He folded his arms on his desk, put his head down, closed his eyes, and opened his link to Arachne.
The biofeedback routines reacted as if he had ordered a refresher course in an ordinary subject-beard repression, fertility control. He told Arachne to help him learn the use of muscles that an ordinary human man did not possess.
Having no restrictions against what he asked, Arachne proceeded. The web sought out new neural pathways that Stephen Thomas did now possess, and reinforced their connections.
As Arachne worked, Stephen Thomas's perception
of his body grew remote. His conscious mind stayed free and alert. Both bored and apprehensive, he sought something to occupy his attention.
J.D. remained isolated. Stephen Thomas almost sent a message to his partners, then reconsidered. They were busy, and he did not know what to say to them. Nor did he know if they wanted to speak to him.
He tapped into Arachne's reports on transition approach, surrounding himself with a holographic representation and using his link to listen in on the telemetry.
Nerno's ship followed Starfarer, silent; the cosmic string coiled invisibly before the starship. Arachne felt solid and steady.
This is what Feral was doing in the last few minutes of his life, Stephen Thomas thought.
He backed away from Arachne, spoke Feral's passwords, and re-entered his communications fugue under Feral's guest account.
An unusual resonance probed toward him. It snatched itself back. He grabbed for it, but it eluded him so swiftly that it left him doubting its existence.
Suspicious and disturbed, he watched, and listened, and waited for transition.
Victoria linked easily with Arachne. Her view of Starfarer from the transparent sailhouse merged with Arachne's view of the state of the starship. For once, finally, all the systems hovered within reasonable ranges and the sail aligned the cylinders with transition point. No military vessels chased them, firing orders and nuclear missiles; no saboteur-Victoria believed-hovered in the background waiting to crash Arachne at the worst possible moment; and the cosmic string, though it was withdrawing from Sirius, moved without twisting, and at a constant acceleration. The starship had nearly caught up to it.
Jenny glanced up from the hard link, then down again. She typed something, hunt-and-peck. Nobody
ever typed anything; the keyboard was an anachronism, a third-backup redundancy.
Arachne formed a display in the air above the keyboard, mirroring the report in the back of Victoria's mind.
Awaiyar's image appeared between Victoria and Jenny. She had been participating in Starfarer's transition approach, but physically she was in her observatory.
'You know what I wish?' she asked.
'What's that?'
'That we'd find a nexus. A crossroads. The real freeway interchange, the one we thought we'd found at Tau Ceti. An intersection too important to disrupt just because troublesome human beings are using it. They would never blow up a major transportation system because of a couple of infidel joy-riders.'
Victoria chuckled, but the image was apt.
'That's all right with me,' she said. 'If I could jump from freeway interchange to freeway interchange, shouting at Civilization at the top of my lungs till they listened-that's what I'd do.'
She turned her attention to the image of Nemo's ship. The rock sphere had budded out a dozen silken bubbles.
'Hadn't you better try to call J.D.T' Jenny asked.
'I don't think so. She's very even-tempered, eh? But if you interfere with her job she can get quite sharp about it.'
'She's cutting it too close.'
'I know it,' Victoria said, trying to keep her voice steady.
She yearned to call out to J.D. and persuade her, command her, to come back to safety. It took all her strength to keep her silence.
'She isn't coming back,' Victoria said. 'Jenny, she won't leave Nemo. If that means going into transition on an alien ship . . . that's what J.D. will do.'
'How far behind us will she be?'
'I don't know!' Victoria lowered her voice. 'She might be gone . . . a long time.'
'You know, Victoria . . .' Awaiyar's image hung rock solid in the air; Jenny and Victoria, in zero g, hovered and drifted. 'You could-'
'I know!' Victoria exclaimed. 'Don't think I haven't considered it. But . . . if I send J.D. the algorithm, it'll be in Nemo's memory. In whatever Nerno's ship uses for a computer web. That would be like turning it over to Civilization.'
'No strings attached,' Avvaiyar said wryly.
What would J.D. want her to do?
Victoria had only a few minutes left. She had no time to call a meeting to discuss the question with Starfarer's faculty and staff. She hardly had time even to confer with any of her colleagues.
Admit it, she said to herself. You're afraid to ask for advice; you're afraid someone will close off your options. Satoshi would say you must send it; Gerald and the senators would say you must not. And Stephen Thomas . . . it shocked her to realize she had no idea what Stephen Thomas would say.
Victoria took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly. Arachne lay calm around her. Starfarer fell toward its transition point. The stellar sail began to furl.
'Awaiyar,' she said. 'Jenny 'Yes,' Avvaiyar said gravely.
'I agree,' Jenny said. 'I thought you'd come to that decision,'
J.D. felt the quiet power of Nerno's body. She could see, and sense, how to move it, how to guide it, as easy and as natural as walking. She had no more idea of how it powered itself than a child would have of the intricate energy cycle within her own body. J.D.'s adult mind wondered about gravity waves or mass exchanges of subatomic particles. But Nerno's method of propulsion remained speculation, a mystery.
She could reach out through Nerno's senses and recreate the shape of the universe around her. The sur-
face of the planetoid formed her skin; the egg sacs pressed against her, laden with potential.
In the distance, perilously close to the loop of cosmic string, Starfarer plunged toward transition. The last silver flicker of its sail furled and darkened.
'Goodbye!' J.D. cried.
Starfarer disappeared.
J.D. squeezed her eyes shut, reflexively, as the bright transition spectrum flooded through the system. The starship left nothing else behind.
She opened her eyes, breaking her connection with the world outside Nerno's chamber. The silken curtains drooped and shredded like old cobwebs. The whisper and crunch of the symbionts' mouths and mandibles surrounded her.
'They're gone, Nemo,' she whispered.
'Look,' Nemo said, 'my offspring are free.'
Together, J.D. and Nemo watched the surface of the planetoid.
The bulge of one of the silken craters had grown spherical. It expanded, huge and taut, like a quivering soap bubble. Its diameter was much larger than the crater, but it clung to the crater's mouth as if it were being blown up like a balloon.
It detached.
It sank: the planetoid had too little atmosphere to buoy it. But then, as it bounced once, the small opening left in its bottom fluttered. A spurt of glowing gas propelled it from the surface of the worldlet.
J.D. laughed with delight.
The balloon rocketed, silent and free, into space.
In quick succession, Nemo's planetoid released half a dozen of the translucent powered balloons. Malleable surfaces covered obscure, tantalizing shapes. They shrank to blips of light. She-Nemo-had done everything for them that she could. They were on their own. She wished them well, but she would never-
