Metaphase. Part 45

"Goodbye!" J.D. cried.

Starfarer disappeared.

J.D. squeezed her eyes shut, reflexively, as the bright transition spectrum flooded through the system. The stars.h.i.+p left nothing else behind.

She opened her eyes, breaking her connection with the world outside Nerno's chamber. The silken curtains drooped and shredded like old cobwebs. The whisper and crunch of the symbionts' mouths and mandibles surrounded her.

"They're gone, Nemo," she whispered.

"Look," Nemo said, "my offspring are free."

Together, J.D. and Nemo watched the surface of the planetoid.

The bulge of one of the silken craters had grown spherical. It expanded, huge and taut, like a quivering soap bubble. Its diameter was much larger than the crater, but it clung to the crater's mouth as if it were being blown up like a balloon.

It detached.

It sank: the planetoid had too little atmosphere to buoy it. But then, as it bounced once, the small opening left in its bottom fluttered. A spurt of glowing gas propelled it from the surface of the worldlet.

J.D. laughed with delight.

The balloon rocketed, silent and free, into s.p.a.ce.

In quick succession, Nemo's planetoid released half a dozen of the translucent powered balloons. Malleable surfaces covered obscure, tantalizing shapes. They shrank to blips of light. She-Nemo-had done everything for them that she could. They were on their own. She wished them well, but she would never- J.D. brought herself abruptly back to herself. She might see them someday in the future. She was not Nemo. She was not preparing to die.. 323.J.D. reached out to Nerno to offer her congratulations.

She encountered emptiness.

She reached desperately toward the squidmoth's mind. She found a small dim spark in blackness. It flared, welcoming her, and Nerno's soft tentacle twitched feebly in her hand.

Everything grew still around her.

The spark moved. It expanded, spreading itself over the surface of the shape of Nerno's knowledge. But as it expanded, it faded, too. The tenuous light vanished so gradually that J.D. could not be certain of the moment of its disappearance.

"Oh, Nerno . . . Goodbye."

The knowledge surface changed. It grew cold, and solidified. As Nerno's personality dissolved, the surface lost an uncountable number of its infinite dimensions. J.D. reached out as if to stop it, and then drew back, knowing she could have no effect.

Nemo was gone.

J.D. felt more alone than she had ever felt before, in a largely solitary life. She was alone, more alone than any human being ever had been.

Nerno's children, for all their potential, were no more than a few cells each, zygotes clinging to great yolk sacs of knowledge, not even embryos.

J.D. was the only sentient creature in the star system.

She s.h.i.+vered.

All around her, the tattered silk came alive with scavengers. The sound of destruction filled the chamber with a soft, inescapable vibration of rending threads. A new sound added itself to the tapestry: the viscous slide of dissolving support cables. Beneath her, the floor sagged.

Nerno's tentacle twitched. J.D. flinched in surprise, in a brief flash of joy as quickly wiped out by shock. She dropped Nemo's tentacle.

Two of the symbionts struggled with each other, vying for possession of Nerno's tentacle by las.h.i.+ng at each324 other with the cl.u.s.ters of scorpion-tails that projected from their armored sh.e.l.ls.

The leftover egg case, the one that remained unfertilized, writhed against the floor. Unseen creatures moved within it. The silk tore, with a long, ripping scream: claws on prehensile limbs thrust out, snapping.

The fate of Nemo's organic body was the same as what would happen to her own body when she died and was buried in the earth or allowed to sink into the sea. It was all perfectly natural.

But she could not watch it.

J.D. stroked her hand once across Nemo's long eyelid, pressing the squidmoth's eyes closed. She rose to her feet. Shaky and stiff, she fled Nemo's ruined web.

CHAPTER 13.

J.D. CLIMBED FAST, NO LONGER CAREFUL.

about damage. The nest was coming apart around her. Panic chased her. She had to get back to the Chi. How stupid to leave her s.p.a.ce suit behind, how complacent-!

The web tunnels s.h.i.+vered as J.D. ascended. More unfamiliar creatures, sym- bionts and attendants and scavengers, worked and worried at the silk and at each other. Optical fibers hung loose along the walls, some broken and dimmed, some still glowing, their ends bright as white flame.

No longer would Nemo convert the light of Sirius to useful energy, process326 YONDA N. McINTYRErock and extract nutrients, and create the webbing that nurtured the ecosystem. The symbionts would deplete the webbing, the attendants would feed on the symbionts, and the scavengers would feed on the leftovers, till nothing remained of the squidmoth but inorganic matter, dust, a few desiccated bacteria.

Nerno's body was dying.

The tunnel to the Chi billowed down against J.D.'s face. The weight of the heavy sides counteracted the air pressure, collapsing the tube.

The air escaped, osmosing silently through failing walls. Panting for breath, J.D. fought her way past the folds of the silken shroud, making slow progress toward the explorer. If the tube's mouth fell away from the airlock . . .

Remember those stories where somebody had to cross ten or twenty meters of hard vacuum without a suit . . . ? she thought. Maybe you'll find out if it's possible. . . .

Not an experiment she wanted to try.

Blinded by the collapsing tunnel, she ran into the side of the Chi and b.u.mped her knee and her nose. She yelped in pain and flung the silk upward, trying to get beneath it to reach the tunnel's opening.

Several of Nerno's creatures hugged the seam between the tunnel and the Chi. They extruded a gluey, fibrous substance that stuck the organic fabric to the inorganic hull. But the creatures had exhausted themselves. Escaping air hissed around a broken seal.

J.D. held her breath and plunged into the airlock.

"Seal!" She spoke through her link, conserving her air.

The Chi obeyed. The hatch slid, but caught on a swath of silk that tangled around J.D.'s foot. She grabbed the fabric, ripped it, freed the opening.

The webbing parted in her hands like old cobwebs.

The hatch closed in silence, its motion barely vibrating the deck. The air was too thin to carry sound. As the hatch seated, J.D. thought she saw a patch of black s.p.a.ce and bright stars, uns.h.i.+elded by silk or air or gla.s.s. 327.A heavy warm draft from the Chi poured in around her. Tired in every way a person could be tired, J.D. lay on the floor. She breathed long and slow and deep. Once more she thanked good fortune and habit that she had not allowed her metabolic enhancer to atrophy.

The inner hatch slid open. J.D. stayed where she was, resting, gathering her energy.

She had no vital tasks. Nemo's sh.e.l.l was headed for Europa's transition point. J.D. could control the sh.e.l.l, but she feared interfering with Nerno's navigation till she had caught up to Starfarer. She wondered how long that would take.

Claws scuttled on metal.

J.D. bolted upright.

Several of Nemo's symbionts scuttled across the floor, scrabbling at the hatch with clawed, feathery legs.

J.D. gazed at them fondly.

Rising to her knees, she gathered up the creatures in the sc.r.a.p of soft frail webbing.

Flecks of iridescence covered J.D.'s hands. The tiny scales from Nemo's wings gilded her, and when she rose, a scatter of the glitter s.h.i.+mmered to the floor.

Transition surrounded Starfarer.

Arachne continued, strong and steady, indifferent to the border Starfarer had crossed, leaving normal s.p.a.ce behind. Victoria let out her breath and unclenched her teeth.

"The web's intact," she said.

Jenny stared out into transition. Tears pooled in her eyes, collected at her upper and lower eyelids, and drifted into the air in droplets when she blinked.

"It's over," she said softly. "It's finally done. We're safe."

"I hope so," Victoria said.And then they smiled at each other, and Jenny laughed, her laughter warring with her tears. She sniffled and coughed and pulled a handkerchief out of her328 pocket and waved it over the floating teardrops to catch them, and blew her nose.

"Safe!" Jenny said. "Halfway through transition and going where we've been told not to. For all we know they'll blast us out of the sky when we get there."

"That's not allowed," Victoria said. "Their only weapon is coercion."

"Unless they get desperate enough to break the rules to stop us. I think Civilization works by peer pressure."

"You don't mean that as a compliment, do you?"

"I do not. There's nothing more brutal. People will do anything to get other people to do what they think is allowed. Or right. Or holy.

Especially holy. The end always justifies the means."

Victoria said nothing. She did not want to think about ends justifying the means; the charge hit too close to her own doubts and fears.

This wits the third time Starfarer had crossed into transition, the first time Arachne had been able to record, and the first time Victoria had been able to watch. On the journey from Earth to Tau Ceti, she had been helping Satos.h.i.+ drag Stephen Thomas out of the genetics building. On the journey from Tau Ceti to Sirius, she had been trying, and failing, to save Feral's life.

The recordings did not do transition justice. They showed nothing but a formless gray fog. Transition was much more than that.

Victoria wondered if she would be able to describe it afterward. She wondered if Arachne would be able to reproduce a view of it.

The sailhouse hung suspended and isolated in a silver flurry of sparks.

Now and then a streak of color or a shape coalesced from the storm, then disappeared. Victoria could not tell whether she was seeing something real, or if her mind was creating pictures from random intersections of the matrix around her.

"It's like the maze," she said. "We kept thinking we saw a pattern in it, but there wasn't any. Just a maze."

She felt isolated, alone out here with Jenny. They 329.could not even see Starfarer's main cylinder through the silver storm.

The isolation J.D. must be feeling struck Victoria hard.

"Goodbye," J.D. had said, and nothing else, in that last second before Starfarer disappeared.

It sounded so final.

In the Chi's small bio lab, J.D. placed the creatures in sample cases, one to an aquarium so they would not eat each other. She divided the shred of webbing among them.

They probably would not survive. They had not evolved to survive Nemo's death for long; they were part of the body that was dying. Maybe Stephen Thomas or Professor Thanthavong could figure out how to keep them alive.

If she could save the symbionts until she caught up to Starfarer.

I wonder how long that will be? J.D. wondered. How long will I be here alone?

Nemo must have been able to calculate transition duration-or would the time even matter to someone who lived for millennia, who lived a life almost entirely of the mind?

J.D. reached for the knowledge surface of Nemo's sh.e.l.l. She found it-and again her expanded link took over all her senses, disorienting her, leaving her suspended in nothingness-and cast around for the answer she needed.

It overwhelmed her. She skittered along the surface, unable to penetrate its depths, distracted on every side by hints and shadows of Nemo's experience.

She came back to herself, still with no idea how long it would take her to reach the 61 Cygni system. Worse, she had no idea how to find the information in the maze of the knowledge surface.

Maybe Nemo didn't care how long it took, she thought. Besides . . . is it an answer I want to know?

The Chi was well-stocked, but its stores were finite.330 If transition duration lasted weeks, or months, she could find herself in a lot of trouble. The Chi possessed a few organic systems, but it had never been designed to support a human being during a long separation from Starfarer.

She chuckled ruefully. If she had let Victoria give Androgeos the new transition algorithm, no doubt Nemo would have snagged the information, too.

"Outsmarted yourself this time, didn't you?" she said softly, trying not to feel how scared she was.

She wished she had sent a better, more comforting farewell to her friends.

"Goodbye"? That told them nothing; it might even frighten them. They had no idea how long it would take her to traverse the s.p.a.ce between Sirius and 61 Cygni, either. Only that it would take her longer than it took Starfarer.

Leaving Nerno's symbionts to explore the hard edges of their new homes, J.D. headed for the observers' circle.

She caught her breath in surprise and apprehension.

The sinuous, beautiful shape of Victoria's algorithm twisted itself into being in the center of the circle.

J.D. took her place in the circle. The transition algorithm hovered at the focus, Victoria's final message, her final gift.