Her shirt lay in a scummy puddle. She had hosed off most of the crud, but doubted she would ever want to wear it again.
Esther shrugged, grabbed her jacket, and left the shirt where it was. Outside the basement, the evening would still be hot. Too hot for her jacket, and she would not even need her shirt.
She ran up the basement stairs, eager to get outside. She was tired and hungry.
She emerged into air so cool it surprised her.
The chill felt wonderful on her bare shoulders and breasts. It had been too hot lately. She set off for Infinity's house with a spring in her step.
A cold breeze hit her. The skin on her arms turned all gooseflesh, and her nipples hardened. Even then she resisted putting on her jacket.
Don't be a jerk, she said to herself. It's dumb to feel so cold just because it was so hot earlier. She slipped into the lurid green satin. Arachne must be fixing the weather, she thought. Glad to hear it.
Stephen Thomas returned home, dirty and sore. It was very late-or very early-and he guessed Victoria and Satoshi had already gone to bed.
Instead oftaking a shower, he told the house to fill the bathtub. As he watched the water rise along the sides of the azure tub, he tried to remember when the
last time was that he had taken a bath. He usually showered, preferably with one or both of his partners. Sometimes they sat together and soaked afterwards, lounging in clean hot water.
He dropped his shorts and shirt on the floor and stepped into the big blue tub.
The mud swirled away from his dirty feet.
Oh, shit, he thought, I should have at least rinsed off. . . .
But the hot water felt so good, rising around his hips, sliding up his back and belly and chest as he lay down, that he could not bring himself to start over again. He stretched out and let himself relax.
He spread his hands out on the surface; the translucent webs between his fingers nearly disappeared. Today his skin was the color of strong tea. He pulled his hand through the water, feeling the new power of his swimming stroke.
Like his hands and his skin, his lungs were changing. Soon he would be able to store more oxygen, and hold his breath much longer than normal. If "normal" meant anything anymore, in relation to Stephen Thomas.
When the changes were complete, he would possess an ability unique among aquatic mammals: he would be able to extract oxygen directly from the water. In an emergency, breathing like a fish would support the life of a mammal for a little while.
Stephen Thomas balfway expected to be possessed by an overwhelming urge to return to the primordial sea, but that had not happened.
Except, he thought, I'm taking a bath.
"The call of the sea," he muttered sarcastically. "Maybe I ought to add some salt."
Zev talked about swimming all the time, but the talk was habit, and homesickness. Staying dry did not harm his health; he had no gills that had to stay wet.
Air bubbles caught beneath the fine new hairs on Stephen Thomas's arms and legs. They tickled. As they escaped and rose to the water's surface, they made a faint, cheerful crinkling noise. Stephen Thomas rubbed
his hands down his legs, down his arms, down his belly, currying the bubbles away.
His skin did not itch so badly, now that his transparent gold pelt had finished growing. His joints had stopped aching, though his shoulders hurt from digging Feral's grave.
He was beginning to wonder if the pains inside his body were all from his encounter with the silver slug. They should be fading. Instead, they had intensified. His pubic bone hurt with a sharp, hot stab and even his penis felt sore. Would he grow fur there, too? That would be too weird.
He knew as much about divers, or as little, as any average ordinary human being. He had never been fascinated with them, as J.D. was, and none of his work as a geneticist had included Changelings. No one worked on Changelings anymore. First it became impossible to get grants for the research, and then the changes themselves became illegal in the United States.
Stephen Thomas told the house to warm the bath. Warm water gushed from the faucet onto his feet.
His toes shot pain up his leg. He snatched his foot away, thinking the tub had burned him. But the water was only comfortably hot. He sat up in the tub and raised his foot to look at it.
Dark bruises arced across the base of each toenail, and the nails felt loose. Stephen Thomas wiggled the nail of his big toe. He grimaced.
It hurt, but it hurt in a way he remembered from his childhood. It was the itchy pain of a loose baby tooth.
Zev's feet had sharp semiretractile claws that curved over the ends of his toes, recessed into the flesh. Stephen Thomas had not thought much about how his nails would turn to claws, and he found that he did not want to think much about it now. He stopped wiggling his toenail and let his foot sink back into the heat.
The idea of being able to breathe underwater intrigued him. He wondered how far the changes had gone. He lay back in the bath, letting the water rise around his head. His hair fanned out, tickling his neck,
drifting between his shoulder blades. Warm water crept up his face, covered his lips, covered his eyes. He could hardly tell the water from the steamy, humid air.
Stephen Thomas plunged his head the rest of the way underwater and took a fast, deep breath.
The water filled his throat and gushed into his lungs, choking him. He erupted from the bath, gasping. He leaned over the side of the tub, coughing water onto the floor. He nearly threw up.
Finally he collected himself, and hunched in the cooling bath. His chest and his throat hurt. The ache travelled downward and lodged in his belly. I guess I'm not a diver yet, he thought.
He opened the drain, stood up, and splashed out of the tub. Droplets of water sparkled all down his body, trapped by the gold pelt. He curried off the water as he had curried away the air bubbles. He needed a sweat-scraper, the kind grooms used on horses or on Bronze Age athletes.
Rubbing himself with a towel, he went down the hall to his room. But in the doorway, he hesitated. He turned away from his comfortable, familiar mess and went to the end of the hall, to the room that would have been Merry's, to the room Feral had slept in. The partnership had never used it before Feral came to visit.
The futon was made up; the shelf doors were closed. It was as if no one had ever stayed here. As if Feral had never existed.
Stephen Thomas slid open the door to the built-in shelves. Feral's few extra clothes lay in a neat stack.
Stephen Thomas closed the shelf door again. He hung his towel carefully on the rack, got into Feral's bed, curled up around the deep pain of his pelvic bone, and fell asleep.
LIKE THE STROKES OF A BRUSH PAINTING, beach grass covered the soft dunes. Beyond the dunes lay Starfarer's ocean.
J.D. walked along a path too narrow to have been made by human feet. She wondered who or what had formed the path-and saw a tiny hoofprint, a small pile of horse droppings. The tough, sharp-edged grass would be little temptation for the miniature horses, but they might like the salt, and the flat freedom of the beach.
J.D. climbed the gentle rise of the dune. At the top, she paused to look across the shore.
The ocean circled the park end of
Starfarer's campus cylinder. It was the pulse of the starship's ecosystem, and the breath of its weather. The smell of salt sparkled in the onshore breeze, and the dry grains of sand hissed as they spun past J.D.'s feet.
Open ocean created long crescents of white beach, separated by headlands and smoothed by the surf. Fqr overhead, on the shore beyond the sun tube, opposite this point on the cylinder, barrier islands protected salt marshes. The lowlands buffered the air and the water and offered shelter and spawning grounds to many of Starfarer's creatures.