'What is?'
'I'm upset with him because he's doing something so different I can't even understand it . . . and you're upset with him because he's behaving exactly the way he always does.'
As he dressed, Stephen Thomas gradually dissociated himself from the fight with Victoria, from the aches in
his bones and the pain in his feet, from everything he had lost in the last week. In the last year.
He usually wore running shoes to the lab. Shoes, today, would make the pain impossible to ignore. He tried his sandals, but even sandals hurt. He shoved them into his pack. Professor Thanthavong would take off the rest of his toenails one by one if he worked barefoot in the lab-she would do it in private; she would do it metaphorically. But she would do it. So he would have to wear the sandals part of the day.
He did not know what to do about the fight with Victoria. Ile could not answer any of her questions any better than he already had. She wanted more from him, but he was damned if he knew what. He would give it to her if he could. He had made himself stay in control after the accident that took Merry, because the partnership needed someone who could still function. And right after Feral died . . . Victoria honestly thought she had put Feral in a position where he would be safe. Stephen Thomas smiled, fondly, sadly. Trust a reporter to get out to the front, even if nobody could figure out where the war was being fought or whether there was a war at all.
Walking cautiously-no point to limping, since both feet hurt-he went out through the French windows of his room.
Despite everything, the hour was still early when he got to the lab. Neither Mitch nor Bay had arrived yet, and Lehua Aki sprawled sleeping on the couch in the Biochem lounge. A small image of Nerno's chamber hovered above her.
By the evidence of their work, his students had all stayed very late last night. The isolation chambers held several racks' worth of growing alien cells.
He was proud of them for getting so much accomplished when he had been useless to them for the past day. They were working under another handicap, too, camping out in the Biochem labs while the silver slugs tried to rebuild Genetics Hill.
Worse than losing their lab space, the geneticists had lost their equipment, the probes and genetic subroutines that everyone developed over time. All the work in progress was destroyed. The missile had stolen a year of Stephen Thomas's professional life.
He checked the preparation he had started the day before. At least one thing was going right today. He had plenty of material for another series of experiments.
Ordinarily, this kind of preparation would be safe by this stage. No matter how virulent the original cells, they were now dead, dismembered, each cell separated into parts. Cell walls. Mitochondria. DNA. But these cells were alien; he had no proof-not even any evidence-that they could no longer replicate once he vibrated them apart with ultrasound and centrifuged them into layers.
He was not particularly worried about infecting Starfarer with some alien illness that would attack animals or people or plants. It would make more sense to worry that tobacco mosaic virus might infect a human being. Those pathogens were from the same evolutionary scheme. But he had cultured an autotroph, a freeliving cell, from Nemo's web. A microbe that could get by on light and water and simple molecular nutrients could grow independently in the starship.
This was something Stephen Thomas preferred to avoid.
He got Arachne to project an image of the squidmoth in its chrysalis.
'Why wouldn't you give me another sample?' he muttered.
He suspected that, eventually, Earth's biosphere would have to co-exist and cope with alien autotrophs, but he did not intend to be responsible for the first uncontrolled contact. Among other things, Professor Thanthavong would not just have his toenails, she would have his lungs as well. In all her decades of research, it had taken a missile attack to contaminate her lab for the first time.
'Damn!' he said suddenly. He had forgotten to set up the DNA sequencing of the soil bacteria from Europa's ship. A complete sequence would give him a detailed picture of the microbe, rather than the more general view of DNA and protein fingerprints. He set up the analysis with a couple of controls and left it running.
'Hi, Stephen Thomas.'
Satoshi's young graduate student Fox stood uncertainly in the doorway of the lab. With her forefinger, she nervously twisted a lock of her flyaway black hair into a curl.
'Hello, Fox,' Stephen Thomas said.
'Anything I can do?'
'Why? Thinking of changing departments?'
Her expression brightened. 'Can IT'
'No.,,
'Oh.'
'Don't you have some geography to do?'
'Yeah,' she said. She stepped back into the hall and he thought she had left.
He went back to work, forgetting, after a moment, that she had ever been there. He pressed his hands into the manipulator gloves that gave him access to the isolation chamber and his new preparation.
'I could wash some glassware-'
'Jesus!' Stephen Thomas exclaimed.
,,-or something,' Fox whispered.
'I nearly dropped this,' Stephen Thomas said. 'Don't sneak up on people like that.'
'I didn't mean to.'
'There's nothing you can do here. We don't wash the glassware, we recycle it. Easier to get rid of contaminants. Anyway, you wouldn't want to spend all day up to your elbows in cell guts.'
'I wouldn't mind.'
'There's still nothing you can do.'
'I can't go back to geography.'
'I keep telling you, Satoshi isn't mad.'
'Did you ask him?'
'The subject never came up. But if he were mad, he'd mention it. Fox: Satoshi doesn't get mad. He'll talk to you. It sounds to me like you need to talk to him.
'He ought to be mad. So should you.'
Watching the holographic image from the safety chamber, Stephen Thomas put the prep carefully back on its stand and disengaged his hands from the manipulator gloves. The swimming webs itched slightly; the gloves had pressed the webs back between his fingers farther than they would ordinarily go.
He crossed his arms and faced Fox, leaning back against the lab table.
'I don't blame you for what happened to me. But if you really want to know, I think you made more trouble for yourself and for us than any of us need. You should have been on the transport.'
'A lot of difference that would have made! I'd still be here!'
'It'll make a lot of difference. The folks who were on it will be legally tree and clear. Maybe even entitled to reparations. Gerald and the senators and Esther Klein . . . hm, I'm not sure about Esther. Doesn't matter. You and Zev, though-you're in as much trouble as the rest of us. Maybe more.'
'I don't care.'
'And the president might not be able to-'
'I wouldn't ask him to!'
'You wouldn't have to.'
'Stephen Thomas, I just want to be part of the expedition. I just want to help.' Her smile strained as she fought tears.
'You are part of it,' Stephen Thomas said gently. 'And the way to prove you deserved to come with us is to work your ass off. In your own department.' 'Are you sure-'
'I don't-' He stopped. There was no reason to involve Fox in the partnership's problems. No reason, and no excuse. What good would it do to tell her that he had
not talked to Satoshi about her, or about much of anything else either, for the past several days?
