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 Satoshi 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 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 shell. 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.
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 space 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.
Nerno's shell plunged toward transition point. J.D. had only a few minutes to decide what to do.
With apprehension, she closed her eyes and opened her link completely, sliding onto the knowledge surface, stretching to connect it with the Chi's onboard computer. The real world vanished as J.D. approached the chasm in the knowledge surface and compared it to the algorithm.
They do match, she thought. Not a perfect fit . . .
She asked herself a question: What happens if the fit isn't good enough?
Do I end up on the other side of the galaxy?
Gently she moved the algorithm, rotated it, and translated it into the chasm.
The algorithm joined the knowledge surface, rough,
raw beauty touching elegance refined and polished by time. The algorithm was a crystalline chunk of ice on the cracked surface of an ancient, flowing glacier. The crystal's edges melted; it sank in; the points of attachment melded. The surface and the algorithm remained distinct.
If Nemo were still alive, the fit would have been precise. So much detail was lost when Nerno's personality slipped away. J.D. withdrew from the surface. Now all she could do was wait.
When her senses returned to her, she gazed through the wall of the observers' circle, toward Nerno's crater. The flattened access tunnel lay between the Chi and the nest, like a shed and discarded snakeskin.
The wings and sails of Nerno's nest shuddered.
Nerno's convoluted tapestry collapsed, like ice cliffs avalanching. One side tore free of the rock. Limp and silent, it flopped inward. It dragged the access tunnel from the Chi's hatch, to the crater, and over the edge.
The nest vanished into the crater's depths.
Nerno's shell slipped from space into transition. J.D. perceived the change, a change in angle down the knowledge surface, from an oblique traverse to a headlong plunge.
She had to choose now: To travel with the ancient glacier along the smooth, long ice slope, or to plunge into the choppy, dangerous terrain of the new algorithm.
She guided Nerno's shell into new territory.
J.D. felt like a chambered nautilus, shelled and tentacled, extending herself far beyond her own body, exquisitely sensitive. The shell found the pathway she sought and fitted itself to the jagged curve.
J.D. felt exhilarated, yet frightened. She believed she was following Starfarer's path . . . but she could not be absolutely certain.
As she thought of the starship, she thought'she saw it--or heard it, or felt it, with a sense Nemo had possessed but humans lacked. An anomaly appeared in the part of the knowledge surface that represented transition. The anomaly vanished, then appeared again, like a train chugging down the track into a valley and out of it again.
The anomaly distracted her. She wanted to catch up to it, to be sure it was Starfarer and to be sure she kept following it. She knew she could make Nemo's shell catch up to the anomaly. That surprised her. Starfarer had never tried to change its vectors from the time it achieved transition energy to the time it re-entered normal space.
J.D. restrained herself. One experiment was enough for any trip.
She drew her attention back toward herself, back within Nemo's shell. She was trembling with excitement. She breathed deeply of air tinged with the hydrocarbondrenched odor of Nemo's ship. She sneezed.
I'll have to do something about the atmosphere, she thought. Nemo isn't creating it anymore. Will I be able to terraform the shell, like Europa's ship? Again she wondered how Europa had acquired her starship, and how she had configured it to her liking. Surely starships were a booming business within Civilization.
Sally's Used Starships, J.D. said to herself. Gort's Starship Redecoration. J.D. laughed. She laughed, and then she cried for a while.
She extended her attention to the edge of Nemo's shell, and stretched beyond-
She discovered that Nemo's last two egg cases had detached and vanished, leaping off into transition while her thoughts were elsewhere.
