'Are you certain about changing your link?' she asked.
'Yes,' J.D. said. 'I want to enhance it. There still may be time to use it.'
'Very well,' Thanthavong said. 'I've made the preparation. See me when you're ready.'
'Thank you,' J.D. said, as Thanthavong touched the wall, pushed off, and floated toward Stephen Thomas's discussion section.
Stephen Thomas led his group out of the waiting room, heading down into Starfarer's main cylinder and out of zero g.
The group was much smaller than it should have been. Many of the scientists of the multinational faculty
had been recalled by their governments, protesting the threat of change in Starfarer's purpose. So they had all been left behind when Starfarer fled. Stephen Thomas was glad Florrie Brown had joined his group. He liked her; he only wished she and Victoria had not started out on the wrong foot. Besides Stephen Thomas, the scientists included Professor Thanthavong, a couple of biochemists and a botanist, and a dozen graduate students: Lehua, Bay, Mitch, Fox-'Fox, what are you doing here?'
Fox was one of Satoshi's graduate students.
'Satoshi isn't talking to me.'
''at?' he asked, incredulous.
Both Satoshi and Stephen Thomas had good reason to be annoyed with Fox. She was only twenty, too young to apply for a place on the deep space expedition. She had refused to return to Earth. Stephen Thomas and Satoshi had been in the genetics building, trying to persuade her to get on the transport and go home, when the missile hit Starfarer and brought the hillside down around them. But the missile might have hit anywhere. Stephen Thomas found it impossible to blame Fox for staying behind, and he assumed Satoshi felt the same. So what, if they got charged with kidnapping when they got back home? Their prosecution for hijacking the starship would probably take precedence anyway.
Unless kidnapping the niece of the president of the United States took priority over everything.
'Satoshi thinks it's my fault you're turning into a diver!' Fox said.
'Oh, bullshit.'
'Don't make me leave,' she said.
He shrugged. 'Doesn't make any difference to me.'
Stephen Thomas was tired and distracted. Most of his body had stopped aching for the moment, but his toes hurt fiercely. He wanted a hot bath.
He thought it might help.
Thanthavong watched him with concern. 'Come
along, Stephen Thomas. Questions can wait till we're back on solid ground,'
'It doesn't matter,' he said. Everyone was used to his bitching about zero g, but he had spent so much time in weightlessness recently that he had overcome his aversion to it. Or . . . his body was preparing him for living in water.
He followed Thanthavong obediently. He was in the habit of complying with her requests. Like everyone else, he admired her to the point of awe.
When the changing virus infected him, and she prepared to treat him against it, saying no to her was one of the hardest things he had ever done.
They made their way to the long hill that formed one end of Starfarer's campus cylinder. The hill, with its winding switchback paths, led down from the axis to the cylinder floor, the living surface. The air was sharp and cool with rain. Overhead, puffy clouds softened the sharp bright line of the sun tube and, beyond the tube, the cold glitter of lakes and streams on the far side of the cylinder. Starfarer's small shallow ocean, gray and foggy, circled the opposite end of the cylinder. Stephen Thomas kept waiting to feel some primeval call to the sea, but it did not happen.
You aren't turning into a fish, he said to himself, repeating Zev's distressed protest to a joke about what was happening to Stephen Thomas. You aren't turning into a fish. You aren't going to get pulled to the sea to spawn.
At a hairpin turn of the trail, halfway to the floor of the cylinder, benches clustered in a small circle. The false gravity was about half of Starfarer's regular seventenths g. One could sit without bouncing into the air.
Thanthavong took a seat and motioned the others to join her. Stephen Thomas limped to a nearby bench, lowered himself gratefully, and stretched his long legs. He curled his toes, pressing them against the soles of his sandals, straightening them quickly when the ache turned to a raw jolt of pain.
Everybody else joined the circle and watched with anticipation as Stephen Thomas slipped his carryingcase strap off over his head and held the case in his lap. The grad students had been waiting for something new to work on. J.D. had brought Stephen Thomas a crumpled plant from Europa's ship, but the plant was, as Europa said, of Earth origin. Though the bacteria associated with it were still acting strange, they matched ordinary Earth species. He was glad he finally had something for his students.
'Stephen Thomas?'
He opened the sample case. He had not transmitted any of this information, or discussed it on the public access. Europa and Androgeos had made him more cautious-more sneaky-than he had ever been before.
'The optical fiber J.D. picked up is just a polymer. Organic. Similar to silk, a little stronger.' He shrugged. 'Most of its interesting qualities are optical. But it was shed into a living ecosystem. Good and nonsterile. Particles in the range from viral to amoebic. I made some slides, and . . .'
He pulled the cushioned isolation chamber out of the case and held it up, letting light flow through the windows ofthe sample vials.
Tiny cell colonies traced one inoculation stab.
He had not expected-not dared to hope for-the growth to appear so quickly. He had been afraid to hope for any growth at all.
Most of the tubes of growth medium remained clear. No surprise: he had no way-yet-of knowing what to feed an alien cell.
But something, some alien equivalent of a bacterium, was an autotroph: an organism that could grow and replicate using only simple sugars, oxygen, water. . . .
He offered the isolation chamber to Thanthavong.
'No,' she said. 'No. You carry it. I'm afraid my hand . . . might not be steady enough.'
They had met the alien humans. They had encountered an alien species of intelligence. But this microscopic quantity of life was the first alien cell they could look at, grow, and study.
'Maybe some of the other microbes feed on the autotroph,' Lehua said. 'Right.' With a little luck, he could end up with a self-sustaining mixed colony of alien microbes.
'Did you have enough to do any tests?' Thanthavong asked.
'Just one.' He paused. 'Whatever Nemo's ecosystem uses to make whatever it uses for genes . . . it isn't DNA.'
J.D. and Zev found themselves among a diverse group of faculty and staff, including most of the artists, Jenny Dupre, and Senator Orazio.
J.D. wished she did not have to meet with them all so soon after getting back. She was tired, and sad. Still, she understood why her colleagues were here waiting for her. She would have been with them, if she had not been a member of the alien contact department.
'There's no question of letting the alien into Arachne,' Jenny Dupre said.
'I don't think so,' J.D. said sadly. 'And I'm beginning to think that's a mistake.'
'The web's still too fragile to risk it!'
J.D. (lid not blame Jenny for her concern. She had nearly died in Arachne's crash, the crash that killed Feral. If Feral's death was murder rather than accident, as Jenny believed, then Jenny had probably been the target.
Nevertheless, the more J.D. thought about it, the more she disagreed with keeping Nemo out.
She wanted to be back with Nemo.
She was still moving through microgravity, so she tried to keep her eyes from closing as she went into a communications fugue. She did not want to crash into a wall while she was not looking.
She touched Arachne, sending a gentle message to the squidmoth. Nemo made no reply.
