“Hey, be careful — you’ll tear something!”
“My suit is quite sturdy. I am all right where I am, truly.”
“You’ll be better on the slug,” J.D. said, thinking, I didn’t mean you’d tear your suit. “Come on, I’m in a hurry.”
Late’s body rippled against J.D.’s back, pressing the support pack uncomfortably between her shoulders.
“You want me to ride... on a synthetic creature?”
“Sure.”
“How do human people think of such things?” Late asked, marveling. “Such bizarre things.”
“We do it all the time. You ride in spaceships, what’s the difference?” It occurred to her that she had never seen anyone ride a silver slug; maybe they disliked being ridden as much as orcas did. But the orcas had strong tastes and a quick and alien intelligence; it had never occurred to J.D. to wonder if silver slugs could be said to like or dislike anything.
“I cannot, I’ll be upside down!” Late protested.
“You’re often upside down. You were eating, upside down on the lichen shelf.”
“I wasn’t upside down, you were upside down. There was no gravity there! I’ll fall off. There’s nothing to hold to!”
“Okay, the slug can crawl down on the web and turn over and you can flatten on its back. You’ve got a line, you’ll be perfectly safe.” She hoped the slug could crawl on the web. She assumed it could; the slugs had been designed with versatility in mind.
“I’m sorry, I had no idea I was being such a trouble, you go ahead, I’ll catch up to you.” Very, very slowly, he loosened one edge from its death grip on her suit.
J.D. knew when she was licked. Late would take half an hour to disengage himself, and heaven only knew how long to reach the squidmoth nest.
And here I was going to challenge him to walk it, she thought.
“All right, never mind. Stay where you are, it’s only a little farther.” J.D. sighed, then thought hopefully, Maybe he’s being careful because he isn’t getting ready to die after all.
She trudged on, grabbing the edge of the silver slug and letting it move above and ahead of her to pull her along. She was anxious to try to speak to Nemo’s offspring again. She had some ideas about communicating with it without frightening or upsetting it.
You were expecting it to be like Nemo, she told herself, but that’s a silly expectation. It hasn’t even metamorphosed into its juvenile form yet.
Nemo had lived, as a juvenile, for a million years.
She missed the calm intelligence of the old, wise juvenile squidmoth, who gained information effectively by making statements, testing hypotheses, changing each hypothesis in response to results.
The iridescent sheen of the egg nest appeared over Starfarer’s horizon. J.D. hurried toward it.
The squidmoth nest was larger than when she visited it before, its edges reaching wider, the central bulge larger.
Approaching the squidmoth, she fell silent. The translucent, iridescent nest was so delicate that for a handsbreadth its border lay transparent and nearly invisible against the stone.
The egg nest grew past and around the inspection web supports. It loomed and bulged, threatening to lose its hold on the cylinder and fall, to slide down the supports and engulf J.D. like a sticky, slimy blanket. Its edge crept around the curve of the cylinder.
J.D. moved cautiously onward, till she stood beneath the nest’s central mass.
“Why didn’t you bring your little machines?” Late asked. “You aren’t transmitting, I thought human people transmitted everything.”
J.D. gestured upward, where an LTM clung like a mechanical lizard to one of the inspection web supports.
“That LTM’s making a record. I’m about the only person who’s interested in Nemo’s offspring. Everyone is very busy.”
J.D. gazed up at the squidmoth egg. Egg? Larva? She needed a whole new set of terms, or a conversation about taxonomy with Arachne, or with the squidmoth.
She had to find out the relationships between the baby squidmoth’s life stages. It could tell her; it had all Nemo’s memories and the memories of its juvenile parent as well. But J.D. would not get specific, alien terminology from it. The squidmoth language had no words.
“What a strange thing,” Late said. “Every bit as ugly as everyone —”
“Hush!” J.D. said, annoyed. “It can hear you and it can understand you.”
“I beg your pardon,” Late said, both chastened and offended.
“And it isn’t ugly, either!” J.D. said. “It has the beautiful shimmer of its adult parent, who was my friend.”
The baby squidmoth made no response.
She wished again that 61 Cygni’s resident squidmoth had remained in the system. Why had it left, after being here so long, at the same time Starfarer arrived? She worried; she wondered if the two events were connected in a causal way, rather than coincidentally.
Right now it just matters that it’s gone, she thought. I would have liked to ask it about young squidmoths.
She sat on the inspection web. Late clambered down from her back and secured himself grimly around several web strands. J.D. leaned back against one of the supports, gazing upward at the shimmering, slowly pulsing mass.
Arachne replied to her request, sending a message to Infinity Mendez, returning with a reply.
J.D. accepted. Infinity appeared. His image floated between the inspection web and the surface of Starfarer.
“I’m in the tunnels,” he said. He widened the view so she could see. Silver slugs congregated behind him, spewing rock foam into the rough stone corridor.
Arachne showed a small schematic of the wild side cylinder, pinpointing Infinity’s position. He was above her, above the egg nest, several levels higher in Starfarer’s skin. Thin tendrils extended from the egg nest up almost to the tunnel. Silver slugs sparkled here and there, bunched above the squidmoth. Another cluster of slugs congregated on the far side of the cylinder, directly opposite the squidmoth’s nest. Balancing out the mass change, J.D. thought.
“It’s a lot farther inside than I expected.” J.D. cleared her throat before she spoke again, hoping to smooth the consternation from her voice. “Are you repairing damage?”
“It hasn’t done much damage,” Infinity said. “But just in case, I’m giving it more stuff to dig through. I figured if it does dig in, if it has to go through rock instead of corridors, it might stop before it got to the inner surface.”
“Thank you, Infinity,” J.D. said. “I never would have thought of that. What about the water?”
“It’s using some. Not enough to worry about.” He shrugged. “All things considered, it’s pretty benign. If it keeps on behaving like this, it can stay right there as long as it wants.”
J.D. blew out her breath with relief.
“Can you find out,” Infinity added, “if it’s going to grow much more?”
“I’ll try,” J.D. said.
“No doubt it is excreting into your water supply,” Late said. “Typical squidmoth behavior.”
“You don’t know anything about typical squidmoth behavior!” J.D. said, furious. “I know more about squidmoths than everybody in Civilization combined!”
“I know it,” Late said mildly. “But I think you should turn your intellect to matters of importance.”
J.D. muttered something.
“What?”
“I thought you wanted an adventure.” J.D. did not repeat what she had muttered. She thought, I’ve been hanging around Stephen Thomas too much.
“Adventures are hard work,” Late said.
“I can’t see any contamination,” Infinity said. “Arachne’s keeping up an analysis. If there’s a change, we’ll know it.”
“Thanks,” J.D. said, relieved. “Again.”
Infinity gestured an acknowledgement; his image vanished.
J.D. opened her link, offering communication to the young squidmoth, but protecting the knowledge surface.
The wild cy
linder spun, propelling J.D. and Late and the young squidmoth through several cycles of starlight and shadow.
J.D. thought she saw a pattern in the nest’s growth, a slow progression. Arachne gave her a speeded-up image, superimposing the LTM’s record over the real egg nest.
The image crept outward while the light of 61 Cygni fell upon it; in the darkness, it slowed and stopped. When the image reached the edge of the real nest, the recording ended.
It’s photosynthesizing, J.D. thought, like Nemo did. Powering its growth with starlight. No wonder Nemo chose Sirius as the place to reproduce, within the blue-white light, where the energy flux is high.
If I hadn’t taken Nautilus out of the system, if I hadn’t pulled this young one along with me, it would be back with its siblings. Growing faster, and probably healthier.
She wondered, again, about the egg case that had escaped, the egg case she had lost while Nautilus passed through transition.
J.D. widened her link.
“I’d like to speak with you,” she said. “I promise not to touch you again. I’ve been worried about you.”
She expected tentative curiosity.
“I don’t care if you touch me,” the young squidmoth said abruptly, arrogantly.
“Hello,” J.D. said, surprised. “I’m glad you’re speaking to me. Are you all right?”
“You didn’t hurt me.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“You couldn’t hurt me!” The voice swaggered like a buccaneer’s, articulate and self-possessed.
“You sound a lot different than the last time we talked.”
“I was an embryo!”
“What are you now?”
“Second instar — you would say.”
“A juvenile?”
“Soon!”
The squidmoth was only a few days old, and about to become a juvenile. Nemo and J.D. had met when Nemo was a still a juvenile, toward the end of Nemo’s million-year lifespan. After metamorphosing, after adult reproduction, the squidmoth died. So members of the species must live virtually all their long lives as juveniles.
“Will you grow deeper into the rock?” she asked.
“My life is growth!”
Infinity Mendez’ reassurance began to erode.
“When you become a juvenile, won’t you need your own starship?”
“I am on a starship.”
J.D.’s heart followed the pull of centrifugal force and ended up below the inspection net, reeling as the wild cylinder spun past the stars.
I’m going to have to persuade it to leave, she thought.
“But this starship is smaller than your parent’s.”
“I am adaptable.”
“This starship belongs to human people,” J.D. said.
“Human people are mobile.”
“We have no place to be mobile to.”
“I don’t care.”
“Even if we left, you can’t control Starfarer, you wouldn’t be able to go where you wanted.”
“I don’t care.”
I think I’ve made a terrible mistake, J.D. thought. I should have taken Andro’s advice to try to move it when it was smaller, when we might have moved it without hurting it. Without any damage to the wild cylinder.
“Won’t you let us help you?” J.D. asked. “If you tell us where to take you, to get the kind of starship your people usually —”
“It isn’t me you want to help.”
“I want to help human people, it’s true,” J.D. said. “If our starship is destroyed, we’ll be stranded here. Some of us might die. But I want to help you, too.”
“That’s what all the Civilized people said while they were chasing my juvenile parent.”
J.D. sighed with frustration. She could not blame the being for its suspicions. Nemo, the baby squidmoth’s adult parent, had never mentioned being pursued. But Europa had referred to piratical predators, members of Civilization trying to steal the ships of squidmoths.
Nemo and other juvenile squidmoths had exchanged unfertilized eggs, becoming juvenile parents to each other’s offspring. The juvenile parents had bequeathed memories to their offspring, just as the adult parents did.
Apparently the baby squidmoth remembered its juvenile parent’s experience as an intended victim of the predators. J.D. wondered if the memories of the chase would be terror, of the hunt and the escape? Or memories of amusement, excitement, and triumph?
In Europa’s story, the pirates had followed a squidmoth into transition, intent on stealing a single ship or finding the graveyard of the other ones’ starships.
The pirates had not been seen thereafter.
The reclusive squidmoths, the oldest existing species, had scavenged the small massive starships of the vanished and mysterious other ones. The starships gave them tremendous power, which as far as J.D. knew they never employed except in self-defense. Androgeos complained that they never put the ships to good use, using them only as orbiting homes.
But how would Andro know? J.D. wondered. Nemo was a million years old. Civilization is — how old? A few tens of millennia? To a member of Civilization, a squidmoth might be immobile. To the squidmoth, a rest of only ten thousand years might be hyperactivity.
J.D. decided to give the immature squidmoth some straight talk.
“We have to come to an accommodation,” she said. “I’ve persuaded my colleagues to let you stay, but you must be careful not to damage the cylinder — not to go deeper into the rock.”
“I crush your threats with my tentacles!”
The fulmination startled her. Nemo had been mild and friendly. Except for one moment of fright, J.D. had always felt comfortable and respected in the squidmoth’s presence, despite her own relative youth and inexperience.
“You don’t have tentacles,” J.D. said. The LTM transmissions revealed a pool of cells metamorphosing around a central neural mass.
“You’ll be sorry when I do!”
This isn’t Nemo, J.D. reminded herself. No matter how much you miss your friend, Nemo’s gone. The young one is different. Different age, different personality —
“What are you going to do?” Late asked.
“I don’t know,” J.D. said. “Nothing, yet.”
The inspection web vibrated violently beneath her. Late’s pincers clamped tighter on the cables; the metal transmitted the shriek straight through J.D.’s suit. The sound made her flinch.
“Be careful!” Late cried to the squidmoth. “Intelligent beings are beneath you!”
J.D. laid one hand gently on the dorsal surface of Late’s spacesuit. The Representative’s Representative fell silent, still agitated, quivering.
Above her, the squidmoth quaked. Its surface rippled and plunged. The web supports, projecting down through the substance of the squidmoth, tore holes in the protoplasm. J.D. grabbed at the cables, convinced all over again that the creature was going to fall out of its crater and crush her.
“Scared you!” the squidmoth said.
Its presence crowded her link, pushing and taunting her.
J.D. heard a note of panic in the bravado of the voice.
“That must have hurt,” she said.
I may be asking it for something it can’t do, she thought. It can’t help growing, maybe it can’t help digging. I might as well tell a child to decide not to go through puberty.
Above her, the rips closed slowly, healing around the web supports. Livid scars marred the smooth surface.
“Nothing hurts me.”
J.D. opened her link wide. Her senses blanked out, erasing perception of her body, of the weight on her shoulders, of the stars spinning beneath her. She searched, thoughtfully, for another way to reach the youngster. She slid toward Nautilus and onto the knowledge surface, seeking information about the development of squidmoth. But the species did not raise its children after the adult parent freed the egg cases.
Nemo’s memories of youth were a million years old. J.D. could not gain access to them, though she was
able to penetrate the surface a little deeper than last time. Tantalizing images of distant stars and of transition tempted her.
During J.D.’s distraction, the immature squidmoth poured its presence through her link and scrambled toward Victoria’s algorithm.
“Dammit!” J.D. cut her connection to Nautilus, evicting the squidmoth at the same time. The world flashed into reality; she regained her perception of her body. Only the smallest thread of communication remained between her and the invader.
“I told you before,” she said sternly, “you may not have that.”
“Fuck you!” the squidmoth cried. “Bitch! Shit! Damn! Poop! Fooey!” Through the attenuated link, its voice was the faint echo of an infuriated scream.
Prepared for the anger, J.D. maintained her balance on the inspection web. Late hunkered down on his cables, all four edges curled around strands, the pincers clamped.
Maybe the squidmoth has been hanging around Stephen Thomas too long, too, J.D. thought. Though for all the offhand profanity Stephen Thomas uses, he hardly ever directs it at anybody in particular.
JD projected her image through Arachne to speak to Infinity Mendez. His image appeared before her in return.
“Have you been listening?”
“Yeah, unfortunately.”
“What age am I dealing with?”
“Sounds like an adolescent to me... Relative to a human kid? About thirteen. The profanity stage.” He chuckled. “‘Poop.’”
“Don’t laugh at me!” the squidmoth screamed. “I’ll squash you!”
J.D. damped down the squidmoth’s transmission frequency.
“What do I do?” she asked Infinity. “How do I get through to it?”
“You wait for it to outgrow the phase,” Infinity said.
JD hesitated, wanting a better answer.
“Look at it this way,” Infinity said. He was standing on an extra layer of dense rock foam, while behind him the silver slugs continued to laminate the space with a deeper and deeper barrier. “You won’t have to wait till it’s eighteen. At the rate it’s changing, you’ll probably only have to wait a couple of days.”
o0o
Ruth Orazio sat in the warm sand of the beach, folded her arms on her knees, and gazed across the sea.
The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus Page 131