'That's the decoration.' Nerno's fins returned to their normal color, and settled back into their usual gentle wave. Instead of replacing the spinners on the rim of the silken pouch, Nemo let them wander in patterns across the surface.
'Did you know how I'd react to it?' J.D. asked.
'Tell me how it felt.'
'Like ninety-proof champagne. Like excitement.'
'Yes,' Nemo said.
'How did you know?'
'Human biochemistry.'
'Is that how it feels to you?'
'If excitement feels the same to me as it does to you.,,
'Is this what you live on all the time?'
'No one can live on decorative food,' Nemo said.
'What do you live on?'
'Starlight,' Nemo said. 'Radiation.'
'Photosynthesis-?'
The theory had always been that the metabolism of animals was too high to be sustained by sunlight alone, that fictional creations like giant, walking, talking plants could not exist-or at least that they could not walk very far, very fast, or think very much.
'The light.of Sirius helps sustain me.9'
That would explain the other crater-nests, the ones filled with smooth silver silk in parabolic shapes: solar collectors, focusing the starlight, converting it, and funneling it to its users.
Nemo touched the silk-spinners and guided them to
the rim of the pouch. They had created a pattern of scarlet and indigo. J.D. wiped her forehead. Her hair was damp with sweat. The first effects of the decorative food had passed, but her hands were shaking. She wondered if the food acted with a wave effect, or if it was about to give her a flashback.
I'm hungry, she thought. I'm hungry and I'm exhausted and I have a bad case of sensory overload. And like Nemo said . . . nobody can live on decorative food.
'Nemo, I must go back to the Chi for a while. I have a lot to think about, and I'm tired-aren't you?'
'No, I don't tire.'
'You're fortunate. Would you like to visit with someone else while I'm gone?'
'I will think, until you return.'
She took that as a polite refusal.
As she put on her spacesuit, she wondered how to persuade the alien being to let her colleagues come into its nest. They would be horribly disappointed if they could not.
Several of Nemo's attendants whispered past her on tiny invisible feet, and clustered around the gossamer thread that had led her in. When they passed over it, it parted. They hunkered down over the pieces, drawing in the threads.
'May I have a piece of your silk?' J.D. asked Nemo, gesturing to one of the threads.
'Tell me what you'd do with it.'
'I'd give it to one of my colleagues to analyze. He studies genetics.' 'You may have it.'
J.D. pulled the sampling kit from the thigh pocket of her spacesuit and used the sterile tongs to pick up a thread. One of the attendants lunged, arching upward to snap with shiny jaws. Startled, J.D. snatched the sample away.
'It doesn't want me to take it,' she said to Nemo.
'It doesn't have much tolerance for change.'
The attendant flopped back to the floor, forgot about J.D., and headed for another loose bit of silk.
J.D. put her prize in a sample bag and sealed it.
'Thank you, Nemo,' she said. 'I'll come back as soon as I can.'
'I will wait.'
'Shall I leave my lifeline here? Then I could follow it in when I come back.'
'One of my attendants will spin you to me,' Nemo said.
'But that's so much trouble for you, when I could just follow the line.' 'The line is essential to you,' Nemo said.
'No, not really. It's for safety, for backup.'
'J.D.,' Nemo said, and J.D. thought she heard a hesitation in the squidmoth's voice, 'the line is uncomfortable.'
'It-what?'
She thought about the line, snaking back and forth through Nemo's body, pressing against, even cutting into, Nerno's tissues and organs.
'I'm so sorry!' she exclaimed. 'Nemo, why didn't you say something before?' She blushed, mortified at having thoughtlessly caused Nemo pain. 'I want you to feel welcome,' Nemo said.
J.D. grasped the end of Nerno's tentacle gently. 'I'm so sorry,' she said again. 'I won't bring the line when I come back.'
'Thank you,' Nemo said.
As she left the bright sphere of light in the center of Nerno's nest, the long tentacles slithered after her, touching her heels. She paused at the opening between two inner curtains, glanced back, and waved. Nerno's mustache vibrated.
'Good-bye for now,' she said.
'J.D.'
She glanced back. 'Yes, Nemo?'
'Tell me the questions you seek.'
J.D. smiled. 'We won't know what those are,' she said, 'till we find them.'
Reeling in her lifeline, J.D. left Nerno's chamber and entered the labyrinth. At the first switchback turn, the line had pressed against the edge of the curtain. When she released it, a dark welt formed. She touched it gently, sorry for the pain she had caused.
Motion fluttered against her fingers. She started and drew back her hand. Several palm-sized flat creatures, the same color as the curtain and camouflaged against it, had snugged up against the place where the cable had lain. Now, as J.D. watched, they flowed over the welt, covered it, and settled against the fabric. The welt vanished beneath a rough line of scar tissue.
J.D. left the labyrinth and hurried through the cathedral corridors, climbing toward the edge of the crater. Now she noticed more of the creatures who maintained the intricate environment that was Nemo. They crept up every wall, spinning, weaving, unweaving; they peered at her with eyespots or antennae from luxurious folds of drapery; they scuttled away before her so all she knew of them was the sound they made when they fled. And always she was aware of the larger creatures beyond the sides of the tunnels, shapes and shadows, the touch of a powerful limb tenting the wall or the ceiling.
Maybe I should think of Nemo as an ecosystem, she thought. Or maybe I need a whole new term.
She passed through the double sphincter that formed Nerno's airlock, no longer frightened by the monster- organisms that closed in to change the shape of the tunnel.
She started up the long steep hammocks that led to the surface.
The closer she got to the outside, the more deeply the lifeline had cut into Nerno's fabric. In places, she had to pull it-as gently as she could-from beneath the healing creatures.
At the last place where the lifeline had sunk in, just before J.D. emerged from the crater, a healing creature
had fastened itself firmly to both sides of the welt. J.D. pulled on the lifeline, but not gently enough. The creature's body ripped open. Pale fluid dripped out. The creature's edges had melded into the wall.
The lifeline fell free.
J.D. stared at the dripping tissue. The dripping slowed, and the fluid solidified. Soon the edges had healed, the walls began to absorb the two halves of the creature, and more healers came fo finish covering the welt. J.D.
