Beneath the toenail, the bruised end of his toe had begun to form a valley, a cavity, where a claw would grow. It would interest her, in an intellectual way, if the foot the claw was growing on belonged to a body with which Victoria was less intimately familiar.
Even angry with Stephen Thomas, Victoria felt the attraction of his powerful sexuality.
"Are you done grieving now?" She forced her voice to remain so neutral that her tone came out cold, and hard.
Stephen Thomas's shoulders stiffened. He stared at his foot, then glanced at Satoshi, then turned to Victoria.
,,No," he said. "No, I don't think I am."
"I know you liked him! But you barely knew him. I knew him better than you did-"
"You knew him longer than I did. Not better."
"Next I suppose you'll say the same thing about Merry."
Stephen Thomas looked confused. "What does Merry have to do with this?" "Nothing. Except that Merry was our partner and Feral was our acquaintance, and it seems to me that you're grieving a lot harder for Feral."
Stephen Thomas stood up slowly, gingerly, balancing precariously on his abused feet, and walked out of the room.
Victoria wanted to scream, or apologize, or crywhat she really wanted was for Stephen Thomas never to have received the changing virus, and for Feral and Merry never to have died.
She followed Stephen Thomas as far as the doorway. He was halfway down the hall to his room. In the dim light the new gold pelt was invisible, but it made his outline fuzzy.
He disappeared into his room.
Victoria glanced back at Satoshi, expecting him to tell her what she deserved to hear: that she had been far too hard on Stephen Thomas.
"I shouldn't criticize him for his feelings," she said,
before Satoshi could speak. "Your feelings are your feelings. He can't help being so open. . . ."
"I hate what's happening to him," Satoshi said abruptly.
"I-what?"
"I loved him the way he was," Satoshi said. "God, I don't want to think of myself as changing my feelings for someone because of the way they look.
"
"He hasn't changed that much," Victoria said, because that was how it seemed to her. "Not physically . . ."
"He's changed a lot, " Satoshi said. "And he's going to change more. I hardly even know him now. . . . I can't stand to say it."
He folded his arms across his knees and buried his face against them. Victoria sat beside him and hugged him, trying to reassure him, trying to comfort him, not doing a very good job of it. She was used to Stephen Thomas being the most emotionally demonstrative of them all, to Satoshi being the most reserved and calm, to taking the middle ground herself. Satoshi's shoulders began to shake. Victoria could not remember- Yes. At Merry's funeral, Satoshi had cried. So had Victoria. Stephen Thomas, dry eyed, held them both. At the time she had been grateful that one of the partnership could maintain some equilibrium. She had not considered how strange it was that the calm one was Stephen Thomas.
Satoshi straightened up, drawing in a deep, harsh breath. He flung himself back on the rumpled bed and scrubbed his bare arm across his eyes. He tried to smile.
"This is so weird," he said.
"What is?"
"I'm upset with him because he's doing something so different I can't even understand it . . . and you're upset with him because he's behaving exactly the way he always does."
As he dressed, Stephen Thomas gradually dissociated himself from the fight with Victoria, from the aches in
his bones and the pain in his feet, from everything he had lost in the last week. In the last year.
He usually wore running shoes to the lab. Shoes, today, would make the pain impossible to ignore. He tried his sandals, but even sandals hurt. He shoved them into his pack. Professor Thanthavong would take off the rest of his toenails one by one if he worked barefoot in the lab-she would do it in private; she would do it metaphorically. But she would do it. So he would have to wear the sandals part of the day.
He did not know what to do about the fight with Victoria. Ile could not answer any of her questions any better than he already had. She wanted more from him, but he was damned if he knew what. He would give it to her if he could. He had made himself stay in control after the accident that took Merry, because the partnership needed someone who could still function. And right after Feral died . . . Victoria honestly thought she had put Feral in a position where he would be safe. Stephen Thomas smiled, fondly, sadly. Trust a reporter to get out to the front, even if nobody could figure out where the war was being fought or whether there was a war at all.
Walking cautiously-no point to limping, since both feet hurt-he went out through the French windows of his room.
Despite everything, the hour was still early when he got to the lab. Neither Mitch nor Bay had arrived yet, and Lehua Aki sprawled sleeping on the couch in the Biochem lounge. A small image of Nerno's chamber hovered above her.
By the evidence of their work, his students had all stayed very late last night. The isolation chambers held several racks' worth of growing alien cells.
He was proud of them for getting so much accomplished when he had been useless to them for the past day. They were working under another handicap, too, camping out in the Biochem labs while the silver slugs tried to rebuild Genetics Hill.
Worse than losing their lab space, the geneticists had lost their equipment, the probes and genetic subroutines that everyone developed over time. All the work in progress was destroyed. The missile had stolen a year of Stephen Thomas's professional life.
He checked the preparation he had started the day before. At least one thing was going right today. He had plenty of material for another series of experiments.
Ordinarily, this kind of preparation would be safe by this stage. No matter how virulent the original cells, they were now dead, dismembered, each cell separated into parts. Cell walls. Mitochondria. DNA. But these cells were alien; he had no proof-not even any evidence-that they could no longer replicate once he vibrated them apart with ultrasound and centrifuged them into layers.
He was not particularly worried about infecting Starfarer with some alien illness that would attack animals or people or plants. It would make more sense to worry that tobacco mosaic virus might infect a human being. Those pathogens were from the same evolutionary scheme. But he had cultured an autotroph, a freeliving cell, from Nemo's web. A microbe that could get by on light and water and simple molecular nutrients could grow independently in the starship.
This was something Stephen Thomas preferred to avoid.
He got Arachne to project an image of the squidmoth in its chrysalis.
"Why wouldn't you give me another sample?" he muttered.
He suspected that, eventually, Earth's biosphere would have to co-exist and cope with alien autotrophs, but he did not intend to be responsible for the first uncontrolled contact. Among other things, Professor Thanthavong would not just have his toenails, she would have his lungs as well. In all her decades of research, it had taken a missile attack to contaminate her lab for the first time.
"Damn!" he said suddenly. He had forgotten to set up the DNA sequencing of the soil bacteria from Europa's ship. A complete sequence would give him a detailed picture of the microbe, rather than the more general view of DNA and protein fingerprints. He set up the analysis with a couple of controls and left it running.
"Hi, Stephen Thomas."
Satoshi's young graduate student Fox stood uncertainly in the doorway of the lab. With her forefinger, she nervously twisted a lock of her flyaway black hair into a curl.
"Hello, Fox," Stephen Thomas said.
"Anything I can do?"
"Why? Thinking of changing departments?"