it.'
' If you say so,' J.D. said, and rushed to change the subject. 'I want to enhance my internal link. Can IT'
'Sure, but why the fuck would you want to?'
'Weren't you watching? Weren't you even listening?'
'Of course I was watching. Why are you pissed off at me? Is everybody pissed off at me?'
'No, of course not, I'm sorry.' J.D. gestured at the floating image. 'I want to communicate with Nemo on Nerno's own terms. So I have to enhance my link. Can I start working on it now?'
'No, I don't have any prep here.' He frowned. 'You'll have to ask Professor T'hanthavong if she can mix some up for you in the biochem lab. The readymade stuff was in the genetics building, so it's under forty tons of rubble.'
'Oh,' J.D. said, disappointed. 'Okay. I'll talk to her.' As soon as I get some sleep, she said to herself. As soon as I can sound coherent. Though Professor Thanthavong was usually pleasant and invariably at least civil, J.D. always felt intimidated by the idea of walking up to a Nobel laureate and talking to her as if she were an ordinary person. Miensaem Thanthavong was not ordinary.
'Just how much are you planning to enhance the link?' Stephen Thomas said. 'As much as I can.'
He knit his eyebrows. 'You won't like it. You'll be a zombie whenever you use it. The synapses have to feed in somewhere, they'll take over all your other senses.'
'I don't care,' J.D. said. 'It's important.' Her link warmed in the back of her mind, notifying her of a message. 'Excuse me it second.' Her eyelids fluttered. As she went into a communications fugue, she thought, Most of us close off the rest of the world when we use our link, so what does it matter?
She accepted the message. Nemo's characteristic signal touched her mind. 'Nemo! Is everything all right?'
'The attendants are prepared,' Nemo said.
'Does that mean- Are you willing to meet my colleagues? Can we visit you?' 'Yes, you may visit.'
J.D. opened her eyes. 'That was Nemo! Come on!'
Without waiting to explain, J.D. ran out of the lab.
J.D. TWEAKED HER METABOLIC ENHANCER again. It flooded her body with extra adrenaline, hiding her exhaustion. She led the way to the edge of Nerno's crater.
'It looks different,' Victoria said.
'It is,' J.D. said.
The surface had changed, and the entrance. The tunnels were rewoven, reformed. If J.D. had left her line in the nest, it would not simply have cut into the edges of Nerno's curtains. It would have grown into the fabric of the nest
. . itself, like gravel in a wound.
Satoshi knelt at the edge of the crater and peered down the new slope.
'There's our guide,' he said. 'One of the lifeliners.' They followed the creature's thread downward. The lifeliner ambled before them, no longer trying to hide.
'The route's easier,' J.D. said, with wonder. 'Nemo remade all the tunnels.' They were higher, the slopes shallower. She never had to stoop. She let her eyelids flicker, touched her internal link, and sent a quick message of thanks to Nemo.
'I rebuild all the time,' Nemo said.
J.D. hurried between the pearly gray curtains. Without the lifeliner, without its thread through the labyrinth, she would be lost.
'It's beautiful,' Zev said. 'It's like anemones.'
'Anemones?' J.D. said. 'How do you mean?'
'On the curtains.'
'Look at it in the ultraviolet,' Stephen Thomas said. 'It's like flowers. Jungle.'
J.D.'s suit obediently displayed Nerno's web in the UV.
The web exploded.
Intricate patterns whirled into alien plants and surged with violent blossoms. Auroras chased themselves in spirals that expanded to-cover every surface, then diminished to a single point, and vanished.
Dazzled, J.D. took a step forward and ran into a silken wall. Victoria grabbed her arm and steadied her.
'Whoa, careful.'
She stopped and closed her eyes and canceled the suit display. When she looked again, the storm of color had vanished and the path lay clear before her again, winding between the curtains and their invisible decorations, their camouflage.
'Wow,' she said softly. 'That's something.'
'It sure is,' Victoria said.
'Can you see it?' Satoshi asked Stephen Thomas. 'I mean, like Zev? Without the suit display?'
'Yeah,' Stephen Thomas said. 'I can see it.'
The path spiraled deeper into the crater. They reached the airlock. As the shadows outside bore down on the walls, Satoshi cupped his hands against the translucent tunnel. 'Damn, I wish I could see them!'
The pocket filled with air; sound returned.
The interior end of the airlock relaxed and opened. They continued to the central chamber. The maze of curtains around Nemo remained, but the chamber extended farther upward, and the curtains reached to its ceiling. In single file, the members of the alien contact department followed the lifeline through Nerno's maze.
The gossamer thread ended. J.D. entered Nerno's chamber. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and Zev came in behind her.
'Hello, Nemo.' J.D. unfastened her helmet. The thick, smelly air displaced the tasteless air of her support system.
Nemo's eyelid rose; the faceted eyes glittered. Nerno's central tentacle snaked out and grasped J.D.'s wrist. She gripped it, her fingers closing around silky fur. The tentacle felt hot, like the tail of a cat basking in the sun.
'These are my friends, my colleagues,' J.D. said to Nemo.
'Welcome,' Nemo said.
'Thank you,' J.D. said.
The others took off their helmets. J.D. had warned them of the exhaust-fume smell, and they had seen the LTM analyses. Stephen Thomas wrinkled his nose in distaste, and Zev sneezed.
'Tell me if you thought new things.' Nemo said.
'I sure did,' J.D. said. 'We all did.' She and her companions removed their spacesuits and left them at the edge of the inner chamber. J.D. approached the squidmoth. 'How are you? Did you think new things, too?'
'I thought of some old things,' Nemo said.
'I want to introduce my friends,' J.D. said. 'Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, who's the head of the alien contact department, and a physicist. She discovered how to use the cosmic string to enter transition.'
'I am glad to meet you, Victoria,' Nemo said.
The long central tentacle snaked out and hovered. Victoria extended her hand, and Nemo laid the soft tip of the tentacle in her palm. She shivered.
'I'm glad to meet you, too, Nemo,' Victoria said through her internal link.
'Here's Satoshi Lono. He's a geographer. He studies how communities interact with their environments. And Stephen Thomas Gregory, who studies genetics. And this is my friend Zev. Zev is a diver.'
Nemo went through the new greeting ritual with each of J.D.'s colleagues in turn.
'You're the ichthyocentaur,' Nerno said to Zev.
'That's what Europa called me,' Zev said. 'But the word means I'm part fish. I'm not.'
'You are different from J.D.,' Nemo said.
'Of course. I'm a diver, and J.D.'s still a regular human being.'
J.D. was touched that he used the word 'still.' She would probably always regret turning down the chance to become a diver that Zev's mother had offered her.
'And Stephen Thomas is different from you all,' Nemo said.
'I'm changing into a diver,' Stephen Thomas said. 'I'm about half and half at this point.'
