"Obviously," Stephen Thomas said sarcastically. But then he went back in his mind and listened to what Zev had just said. "What do you mean by 'ready'?"
"She-"
"Not for Victoria. For me. How would you know if you were ready?"
"I'd be slick, of course," Zev said.
"Oh," Stephen Thomas said. "Oh.
"That doesn't happen to men humans?"
"No.,,
"And it didn't happen for you?"
"Not as of this morning."
"You're still changing," Zev said. He patted Stephen Thomas on the arm. "It'll be better when you're done." He cocked his head, thoughtfully. "You'll have to learn how to retract and extend. I never thought of that." He jumped up and stood knee-deep in the water. "Come on. Come swimming." Stephen Thomas pushed himself to his feet. "I can't right now, Zev."
Zev glanced over his shoulder, wistfully, down the river. "Are you okay? Can you get where you're going by yourself?"
"Sure."
Zev grinned and waved and pushed off backwards. The current caught him. He vanished into the tumble of white water.
Stephen Thomas waded out onto the dry rocks. They were uncomfortably hot. He slid his feet quickly into his sandals and shook himself off. Droplets scattered from his body. In the bright light, his pelt was white-gold against his darkening skin.
He eased into his shorts, tempted to return to the cool solace of the river. He needed time to think and
reflect . . . or he needed to be distracted from too much thinking and reflecting.
As he climbed the path, Crimson Ng strode down it, pulling a wheelbarrow. "Hi," she said.
"Hi. Current project?"
"A new one." Crimson let him look into the wheelbarrow. He expected to see the bones of one of her heavy-boned, long-fanged predators.
The rough slab of stone contained alien shapes, the fossilized soft bodies of creatures never in any vertebrate line. Tentacles writhed and tangled. Eons ago, some violent accident had crushed the feathered legs. "It looks like-"
"I devolved Nemo," she said. "And invented the rest of the ecosystem."
She gazed past Stephen Thomas to the riverbank, barely aware of his presence. "It's ready to go in the ground. Want to help?"
"No," he said, aware that she was offering him a courtesy. "Thanks. I have to stop by the lab, and then I promised Fsther a stint with the ASes."
"Yeah,' Crimson said. "Right. I should do that, too." She grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and hurried past, instantly oblivious to everything but her work.
The cells from Nemo's ship thrived in growth medium. Stephen Thomas set to work parceling cultures out for the other departments.
Stephen Thomas tried not to worry about the weird changes in his body; he tried not to dwell on them. It was hard, when what felt like the world's worst sunburn was peeling and itching in his crotch. He could not forget the raw red flesh. Zev's explanation helped, but not much.
He kept imagining that his genitals had drawn up inside his body. Imagining, hell! he thought.
He knew if he scratched himself, it would just start hurting.
I'd rather have the pain than the damned itching, he thought. But when he remembered the pain, he changed his mind.
He surrounded himself with images: Nerno's chamber, a recording of the cell growth, a micrograph of the huge dendritic molecules. He brought the cell growth image closer, and speeded up its replay.
The cells grew in a snowflake-shaped colony, stretched out in a network of interconnecting processes. The pattern was clearer in two dimensions than in three. In three, the concentric layers obscured and confused the lacy structure.
He let the cell colony recede and studied the strange three-dimensional polymers that he suspected of being the alien cell's genetic material.
He could not figure them out. The magical beauty of DNA was that its structure implied its means of replication: simple, elegant, self-evident. The double-stranded molecule split; the dividing cell recreated the missing half of each strand, using the strand itself as a map for its mirror image. Dendritic molecules, though, were both more complicated and, ordinarily, simpler: structurally more complicated, but with less room for variation within the structure. He could figure out how they could form. But he could not figure out how they replicated. If they replicated. And he could not yet see a straightforward way of getting genetic information into or out of them.
You have plenty of time, he said to himself. What do you have to show for visits to two alien ships? One ordinary bit of living bunch-grass, and a couple of species of alien bacteria. Shit, all you have is time. You can afford to dissect a sample atom by atom, if that looks promising.
Stephen Thomas composed a note telling his colleagues that their alien cells were ready. He closed his eyes and linked with Arachne.
The computer opened up to him, serene and limit-
less, apparently unscarred and undaunted by the system crashes that had crippled it. Arachne's confidence could mislead him into believing nothing had changed. The truth was that the crashes had left invisible pockets of emptiness, as undetectable and as treacherous as snowcovered crevasses in a glacier.
Stephen Thomas sent out his message, then, on impulse, asked Arachne to show him Feral's files.
Feral had specialized in reporting on the space program. Both Victoria and Satoshi held him in high regard as a writer, but Stephen Thomas had read few of his articles. Stephen Thomas had liked Feral for himself. Feral had left a lot of work on the system. A collection of his finished pieces, written back on Earth. Some slice of life reportage. A long series he called "Life Log." The last installment reported Feral's trip from Earth to the transport to Starfarer. It ended with the communications cutoff before the missile attack. After that, his work lay unfinished, stored in private files.
Someone should put it together and publish it for him, Stephen Thomas thought. If we can get to it.
The names of the files were intriguing. His final "Life Log."
"Resonances: Starfarer. " "Stephen Thomas."
Stephen Thomas asked Arachne to let him into the files. Receiving a polite refusal, he shrugged. He had not expected it to be that easy.
Feral had recorded no will, no next of kin, which could mean that the files were locked forever. But Stephen Thomas was not ready to give up.
He tried the obvious sorts of passwords: Feral's name, his birthdate. Stephen Thomas even tried his own name.
Nothing worked.
I'll figure it out, Feral, Stephen Thomas thought.
Reluctantly, he put the locked files away and withdrew from Arachne. He had promised some time to Esther Mein and the artificials. He had better get going.
Mitch sauntered in, looking ridiculously happy.
"Sorry I'm late," he said cheerfully and without a
shred of regret. He dragged a chair up beside Stephen Thomas and straddled it.
Stephen Thomas thought, this does not sound like unrequited love anymore.
I wonder . . . ?
"Listen, Mitch-" Stephen Thomas said. "Yesterday. When Fox was here. It all came right out of thin air."
"I know. She told me. And at your house last night, she just wanted to talk to somebody. She sure picked the wrong person." Mitch chuckled. "Boy, is she mad at Florrie."
"That's probably the only thing Fox and I agree on right now," Stephen Thomas said. It hurt that Florrie had junked the connection they had made-that he thought they had made-so readily.
"She's pretty embarrassed, too. I think she's afraid everybody will take your side."
"There aren't any sides! Shit, people aren't taking sides! Are they?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. Maybe a little bit."