battered pieces, leaking guts and golden blood.
Stephen Thomas backed away from the pond. He felt sick. His vision blurred. He stumbled out into the corridor, fighting for breath.
Don't throw up, he told himself. Not here, not now. Whatever you've seen, whatever it signifies, don't let it affect you.
He grabbed his shirt and his sandals and fled from the soft vicious sounds of struggle.
J.D. and Zev remained with Nemo.
One of the armor-scaled creatures flowed up to Zev's bare foot and extended its frilly mantle, rippling out to touch him. Zev watched it curiously. Then, fearless, he picked it up and turned it over to look at it. Its feathery appendages waved frantically, and a stream of fluid spurted from its underside. Zev laughed. An old hand at catching creatures who used water jets and ink and even tiny poison darts for defense and escape, he had been holding it at an angle. The liquid jet missed him and spattered, pungent and oily, on the floor. Zev put the creature down, and it zipped off under one of the silk-sheet walls.
Zev crossed the distance to Nemo. He knelt down and touched Nerno's sleek side, stroking the iridescent skin. Nemo blinked slowly. The long eyelid closed. Nemo reminded J.D. for all the world like a huge mutant cat being petted. The long tentacles moved languorously, tapping against the silk floor, the spinners, Zev's leg.
Nemo plucked one of the honey ants and gave it to Zev, plucked another and handed it to J.D. J.D. ate hers
slowly, preparing for the rush and dizziness. Zev popped his into his mouth and crunched it.
'Oh, I like that,' he said out loud, his voice breathy. He returned to using his link. 'Thanks, Nerno! I wonder if you'd like beer.'
Nerno's long eyelid opened; the glittery eyes peered out. The long tentacles Surrounded Zev, touching and stroking him.
'I eat only insubstantial food,' Nemo said.
Zev sat quiet and interested as Nerno's tentacles explored him.
The tentacles touched and probed his body through the thin fabric of his shorts and shirt. Zev, not in the least uncomfortable, stroked Nerno's back and played his fingers along the shorter proboscises that formed Nerno's mustache.
Nemo touched Zev's face with the tip of one long tentacle.
'You have had your children.'
'Me?' Zev said, startled, yet flattered. 'No, I've never been asked to father a child. Not yet.'
Nerno's short tentacles wuffled in a complex wave.
'You're a juvenile.'
'I'm grown!'
Nemo pulled the tentacle sharply back. Zev leaned toward the squidmoth and touched the purple fur.
'I didn't mean to frighten you,' Zev said.
'Zev's an adult,' J.D. said. 'But divers wait till they're older, usually, before they reproduce.'
'Humans change to divers,' Nemo said.
J.D. was having trouble following Nerno's reasoning, though the insubstantial food made her feel intense as well as dizzy, able to make great leaps of intuition. Unfortunately, figuring out what Nemo meant, or what Nemo wanted to know, was too great a leap even for J.D.
'Divers started out as human beings. But we changed ourselves. My grandparents did.'
'Divers are not the adult form of human beings.'
'No,' J.D. said. 'I mean, that's right. Humans can change to divers and divers can change to humans, but we usually don't.'
'I was never an ordinary human being,' Zev said. 'And we breed true. Diver genes are dominant. If J.D. and I had children, they'd be divers.'
'There's another difference between Zev and me,' J.D. said. 'Zev is male and I'm female.'
She was glad to have a relatively neutral way of bringing up the subject of sex and gender. Though Nemo had not balked at any of J.D.'s questions so far, she had felt shy of asking about the reproductive strategies of squidmoths. And though J.D. assured herself that a squidmoth would be shy of completely different subjects than the ones human beings found difficult and delicate, she did not find broaching the question of sex any easier. 'Europa is a female and Androgeos is a male,' Nemo said.
'Yes. Exactly.'
'This is significant for your reproduction.'
'Yes. For us, and for most of the higher animals and plants on Earth. To reproduce, we need a male and a female. How does it work for you?'
'We exchange genetic material, then save it for our reproductive phase.' Male first, and then female, J.D. thought. Or hermaphroditic-Then: You're doing it again, she thought. Trying to fit Nemo into familiar terms. Just because you think you've pinned something down, just because you've named it, doesn't mean it fits in the box you've made of the name. 'How often do you reproduce?' J.D. asked.
'One time.'
'Do you have children, then? Young ones, offspring?' Nemo was a being of great age; J.D.'s impression was that Nemo was an elder of the squidmoths. 'I have no offspring yet.'
'How do you decide when to have them?'
'I decide when the juvenile phase of my life is finished.'
J.D. started to say something, then stopped, for she had been about to interpret Nerno's comment without double-checking her assumptions.
'Do you mean that you decide when to become an adult-when to become sexually mature?'
'I decide when to enter my reproductive phase.'
'Is that when you become an adult?'
'Yes.,,
'Are you still a juvenile?'
'I'm still a juvenile.'
'I thought you were old,' Zev said. 'Older than Europa, even.'
'I am older than Europa,' Nemo said.
'And still a juvenile!' J.D. said, amazed.
Maybe that's why Nemo's willing to talk to us, J.D. thought. Jusi a crazy kid.
'Nemo, how long is your lifespan?'
Nemo hesitated.
I wonder, J.D. thought, if Nemo is afraid I'll say, 'Take me to your mother'?
'I'm nearly a million subjective years old,' Nemo said.
Some juvenile! J.D. thought. If Nemo's a juvenile, how old and wise the adults must be!
'Did Civilization increase your lifespan, too, like Europa's?' J.D. asked. 'Or do you naturally live a long time?'
Again, Nemo paused before replying. Would the squidmoth start behaving like Europa and Androgeos, withholding information because it was valuable, and human beings had so little to trade for it? She could not bear to think that after all, Nemo would send the humans away.
If everyone in Civilization is four thousand years old, a million years old, J.D. thought, no wonder they think of us as immature. But . . . do they have kids of their own? Europa gave me the idea there were a lot of different people out here. Where do they put their popula-
tion? She wondered, feeling depressed, if the people of Civilization crammed themselves together, like human beings in some of Earth's cities, and comforted themselves by calculating how many people could be packed into a given area, and still have a spot of ground to stand on.
'Civilization helped my people naturally live this long,' Nemo said.
'Do you build in a long life-span? Instead of prolonging it with outside treatments?'
'More or less,' Nemo said.
'Who decides who gets to make those changes?'
'With enough knowledge, you can change yourselves.'
