DISSOCIATION
The ache in her midsection had grown into a knot that throbbed in her chest, but Deirdre tried to ignore it as she stood by her sensor console watching the leviathan. Andy swayed in the perfluorocarbon liquid beside her. Dorn was watching the sensor display on a screen of his control console, Yeager beside him, bending forward eagerly.
“It’s coming apart, all right!” Corvus said. “Look!” He was excited, but in the perfluorocarbon his voice still sounded deep, almost sonorous.
“We’ve caught it in the act of reproducing,” said Dorn.
“Jovian pornography,” Yeager cracked. Deirdre shook her head at him.
“Get closer,” Corvus urged.
“No,” Deirdre said, surprising herself. “Stay back.”
Dorn half turned, a questioning expression on the human side of his face.
“If it’s reproducing we should give it as much privacy as we can,” Deirdre said.
“It’s just an animal,” Yeager argued. “It doesn’t have any feelings of modesty.”
“How do you know?” Corvus asked.
“Animals have feelings,” said Deirdre. “They can get very annoyed when you bother them at the wrong time.”
“You wouldn’t want to annoy something that big,” Corvus added.
Dorn said, “I think discretion is the better part of valor in this case.”
Deirdre smiled to herself, thinking,
She asked Dorn, “Can the spectrograph laser work at this range?”
“It should pick up something,” Dorn replied.
“Could you activate it for me, please?”
“On console two.”
Deirdre floated over to the console built into the compartment’s curved bulkhead and slipped into the foot loops there. On its screen she saw the spectrograph’s deep green laser beam lancing through the dark water. She touched the electronic keyboard and the visual display was immediately replaced by a string of alphanumerics. Plenty of chemical species in the water around the creature, Deirdre saw. The water’s saturated with the Jovian equivalent of pheromones and sex hormones.
She heard Yeager sneer, “Exoporn.” Max was still watching Dorn’s main screen and the leviathan shaking itself apart. “We could sell this footage to some of the freaks back Earthside.”
“Oh Max,” Deirdre chided.
Dorn said, “We can stay at this distance and observe without—” Suddenly he stiffened. “Sharks approaching.”
Leviathan saw the alien clearly, hovering in the distance. Stay together, it commanded its member parts. We can’t dissociate while a stranger is near.
But several of the mindless flagella had already broken free and were floating off. Leviathan tried to resist the mounting urge to dissociate. It would be too dangerous with the alien so close. We must stay together.
Sensor parts were drifting away. Deep within its armored hide, Leviathan’s vital organs were pulsing with the need to disassemble, to end their unity and begin the ancient passion of dissociation and recombination.
With stunning swiftness the need overpowered Leviathan. Everything else dwindled into nothingness. Nothing else mattered. The gigantic creature surrendered to the impulse, to the shuddering ecstasy of dissociating. The presence of the alien was overwhelmed in the driving compulsion to reproduce, the insistent orgasmic irresistible joy of release.
But as it at last surrendered to its primitive need, Leviathan’s brain registered a sudden terrified warning from the last of its functioning sensor parts. Darters!
That was the last thing Leviathan recognized. Its mind went blank. Its final thought was that death and rebirth are forever intertwined.
“Sharks?” Yeager barked. “Where?”
Dorn ran his fingers across the console’s electronic keyboard and the main display screen shifted to show a half-dozen sleek, dangerous shapes hurtling toward the cloud of pieces that had been a single leviathan only moments earlier.
“They’ll attack while the leviathan’s helpless,” Deirdre said.
“Predators,” Yeager muttered scornfully.
“We’ve got to do something to help!” said Corvus.
“Do what?” Yeager snapped.
“Drive them away,” said Deirdre.
Dorn shook his head solemnly. “Should we try to interfere in the natural processes of their world?”
Impatiently, Corvus insisted, “I came down here to try to make contact with the leviathans. I don’t want to stand here and watch it served up for lunch!”
“It’s helpless,” Deirdre said.
“It’ll be a massacre,” Corvus added.
Dorn looked up at Yeager. “Do you think we could discourage the sharks?”
Yeager made a sound that might have been a grunt. In the perfluorocarbon it sounded more like a moan.
“I attached a couple of electron guns to the outer hull. We could shock ’em if we can get close enough.”
“How close?” Dorn asked. But he was already activating the ship’s propulsion system, steering toward the approaching sharks.
“Fifty meters,” Yeager said, clearly unhappy. “Closer.”
Dorn nodded. Deirdre could hear the hissing rumble of the propulsion jets and felt the surge of acceleration. In the display screen the charging sharks’ images began to grow larger.
“The charge of the light brigade,” Yeager murmured.
Deirdre remembered a line from the poem: “All in the valley of death rode the six hundred.” Then she thought, We don’t have six hundred. There’s only the four of us.
“So how’s the sim?” Devlin asked.
Franklin Torre glanced over his shoulder before whispering, “Terrific. It’s like being with her.”
Devlin nodded. It had been simple enough to take a standard VR simulation and dub Deirdre Ambrose’s face in place of the porn star. It was a pretty ragged job of dubbing, but apparently Torre didn’t mind.
The two men were standing in a corner of the busy galley, slightly away from the lines of chattering people who were filling their dinner trays. Torre seemed to be worried that his sister would see him, Devlin thought.
“So you’re happy, then?” he asked, with his impish grin. “No complaints?”
“Uh … can you get one that’s a sort of Arabian Nights setting?” Torre asked, his cheeks reddening slightly.
“Harem scene? Sure. How many girls do you want?”
His face flaming hotter, Torre said, “Doesn’t matter, as long as one of them’s Dee.”
