,,Afl right.' He agreed reluctantly; he did not know what else to do. 'I have to go. A friend is waiting for me.
'Go ahead,' she said. 'And-thanks for giving me your word.'
He waded toward deeper water. When the waves rose around his chest, he glanced back.
'I didn't mean to . . . to trouble you,' he said. 'Do you have friends to be with?'
'Sure,' she said quickly. 'Sure I do. You go on, now.'
He stroked forward through the waves, and dove.
J.D. wondered why it was so hard to discuss, on land, a subject that was so easy and natural in the sea. She wondered why it was so hard to discuss it with Victoria, who found her attractive, whom she had kissed.
'Divers and ordinary humans have different manners,' she said to Victoria. 'Zev behaves differently on land than in the water. So do 1, but it's easier for me. The land manners, I mean, because they're what I'm used to. It took me a while to get used to the way divers behave with each other, back on Earth. They play a lot. And their play's very sexual.' The words for sex and play were nearly indistinguishable in true speech, the language divers learned from the orcas.
'Yes?' Victoria said.
J.D. glanced out at the sea, and obliquely overhead. The ocean extended in a blue and silver circle all the way around this end of Starfarer. She could see nearly three-quarters of the circle; directly overhead it vanished behind the brilliance of the light tube, and she could not look in that direction.
'If it will make you uncomfortable,' J.D. said to Victoria, 'for either of us to touch you while you're
swimming, I'll tell Zev that we're using land manners in the ocean today.' 'It wouldn't make me uncomfortable to touch you,' Victoria said. 'Quite the opposite. And Zev . . . intrigues me. The question is, what do you want to do?'
'I'd like . . . I'm looking forward to playing. With both of you.'
Victoria grinned. 'That sounds like fun, eh?'
J.D. smiled in return. 'Yes. It does. Let's go swimming.,,
She flipped off her sandals with her toes, stood up, and unbuttoned her shirt. She was not wearing a bathing suit, and she felt shy about undressing in front of Victoria. She faced the ocean and took off her pants. She was built like a long-distance swimmer, medium tall and stocky. She had done competitive endurance swimming when she was in school.
Recently her endurance swimming had consisted of trying to keep up with the divers, a task an order of magnitude harder than swimming a sea race.
Taking a deep breath, she let it out and dropped her shirt. Nearby,
Victoria dropped her bathing suit on the sand.
'Let's go!' She sprinted for the water, laughing, free and excited.
Swimming underwater, Zev heard his name-sound, in J.D.'s voice with her unique true-speech accent. He replied. He could hear her from both directions: without mechanized craft making engine noises, sound could bounce around and around the cylinder. He could hear multiple sets of echoes, each one fainter than the last.
JDA voice came a moment sooner from in front of him than from behind him.
He had swum more than halfway around the cylinder. The shortest way to return, and the most fun, was to swim the rest of the way around in the minus-spin direction. He plunged ahead. The faster he swam, the steeper downhill slope he perceived. He would be back to his starting point in a short time.
Suddenly aware of the restrictions in his movements, the small size of Starfarer, Zev felt closed in. Orcas could travel a hundred kilometers in a day. He was on board a vessel a few kilometers in circumference, twice that in length. Its ocean took up only a narrow ring along one end. Swimming hard through the cold water, anxious to meet J.D., Zcv passed the source of the chill current: a small glacier, flowing and dripping down one narrow angle of the cylinder's end. Zev swam as fast as he could. Bits of ice, calved by the glacier, bobbed on the waves. They were too small to be icebergs, or even ice floes. They were ice cubes, nearly freezing the water, chilling the air. His breath steamed.
Zev was not arctic adapted. Divers had discussed adapting themselves for polar life, but Zev liked the temperate climate of the Puget Sound wilderness. During most seasons back home, the water was cold. But not this cold. He had never swum in such cold water before. His body reacted, his metabolism kicking into high gear, pumping out heat as fast as the cold drained it.
The webs between his fingers paled as his capillaries contracted, conserving heat within his body. He pushed himself to keep going. He could hear the end of the cold water, not very far ahead: his searching voice echoed against the rough interface where the cold current plunged beneath the warm gulf stream.
In the distance, J.D. swam toward him. But she was slower than usual. She was swimming plus-spin. She would feel as if she were going uphill.
Zev asked Arachne if the current was always this cold, and found that the computer web was attempting to solve the problem of the unseasonably warm weather. He began to shiver, deep and hard. He called out to J.D.
She answered, greeting him, teasing him. New energy propelled him.
J.D. heard Zev's call. She replied to him, caressing him with her voice. She heard a change in the water.
She paused for a moment to look ahead. The surface turned from soft blue to dark, dense blue. Zev was fifty meters past the boundary. She did not know what the difference was until she plunged into the frigid current. She gasped and nearly stopped, kicked her metabolic enhancer, and ploughed into the swirling mix of currents.
Zev swam doggedly forward, his stroke rough and noisy instead of smooth and silent.
'Whew!' J.D. said in true speech. 'It's cold over here! '
She flip-tumed beside him and matched his speed and direction. She laughed in delight at the change from plus-spin to minus-spin, as if she had caught a wave.
She swam very close to Zev, letting her motion pull him along. Zev let his arms relax against his sides, and rode J.D.'s strength through the rough boundary.
They broke out of the cold, into a current so warm it felt tropical. Zev whistled in pleasure and relief, spiraled out of J.D.'s wake, and let himself sink.
J.D. sank beside him, immersing herself in the heat. 'Are you okay?'
'Just cold,' he said.
'Your hands are freezing!' She chafed his chilly fingers, then rose with him to the surface, expelled her breath, and drew in fresh air. She wished she had the artificial lung that had aided her when she lived with the divers. She had left it back in the wilderness. Zev had lent the lung to Chandra, then released it.
J.D. put her arms around him. He held her tight, his head on her shoulder. They drifted downward again.
'You rescued me!' Zev said.
'Nonsense.' She blew a stream of bubbles at him. 'You were all of thirty meters from the gulf stream.'
'I.didn't know it would be so cold,' he said. 'Or maybe I wouldn't have swum all the way around.'
'It was cold back there, wasn't it?' J.D. said.
Zev warmed up quickly.
'Do you want to rest?' J.D. asked. She felt full of energy, exhilarated with the effort of the swim.
'No,' he said. He grinned. His eyes were bright. 'It's good to know everything isn't safe on Starfarer. '
They surfaced and sidestroked against the warm current, facing each other. J.D. let her fingers caress Zev from collarbone to groin. She kissed him.
He had just learned to kiss. She explored his lips and his sharp canine teeth with her warm, soft tongue, then reluctantly drew away.
'Come on, let's go meet Victoria.'
'Do we have to use land manners?' Zev said.
'No,' J.D. said. 'Not here. Not at all.'
Victoria was a strong but inexperienced swimmer. J.D. had not wanted to criticize her, but she lost a lot of the power of her stroke because she did not know exactly how to place it. She churned valiantly ahead. J.D. was impressed that she had kept swimming through the open water, rather than heading to shore and waiting in the shallows.
Zev dove. The pressure of the water caressed J.D. as he passed her. He swam close beneath Victoria.
He startled her: she stopped swimming and trod water, kicking hard. He surfaced. Victoria grinned at him,
