Metaphase. Part 6

J.D. hurried between the pearly gray curtains. Without the lifeliner, without its thread through the labyrinth, she would be lost.

"It's beautiful," Zev said. "It's like anemones."

"Anemones?" J.D. said. "How do you mean?"

"On the curtains."

"Look at it in the ultraviolet," Stephen Thomas said. "It's like flowers.

Jungle."

J.D.'s suit obediently displayed Nerno's web in the UV.

The web exploded.

Intricate patterns whirled into alien plants and surged with violent blossoms. Auroras chased themselves in spirals that expanded to-cover every surface, then diminished to a single point, and vanished.

Dazzled, J.D. took a step forward and ran into a silken wall. Victoria grabbed her arm and steadied her.

"Whoa, careful."

She stopped and closed her eyes and canceled the suit display. When she looked again, the storm of color had vanished and the path lay clear before her again, winding between the curtains and their invisible decorations, their camouflage.

"Wow," she said softly. "That's something."

"It sure is," Victoria said.

"Can you see it?" Satos.h.i.+ asked Stephen Thomas. "I mean, like Zev? Without the suit display?"

"Yeah," Stephen Thomas said. "I can see it."

The path spiraled deeper into the crater. They reached the airlock. As the shadows outside bore down 46 on the walls, Satos.h.i.+ cupped his hands against the translucent tunnel.

"d.a.m.n, I wish I could see them!"

The pocket filled with air; sound returned.

The interior end of the airlock relaxed and opened. They continued to the central chamber. The maze of curtains around Nemo remained, but the chamber extended farther upward, and the curtains reached to its ceiling.

In single file, the members of the alien contact department followed the lifeline through Nerno's maze.

The gossamer thread ended. J.D. entered Nerno's chamber. Victoria and Satos.h.i.+ and Stephen Thomas and Zev came in behind her.

"h.e.l.lo, Nemo." J.D. unfastened her helmet. The thick, smelly air displaced the tasteless air of her support system.

Nemo's eyelid rose; the faceted eyes glittered. Nerno's central tentacle snaked out and grasped J.D.'s wrist. She gripped it, her fingers closing around silky fur. The tentacle felt hot, like the tail of a cat basking in the sun.

"These are my friends, my colleagues," J.D. said to Nemo.

"Welcome," Nemo said.

"Thank you," J.D. said.

The others took off their helmets. J.D. had warned them of the exhaust-fume smell, and they had seen the LTM a.n.a.lyses. Stephen Thomas wrinkled his nose in distaste, and Zev sneezed.

"Tell me if you thought new things." Nemo said.

"I sure did," J.D. said. "We all did." She and her companions removed their s.p.a.cesuits and left them at the edge of the inner chamber. J.D.

approached the squidmoth. "How are you? Did you think new things, too?"

"I thought of some old things," Nemo said.

"I want to introduce my friends," J.D. said. "Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, who's the head of the alien contact department, and a physicist. She discovered how to use the cosmic string to enter transition." 47."I am glad to meet you, Victoria," Nemo said.

The long central tentacle snaked out and hovered. Victoria extended her hand, and Nemo laid the soft tip of the tentacle in her palm. She s.h.i.+vered.

"I'm glad to meet you, too, Nemo," Victoria said through her internal link.

"Here's Satos.h.i.+ Lono. He's a geographer. He studies how communities interact with their environments. And Stephen Thomas Gregory, who studies genetics. And this is my friend Zev. Zev is a diver."

Nemo went through the new greeting ritual with each of J.D.'s colleagues in turn.

"You're the ichthyocentaur," Nerno said to Zev.

"That's what Europa called me," Zev said. "But the word means I'm part fish. I'm not."

"You are different from J.D.," Nemo said.

"Of course. I'm a diver, and J.D.'s still a regular human being."

J.D. was touched that he used the word "still." She would probably always regret turning down the chance to become a diver that Zev's mother had offered her.

"And Stephen Thomas is different from you all," Nemo said.

"I'm changing into a diver," Stephen Thomas said. "I'm about half and half at this point."

"Maybe someday J.D. will decide to change, too," Zev said.

A spinner crept from a fold. Nerno's tentacle snapped out and grabbed it and teased it into spinning and urged it in a tight circle and started to weave another pouch.

"Can we look around?" Stephen Thomas said.

"You would like to see other parts of me."

"Yes.,, "The attendants will take you to what you wish to see.,, Three lifeliners crept into the chamber.48 The lifeliners led Victoria, Satos.h.i.+, and Stephen Thomas out of Nemo's chamber through the same path. At the first split in the path, two went one way and one went another.

"See you guys later," Stephen Thomas said. He strolled after the spinning creature and disappeared between two curtains.

Victoria started to call after him.

"He'll be all right," Satos.h.i.+ said.

Victoria stepped back, took a shallow breath of the fetid air, and blew it out abruptly.

"I know," she said. "But I'd feel easier if our guides didn't look so much like scorpions."

Intellectually she understood all the reasons for believing they were safe with Nemo. Emotionally, she had a harder time. She was very glad Nemo had not offered them all decorative food.

I wonder how you turn it down if you don't want it? she said to herself.

Maybe you say, Thank you very much, but I don't care to be decorated.

Satos.h.i.+ grinned. "They do look like scorpions, don't they? Not as mean, though, or they'd be beating the h.e.l.l out of each other right now."

The other two lifeliners scuttled down the path. At the next fork in the corridor, they diverged.

Satos.h.i.+ grabbed Victoria in a quick, fierce hug, then hurried after his lifeliner.

Victoria descended through twisting tunnels, curving tubes of watered silk that spiraled steeply downward. The color-shot patterns quivered beneath her footsteps, and the lifeliner scuttled drunkenly along the s.h.i.+fting floor.

Victoria jumped, experimentally, cautious because of the low gravity. She hit the ceiling, pressing into the warm, slightly sticky fabric. She broke away from it with a faint ripping sound, bounced to the floor, and rebounded. By the time she came to a sprawling halt she 49.was laughing at the position she was in, and even at her fear.

Above her, the ceiling darkened where she had hit it. A shape pa.s.sed over the bruise. The silk dimpled from the other side as one of Nerno's attendants stepped lightly across the upper curve of the tunnel. It was like being underwater during rain. The brief shadow of the cloud, the quick touch of raindrops sweeping delicately across the surface. The shadow faded; the bruise disappeared.

Victoria continued down the tunnel.

The air grew sharp and clear. Ozone tinged it. When she touched her hair, static electricity crackled.

And the gravity grew stronger.

At first she thought she was imagining the gradual effect, but it was real.

It makes sense, she thought. Grade-school physics. I knew there had to be something inside Nerno's s.h.i.+p at least as dense as neutronium. And I'm getting closer to it.

The LTM sensors registered a slight increase in the radiation level.

Nothing dangerous yet. Victoria knew she should not stay long, but curiosity drew her on.

The lifeliner scrambled onward and downward, leading her toward a lambent glow.

Victoria followed the creature around a bend in the tunnel.

The creature stopped. The tunnel ended its spiral and curved abruptly straight down.

Victoria glanced back. Her escape route was open and clear. She crossed the last few meters to the sharp curve of the tunnel, pa.s.sing the lifeliner.

A thick panel of transparent webbing covered the end. She knelt on the floor and gazed down through the clear surface. It was like looking into a well, a well lit from below, or through a pane of old, wavery gla.s.s.

A s.h.i.+ning sphere lay in the center of Nerno's planetoid. A curving pattern of pale cables suspended it and held it in place-held the planetoid in the proper relations.h.i.+p to it. Here and there, more of Nemo's crea-so VONDA N. MONTYREtures crept about. They looked like the lifeliners, but they had much heavier carapaces, shorter spinners, legs nearly invisible. They picked their way across the suspension cables. In front of them, the white cables flexed in response to the spinners' motion and the faint occasional vibration of Nerno's sphere. Behind them, they left dark metallic rope of twisted wire.

Victoria ignored the faint scratching noise behind her. She wished she could see into the sphere, but she knew it was protecting her from radiation and energy flux that would kill her, and all her colleagues, and probably Nemo as well. The sphere hid the engine that powered Nemo's voyaging.

The lifeliner scratched persistently at the floor. Victoria finally noticed the sound and glanced over her shoulder.

The creature huddled over a tangled tracery of silk. It scratched again, ran a little way up the tunnel, stopped, and ran back toward her. It did not turn; it ran both directions with equal ease. Wherever it moved, it trailed a line of silk. Its scorpion tails twitched, fore and aft.

,,Okay," Victoria said. "You're right. It's time to get out of here."

She rose, glanced one last longing time into the center of Nemo's stars.h.i.+p, and followed the lifeliner back toward the surface.

"Thank you for showing me," she said aloud to the creature and silently to Nemo, using her internal link.

"You are welcome," Nemo said.

Satos.h.i.+ followed the small scuttly creature spinning black silk before him. He wanted to get close to the lifeliner, to pick it up and inspect it, to subject it to the electronic gaze of the LTM clinging to his s.h.i.+rt.

J.D. had asked him to be careful, and he approved of her caution. But he wanted to see and understand every facet of the environment surrounding him.

The wide, low corridor narrowed, the deep-fissured 51.

walls smoothed, and the firm, springy floor dropped into a slope. Satos.h.i.+ climbed downward. The light began to fade. The slope ended in a tall, cylindrical chamber hung with heavy, fibrous curtains and pierced with two more tunnels slanting up and out, like the one through which he had descended.

The lifeliner stopped and huddled against the wall.

Satos.h.i.+ sat on his heels beside the creature. The lifeliner rubbed against the wall, severing the silk.

"Is this the end of the road?" Satos.h.i.+ said softly.

He walked around the edge of the chamber, touching the long bright swaths of drapery.

They open, he thought.

He looked up.

Long-lidded glittery eyes looked back.

Satos.h.i.+ started and spun around.

At the top of each set of curtains, a creature clung to the vaulted ceiling. If Satos.h.i.+ had not met Nemo, he might not have recognized them as creatures, or the circular fissure as their eye-slits. The creatures hugged the wall, arching long legs overhead till they touched at the center of the ceiling. The legs pressed upward and outward like an arch, holding the creatures in place.

The mouth parts of the creatures, tremendously enlarged, formed the curtains.

One of the sets of curtains suddenly billowed wetly outward. A blast of oily, pungent air swept over Satos.h.i.+, knocking him down and slapping him to the floor. The pressure pushed the hot fumes up his nose. He sneezed convulsively, three times, four.

The curtains fell back and the tempest vanished.

Satos.h.i.+ lay flat, catching his breath, breathing shallowly. His eyes and throat stung. A second set of curtains quivered. He ducked and buried his head beneath his arms as the curtains billowed and a second blast crashed over him.