Metaphase. Part 2

J.D. felt very calm. Her rush of fear had subsided, leaving enough adrenaline behind to make her hyperaware, sensitive, as if all her nerves extended beyond her skin.

"I'm very grateful for your invitation, and very glad 17.to visit you," J.D. said. "We haven't made proper introductions. My name is J.D. Sauvage." "I have no verbal name," the squidmoth said.

"Call it Nemo!" Zev's voice whispered in her ear.

"Shh, Zev!" Victoria said.

"Tell me what that meant," the squidmoth said.

"One of my colleagues suggested that I give youthat I offer you a name,"

J.D. said. "The name of a famous fictional character."

"I will be Nemo," the squidmoth said.

"I'm glad to meet you, Nemo," J.D. said. "May I come closer?"

In response, the squidmoth drew its long tentacles toward itself. They twisted and tangled, their tips coming together and parting. J.D. followed, till she was barely two strides away. Even this close, she could see no reason for comparing the alien being to a moth. Up close, it did not look all that much like a squid.

It was exquisitely, strangely beautiful. Bits of every iridescent color flecked its peac.o.c.k skin. Its slender jointed legs splayed out into tiny pointed feet, alternately concealed and exposed by the rippling gills.

For all her resolution, J.D. had begun to a.n.a.lyze the being in familiar terms.

"I would like to touch you," the squidmoth said. Its long tentacles, untangling themselves smoothly, coiled before it, their tips waving as if in a gentle breeze. Its mustache of short proboscises continued to ripple.

Again, J.D. hesitated, and she realized just how deeply the alien humans'

duplicity had changed her.

Dammit, she said to herself, you may not be able to trust everybody out here completely; you may not be able to be as open as you'd hoped. But you cannot be afraid all the time.

"Very well," she said coolly.

The being extended one long tentacle toward her. The tip hesitated at her foot, then curved over her toes and down around her instep, meeting the floor where her boot sank into the thick soft silk. A second tentacle moved toward her, arching up till it reached the level of18 her face. The fine hair of the tip brushed her helmet, with a sound as soft as dust.

"This is not your body."

"It's my s.p.a.ce suit," J.D. said. "It carries my air."

"You may breathe this air."

"I know. But the suit also protects me from unfamiliar infections-and protects you from contamination."

"Nothing here will infect you."

"Androgeos said the same thing-but he wouldn't tell me how he was so sure.

You'll forgive my fears, I hope. I trusted Androgeos, but my encounter with him was . . . unfortunate, in many ways." Androgeos had tried to steal Victoria's new work on cosmic string. He had tried to take away all Earth had to offer to claim respect within the interstellar community.

"Androgeos is young, and zealous."

"Young! He's thirty-seven hundred years old!"

The squidmoth's tentacle brushed back and forth across J.D.'s faceplate.

The pattern of the rippling of its proboscises had changed: from a single wave-form, moving regularly across its mustache, to a double pattern, two waves starting one at each side, clas.h.i.+ng in the middle, adding to each other, canceling.

Could I have perturbed it? J.D. wondered. But the question of contamination must be the first one everybody wants the answer to, and the first question these people must have solved. They've been interacting with each other for millennia.

Maybe I made it mad because I don't want to put my life completely in its hands.

"Androgeos is young," the squidmoth said again.

J.D. wondered if she heard a tinge of amus.e.m.e.nt or irony in its voice.

Surely not; it was her imagination.

Strangely enough, Androgeos had struck her as young. He was physically young, while Europa had chosen a more mature physical presence.

"Androgeos acts young sometimes," J.D. said.

"We have nothing to fear from each other's symbiotic microbes," the squidmoth said, and waited.

J.D. hesitated. The potential danger was very low. 19.She and Nemo were products of completely different evolutionary backgrounds.

It would make more sense to worry about catching Dutch Elm disease from a tree.

J.D. reached for the seal on her helmet.

"J.D.-" Victoria said, and then fell silent.

J.D. had walked out onto Europa's planetoid, unprotected. She had hesitated then, too, but she had made the decision to trust the alien humans. In several respects, Europa and Androgeos were not trustworthy at all. But when they a.s.sured J.D. she was in no danger of catching, or transmitting, a human or environmental pathogen, they had told her the truth. They had probably eliminated every disease in their environment; they were probably in more danger from Starfarer than Starfarer wits from them. And all Stephen Thomas's tests had come out negative.

It would make no sense at all, besides, to throw Earth 4 lifeline in the form of cosmic string, and then wage biological war on whoever responded.

The interstellar community had been keeping an eye on the solar system for generations; if they had wanted to eliminate humanity they could have done it long since, easily, without ever being detected.

The only difference between walking unprotected onto Europa's planetoid and taking off her s.p.a.cesuit in the squidmoth's presence was that here, her surroundings were strange, and there, they had been familiar. And, perhaps, that then she had not known what her hosts would look like, and now, she was in the presence of a supremely alien being.

Her only reason to refuse was fear: xenophobia.

Recognizing such a reaction troubled J.D. deeply.

Too many bad alien-invasion movies, she said to herself, and then, Bad joke.

She unfastened her helmet. She took it off.

She drew a deep breath.

J.D. started to cough. The air was pungent, musty, reeking of hydrocarbons.

It stung her eyes. She breathed shallowly, tempted to seal herself back up with20 her own clean air supply. The high oxygen content of Nemo's atmosphere made her giddy.

Once she got used to it, it was about the same as back home in one of the more polluted regions. Spending so much time in the wilderness had spoiled her and weakened her resistance to fouled air.

J.D. unfastened her suit and climbed out of it. She put it carefully on the floor. The LTMs clambered around so they could still see and record her actions. She hoped their resolution was insufficient to capture the trembling of her hands.

Nemo's voice, tinny and indistinct, droned from the helmet. In order to converse, J.D. would either have to wear the helmet without the suit, which struck her as ridiculous, or communicate with Nemo through her di- rect link. Ordinarily she used the direct link only to communicate with Arachne.

J.D. reached out, cautiously, tentatively, into her link. She could talk with her colleagues via the direct electronic transmission, if she wished, but she usually did not do so. Like many people, she found it discomforting. She did not like the sensation of other people's voices in her head. It took a considerable effort of will to overcome her reluctance and speak directly to Nemo.

"Can you hear me?" she asked.

"I can hear you." Nemo's voice whispered in her mind.

The tentacles of the squidmoth hovered nearby, raising and lowering themselves from the silken floor, twisting and turning as they waited.

J.D. faced the squidmoth, moved a step closer, and held out one hand.

The tentacle brushed her palm lightly with its tip. The sensory hairs, soft as fur, quivered against her skin.

J.D. closed her hand gently around the tip of the tentacle. Its motion stilled. Nemo waited, saying nothing. She opened her hand.

The tentacle moved up her arm, curling around her wrist like a snake. Its skin, beyond the fur, felt like suede. Its warmth surprised her. The squidmoth must have a body temperature well above hers, if its append- 21.ages felt so warm to the touch. She had unconsciously expected the slick wet coldness of a real squid, the sharp pull of predatory suckers.

Nemo touched her sleeve, exploring it, probing beneath the cuff.

"This is clothing," J.D. said, touching her s.h.i.+rt, her pants. "It's the custom of human beings to wear it most of the time."

Maybe I should strip down, J.D. thought, but I'm not quite ready for that yet.

Nemo touched her palm, her sleeve, her palm again, testing the differences between skin and fabric.

The tip of one tentacle brushed her throat, her lips. She closed her eyes.

Fur caressed her eyelids. A second tentacle curled around her waist, gently embracing her. The tip probed at her, tracing the texture of her s.h.i.+rt, touching each b.u.t.ton, following the curve of her heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s and coiling softly down her arm. The third tentacle wound around her leg, then its tip traveled up her spine, touching the b.u.mp of each vertebra through her s.h.i.+rt.

She opened her eyes. Her lashes brushed against the sensory cilia.

"You detect sensations with these hairs," Nemo said.

"No." She smiled. The squidmoth was trying to make the same kinds of a.s.sumptions about her that she was making about it. "That is, I can feel your tentacle, but my eyelashes are for protecting my eyes. Um--do you call this a tentacle?" She brushed her fingers across the soft peac.o.c.k skin.

"In English, I call it a tentacle."

This time J.D. thought she heard a flash of humor in Nerno's voice. Again, she told herself she must be imagining it.

"I meant, is 'tentacle' an accurate translation of what you call it in your language? What do you call it in yourlanguage?"

"I have no language."

"I don't understand," J.D. said.

"Our communication does not consist of sounds."22 "I know, you told me: you use transmissions. But what do you transmit?

Words? Visual images? Sensations?"

"A surface of meaning and perception."

J.D. frowned. "A neural visual image?"

"Position, and change of position, within a multidimensional surface of meaning, intensity, rapport between the speakers."

"Multidimensional? More than three dimensions?"

"Many more."

J.D. tried to imagine a more-than-three-dimensional surface; she tried to imagine being shown a more-thanthree-dimensional surface in her mind.

An acquaintance of hers claimed to be able to imagine rotating a sphere around a plane, but she had never been able to explain to J.D. how to do it.

"It sounds beautiful," J.D. said.

The squidmoth tentacles twined and curled before her; their tips touched her cheek, her breast, her hand.

"It is beautiful," it said.

"Do you have art forms a.s.sociated with your communication? The way humans have singing and stories and poetry?"

"It is an art form in itself, whenever a talented one extends the limits and forms new regions and new shapes."

"May I . . . Will you show it to me?"

Without warning, a flash of perception tantalized her brain. She heard sugar dissolving, smelled the pink clouds of a brilliant sunset, sensed the position of a billion raindrops like muscle fibers. She saw a melody of Nerno's vision. Each sensation had its own particular place, its own connections with all the others. More information poured into her. But her internal link acted like the narrow end of a funnel. Nerno's transmission filled the funnel to the brim, and spilled out into noth- ingness.

J.D. gasped acrid air. She sneezed, and began to cough. Nerno's transmission faded away, and J.D. found herself sitting sprawled on the floor. She buried her 23.nose in the crook of her elbow, breathing through the fabric of her s.h.i.+rt, forcing herself to take shallow breaths, until her coughing stopped. She wiped her teary eyes.

Nemo lay placidly before her, short tentacles ruffling slightly, long tentacles guiding a frilled, wormy little creature as it spun silver thread in concentric circles.

The radio in her helmet rumbled with a faint hollow sound. J.D. sent an "I'm okay" message back to Victoria and the Chi. The rumbling ceased. J.D.

pulled herself together and sat crosslegged near Nemo.

"I didn't understand what you sent me," J.D. said to Nemo. "But you're right, it was beautiful."

"You cannot absorb enough information to gather the complete communication surface," Nemo said.

"Internal links aren't one of our natural senses," J.D. said sadly.