"I wanted it all to be perfect," Victoria said softly. "We'd take off with a fanfare, and explore, and come back with . . . I didn't know what, but some treasure.
Not a material treasure, an intellectual one." She rested her forehead against her knees. "Some fanfare. Some treasure." She looked up again; if she did not hide her face maybe she could keep from crying. "And I'm worried about my family back home, my great-grandmother especially. I wish you'd gotten to meet her. I wish she'd come on the expedition."
"She'll be all right," J.D. said, her voice reassuring. "They won't blame our families for what we've done. Surely."
"Grangrana has no way of knowing if we're still alive," Victoria said. "She'll be so worried. . . . And Satoshi's parents. They're wonderful. They'll stand up for us. But they'll be scared for us, too."
"What about Stephen Thomas? Doesn't he have family back home, too?"
"Just his dad. I mean, I guess he could find his mom if he really wanted to, but he never has. And Greg is . . . kind of self-centered. He knows all the right buttons to push." She sighed. "I try to like him, I really do.
But it's hard to get worked up over worrying about him."
J.D. squeezed Victoria's hand.
"And I miss my cat!" Victoria said suddenly. "No matter what I said to Alzena, I couldn't persuade her to let me bring Halley along." Sometimes she dreamed of petting the sleek black cat; she would wake remembering the soft vibration of Halley's silent purr. Victoria laughed. "Isn't that ridiculous? Everything that's happened, and I think about missing my cat!" "It's all right," J.D. said. "It's understandable."
"You don't need to hear all this!" Victoria said. "I meant to come and see how you're feeling, not to whine all over you." She let go of J.D.'s hand and pulled herself back, hugging her knees. In a moment she would leave.
She would leave J.D. and Zev alone.
"J.D. and I are going swimming in the morning," Zev said. "In the ocean." Victoria glanced up again. At first she thought Zev's comment was a complete non sequitur. But J.D. and
Zev were looking at each other with understanding, with happiness.
"Would you like to come with us?" J.D. said.
"I'd love to," Victoria said, surprised and pleased by the invitation. "We'll stop by for you. Five a.m."
"Five!" Victoria said.
J.D. grinned. "Second thoughts?"
"Not at all. If you're sure you want company-T'
"I'm sure," J.D. said.
Alone in the dark basement of the administration building, Esther Klein put a box of probes and regenerators on the floor and tossed her lime-green baseball jacket beside it. The hot afternoon had even penetrated to the basement. Repair supplies and the dead artificials surrounded her. Over the dank scent of the basement lay the hint of mycelial growth, and ozone, and decay.
"I'm going to kill Infinity," she muttered. "I'm going to kill him." Esther could have-should have-been out on the surface of the cylinders, in space, checking damage and making sure the silver slugs were properly maintaining the starship. Instead, she was stuck down here nursing sick artificials. It was all Infinity's fault. He was the only person on board who knew she had worked as an artificials tech.
But somebody had to do it, and she was the only person here with any experience. How the administration could let all the techs get recalled and not replace them . . . Esther supposed that was part of Blades's plan. It was convenient for him to let the techs go unreplaced. If they had remained on Starfarer, he would have chosen some other subsystem to disable. Esther remained with the expedition only because she had been piloting the transport that was trapped in the dock when Staty~rer plunged into transition.
Fixing the artificials is the least I can do, I guess, she thought. Considering how much trouble I made by following orders. Following orders! I'm lucky Gerald or one of the senators hasn't punched me out for dragging them along on the expedition.
On the other hand, if I had undocked, I wouldn't be along on this trip, and I'd probably be in jail.
She rubbed her hands down the seat of her pants, rummaged for a probe in her toolbox, and set to work on the first artificial stupid.
She cracked the sea] on its brain pan. Nothing. Blowing out her breath in relief, she opened the bioelectronic brain the rest of the way. Not too bad. Desiccated, like a crust of algae on a mudflat. If all the artificials were like this, she could resuscitate them in short order. She hooked up a rehydration tube and watched for a few minutes. The rumpled surface engorged with saline and fructose and salicylic acid, responding to the rich mix of hormones and growth factors. The fissures deepened.
Esther patted the artificial.
"You're going to remember everything, aren't you?" she asked it hopefully. "Arachne isn't going to be much help, so I'd appreciate it if you'd come out of this with your memories intact. You aren't gonna be much use to me as a stupid vegetable."
She went on to the next artificial and broached its seal.
The brain case hissed and burst open. Esther jumped back. Putrid bits of bioelectronic conductor sprayed her chest. Esther gagged and stripped off her shirt. It fell with a soggy thud. Bioelectronics rotted with all the worst qualities of animal, vegetable, and fungal matter: the sweet and nauseating smell of decomposing meat and the slimy deterioration of plant cells, all held together in a yeasty matrix.
First she hosed herself down, then her shirt, and finally the artificial, sluicing the spoiled brain tissue into the waste digester. The smell hung thick around her. It was not very toxic, but it sure was nasty.
She was soaking wet. Now she was glad of the day's warmth. If she had been working in her jacket, the unofficial uniform of transport pilots, it would be ruined.
I bet Starfarer's storeroom doesn't have any fluorescent chartreuse baseball jackets, she thought.
Esther set to the laborious task of cleaning the brain case. She sterilized it, seeded and sealed it, and hooked it to a feeder tube. That one would be a week regrowing. Then someone would have to retrain it.
She had Arachne display the transmission from Nerno's chamber next to the AS brain schematics. It had not changed since the chrysalis hardened; Esther had practically memorized it. She asked for some music. Trash rock. At least the recent music archives had not been wiped out in the system crash.
She set to work on another brain.
After eight hours, she was cursing Infinity under her breath. The first artificial had been a stroke of cruel good luck. Of the five open ASes, only the first had survived with any usable brain at all. Eighty percent complete destruction rate. Hands on her hips, she gazed around at the hundreds of robots that waited for her attention.
She felt like a cross between Dr. Frankenstein and an AS housekeeper. Or, maybe, considering the spatters of gunk on her clothes, she was more like Dr. Frankenstein's assistant Igor. She wiped a smudge off her wrist, thinking, The doctor never got brains all over his nice white lab coat.
"I need some help here, guys," she said to the deaf and blind and mindless robots.
She could hardly ask Infinity for help. He had more than enough to do.
But Esther knew almost no one else on board. Except Kolya Cherenkov, and she was not going to ask the cosmonaut to do this job.
She only got over to Starfarer once a month or so. Most of Esther's piloting had been between O'Neill colonies. She always accepted the Starfarer run with pleasure.
Esther travelled a lot, she seldom stayed long in one place, and she did not like to sleep alone. Whenever she
boarded Starfarer, all she wanted to do was take Infinity Kenjira Yanagihara y Mendoza to bed with her. He was one of her favorite lovers. But that had not left her much time for making other friends on board the starship.
She asked Arachne to send out a general request for help for tomorrow morning. She cleaned off her tools and put them away. She let the brain schematic fade, and took one last glance at Nemo's chamber. In all the time she had been working, the squidmoth's chrysalis had not changed.