Metaphase. Part 1

METAPHASE.

BY.

VONDA N. MCINTYRE.

To the folks in the Wallingford-Wilmot Library and the Fremont Library who let me move in on them, laptop computer and all, fleeing the marsians who decided that right next to my office was a good place to build ufo hangars.

For ten months.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

MANY THANKS,.

To the people who helped me get Starfarer right: Kristi N. Austin, John H. Chalmers, John Cramer, Howard L. Davidson, Jane E. Hawkins, Marilyn J. Holt, Nancy Horn, Ursula K. Le Guin, Debbie Notkin, Paul Preuss, Kate Schaefer, Carol Severance, and Jon Singer; To Gerard K. O'Neill and the s.p.a.ce Studies Inst.i.tute for the work on which the campus is based; AND, OF COURSE, To the Starfarers Fan Club. PARTICULR THANKS, To Teresa Meikle and Charles E. Griswold, whose Natural History article on SteG.o.dyphus sp.a.w.ned (as it were) the squidmoths.

-VNM.

CHAPTER 1.

J.D. SAUVAGE, THE ALIEN CONTAC-r SPECIAList, picked her way across the rough surface of a rocky planetoid.

A gossamer thread, s.h.i.+ning bluewhite in the actinic glare of the star Sir- ius, stretched across the stone beneath her feet. She followed it. A coa.r.s.er line, her lifeline, unreeled behind her.

The planetoid was more or less spherical, so small that its pitted and scarred surface curved sharply away to nearby horizons. At first glance, it looked like a barren, airless asteroid, weathered by primordial meteors; after a first glance, it would be easily over-iwl,F looked. J.D. and her colleagues in the alien contact department almost had overlooked it.

The silken strand thickened, branched, and intertwined, gradually forming a lacy gauze. Not wanting to damage the fabric, J.D. followed it without stepping on it, as if she were walking beside a stream. This stream flowed upward, climbing a steep escarpment. J.D. climbed with it, moving easily.

The low gravity was far higher than a natural rock this size would create. The least of the small world's anomalies, the gravity hinted at a complex interior, perhaps even a core of matter collapsed to neutronium.

The planetoid repaid a second glance. Great ma.s.ses of webbing filled a dozen of its largest craters. J.D. was walking on an extraordinary asteroid. The worldlet was the stars.h.i.+p of alien beings.

Iridescent fibers wove together, forming a solid ribbon that led through a cleft in the escarpment. J.D. stepped cautiously onto the fabric. It gave slightly, a springy carpet over solid rock.

The band of silk guided her to the edge of one of the web-filled craters.

Somewhere within it, the alien beings waited.

The message from the squidmoths had been brief and direct. "You will be welcomed."

J.D. scrambled up the last steep slope to the edge of the crater. Her destination lay below.

The silken pathway blended into a convoluted surface, filling the wide, deep crater. Valleys and ridges rumpled the webbing, and half a dozen trails twisted into it from where she stood. To proceed, she would have to walk off the edge of the crater and let the web alone support her weight.

She hesitated, listening and hoping for another message from the squidmoths.

"I'm here," she said softly. Her s.p.a.cesuit radio transmitted her voice.

In the silence, waiting for a reply, she knelt down and slid her hand across the smooth webbing. The faint shussh of her touch transmitted itself through her glove. She wished she could feel the silk with bare fingers, but the atmosphere was far too thin for her to remove her suit.

A single filament, darker silver than the rest, crossed the surface and disappeared along one of the trails.

J.D. rose, lifting the thread, holding it carefully across her palm.

Starlight spun along its length.

She slid one foot gingerly forward. The floor yielded, then tightened, bouncing gently in the low gravity. She felt like a skater crossing ice so thin it flexed beneath her. She feared her touch would rip the silk; she feared a dark tear would open beneath her, and she would fall fifty meters to the bottom.

Most of all, she feared that her presence would cause the structure to self-destruct. She had watched Tau Ceti's alien museum destroy itself

rather than admit human beings. Rather than admit her.

But the squidmoths had invited her. The thread in her hand acknowledged her existence.

J.D. moved farther onto the silk, following the thread into the labyrinth.

Her boots left no marks.

The path dipped into a meandering valley. J.D. descended through a cleft of delicate cascades. The fluttery fabric responded to her footsteps, trembling, vibrating. The cascades closed together overhead, and she found herself walking upon one horizontal sheet, and beneath another, past and through translucent tissue-thin layers like huge fallen parachutes that filtered harsh starlight. The membranes formed tunnels and chambers; cables and strands connected the membranes. The sheets rippled silently as she pa.s.sed.

If a suspension bridge and a Gothic cathedral had interbred, this construction might be their offspring.

Without the filament, she would have no idea which way to go. If it broke, only her lifeline would lead her out.

Silvery-gray illumination surrounded her, suffusing the s.p.a.ce with a luminous glow. The spun silk carried the light within its strands.

Deep within the crater, she paused at the top of a slope that plunged into light. Afraid she would slip, fall, and slide sprawling to-wherever the hillside led-she wrapped her fingers around a supporting strand and tested its strength. It gave, then contracted, as if to embrace her hand.

Like the floor, the fiber was elastic and strong. She reached for another strand, an arm's length farther on, and ventured deeper into the web.

"No more communication yet," J.D. said, though her colleagues in the alien contact department and everyone back on board Starfarer could see and hear all that she was witness to.

Don't say things just because you're nervous, she told herself firmly.

You're supposed to be the professional, bravely facing the unknown.

Some professional: you've only been certain for a week that your profession really exists.

She did not feel brave. Being watched and recorded only made it worse.

J.D. concentrated on climbing down the smooth silken slope. Even in the low gravity, it was painstaking work. Her metabolic enhancer kicked in, flooding her body with extra adrenaline and inducing extra adenosine triphosphate. Not for the first time since the expedition started, she was glad she had decided to maintain the artificial gland. When she left the divers and the orcas, the long days of swimming naked in cold salt water, she had a.s.sumed she would not need to enhance her metabolism anymore.

Thirty meters down, the slope curved to a nearly horizontal level and she could again walk upright on its springy inner surface. Sweat beaded on her forehead. The s.p.a.cesuit's systems evaporated the sweat away.

Within the webbing, thick silk strands glowed brightly, filling the corridor with a soft pink light that imitated some other star than Sirius. J.D. knew, by inference, that the squidmoths had.not evolved beneath this star. Other than that, she knew very little about them. They were intelligent beings, reticent. They drifted through the galaxy in their small ma.s.sive star- 5.s.h.i.+ps, ignored and apparently despised by the interstellar civilization.

Maybe they're outcasts, just like us, J.D. thought.

The squidmoths had, at least, invited humans to visit them. The rest of interstellar civilization had ordered Starfarer to return to Earth, so human beings could spend the next five hundred years growing up.

This they had declined to do. In response, in retaliation, the cosmic string by which Starfarer traveled had begun to withdraw. If Starfarer stayed in any one place too long, it would be stranded there forever.

The pa.s.sage curved and branched. The guide thread pa.s.sed into the central tube. J.D. followed it. Behind her, her safety line snaked along the floor and pressed against the convex wall. The line creased the silk, an anomalous, coa.r.s.e dark strand.

J.D. thought she saw the guide thread move. She hurried forward, but the tunnel's curve straightened and she saw nothing but the guide thread lying motionless on the floor, disappearing into the tunnel's next descent.

But her s.p.a.cesuit replayed for her what she had seen. The thread had moved.

She stopped and leaned sideways, pressing her helmet against the tunnel wall. Could she hear a faint scuffling, or was it her imagination? Replayed and amplified, the phantom sound vanished into background noise.

Increasing her pace, she tried to catch up to whatever was laying the guide thread. But the delicate strand grew even thinner, dangerously thin, as if it were being stretched as it was created. J.D. slowed down, afraid she would cause the thread to break.

She rounded a curve and confronted a complete constriction of the pa.s.sageway. She stopped. The end of the guide thread lay in a tangle at her feet.

"d.a.m.n," J.D. muttered.

She asked for a visual display of the radar traces of the tunnels around her. Her suit obeyed. Up until a few minutes ago, this tunnel had continued, leading deeper into the web.

6.

"Victoria?" J.D. said.

"I'm here." Victoria spoke softly into her ear through her suit radio.

"Shall I follow you in?" Victoria was J.D.'s backup; she waited outside the Chi, the explorer s.p.a.cecraft, at the home end of J.D.'s lifeline.

"Not yet. There's no threat of danger." Disappointed and confused, J.D.

smiled sadly. "Maybe I just misunderstood what I was supposed to do."

Recently they had misunderstood, and been misunderstood, more often than not.

"J.DT' Zev exclaimed.

The backward-watching recorder, a little tiny machine that clung between J.D.'s shoulder blades, flashed an image to the Chi and to J.D.'s display.

Zev whistled a sharp warning in true speech, the language of the orcas and the divers. The shrill sound raised the hair on the back of J.D.'s neck. She spun around.

The tunnel was slowly constricting. She took one step toward it.

Outside the translucent wall of the tunnel, creatures moved.

J.D. stopped, her heart pounding. She glanced at the LTM display in her helmet, but the recorders saw the creatures no more clearly than she did.

Around her, vague shapes made deliberate motions. Legs or feelers or tools pressed the tunnel inward, cinching it with a narrow band that grew progressively smaller.

The tunnel puckered, lifting her lifeline and the guide thread off the floor till they hung in the air, drooping from the closed sphincter.

"J.D., get out of there!" Victoria said.

She was trapped in a silken coc.o.o.n, a twist of the tunnel.

"No," she said. "Not yet. Victoria, Zev, I'm all right."

She was frightened, but she calmed herself and slowed her thudding heartbeat. The creatures that had immobilized her came no closer. 7."I'm coming in after you," Victoria said.

"No. Stay there."

"But-"

J.D. pressed her hands against the wall. It yielded. Unlike the floor of the chambers higher up, it remained supple. The constricting band stretched. Thinking about what this must look like to all her colleagues, J.D. blushed and released the band. She dreaded hearing Stephen Thomas make one of his offhand, off-color remarks.

But when he remained silent, it troubled her even more. He had been silent a lot, since Feral's death.

"I think I could force my way out," J.D. said to Victoria. "In either direction. But I'm not quite ready to try. I don't think I'm in any danger-"

"You're in the middle of the world's biggest spiderweb, that's all! And the spiders are closing in!"

"I don't feel like a fly just yet. It wouldn't make sense. You'd get awfully hungry, orbiting Sirius and waiting for dinner to come along, what-? Once every million years?"

"Especially if you cultivated a reputation for not being intpresting to visit," Satos.h.i.+ said.

"Satos.h.i.+'s right. And Europa said the-" It occurred to her suddenly that her hosts had not referred to themselves as "squidmoths." Europa, representing the interstellar civilization, had done so, but she had spoken of them with contempt. For all J.D. knew, "squidmoth" was civilization's version of an ethnic slur. She decided not to repeat it. "She said the beings here wouldn't talk to us-she didn't say they were dangerous."

"Quite true," Victoria said dryly. "But she was wrong about them talking to us, eh?"

"Urn, yes." The alien human was wrong about a lot of things, J.D. thought, but she felt, stubbornly, that she should wait and see what happened.

"I don't want you to compromise your safety," Victoria said.

J.D. chuckled. "But Victoria . . . this is my job."