Stephen Thomas hiked through a stand of bushy young trees that showered him with water and dead wet leaves. The trees ended abruptly at the edge of a meadow. The meadow stretched to the steep hill that formed the end of the cylinder. The ferry back to campus waited at the top of the hill, the axis of the cylinder.
When he reached the edge of the boggy field, Stephen Thomas saw someone halfway up the hill, descending in long strides through the low gravity. Stephen Thomas stopped in the shadows of the trees. The person coming down the hill probably could not see him.
It was Griffith.
Griffith unnerved him. Stephen Thomas reminded himself that auras were a figment of his imagination. His perception of Griffith as lacking one meant absolutely nothing. As Victoria had pointed out, Florrie Brown told them all that Griffith was a narc before Stephen Thomas ever thought to look for his aura.
Griffith made him nervous because Griffith made
everybody nervous. He had been the first suspect in Arachne's crash. He was innocent of that charge.
Griffith said he was an accountant for the General Accounting Office. Few believed he worked for the GAO, and nobody believed he was an accountant. Like everyone else, Stephen Thomas believed he had worked against the expedition.
Stephen Thomas moved deeper into hiding among the trees.
Griffith crossed the meadow. He carried a makeshift bedroll. Stephen Thomas wondered why he had not taken a tent and sleeping bag from the storeroom.
It was communal property-but Griffith probably had even less conception of communal property than he had of governing by consensus.
What do I care if he gets wet on his camp-out? Stephen Thomas said to himself.
He stood very quiet as Griffith approached. He was only a few paces from the government agent, and he felt a spark of satisfaction in watching the man, unobserved, from so close a distance.
Griffith stopped.
"Come out of there." He faced Stephen Thomas.
Stephen Thomas hesitated, then shrugged and stepped out from beneath the trees. What could Griffith do to him? Arachne knew he was out here. Stephen Thomas made sure the computer knew Griffith was out here,too.
"You look like hell." Griffith sounded annoyed. "What are you doing in there?"
"Avoiding you," Stephen Thomas said.
Griffith's expression froze.
"What are you doing out here?" Stephen Thomas said.
"None of your damned business." Griffith started away, his shoulders stiff with anger.
"Hey," Stephen Thomas said.
Griffith's pace checked, but he kept going.
"How'd you know where I was?" Stephen Thomas called after him.
Griffith turned back. He looked Stephen Thomas up and down, critically, contemptuously.
"YOU could have been more obvious," he said. "But . . . only if you'd left your scat."
Victoria hesitated on the path to J.D.'s yard. It was later than she had thought. She had spent all day in Physics Hill, analyzing her journey into Nerno's interior. What a strange conglomeration she had come back with. Neither she nor Avvaiyar knew quite what to make of it.
Delicate light poured through the tall windows of J.D.'s main room, and flowed over the wild garden. The huckleberry bushes rustled, their small oval leaves quivering, and something-an owl, a bat?-flew past on whispered wings.
Victoria knocked on the front door of J.D.'s house. Like most of the houses on Starfarer, it had been built and then covered with a hill. Its whole front was windows, except the door. Looking in someone's open windows was bad form.
Backlit by the cool glow, Zev opened the door.
"Hi, Victoria."
"Hi, Zev. Where've you been all day?"
"Professor Thanthavong told J.D. to rest."
"Is that Victoria?" J.D. asked.
"Hi," Victoria called.
Zev stood aside and let her in. She kicked off her shoes at the door. Larger than life, the image of Nerno's chrysalis filled the center of the room, illuminating it. Victoria had kept the same image, much smaller, hovering nearby all day while she worked.
Nothing had changed.
The image overlapped the boxes that remained stacked in random piles in the main room. J.D. had not been here long enough to unpack all her belongings.
Victoria felt comfortable with J.D., and fond of her. It surprised her to remember how brief a time the alien contact specialist had been on board the starship.
J.D. sat in the windowseat, leaning against the side so she could look out the window or at Nerno's image. She had arranged a few things around her: some of her books, a reading light limpeted to the wall, the woven mat Satoshi had given her at her welcoming party. The light was off; J.D.'s attention was on the image of Nemo.
Zev joined her, sitting right-angled to her in the center of the cushioned seat.
Victoria smiled. "You look comfy."
"I feel so strange," J.D. said. "Like I've had too much to drink. I was saying silly things to everybody I saw. I thought I'd better hide out till I felt like myself again."
"Your system's taking a bit of a shock," Victoria said. "I got so involved in analysis-I should have come by to see you earlier."
"I'm okay. Come sit down."
Victoria perched on the other side of the windowseat, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. Zev's body radiated heat.
Stephen Thomas will be like that, soon, Victoria thought.
Zev curled his feet over JDA; his claws gently dimpled her skin above the instep.
"I know the prep is working," J.D. said. "But I don't feel any change in my link."
"Arachne's not set up to dump more information to a person than the regular link can handle," Victoria said. "Not . . . not under normal circumstances."
The safeguards had not worked for Feral. It should have been impossible, but somehow Arachne had overloaded him. His blood pressure had soared, so fast and hard that it blasted open his arteries, his capillaries. The bleeding had simultaneously crushed his brain, and starved it.
J.D. was attempting something very risky.
"Please tell Nemo to be careful when you try this," Victoria said. She knew better than to ask J.D. to reconsider.
"I will. Don't worry." Her gaze drifted to the image of the chrysalis. "It's so quiet," she said. "I got used to the attendants always fluttering around. Did you notice, you could always hear them even if you couldn't see them?"
"No," Victoria said. "I guess I wasn't in the nest long enough."
They talked for a while about Victoria's analysis of Nerno's center. Zev sat between them. Despite his youth, his exuberance, he was content to listen and watch in silence and without trying to draw their attention to himself. He impressed Victoria more and more, the longer she knew him. "Is it what you thought?" J.D. asked. "Neutronium?" Something had to give the planetoid its mass. normal asteroid its size would have negligible gravity.
person would be able to leap off its surface and orbit it before coming down again.
"I don't think so," Victoria said. "I think the gravity source . . . the power source . . . is even more dense."
"A black hole?" J.D. exclaimed.
"Economy quantum sized."
"Pick one up in any hardware store," J.D. said dryly.
"Right. Plus a nice iron shell for it to eat, a drip charge, and an electrostatic field generator. . . . But what the hell do you do to it to make it carry you around the galaxy?"
"A mere trifle," J.D. said.
They fell silent. A pleasurable tension rose between them; the affection and possibility Victoria always felt around J.D. increased. She extended her hand to J.D. J.D. gazed at her, then enclosed Victoria's long dark fingers in her strong square hand.
"Is everything all right?" J.D. said. "I mean She gestured with her free hand, encompassing all of Starfarer.