Metaphase

'A thunderstorm!' That was impossible.

'Digging a grave.'

'A grave . . . T' Victoria said. 'You can't meanYou took his body, all by yourself?'

Victoria's distress was as strong as her anger. She could not bear to think of Stephen Thomas all alone with his grief, burying his friend, and she wanted to have been there, so she too could say goodbye to Feral.

'What about the rest of us?' she cried. 'What about his friends, what about J.D.T'

'Gerald said forget about a funeral,' Stephen Thomas said. 'He wanted Feral just to lie there forever in the morgue! I couldn't stand it. Besides, nobody else thought about him.'

'Stop it, Stephen Thomas, that isn't fair,' Satoshi said.

'But nobody did anything. Nobody else had even

opened his files to see what Feral wanted, if something happened.'

He pushed himself up on his elbows. The gold glow covered his chest and belly. His face and his neck remained bare. Victoria wondered where his necklace was; she had seldom seen him without it. At the center of his collarbone, slightly thicker, slightly darker hair formed a thin line that streaked down his body, stopped just above his navel and started against just below it, and disappeared beneath the bedclothes.

Victoria sat on the edge of the futon. Satoshi joined them, sitting crosslegged on the foot of the bed.

'We didn't have time,' Victoria said. 'When did we have time?'

'Yesterday,' Stephen Thomas said. 'Last night. And not just us. Anybody could have looked for his will, the whole time we were gone. Nobody did.' 'It's awful that he died.' Victoria felt unfairly put on the defensive. 'It's a tragedy. In the classic sense of the word. If he'd done as I asked-'

'He couldn't! I knew he couldn't. Why didn't you?'

'How could you know? You're trying to beat me up with twenty-twenty hindsight.'

'I'm not trying to beat you up at all. I'm trying to tell you where I was and what I was doing and why I was doing it.'

'And why I'm responsible for Feral's death.'

'No,' he said. 'No, I'm not blaming you. But I'm not letting you blame him, either. He knew the risks, he chose to take them, he couldn't do anything else.'

She said, again, doggedly, 'If he'd done as I asked-'

'We'd still be back at Tau Ceti,' Satoshi said.

'But we could always take another run at the transition point.'

'A hundred light-years behind Europa and Androgeos,' Stephen Thomas said. 'We never would have caught them. We might even have gotten stranded back there.'

'I thought you wanted to stay back there,' Victoria said. 'To try to colonize the planet.'

'What if I did? I didn't block consensus. Feral was trying to help you do what you wanted. Uphold Starfarer's charter. Catch the alien ship-' 'And a lot of good it did us!'

'Don't try to tell me Feral died for nothing!' Stephen Thomas shouted.

'I don't want to hear that Feral died for nothing!'

He threw off the blankets and lunged out of bed, sleek and lithe as an otter. Victoria stood up, unwilling to let him flee the discussion.

'Ow! Shit!' Stephen Thomas yelped in pain and sat down hard.

He grabbed his toes and rocked back and forth, his teeth clenched. Victoria stared at him. Satoshi hurried to his side, reached toward him, hesitated, then put one arm around his shoulders.

'What-T'

'Nothing. Nothing at all,' Stephen Thomas said. 'It's just that all my fucking toenails are falling out.'

His little toenail had disappeared; the next largest hung by a thread of connective tissue. His toes were as bruised as if he had dropped a rock on his feet. He wiggled his big toenail, and the next two in turn, each successively looser. Victoria felt a little sick. Stephen Thomas took the hanging toenail between his thumb and forefinger.

'Don't-' Satoshi said.

Stephen Thomas pulled the toenail off.

Stephen Thomas put the toenail, shiny with the transparent polish he used, on the narrow shelf at the headboard of the futon frame. Then he bent over his bruised toe and poked at it, oblivious to Satoshi, who sat back away from him, and to Victoria. She felt ill and angry at the same time. He was so good at deflecting arguments-not defusing them, as Satoshi did, but deflecting anger away from himself and setting up a situation where anger was no longer appropriate, no longer acceptable, and the argument could never be resolved.

Beneath the toenail, the bruised end of his toe had begun to form a valley, a cavity, where a claw would grow. It would interest her, in an intellectual way, if the foot the claw was growing on belonged to a body with which Victoria was less intimately familiar.

Even angry with Stephen Thomas, Victoria felt the attraction of his powerful sexuality.

'Are you done grieving now?' She forced her voice to remain so neutral that her tone came out cold, and hard.

Stephen Thomas's shoulders stiffened. He stared at his foot, then glanced at Satoshi, then turned to Victoria.

,,No,' he said. 'No, I don't think I am.'

'I know you liked him! But you barely knew him. I knew him better than you did-'

'You knew him longer than I did. Not better.'

'Next I suppose you'll say the same thing about Merry.'

Stephen Thomas looked confused. 'What does Merry have to do with this?' 'Nothing. Except that Merry was our partner and Feral was our acquaintance, and it seems to me that you're grieving a lot harder for Feral.'

Stephen Thomas stood up slowly, gingerly, balancing precariously on his abused feet, and walked out of the room.

Victoria wanted to scream, or apologize, or crywhat she really wanted was for Stephen Thomas never to have received the changing virus, and for Feral and Merry never to have died.

She followed Stephen Thomas as far as the doorway. He was halfway down the hall to his room. In the dim light the new gold pelt was invisible, but it made his outline fuzzy.

He disappeared into his room.

Victoria glanced back at Satoshi, expecting him to tell her what she deserved to hear: that she had been far too hard on Stephen Thomas.

'I shouldn't criticize him for his feelings,' she said,

before Satoshi could speak. 'Your feelings are your feelings. He can't help being so open. . . .'

'I hate what's happening to him,' Satoshi said abruptly.

'I-what?'

'I loved him the way he was,' Satoshi said. 'God, I don't want to think of myself as changing my feelings for someone because of the way they look.

'

'He hasn't changed that much,' Victoria said, because that was how it seemed to her. 'Not physically . . .'

'He's changed a lot, ' Satoshi said. 'And he's going to change more. I hardly even know him now. . . . I can't stand to say it.'

He folded his arms across his knees and buried his face against them. Victoria sat beside him and hugged him, trying to reassure him, trying to comfort him, not doing a very good job of it. She was used to Stephen Thomas being the most emotionally demonstrative of them all, to Satoshi being the most reserved and calm, to taking the middle ground herself. Satoshi's shoulders began to shake. Victoria could not remember- Yes. At Merry's funeral, Satoshi had cried. So had Victoria. Stephen Thomas, dry eyed, held them both. At the time she had been grateful that one of the partnership could maintain some equilibrium. She had not considered how strange it was that the calm one was Stephen Thomas.

Satoshi straightened up, drawing in a deep, harsh breath. He flung himself back on the rumpled bed and scrubbed his bare arm across his eyes. He tried to smile.

'This is so weird,' he said.