let the lifeline reel in, glad she had reached the last steep slope.
Victoria was waiting for her at the edge of the crater, her slender, compact body radiating energy and excitement. She gave J.D. a hand up the last long step, squeezing her fingers. Behind the gilt surface of her faceplate, she looked amazed, exhilarated, relieved.
A deluge of questions and comments and exclamations poured through J.D.'s earphones. It was as if everyone had waited as long as they possibly could, till she stepped out of the alien being's home, and then could hold their curiosity no more. J.D. felt a surge of panic. Victoria must have seen it, because she squeezed JDA hand again and opened a voice channel back to Starfarer.
'Come on, folks. J.D.'s had a long afternoon. You saw everything she did.'
The cacophony eased. Someone muttered, 'Sorry,' and someone else said, 'But it isn't the same.' That sounded like Chandra, the sensory artist. 'Nevertheless,' Victoria said. 'I'm closing down the PA for a while. We can all talk to J.D. when she's had a chance to collect her thoughts.'
The monitor signals vanished, leaving J.D. in peace and silence.
'Thanks,' J.D. said. 'You could have said, 'Till J.D.'s had a chance to pee,' but I'm glad you didn't.'
Victoria chuckled.
'You were fantastic, J.D.' she said. 'I wouldn't have had the nerve to do all that you just did.'
J.D. smiled, exhausted but elated. No matter what
happened now, she had begun to make friends with Nemo, with an alien being. Too many things on the deep space expedition had gone badly up till now.
She needed a success. They all did.
'Let's go in,' Victoria said.
'Okay.,,
They retraced their footprints through the dust of the planetoid's rough surface, returning to the ungainly explorer craft, the Chi.
J.D. unplugged the end of her lifeline from the flank of the Chi and let it snap back into the reel. She unhooked the reel from her suit, and handed it to Victoria.
'From now on,' she said, 'I'm working without a net.'
Outside the spacesuit locker, Zev and Satoshi waited for Victoria and J.D. 'You have a hell of a lot of guts,' Satoshi said.
J.D. knew he meant to offer her a compliment, but she also heard the note of caution in his voice.
'More guts than brains?' she said.
'Maybe,' he said. 'But maybe . . . that's what the alien contact specialist needs.' He grinned at her, and she smiled back.
'Thanks.'
Satoshi was the most restrained of the three members of the family partnership. Unlike Stephen Thomas, who said whatever he thought, Satoshi more often than not kept his opinions to himself. J.D. valued his rare comments, and rarer compliments.
Satoshi went to Victoria and brushed his fingertips against his partner's very curly short black hair, smoothing it where her helmet had pressed against it.
J.D. rotated her shoulders and stretched. Zev came to her and hugged her tight. She stroked his fine pale hair, and laid her hand against his cheek. The diver's smooth mahogany skin radiated heat. Zev wore only light shorts and a sleeveless shirt, both
too big for him, both borrowed from Stephen Thomas, who was nearly thirty centimeters taller than Zev. Zev owned almost no clothing, only a heavy wool suit, part of his disguise for boarding Starfarer. He would have abandoned clothing as quickly as he had abandoned his fraudulent identity, if J.D. had not told him it would be socially unacceptable. He never wore clothes back in Puget Sound.
Zev took her hand between his, spreading his long fingers to enclose her hand between the translucent swimming webs. He looked up at her, his dark eyes bright with excitement.
'When you go back, I want to go with you,' he said. 'I want to meet Nemo.' 'We all want that,' Victoria said, her voice intense. 'I hope it happens.' 'I do, too,' J.D. said.
Her colleagues had all been disappointed when Europa refused them permission to explore her starship. J.D. hoped the same thing would not happen with Nemo.
'Where's Stephen Thomas?' J.D. asked.
'In his lab.' Satoshi sounded troubled. He ran his hand through his short black hair. 'I've hardly seen him all day.'
'I need to talk to him before I go back out.' J.D. was disappointed that he had not joined the others to greet her. She held out the sample bag with the fragment of Nerno's thread. 'And I have a sample for him. Didn't he see me pick it up?'
'Maybe he thought it was for me, eh?' Victoria said. She grinned. 'I would like a piece of it. It looked like it had some interesting optical properties.'
J.D. held out the sample bag to Victoria, embarrassed to admit how much she had wanted to give it to Stephen Thomas herself.
'Tell him not to chop it all up looking for microbes,' Victoria said. 'Why don't you give it to him, and freshen up, and we'll get ready for the conference and meet you in the observers' circle?' 'Okay,' J.D. said.
A few minutes later she hurried from her tiny cabin and headed for the Chi's labs. The labs were larger than the cabins, but still minuscule. J.D. stopped in the doorway of the genetics lab. Stephen Thomas sat at the work bench, staring into the microscope's holographic image. The image rotated, then flipped over.
Another holographic projection, the image of Nerno's crater, hovered in the air where he could glance up and see it.
'Stephen Thomas,' J.D. said.
'Hi, J.D.' Stephen Thomas straightened and turned, hooking his elbow over the chair back. 'That was some expedition.'
He smiled at her.
'Thanks,' she said softly, keeping back everything else she might have wanted to say to him.
He looked drawn and distracted. He had been uncharacteristically silent since they left Starfarer. Of everyone, he was taking Feral's death the hardest. It broke J.D.'s heart to see him so withdrawn, so deep in shock. Grief concentrated his beauty, rather than fading it, heightening the blue of his eyes and refining the planes of his classic features. He had pulled his long blond hair back and tied it very tight. His skin, so fair a few days ago, continued to darken. Except for the pale new scar on his forehead, his skin now was a smooth cafd au lait. Eventually he would be the same color as Zev: dark mahogany, deep brown with a reddish sheen.
'I brought you a sample.' J.D. held out the sample bag. 'There's not much of it, but it's less abused than the other one.'
She had inadvertently pulled up a weed from Europa's ship. If she had not been running away from an aurochs at the time, she probably would have stuck it back in the ground instead of shoving it into her pocket. On the other hand, if she had not been running away from an aurochs, she would not have pulled it up in the first place.
Stephen Thomas accepted the bag. J.D. expected
him to react-with excitement, with disbelief that she had picked up no more than a discarded bit, with a profane expression of joy, with some unexpected impulse unique to Stephen Thomas Gregory. When she had given him the battered weed from Europa's ship, he had kissed her forehead.
This time, he simply held the bag up to the light. The silk caught the illumination and carried it from one end to the other. The tips of the thread glowed bluc-white; the length of it shone luminous indigo. Between Stephen Thomas's fingers, the newly-formed swimming webs glowed pale amber.
'I wonder if Nerno's microflora is as diverse as the web fauna,' Stephen Thomas said. 'This'll be contaminated. . . . Too bad you couldn't collect it before you got out of your suit. People just emit bacteria like crazy. But it shouldn't be too hard to separate the alien bugs . . .'
'I'm sorry.' J.D. blushed, both annoyed and embarrassed by the implied criticism. 'I couldn't just go in and start ripping up bits-'
He shrugged. 'Can't be helped.' He turned toward her again. 'Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm glad to have
