Miensaem Thanthavong, the head of the genetics department, stood at the edge of the broken building, staring at it, her shoulders slumped. Infinity glanced at the lithoclasts again, gauging their progress. It would be a while before they finished cleaning up. After that, the geneticists would call in the lithoblasts, the rock-makers, to rebuild the shell of their building.
Every silver slug that came inside, whether to work or to carry out someone's whim, meant one less attending to the constant job of maintaining the strength and stability of Starfarer's main cylinders. He wondered if the scientists had thought of that.
Professor Thanthavong saw him and greeted him. She looked tired.
He was used to seeing her on a screen, or in a holographic projection.
He always forgot how slight and
delicate she was. Informal as Starfarer could be, he never knew what to call her. Few people called the Nobel laureate by her given name.
"I found the artificials," he said.
"Oh, good. We can use some here. Are they-" Her eyelids flickered as she linked to Arachne's web.
"I'm still not getting She stopped. "What is
it?"
" I think their brains are fried."
Stephen Thomas smoothed the earth over Feral's grave. He leaned against the shovel and rested his forehead against his hands. Sweat dripped down his face and over the sensitive webs between his fingers.
He had chosen a spot on a hilltop within a grove of young oak trees. He chose the spot because he liked it, not because he felt certain Feral would have liked it. He had not known Feral long enough, well enough, to be sure what he would have wanted. Feral had left no instructions. Arachne preserved a record of his EarthSpace waiver, accepted and agreed to, probably without a second thought. Where the record asked for next of kin, Feral had written, "None."
Stephen Thomas sat down and rested against one of the oak saplings. The thin trunk would grow into a mature tree in twenty years, fifty. If Starfarer survived, the oak trees would still be here at the end of the exile.
Sunlight poured down between the brilliant red and yellow leaves. Just as spring was hot back on campus, autumn was hot on the wild side.
"Feral, I wish I had a marker for you," Stephen Thomas said aloud. "I'll get somebody to make you one, as soon as I can. I just couldn't stand to think of you lying there in the morgue. . . ."
He hooked his finger through the thin chain around his neck. The delicate links made a cold line of pressure across the nape of his neck. The crystal pendant swung against his thumb. In some light it was red, in some it was blue, and once in a while it turned black. He stared
into it, twisting it back and forth, watching the colors change.
Stephen Thomas thought about Feral; he thought about looking for his aura. Feral had been unique, surrounded by changing rainbows.
"Victoria's probably right," Stephen Thomas said. "There's no such thing as auras. I make them up to go along with my feelings. To explain them, maybe."
Stephen Thomas wrapped his fingers around the crystal and tugged at it, gently at first, then harder.
"When I met you, I felt the same way I felt when I first met Merry," Stephen Thomas said. "I love Victoria and Satoshi. But that's different. That was slower, and steadier. We all had to work at it. Merry, though . . . sparks. Explosions. All those clich6s.
"But Merry's dead. And you're dead. God damn it, Feral, I'm so sorry.
The chain snapped in his hand. He stared at the broken necklace. A film of blood reddened the gold along a finger's length near the clasp.
Stephen Thomas touched the back of his neck and found the long scratch where the clasp had cut his skin. Salty sweat stung the shallow abrasion. The bloody red-gold chain lay in his hand, tangled around the crystal. Stephen Thomas spilled the necklace onto the bare earth of Feral's grave. Nearby, a silver slug rustled the scatter of dry gold leaves on the ground. Stephen Thomas had called it inside to help him carry Feral's body. Stephen Thomas had been able to manage in the microgravity of the hub. Even coming down the hill, where the perception of weight increased with every step, Feral's weight had been manageable. But he had needed some help in regular gravity.
The lithoclast rippled uncomfortably, impatiently, waiting for him to tell it what to do.
Stephen Thomas did not need it any longer. He dismissed it and watched it crawl away. He only wished he
could as easily command the slugs guarding Blades's house.
How could I have been so wrong about that guy? he wondered.
The heat enervated him. He asked Arachne the reason for producing such an intense Indian summer here in the wild cylinder. Both cylinders ordinarily had mild weather. The temperature range of winter overlapped the temperature range of summer. It seldom froze, and seldom came within complaining distance of body heat. People did sometimes complain that the weather bored them.
Arachne replied that steps were being taken to moderate the temperature. Satoshi would like it over here today, Stephen Thomas thought. Being from Hawaii, Satoshi often complained that Starfarer's weather was too cold. Victoria, on the other hand, had spent much of her childhood in Nova Scotia. She thought that Starfarer had no weather worth mentioning, merely climate.
At the bottom of the hill, an access tunnel opened. The silver slug oozed through it and disappeared, on its way back to its regular maintenance job on the cylinder's outside skin. The tunnel closed. Its hatch, disguised by rocks and dirt and a wilting flower, disappeared against the hillside. The sharp cry of a bird made Stephen Thomas glance up. When he looked down the slope again, he could barely see where the hatch had opened.
He should go home. He should go back to the lab, where the alien cells grew and divided on nutrient plates. By now they had probably produced enough for some analyses to begin. Stephen Thomas tried to find the excitement he should be feeling, but it was too remote. In order to experience elation he would have to open himself to grief as well, grief for Feral and grief for Merry.
He had not been able to fall apart when Merry died and he could not fall apart now. The partnership could not afford it.
STEPHEN THOMAS WOKE. A COLD AND refreshing wind cut the humid, heavy air and rustled the gold leaves overhead. White light speared through the branches and speckled the dry grass.
Back on Earth he would have looked for thunderheads, a thunderstorm, but gentle rain was as extreme as weather ever got on board Starfarer.
Stephen Thomas stretched-and froze. He made himself relax until the ache subsided. He sat up, as cautious as an old man.
"I'll be fucking glad when this is over," he said.
It was possible to change from a
diver back to an ordinary human being. For a decade or so, the U.S. government had aimed a good deal of propaganda at the divers, trying to persuade them to convert.
No diver had ever changed back.
Stephen Thomas could change back if he wanted to, but the viral depolymerase would make him violently ill for weeks. As he was, he could function.
Another factor kept him from the reverse metamorphosis. Arachne's crash had destroyed his medical records and his genetic profile; the destruction of the genetics department crushed his hard-copy backup beyond retrieval. Without the records, there was no sure way to separate the diver genetic material from his own genes.
A wind devil of dry leaves whirled past, paused over Feral's grave, and dissolved. The dry leaves fluttered to the ground.
He pushed his hair behind his ears, climbed to his feet, and stood at the edge of the fresh earth of Feral's grave.