“Okay,” Stephen Thomas said, more cheerfully than he felt. “We know one thing about squidmoth genetics.”
“And what is that?” Professor Thanthavong said from behind him.
Stephen Thomas faced his boss. “It’s neater than ours,” he said.
Oh, fuck, she’s going to tell me to drop the dendritic molecules, he said.
“I don’t think that’s terribly likely,” the professor said. “Where have you been? I left you several messages.”
“I got... involved with something in Arachne.”
He recalled, with embarrassment, that he had blurted out to Professor Thanthavong his fears that anyone who loved him was in danger. She had told him to pull himself together. He could not explain to her that he was late because he had been separating his neural node from those of his partners.
“Genetic molecules must have some potential for change,” she said. “For evolution. Do you agree?”
“Sure,” he said. “But...” The trouble was, he could see where she was going and he could not think of a good reply.
“But this polymer — if the sample contains any alien polymer! — is uniform within each class and from cell to cell, from widely distributed samples. It came from a being that spent a million years living beneath cosmic rays, unprotected by a significant depth of atmosphere.”
“So it’d have to be tough,” Stephen Thomas said.
She looked at him askance. He shut up.
“Let us discuss this in my office,” she said gently.
In silence, feeling contentious, he followed her out of the lab and down the hall.
He respected and admired the Nobel laureate as a colleague above all others. She expected a lot of the people in her department, but she made fair demands. And she seldom pulled rank. He had argued with her any number of times, on technical questions, theoretical ones. Sometimes he won the argument, sometimes she did. She had never cut off a discussion this way.
They reached her office and went inside.
“Please sit down.”
She took the rattan chair facing him, rather than the place of authority behind her desk. The self-conscious choice made Stephen Thomas even more uneasy.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “The dendritic molecules are Nemo’s analog of DNA, or they aren’t. We’ll figure it out. We need some time, we’ve only started.”
“The matter is that I’m concerned about you.”
He froze. He did not want to have this discussion. With anyone. Particularly with Professor Thanthavong.
“There’s nothing to be concerned about.”
She gazed at him in silence.
“I spend as much time here as I can!” he said. “The alien contact department —”
She made a sharp, annoyed sound. “Am I that unreasonable?” she said. “Do I expect you to be in two places at once? To give up your position in alien contact? No.”
It was Stephen Thomas’s turn to fall silent.
“Were you here all night?” she asked gently.
“Yeah.”
“You have a great deal on your mind,” she said. “I see you grieving, holding yourself together so hard I can see fingernail scratches in your skin —”
“I’m all right!” he said.
“I would like you to take some time to yourself.”
“And I’d like to work!”
“I’m sorry, I can’t permit it.”
It’s all I’ve got, he said to himself, and barely kept himself from saying it aloud. It’s all I’ve got left...
“I’m frightened, Stephen Thomas,” she said. “You’re obsessed with the dendritic molecules —”
“You wouldn’t say that if you agreed with me about them!”
She smiled. “Perhaps not. But it doesn’t matter whether I agree with you or not. It doesn’t matter to the molecules or to the biological system what either one of us believes. All that matters is what’s true.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You will be right, or I will be right — or possibly we’ll both be right or wrong.”
“You don’t have to be frightened for me,” he said. “I appreciate it, but I’m okay.”
“I’m not frightened for you,” she said.
“You said —”
“I’m frightened of you.”
“You’re — what?”
“You are young, you think you’re invulnerable. Invulnerable to exhaustion, to change, to grief. You are not. You’re in desperate danger of making a serious mistake.”
Stephen Thomas sat back in the chair, hurt and astonished. One of Professor Thanthavong’s few non-negotiable rules was that of safety. She had spent so much of her career working with dangerous diseases that she would not accept sloppy lab procedure.
She was warning him. If he had already made a mistake that involved contamination, the warning was too late.
“I’m not going to walk in the lab and drop alien cells on somebody’s foot!” he said angrily.
“I can give you some slack,” she said. “All you want — all I can make you take. Now. After something goes wrong — then I cannot give anyone slack.”
“Goddammit, you’re talking as if I’ve already fucked up!” Stephen Thomas said.
If he had contaminated the cell preparation, he was finished as Professor Thanthavong’s colleague.
“I said nothing of the sort.”
“So the alien cell preps look different!” he said desperately. “So what? They’re supposed to look different. They’re alien!”
At the same time, he thought — all the while trying to fight off the thought — My life is falling apart around me, my partners probably never want to speak to me again, and I’m jealous of J.D. and Feral. Why shouldn’t my technical skills turn completely to shit?
He stood up so fast the rattan chair fell over and bounced.
“You dragged me out of the lab in front of my students —”
“I asked you to meet with me —”
“— and you’ve decided I’m too stupid to know my own limits —”
“I tried to avoid embarrassing —”
“— and you’re afraid to let me test my hypothesis —
“Your hypothesis — !”
Professor Thanthavong sat back in her chair.
“— because you’re afraid I’ll be right and you’ll be wrong!”
His outburst ended. He glared at the Nobel laureate.
The silence lengthened.
Thanthavong took a deep breath.
“I am very angry,” she said quietly. “I think it best that we do not speak for a time.”
“Fine with me,” Stephen Thomas said. “I have work to do.”
“You may say you have Alien Contact work to do. But you may not work in a laboratory in my department until we have spoken again.”
Furious, hurt, and humiliated, Stephen Thomas picked up the rattan chair and set it back on its feet. When it creaked in protest at the pressure he put on it, he snatched his hand away.
He strode stiffly out of the office, out of the building.
Chapter 8
The Chi plunged through veils of high cloud toward the surface of Largernearer. It broke past the clouds and sailed over the endless sea, seeking one of the few specks of dry land on the alien world.
J.D. stared down hungrily.
She had walked on the moon of Tau Ceti II. She had visited Europa’s terraformed planetoid. She would — she hoped — spend a significant part of the rest of her life aboard her alien starship. Yet she anticipated this landing keenly.
Largernearer is my first natural living alien world, she thought. Another first time.
Always a first time.
Far below the transparent floor of the observers’ circle, the blue-black surface of the sea moved leisurely past in slow, massive swells.
A glittery disk appeared in the distance, rising gently as a swell passed beneath it.
Victoria leaned forward in her couch. “It’s
one of their antennas!”
The disk passed beneath the Chi. Victoria spun her couch to keep it in view as long as possible. She pulled up an image of the genetically engineered dish to inspect at her leisure.
“Interesting problem,” she said, “keeping it focussed.”
The Chi flew onward.
“J.D.,” Zev said softly, “look.”
He pointed off to the left of the Chi’s path.
Colors swept toward the horizon, beneath the surface of the water. Trying to make out what she was looking at, J.D. asked the Chi for a magnification.
A school of fish? she wondered. An illusion, or a rainbow trick of the light?
The Chi brought the view closer.
“Flowers!” J.D. exclaimed.
Rafts of blossoms rode the currents beneath her. For all J.D. knew, the flowers might be creatures, like anemones or coral. She cautioned herself, as she always did, about making assumptions. But the correspondence with flowers was striking. The blooms floating just under the surface were as brightly colored as the flowers in any Earthly garden, azure and vermilion, orange and yellow. Deeper, as the water filtered the light, all the petals appeared blue. Small creatures flicked among them. Larger shapes surged through the deep water between the blooming rafts.
The Chi stored the magnified image, fading it out as the flower meadows dropped behind.
Far ahead, like a signal, a mass of stone rose from the sea.
On all of Largernearer, only a dozen islands broke the surface: a dozen volcanic seamounts, enormous gouts of lava bulging upward from the deep sea floor, producing enough new rock to remain above the highest waves. Each was the youngest of a string of peaks, the track of a moving hot spot in the crust of Largernearer. Back on Earth, similar circumstances produced series of volcanoes: active, dormant, and extinct, like the Hawaiian island chain. On Largernearer, only the active volcano remained exposed, for the sea eroded the dormant peaks to deep-water mesas before an archipelago could form.
The island’s summit rose high above the ocean. Steam from an active crater swirled and dissipated. Higher in the atmosphere, clouds formed and tumbled as the island created its own weather systems.
As the island approached, the color of the water changed from depthless dark blue, to azure, to tropical green.
The waves of Largernearer undulated around the planet without anything to slow them. One of the long, slow swells, an ordinary wave on Largernearer, reached the slope of the seamount. The wave’s force, slamming into the flank of the seamount, pressed the water into a towering wave. The tsunami peaked, crested, and curled, then broke with a tremendous crash against the side of the mountain.
Sea water hit volcanic vents. Plumes of steam exploded from the slope and rose like signals into the air.
Satoshi whistled softly, in rapt appreciation.
“Christ on a surfboard,” Stephen Thomas said. “We’re supposed to land there?”
The Chi passed over the flank of the volcano.
To leeward, a tremendous harbor stretched for kilometers. A dormant, drowned crater held the peaceful water in the half-circle of its broken rim; the active volcano, rising to waveward, sheltered it.
Nothing grew on the raw slopes of the island. Like all the dozen land-points, it was bare lava, isolated and barren.
Largernearer, and all its life, belonged to the sea.
The Chi swooped around the natural harbor and soared toward a narrow strip of white beach. Beneath the observers’ circle, emerald water shoaled rapidly to pale leaf-green above white sand. Intriguing shapes moved below them, but the Chi passed so fast and so low that J.D. could no longer look straight down without feeling dizzy.
The engines thundered, exploding with power. The Chi slowed, stopped, hovered. Sand sheeted out around the explorer craft.
The Chi settled just above the high-water mark. It bounced roughly, then stilled.
The engines cut. The creak of cooling interrupted the sudden silence.
Zev threw off the safety straps. He took two long strides to the transparent wall and gazed out at the sea, at the gentle waves drawing lines of foam across the beach. The gold light of 61 Cygni haloed his fair hair and his fine pelt, and shone amber through the swimming webs between his fingers.
Stephen Thomas was less anxious to reach the water. He remained in his couch. His hands lay relaxed, fingers spread, on his dark thighs. But his feet tensed, and the new claws extended and scraped against the glass of the floor.
Victoria flinched.
“That sounds like fingernails on a blackboard,” she said, keeping her voice light and matter of fact.
“I haven’t quite got used to having claws yet,” Stephen Thomas said.
“Me either,” Victoria said, then, in a barely audible voice, “but I’d like to.”
Stephen Thomas acted as if he had not heard. In silence, Satoshi gazed out at the barren island.
The undercurrent of tension among her colleagues troubled J.D.
“Let’s go outside,” she said.
o0o
The artificial lung was barely mature. It had been unfrozen and revived for this excursion. It clasped itself to J.D.’s back, warm and familiar but unseasoned. Its extensions fumbled over her shoulders and attached themselves to the vents in her mask.
Zev and Stephen Thomas waited nearby, sleek and gilded in the sunlight. J.D. had decided to wear a bathing suit, Stephen Thomas wore his usual running shorts, and Zev had taken off his clothes. Zev was completely unselfconscious about nakedness.
The island radiated heat against J.D.’s bare feet. Wavelets stroked the serene shore, so gentle they were like a different phenomenon than the huge swells of Largernearer’s open sea. A breeze cooled J.D.’s skin and skittered angular sand grains across wrinkled lava.
High above her, the volcano rumbled and steamed. Orchestra had assured them it would not erupt while they were visiting. J.D. wanted to trust her host. But back home, predicting volcanic action remained more art than science.
Nothing moved on the island but the windblown sand and the steam. The slopes were barer than any desert, for Largernearer had no land life. None at all. Its bits of dry land were so small, so isolated and transient, that terrestrial life never had a chance to develop.
But the life in the sea vibrated in J.D.’s perception. She could see it and smell it, and when she dipped her hand in the water, tiny finned creatures squirted away from her. Dark against the sea floor, they turned over, exposed a pale side, and disappeared. She tried to catch one, but they were too fast for her.
In the clear air of Largernearer, J.D. could see past the bright green of the lagoon, between the dark lines of the sheltering crater, out across the dark deep sea.
Victoria joined J.D. at the water’s edge and gave her a quick embrace. Victoria was trembling. J.D. squeezed her hand gently. Victoria’s fingers were dark and cool and slender within J.D.’s larger, fairer hand.
“Take care,” Victoria said.
“I will,” J.D. said. “What’s wrong? We’ll be fine, don’t worry.”
“I don’t know,” Victoria said. “This is scarier than the other times. Why is that?”
“It’s more like home,” J.D. said. “More like home, but stranger.”
Victoria smiled.
“Zev and I will take good care of Stephen Thomas,” J.D. said.
Victoria’s expression went solemn. She squeezed J.D.’s hand.
“I’ll just say goodbye to him, eh?”
She let J.D.’s hand go and crossed the beach to join her partners. They spoke softly, inaudibly. Stephen Thomas stood with his back to the Chi’s recorders.
J.D. turned away, saving their privacy, focusing her LTMs on the sea. She squinted into the bright water.
As far as she could tell, things were going from bad to worse with the partnership. Direct conflict would be easier than the polite tension between the three, but the problems were too complicated for an open fight. If they fought during the excursion
, their conflict would be completely public.
J.D. hoped they could work out their difficulties. She liked Satoshi, she had a terrible crush on Stephen Thomas, and she loved Victoria. She wanted them all to be happy.
In the distance, rising from the depths beyond the mouth of the harbor, another island appeared where no island existed. J.D. caught her breath.
Orchestra rose above the surface, water exploding from the bright-colored summit of her head and back. Waves cascaded down her sides, foaming waterfalls that crashed and echoed all the way to the island.
She waited.
The representative of the Largernearlings could not approach too closely. She was far too large to enter shallow water.
Zev joined J.D. at the water’s edge. His face glowed with eagerness and joy.
“Let’s go,” he said solemnly.
“Okay.” J.D. checked the LTMs clinging to her shoulder strap.
Zev sprinted across the sand and plunged into the water.
“Zev! Wait for the boat! I meant —” She ran after him. He was competent and self-assured in the sea, but he had no way of knowing what he might face on Largernearer.
Europa and Androgeos swim here, J.D. thought. Zev’s probably safe. But he shouldn’t go out alone. Besides, my lung needs to hydrate...
She chuckled and stopped making excuses. She wanted to swim here as much as he did.
She stepped off the barren sand and into the sea. She splashed into the warm, alien water, pulling her mask down over her eyes and nose. Life pulsed against her feet.
She pushed forward into the water, entering slowly. The artificial lung quivered and hydrated, plumping against J.D.’s back, pumping fresh oxygen to her. It needed water, oxygen. It worked with elements and simple molecules, oblivious to complexity and alienness.
J.D. could feel and taste and smell the differences. The sea was less saline than back on Earth, making her less buoyant. Even sounds were different, shriller in the thinner atmosphere. When she ducked her head underwater, the sound there was different, too. She was used to swimming with divers, to being surrounded by the clicks and wails and groans of true speech. Here, she heard the beating of her own heart, the shussh of the waves against the beach. She felt, rather than heard, a low drone of complex harmonics.
The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus Page 118