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!"