She had assumed each of the silky craters held a being like Nemo, each in its own web.
'You're all alone here?'
'I am myself,' Nemo said without inflection.
Great question, J.D., she thought. What would you say if somebody asked if you were all alone in your own body? 'No, I'm here with a bunch of white blood cells and a liver'? But-no wonder Europa and Androgeos said squidmoths were reclusive! '
She looked around with an even finer appreciation of her environment and all the other species living here, helping to repair and remake the structure, adapted or co-opted to a perfect interaction. . . .
Were they symbionts, or did they correspond to blood cells, or organs?
She was still trying to put names from her own frame of reference, from her own linear language, into a system that corresponded more closely to Nerno's multidimensional communication.
'Who do you communicate with?' she asked abruptly.
'I communicate with whoever speaks to me.'
'I meant . . . if you're the only one of your people in the Sirius system, how do you communicate with others? We haven't found any way of sending electronic signals through transition. Can you-T'
She stopped her excited rush of questions and waited impatiently for Nerno's reply. She imagined the anticipation of her colleagues pressing against her link to Arachne.
If Nemo knew how to communicate through transition, the deep space expedition would be able to tell Earth that it had met alien beings. That could change everything.
If we could let them know back on Earth, J.D. thought, that an interstellar civilization really exists . . .
J.D. knew it was Utopian to believe human beings would come to their senses, and end their interminable and dreadful power games, if they knew of a civilization beyond themselves. She knew it was Utopian . . . but she believed it anyway.
And if Starfarer could send back word that it had met other intelligences, the members of the expedition might be forgiven for taking Starfarer out of the solar system against EarthSpace orders.
If they could signal through transition, at the very least they could let their friends and relatives know they had survived the missile attack.
'I am mobile,' Nemo said, 'like all my people.'
'Oh,' J.D. said, as suddenly disappointed as she had been elated. 'Then you can't signal through transition?'
'No.,,
'Can anyone?'
'No one I know of.'
'You go visiting.'
'I go visiting,' Nemo agreed.
J.D. sighed. It had been a long shot. Cosmic string theory allowed only large masses to enter transition. No one-no one human-had figured how to chitchat across the transition threshold. Apparently no one nonhuman had made such a discovery, either.
Talking about cosmic string reminded her of something she had put off discussing for too long.
'I understand your wanting to get used to meeting people,' she said to Nemo. 'But if you want to meet any other human beings, you have to do it soon. Starfarer has to move out of the star system before the cosmic string withdraws. If it does withdraw-you'll have to move, too, or you'll get stranded.'
'I will not allow myself to be stranded,' Nemo said.
'Good . . . I was afraid . . .' She shrugged. She was ambivalent about bringing up the subject. 'I'm surprised you'll talk to us. Aren't you afraid of being contaminated by us? You've talked to me more than Europa and Androgeos did altogether, I think.'
'They were disappointed that you failed the test.' 'But it was a mistake! We weren't armed with nuclear weapons. Or with anything else, for that matter. Nemo, we were attacked in our own system. We dragged the missile through transition because it hit us.'
'That is a shame,' Nemo said.
'And the only thing that will keep us from being attacked again, if we go home, is proof that Civilization exists.'
'Your own people would kill you because you failed,' Nemo said.
Another silk-spinner crept out of a fold in the wall and joined the silk worm in the new circle of fabric. The second spinner scrambled across the disk, leaving a radial trail of thread that secured the delicate, tight spiral.
'They wouldn't kill us, but they'd put us in jail.' Nemo's attention to the handwork exasperated her.
Is there any way to get Civilization to listen to us9 she thought.
'Maybe you should neither go on, nor go home, but allow yourself to be stranded,' Nemo said.
'We've thought about it,' J,D. said. The ecosystem could support far more people than the ship carried; it could support them indefinitely. 'We could turn Starfarer into a generation ship, and form our own little isolated world. . . .' The whole idea depressed her. It meant abandoning Earth. She could not imagine anything more selfish. 'I'd rather go back and get put in jail!' she cried aloud, and her voice broke. She struggled to calm herself.
'I did not understand that,' Nemo said.
J.D. repeated herself. Her electronic voice sounded so calm, so rational. 'Imprisonment is preferable to freedom.' Nemo's eyelid opened all the way around, and the tentacles extended to J.D. and touched her forehead, her shoulder. The silk-spinners, deprived of guidance, wandered across the fabric and trailed threads that left flaws in its surface.
Nerno's tentacles drew away from J.D. and returned to the spinners.
'No! But ... we didn't come out here to found a colony. That's against everything we agreed on, everything we dreamed of! We came out here hoping to join an interstellar community. We came out here to meet you! And now you tell us we have to go back, or abandon Earth, because of a mistake-!' 'Five hundred years isn't so long,' Nemo said.
'Not to you! You and Europa and Androgeos will still be here when five hundred years have passed. But I'll be dead. Everyone on board Starfarer will be dead. And if we go back to Earth with nothing but the news that we've failed . . . I'm afraid human beings won't survive at all.'
'Many civilizations have destroyed themselves.'
J.D. looked away from Nerno's brilliant, colorful form, with two long tentacles shepherding the spinners, the third waving delicately in the air. 'I'd hoped . . .' She started to take a deep breath, felt the tickle of acrid gases in the back of her throat, and instead blew her breath out in frustration. 'I hoped you might tell me that no civilizations are ever lost. That somehow we always manage to pull ourselves out of destruction.' 'Civilizations are lost all the time, J.D.'
'I meant . . . a whole world's civilization.' The culture she lived in had reached out for the stars, and had attained them, however temporarily. Why should that be proof against extinction?
Nerno's tentacle brushed her toe, her shoulder.
'So did L' the squidmoth said.
CHAPTER 2
J.D. SAT CROSSLEGGFD BESIDE NEMO, THE SILK beneath her warm and soft. She could happily stay here for a week, just talking. She shifted her position, resting her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand, looking at Nemo, amazed and enthralled by the being. She watched, in silence, as Nemo guided the silk-spinners. The disk had become an iridescent pouch, like several others lying at the edge of the chamber.
'Tell me about Civilization,' J.D. said.
'Beings exchange their knowledge,' Nemo replied.
The two spinners, one wormlike, one
resembling a starfish crossed with a lace handkerchief, met nose to nose. 'But there's more than that!' J.D. said. 'How many worlds are there? How many people? How many kinds of people? What are they like? What kind of governments do they have? I want to know everything, Nemo, about Civilization and how it works, about the movements of the cosmic string-!'
The worm reared up, the starfish twisted. They touched. Each extruded a spurt of silk.
'The people of Civilization will want to describe themselves to you.' 'What do they do when they meet? How
