from Earth. As soon as it was too late to change her mind, Chandra had realized her mistake.
The other experience she would have wanted to capture had also passed her by: transition. When Starfarer fled Earth, she had been connected by hard link to a backup computer, storing a full load of sensory recordings. If Arachne had been up, she could have been ready for transition, and for Starfarer's arrival at Tau Ceti. But she had missed that chance. The Tau Ceti to Sirius transition had been just as bad. Arachne crashed again,
Feral died, and Stephen Thomas and J.D. caught Blades at sabotage.
I should have been part of the hunt, too, Chandra thought. But J.D. didn't even consider trusting me.
Chandra's body still had not recorded transition. She needed a calm, controlled approach to the transition point, not the chaotic flights they had made so far, with the computer web crashing around them.
When J.D.'s recorded image took off her spacesuit and let,Nemo touch her, Chandra groaned in exasperation. The swollen nerve clusters all over Chandra's body throbbed and engorged with anticipation.
'Why didn't you take off your clothes, you stupid bitch?' Chandra shouted. She flung herself against the back of the couch.
'Chandra!' Crimson exclaimed. But at least she spared a little of her attention from the replay, and from her sculpted bone.
'She should've,' Chandra said irritably. 'She's seen
too many old sci fi movies. She thinks aliens want to have sex with human beings, and she's scared.'
'That's silly. Would you've taken your clothes off?'
'You bet I would.'
'Wouldn't you be embarrassed?'
'No. Why should P I let people experience my body from the inside out.
Damn! They should've let me go along! Or at least made her make a sensory recording.'
'Now I understand,' Crimson said.
'What?'
'Why you kept trying to scare J.D. into not going back.'
Chandra shrugged. 'It was worth a try.'
'No, it wasn't. If you wanted to be in the alien contact department, why didn't you apply there instead of the art department?'
'I joined Starfarer at the last minute, it was too late,' she said belligerently.
Crimson gave her a skeptical glance.
'I didn't think they'd take me-all right? But I knew I could get in the art department. Will you stop playing with that?'
'I'm not playing.' Crimson did not press the point of Chandra's Starfarer affiliation, or her ambitions. 'I'm figuring out what it ought to look like. I have to hold it and carry it around and change it till I get the model right. I can't fossilize it till I get it right.'
But she put the strange model bone aside and knelt on the couch beside Chandra, gazing at her with concern.
'It would have made more sense for them to let me go than for them to let Zev tag along,' Chandra said. 'It isn't fair! He'd never've gotten up here if I hadn't smuggled him on board.'
'I'd like to go on the Chi, too, you know,' Crimson said. 'Everybody would. But J.D.'s the alien contact specialist.'
'So she's first.'
'You've done a lot of other things first. And recorded them for us.'
'I've recorded a lot of things best,' Chandra said. 'But not first. I don't think there's anything left on Earth to do and be, first. That's why I came out here!'
'I don't care if you're first or not.'
'I'm glad you like my stuff,' Chandra said. 'Nobody else on this heap pays it any attention. Maybe three whole people have accessed it in the past two weeks.'
'You are in a bad mood,' Crimson said, out of patience. Then she laughed. 'What's so funny?'
'Chandra, who's had a chance in the last two weeks to spend any time-' Chandra thought Crimson was about to say 'to spend any time playing.' Bristling, she readied a retort.
11
-on anything but the real world?'
Chandra cut off the sharp words she had planned when she heard what Crimson really said. Finding another reply took her a moment.
'Yeah,' Chandra said, reluctant to be placated. 'I guess you're right.'
On the crater replay, J.D. scrabbled her way up a steep silky slope. The LTMs had caught a glimpse of several of Nemo's attendants, but the recording pitched and yawed till Chandra closed her strange all-over-gray eyes.
'It's making me seasick! They'll have to edit that to death!'
'Shh, look, there's another one of those spider things. I want to watch it.'
The creature left off creating a shimmery sheet of new white silk, rappelled to the floor, and snaked off on half a dozen ropy limbs. It looked like a cross between a brittle star, with long whiplash tentacle-legs, and a crustacean, with a shrimplike head and a ring of eyes. Crimson stroked her model bone again. She examined it intently, turned it over, put it down, glanced at the image of Nemo's attendant.
'It's too conventional,' Crimson said.
'Huh? My stuff?'
'No, mine. The fossils. They're all on an ordinary vertebrate body plan.' 'Oh, right. Six-legged, winged, fanged, twelve-eyed vertebrates.'
'Even if I did that all at once, they'd be too much like us.'
Chandra sat crosslegged on the sofa, enjoying the soft warmth of the leather, and the way the leather stuck to her skin.
'You sure pissed Gerald off when you told Europa you're a paleontologist,' she said. 'I think you really got her to believe we'd found alien bones on the moon.'
'Gerald just doesn't get it,' Crimson said. 'I am a paleontologist.' Chandra laughed. 'I like the way you never go out of character.' 'Seriously. My degree's in paleontology. But it got so I couldn't do field work. When the Mideast Sweep started expanding again.'
Chandra sobered and looked at Crimson, tilting her head thoughtfully to one side. She was not sure if Crimson was pulling her leg or not. 'Androgeos took one of my fossils,' Crimson said.
'What? Why'd you let him get away with it?'
'Because that's what they're for.' Crimson laughed with delight. 'I hope I get to find out what he thinks of it.'
,,He probably got the twelve-eyed fanged one. He'll just think it was one of our ordinary ancestors.'
Crimson laughed again, then fell silent.
Gazing into Chandra's eyes-most people did not gaze into Chandra's featureless silver-gray eyes-Crimson touched Chandra's wrist, stroking the bright blue rope of vein that throbbed just beneath her translucent tan skin. Crimson's hands were rough from sculpting, from digging in Starfarer's coarse new ground to bury her fossils in an artificial but convincing stratigraphy. Her fingers circled gently in the sensitive hollow of Chandra's palm.
The nerve clusters pulsed.
Chandra drew away.
Crimson let her hands fall into her lap. She frowned, confused and disappointed.
'What's the matter?'
'I don't do that.' Chandra was tempted. But Chandra had made a career of resisting temptation.
'What do you mean? With me? With women?'
'I don't do it at all.'
'Why? Why not?' Crimson asked, shocked.
'Every sensory artist in the universe does sex scenes,' Chandra said. 'You don't have to record it!' Crimson exclaimed. 'I didn't want you to record it!'
Chandra squinted at her, trying to see her in a different way, trying to see her even more clearly. She decided Crimson was serious about not recording.
