the slugs make fucking good watchdogs. It just about squashed the crap out of me. For a while I thought it broke my pelvis."
"Are you sure-"
"It's just bruises."
"Good lord," Satoshi said. The lithoclasts guarding Blades were the size of rhinoceroses. "You could have been killed."
"I know. I won't do it again." He moved Satoshi's hand away, gently but firmly. "I want to sleep alone tonight." His voice was careful, neutral. Satoshi hesitated. "Okay," he said. He was upset and confused and he had no idea whether he was relieved or disappointed that Stephen Thomas would not come to bed with him. "See you in the morning."
He started out of the lab.
He could still feel the fur against his fingers.
"Satoshi!"
"Yeah?" He turned back.
"Don't tell Victoria," Stephen Thomas said, his voice intense. "About the slug."
Satoshi frowned. "I hate it when you ask me to keep things from Victoria."
"I shouldn't have told either one of you, dammit! I knew it would just upset you both-"
"All right. All right! I won't tell her."
He left his younger partner alone.
He returned to Victoria. She lay on the sleeping surface of her cabin, one knee drawn up, the other leg extended, her fingers laced behind her head, her eyes half closed.
"He wants to sleep by himself tonight."
Her expression was her only question.
"He said he was achy, he said he'd thrash around. . . ." Satoshi was not lying. Not technically. "I don't know," he said.
"One of his moody spells," Victoria said. She had learned to overlook them, as Stephen Thomas preferred. "He'll be okay in the morning."
"Victoria," Satoshi said, "he's growingfur."
"I know. I saw." She grinned. "I think it's kind of sexy, don't you?"
She reached out to him. He grasped her long, slender fingers, lay beside her, and pulled the blanket over them both. Victoria hooked her foot over his leg, sliding her instep up his calf. She pulled him closer and kissed him, hard and hungrily. He opened his mouth for her tongue, and rolled over on his back, drawing her on top of him, abandoning himself to her, abandoning his worries and his fears.
And yet, making love with Victoria in the starlight, in the harsh reflected shine of Sirius, Satoshi missed the touch of Stephen Thomas's body, the strength of his hands, his voice.
After Satoshi left, Stephen Thomas stared at the cell cultures for a few more minutes. He did not want to move. His whole body hurt.
Just ignore it, he said to himself. You'd feel worse after a rough soccer game.
He was used to recovering quickly. He still did recover quickly: a few days ago he had had two black eyes and a livid cut across his forehead. Those bruises had vanished and the scar was fading.
The ache of the changing virus remained. And once in a while, completely unexpectedly, real pain ambushed him. Before he realized how badly the slug had bruised him, he had feared something was going wrong with the changes.
He wished he could just take to his bed and get his partners to bring him chicken soup. They would do it, too . . . except that then he would end up having to tell Victoria what had really happened. Admitting to Satoshi what a fool he had been was bad enough. He did not think he could stand to admit it to Victoria.
He swore out loud, shut down the lab, and went across the Chi to his cubicle. In the far cabin, Victoria and Satoshi murmured to each other. An ache radiated from the center of his pelvis. It spread in a wave. He quietly closed the door that joined his partners' cabins to his own.
He stripped off his clothes, untangled his quilt, and lay down on the sleeping surface. He pulled the quilt around his shoulders. It used to smell like Merry, but it did not anymore, even in his imagination.
He was wide awake. He flung off the quilt, turned over, stretched, and looked at himself.
His body proportions were similar to Zev's: he was slender, narrow-hipped; he had good shoulders. But Zev, like most divers, was rather short. Stephen Thomas liked being tall. He hoped that would not change.
So far, his toenails had not begun to change to semiretractile claws. He curled his toes. His feet were about the only part of him that did not hurt.
His skin changed from day to day. Not only its color. He had traded the maddening itch between his fingers, while the webbing formed, for a milder itch all over his body as the fine, nearly invisible hair grew in.
He liked the delicate pelt. He thought he would find it sexy on another person. He rubbed his hand down his forearm, down his side. He hoped Victoria and Satoshi would get to like it, too.
I wonder whether Merry would have liked it? Stephen Thomas thought. Probably. Merry was always the one who wanted to experiment.
The partnership had never quite perfected the com-
plex, erotic chaos of four people making love to each other in the same bed. They had needed more time. They had all been looking forward to trying sex in freefall. But they never got to try it as a foursome; Merry died before their first trip into space.
With a sharp pang of loneliness, Stephen Thomas wished he were sleeping with his partners. But all his reasons for sleeping alone remained. He hurt, he was restless, he would keep them awake. Besides, he liked to please them, and for the past couple of days his interest in sex had been very low.
That worried him. He explained his lack of interest to himself with the bruises, the persistent ache, the occasional intense pain.
He told the lights to turn off, curled up in his quilt, and hugged his knees to his chest. That eased him a little.
His mind spun around the strange behavior of his cell cultures, the disturbing encounter with Nerno's pond creatures.
Trying to take his mind off his work, Stephen Thomas thought about Feral. Feral liked change, just like Merry did. That was one of the reasons Stephen Thomas had been attracted to hirn. Feral had joined the expedition's revolt without hesitation. Hc had been excited when Stephen Thomas decided to finish turning into a diver. He had even been envious. Stephen Thomas smiled wryly to himself.
Some of these changes you wouldn't be envious of, my friend, he thought. But I bet you would've liked my new fur.
On impulse, he opened a private channel back to Starfarer. In response to his call, Gerald Hernminge appeared, his dark hair mussed. A wrinkle, the image of a crease in his pillow, was imprinted across his cheek.
"Did I wake you up?"
Gerald glanced sideways, realized he was transmitting his image, and snapped a command to Arachne. He faded out.
"What is it? Has there been a new development?"
"No," Stephen Thomas said. "Nerno's still quiet."
"Then why did you call me? Don't you ever sleep?"
No, Stephen Thomas thought, I don't, these days.
"I called you because I want to talk to you for a minute. Why'd you answer, if you were asleep?"
"Because I'm your bloody liaison!"
"But I marked the message private-"
Stephen Thomas stopped. No point in deliberately getting into an argument with Gerald. They argued enough anyway.
"It's about Feral."
"What about him?"
Gerald's image reappeared. He had combed his hair and put on a shirt. Except for the crease across his cheek, he looked wide awake and professional.
"His funeral. We should do something-"
Gerald stared at him. "You never cease to amaze me. You're in the midst of humanity's first alien contact-"
"It's only the first if you don't count Europa," Stephen Thomas said. "Europa isn't an alien."