you crashed the web. Even though they know Blades was responsible. None of them care that you sacrificed your career and your marriage for their expedition. They don't care that you'll be the first one in jail when-if-we ever get back to Earth.
He turned away from Kolya's deserted and probably unlocked home-no one, except Griffith, locked doors on campus-and headed down the long curving flight of stairs.
As he passed Floris Brown's apartment, a dapplegray miniature horse squealed and kicked up its heels and galloped away from Brown's front porch. The yearling filly raced across the open field and past the herd, alerting and exciting them. The whole bunch of them burst into a run, tangled manes and tails flying and bobbing like dreadlocks.
Floris Brown sat in the shadows of her deep porch, bits of carrot bright against the black of her knee-length tunic. She blinked at him like an aged, prehistoric lizard, her eyes beady within their rim of dark eye makeup. Fox, one of the graduate students, sat at Brown's feet and leaned companionably against her leg.
'You always frighten things,' Floris Brown said to Griffith, her voice accusatory. 'You frighten people and you frighten creatures. Why didn't you go home?'
He almost said, Because I was trying to figure out a way to keep you disorganized anarchists from getting blown out of the sky.
Instead, he said nothing, but turned away and strode stiffly back toward the guest house.
If he had told her what he had tried to do, she would not believe him anyway.
These people, Griffith thought, are driving me crazy.
Infinity left the administration building and hurried along a path that spiraled around the interior of Starfarer. The anomalies he kept seeing in the growth patterns of the plants added to his distress. A lot of the flowers had been bred for long-lasting blooms: the snow irises and the crocuses lasted well into spring; the daffodils came up so early that back on Earth, the threat of snow would not have passed. On Starfarer, it seldom snowed more than an artistic sprinkle.
He had gotten used to the long bloomings, when Starfarer was half finished, during its muddy first spring.
But other plants had other rhythms, and many of these were disarranged. Crossing a warm microclimate, he entered a grove of orange trees. They were heavy
with fruit. Though the cafeteria was empty of fresh food, in the absence of the ASes, no one had thought to pick any oranges. Infinity smelled not just the sharpness of the oranges, but the heavy sweetness of a profusion of orange buds and blossoms.
The orange trees looked healthy, but their burst of blossoms worried Infinity. Plants under stress reacted like this, with an extravagance of reproduction.
Honeybees harvested the pollen, and more dead bees lay on the ground. Farther along the path, in a cooler microclimate, Infinity passed through a field of spinach that had already begun to bolt.
He was worried for a lot of reasons when he reached the edge of the tumbled patch of ground where the genetics department had been. Lithoclasts crawled through the broken building, dissolving the shattered walls, eating them away. The place had been disinfected. Everything that could be salvaged had been brought out. A great deal of work had been lost, not only experiments in progress but some of the back-up embryonic tissue meant to support Starfarer's biological diversity.
Miensaem Thanthavong, the head of the genetics department, stood at the edge of the broken building, staring at it, her shoulders slumped. Infinity glanced at the lithoclasts again, gauging their progress. It would be a while before they finished cleaning up. After that, the geneticists would call in the lithoblasts, the rock-makers, to rebuild the shell of their building.
Every silver slug that came inside, whether to work or to carry out someone's whim, meant one less attending to the constant job of maintaining the strength and stability of Starfarer's main cylinders. He wondered if the scientists had thought of that.
Professor Thanthavong saw him and greeted him. She looked tired.
He was used to seeing her on a screen, or in a holographic projection.
He always forgot how slight and
delicate she was. Informal as Starfarer could be, he never knew what to call her. Few people called the Nobel laureate by her given name.
'I found the artificials,' he said.
'Oh, good. We can use some here. Are they-' Her eyelids flickered as she linked to Arachne's web.
'I'm still not getting She stopped. 'What is
it?'
' I think their brains are fried.'
Stephen Thomas smoothed the earth over Feral's grave. He leaned against the shovel and rested his forehead against his hands. Sweat dripped down his face and over the sensitive webs between his fingers.
He had chosen a spot on a hilltop within a grove of young oak trees. He chose the spot because he liked it, not because he felt certain Feral would have liked it. He had not known Feral long enough, well enough, to be sure what he would have wanted. Feral had left no instructions. Arachne preserved a record of his EarthSpace waiver, accepted and agreed to, probably without a second thought. Where the record asked for next of kin, Feral had written, 'None.'
Stephen Thomas sat down and rested against one of the oak saplings. The thin trunk would grow into a mature tree in twenty years, fifty. If Starfarer survived, the oak trees would still be here at the end of the exile.
Sunlight poured down between the brilliant red and yellow leaves. Just as spring was hot back on campus, autumn was hot on the wild side.
'Feral, I wish I had a marker for you,' Stephen Thomas said aloud. 'I'll get somebody to make you one, as soon as I can. I just couldn't stand to think of you lying there in the morgue. . . .'
He hooked his finger through the thin chain around his neck. The delicate links made a cold line of pressure across the nape of his neck. The crystal pendant swung against his thumb. In some light it was red, in some it was blue, and once in a while it turned black. He stared
into it, twisting it back and forth, watching the colors change.
Stephen Thomas thought about Feral; he thought about looking for his aura. Feral had been unique, surrounded by changing rainbows.
'Victoria's probably right,' Stephen Thomas said. 'There's no such thing as auras. I make them up to go along with my feelings. To explain them, maybe.'
Stephen Thomas wrapped his fingers around the crystal and tugged at it, gently at first, then harder.
'When I met you, I felt the same way I felt when I first met Merry,' Stephen Thomas said. 'I love Victoria and Satoshi. But that's different. That was slower, and steadier. We all had to work at it. Merry, though . . . sparks. Explosions. All those clich6s.
'But Merry's dead. And you're dead. God damn it, Feral, I'm so sorry.
The chain snapped in his hand. He stared at the broken necklace. A film of blood reddened the gold along a finger's length near the clasp.
Stephen Thomas touched the back of his neck and found the long scratch where the clasp had cut his skin. Salty sweat stung the shallow abrasion. The bloody red-gold chain lay in his hand, tangled around the crystal. Stephen Thomas spilled the necklace onto the bare earth of Feral's grave. Nearby, a silver slug rustled the scatter of dry gold leaves on the ground. Stephen Thomas had called it inside to help him carry Feral's body. Stephen Thomas had been able to manage in the microgravity of the hub. Even coming down the hill, where the perception of weight increased with every step, Feral's weight had been manageable. But he had needed some help in regular gravity.
The lithoclast rippled uncomfortably, impatiently, waiting for him to tell it what to do.
Stephen Thomas did not need it any longer. He dismissed it and watched it crawl away. He only wished he
could as easily command the slugs guarding Blades's house.
How could I have been so wrong about that guy? he wondered.
The heat enervated him. He asked Arachne the reason for producing such an intense Indian summer here in
