Iris

'What're you doing?' Tem asked.

'Reading.' She came up and opened the bag that she carried, pulling out a book, and smiled. 'Look at this.' After a moment of turning slick pages, she had it.

'How the hell did you find a picture of a Seedee'—the oddness of it suddenly took hold of him—'in a book?'

She held it up so that he could see the cover. It was the 2007 edition of Raymond's Elements of Virological Anatomy.

'I don't understand. What're they doing with it?'

She smiled crookedly at him. 'It isn't a Seedee, Tem. It's a T—4r+bacteriophage virus.'

'I see.' He picked up the book and read through the stereophotomicrograph's accompanying text. Gobbledegook, material far outside of his own specialty. 'How did you come to find it here?'

'When we were in with Brendan, I knew I'd seen the Seedees before, somewhere. I think I even remembered the name.... I got an equivalency in bioengineering, back before residencies were required. I've forgotten a lot, but not everything. All it takes is something to jar it out. I wish I'd brought my tech info along! But I didn't. I suppose it was Beta-2 that saw to that. Shit! It never lets me care about things like that.' She laughed softly. 'When you people filled up Shipnet, you neglected the basic biology stuff. I ran a quick check on the cargo manifest. I was hoping . . . Anyway, this book turned up on Brendan's list.' She looked at the man in front of her and was amazed to see how pale and watery his eyes looked.

'Is something wrong?' she asked.

Temujin looked hard at the woman. He had never heard someone use those words with such a lack of solicitousness. 'I'm all right.'

'That bastard was interested in too many things.'

Was.Krzakwa felt a cold prickle of realization creep along his neck. He thought of Sealock back on the alien lander, swearing that the empty shell they'd found had a familiar shape. 'So what does it mean?'

'Nothing, I suppose, but it's an interesting coincidence. If I'm not mistaken, evolution at the viral level is very quick, and what we see is almost totally optimized. Maybe these things are optimized for a similar type of existence.'

'What, invading asteroid-sized cells? We didn't see anything like that in the Centrum memories. That is what viruses do, isn't it, parasitize DNA?'

'Something like that.'

'OK. You're the closest thing we have to an expert on this. If you can integrate some sort of theory on the shape of the Seedees with what you know about these viruses, do so.'

'They do parasitize planets....'

'So do we all ... we need something better than that. Anyway, I don't want to talk about it right now. I've got to get some more sleep.'

Elizabeth Toussaint lay alone on the bed in her room. Periodically, for no reason, tears would start to flow down her cheeks, oozing in the low gravity, then stop, and she would be still, staring at the ceiling. When her face had time to dry, the crying would start again.

What's wrong with me now? she wondered. I'm not feeling anything. Brendan's dead; Jana's dead. Am I? Why am I thinking about these things? This numbness was a new, withering factor. It was something she had inherited from John, and though it was, in a measure, comforting, it felt so wrong. Perhaps if she had to come up with a word for it, it would be perspective. She had lost her gauge for the importance of things. And experiencing the primitive emotions that dominated Sealock's memories had given this emotionlessness even a greater hold on her. I need to be with someone, she thought. John? No. She rejected the idea summarily. How could he help? Right now she couldn't even call up an image of his face.

The door opened quietly and Vana Berenguer came in. People were not respecting the idea of privacy anymore. There were connections now, strange ones.

'Beth?' She saw the drying tears and came over, concerned. 'Beth? What's wrong?

The woman looked up at her, wooden-faced. 'I don't know.' She started to cry again, shaking silently. 'I really don't know!'

Vana put her hand on Beth's brow, brushed back her hair a little, and shook her head slowly. 'You shouldn't be in here alone. . . .'