It hurt, but it hurt in a way he remembered from his childhood. It was the itchy pain of a loose baby tooth.
Zev's feet had sharp semiretractile claws that curved over the ends of his toes, recessed into the flesh. Stephen Thomas had not thought much about how his nails would turn to claws, and he found that he did not want to think much about it now. He stopped wiggling his toenail and let his foot sink back into the heat.
The idea of being able to breathe underwater intrigued him. He wondered how far the changes had gone. He lay back in the bath, letting the water rise around his head. His hair fanned out, tickling his neck,
drifting between his shoulder blades. Warm water crept up his face, covered his lips, covered his eyes. He could hardly tell the water from the steamy, humid air.
Stephen Thomas plunged his head the rest of the way underwater and took a fast, deep breath.
The water filled his throat and gushed into his lungs, choking him. He erupted from the bath, gasping. He leaned over the side of the tub, coughing water onto the floor. He nearly threw up.
Finally he collected himself, and hunched in the cooling bath. His chest and his throat hurt. The ache travelled downward and lodged in his belly. I guess I'm not a diver yet, he thought.
He opened the drain, stood up, and splashed out of the tub. Droplets of water sparkled all down his body, trapped by the gold pelt. He curried off the water as he had curried away the air bubbles. He needed a sweat- scraper, the kind grooms used on horses or on Bronze Age athletes.
Rubbing himself with a towel, he went down the hall to his room. But in the doorway, he hesitated. He turned away from his comfortable, familiar mess and went to the end of the hall, to the room that would have been Merry's, to the room Feral had slept in. The partnership had never used it before Feral came to visit.
The futon was made up; the shelf doors were closed. It was as if no one had ever stayed here. As if Feral had never existed.
Stephen Thomas slid open the door to the built-in shelves. Feral's few extra clothes lay in a neat stack.
Stephen Thomas closed the shelf door again. He hung his towel carefully on the rack, got into Feral's bed, curled up around the deep pain of his pelvic bone, and fell asleep.
LIKE THE STROKES OF A BRUSH PAINTING, beach grass covered the soft dunes. Beyond the dunes lay Starfarer's ocean.
J.D. walked along a path too narrow to have been made by human feet. She wondered who or what had formed the path-and saw a tiny hoofprint, a small pile of horse droppings. The tough, sharp-edged grass would be little temptation for the miniature horses, but they might like the salt, and the flat freedom of the beach.
J.D. climbed the gentle rise of the dune. At the top, she paused to look across the shore.
The ocean circled the park end of
Starfarer's campus cylinder. It was the pulse of the starship's ecosystem, and the breath of its weather. The smell of salt sparkled in the onshore breeze, and the dry grains of sand hissed as they spun past J.D.'s feet.
Open ocean created long crescents of white beach, separated by headlands and smoothed by the surf. Fqr overhead, on the shore beyond the sun tube, opposite this point on the cylinder, barrier islands protected salt marshes. The lowlands buffered the air and the water and offered shelter and spawning grounds to many of Starfarer's creatures.
The hill that formed the cap of the cylinder rose from the far edge of the ocean, at the rim. The hill supported an ice field on one slope, hot springs on another. Their cold and warm currents circulated the seawater and helped drive the weather.
Zev stopped beside her, staring out at the ocean. He glanced at J.D., his face glowing.
'You go on ahead,' she said softly. 'I want to talk to Victoria for a minute.'
He hesitated, then whooped in excitement and took out for the sea. He skidded down the face of the dune and dropped the beach blanket. Racing across the narrow crescent beach, kicking up bright showers of dry sand, he flung off his shirt; he hopped on one foot, then the other, while he stripped off his shorts.
Zev splashed into the shallow water, pushed forward, swam a few strokes, kicked his heels in the air, .and vanished.
'He's eager, , Victoria said, a smile in her voice. She stopped beside J.D. 'He's homesick, I think.'
'He doesn't act it.'
'He doesn't mope . . . but . . . when you spend time with the divers, you get used to a lot of contact. A lot of touch. He doesn't get that here.'
'He docsn't?' Victoria sounded skeptical, and amused. 'Could have fooled me.'
'Not like back at his home.'
The dune grass ended abruptly. J.D. and Victoria
crossed the beach: soft deep dry white sand, a narrow line of drying seaweed and small shells, then damp, yielding dark sand. It was easier to walk, here where the tide had just gone out, where the siphon-holes of clams pocked the surface and squirted when J.D. stamped her foot.
Out in the low breakers, Zev surfaced, waved, beckoned, and disappeared again.
'Are you going to join him?'
'In a while,' J.D. said. 'Let's go over by that piece of driftwood.' She scooped up the beach blanket, and then she thought: Driftwood?
The huge, gnarled tree trunk lay above the highwater line, down where the beach began to curve out to a low headland. Its twisted, weather-silvered roots reached into the air. The trunk itself was larger in diameter than J.D. was tall. The top of the trunk had been broken off in a jagged point, as if wind had uprooted it and the fall had shattered it.
If it had ever lived.
J.D. touched the trunk. It felt like wood, and when she knocked against it with her knuckles, it resounded with a familiar, woody thunk 'It is wood! I thought it'd be rock foam. How-?'
Victoria grinned. 'Realistic, eh? Cellulose and lignin and what-all.
Crimson sculpted it. She said any self-respecting beach should have cedar driftwood on it.'
'It's handsome.' J.D. stroked the smooth, weathered surface. 'I miss big trees.'
'There are some, over on the wild side. Twenty years old, from one of the O'Neills.'
'Twenty years old?' J.D. smiled. The broken end of the driftwood revealed the sculpted growth rings. 'This would be hundreds of years old.'
'Crimson's good, isn't she? She told me she'd grown it layer by layer, and cooked the sculptural material so even the isotopic ratios would be right.' 'She's very talented.' J.D. let her day pack slide off her shoulders, spread out the blanket beside the tree trunk, and sank down crosslegged.
'I don't remember the last time I went swimming,' Victoria said. 'I've never swum in Starfarer's ocean.' She took off her floppy red T-shirt and kicked off her sandals. She was wearing a shiny blue two-piece bathing suit.
Zev had paced them as they walked along the shore. He waved again, called to J.D., bodysurfed halfway to the beach, then did a flip-turn and vanished into the waves again.
'Good lord, he's going to break his neck!' Victoria said.
'No, don't worry. He knows where the bottom is.'
'Shall we swim?'
'I want to talk to you for a minute, first.'
Victoria knelt beside J.D.
'I'm listening.'
Zev was used to older adults gathering to talk while the younger adults swam and played. He was patient, and he knew J.D. would join him soon. He looked forward to casting off the restrictive land manners for a few hours, and he wished he had someone to swim with now while he waited for J.D. and Victoria. He wondered if Victoria's presence meant he and J.D. would have to maintain land manners. How would Victoria know diver manners?
Victoria's intensity both scared and intrigued him. He knew she did not altogether approve of his being along on the expedition. Still, she had let him accompany the alien contact department, so she must like him just a little.
Among the divers, Zev had spoken for J.D. to Lykos; J.D. must have spoken for him to Victoria.
While he waited for J.D., he swam through the shallow ocean.
The starship spun one direction; he swam the other direction, minus-spin, because it felt as if he were
