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"Out with it, Stephen Thomas."
"I tried taking a culture off my shirt. The stuff I wiped up from the
pool. Nothing's growing. Yet. Maybe it will."
108 VONDA N. MONTYRE
"We can hope."
"Yeah.
"These other experiments you're doing," she said. "With the soil bacteria
from Europa's ship."
"I haven't figured those out yet. Any ideas?"
"Their DNA fingerprints are very close to normal. About what you'd expect
if they diverged four thousand years ago."
"They look the same," Stephen Thomas agreed. "But the buggers act
different."
"Have you sequenced them?"
"Not yet. I was resequencing bacteria from J.D. From all of us in alien
contact."
"You suspect contamination?" she said sharply.
"No. I was double-checking. It's strange, though. You'd expect some
exchange between us and the alien humans. Nothing pathological. The normal
skin microbes and so forth."
"But you found none."
"No. Europa told the truth about something, anyway. "
"Or we're blessed with unusually robust microbial flora," Thanthavong said
dryly. "Your students could have done the sequencing."
"I didn't have the heart to make the kids stop watching the reports."
"Graduate students expect to work," Thanthavong said. "You're perhaps a bit
too indulgent of yours. The sequencing should be done soon."
"Do we have a machine to use?"
"Biochem's is at your disposal."
"Good. Thanks." He had not been looking forward to the commute up the hill
to use the sequencer in the Chi. "I'll go-"
"Go get some sleep, Stephen Thomas! I said 'soon,' not 'instantly.' Leave
instructions for your students to do it. You look worn out."
"Yeah. Okay. I'll see you tomorrow. Today. Later." His time sense was
completely skewed.
Stephen Thomas went outside. He paused in the
METAPHASE 109
dawn air, enjoying the coolness. The daytime temperatures on Starfarer had
been warm for spring. He touched Arachne and left a message for his
students, obeying Professor Thanthavong as far as that went.
But he did not go home to bed. He had something to do. If he did it now,
while everyone was still caught up in the reports from the Nemo
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expedition, no one would stop him. If he waited, he might not be able to
carry out the task at all.
Infinity Mendez dozed on his futon, drifting in and out of sleep, telling
himself he should get up and go to work. Beside him, Esther Klein slept
soundly, her snore a soft buzz.
By this time of the morning, Infinity had usually been up for a couple
of hours. He liked to be outside in the gray foggy dawn while the light
tubes slowly brightened. But he and Esther had sat up late talking to
J.D. Sauvage.
Every so often, Infinity stopped and said to himself, We've met an alien
being. No matter what happens now, we did what we said we were going to.
Like just about everyone else on board, Infinity would have liked to tag
along with J.D. He wished he could lie here all day, cuddle with his
lover, replay the transmissions from the Chi, and wait to see what hap-
pened next.
But anticipating what happened next meant anticipating the death of Nemo.
Come on, he said to himself, suddenly restless. Get up, you have things
to do.
Esther curled on her side, facing him, her knees drawn up beneath his
legs, her small square hand draped down between his thighs.
Light washed the room. Starfarer's light always came from high noon,
straight overhead, from the light tubes along the axis of the campus's
cylindrical body.
Infinity had gotten used to the unchanging direction of the light before
the campus was even finished. He
110 VONDA N. McINTYRE
had belonged to the construction crew that built the starship. Infinity knew
Starfarer from the outside in. Having helped build its shell, he now helped
maintain its ecosystem.
Infinity covered Esther's hand with his own. She snuggled closer, still
asleep. Moving away from her warm touch, Infinity slid out from under the
covers, drew the blanket up around Esther's shoulders, and looked for his
clothes.
It's sure harder to keep track of things without the artificial stupids,
Infinity thought. They should have been released by now. . . .
Chancellor Blades had impounded them, but he could not control them
anymore.
Maybe Gerald's been too busy to let them loose, Infinity thought. He smiled
to himself. Big job, being acting chancellor of a bunch of revolutionaries.
Probably Gerald had just not got around to the task. When Chancellor Blades
impounded the machines, he got everyone's attention. The ASes did the kind
of work nobody noticed till it did not get done. It was annoying to order
dinner and get nothing; to find dirty clothes still lying around instead
of washed and pressed and returned to the shelf.
What a lot of people did not realize was how important the ASes were to the
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health of Starfarer. The faculty thought of the ASes and mobile Als as
conveniences. But the machines also watched and maintained and repaired the
complex structure of the starship.
Infinity threw on his jeans and sandals and his leather vest, combed the
tangles out of his long black hair, and left the coolness of his house.
Outside, in his garden, bees buzzed loudly and birds called and chirped and
rustled the bushes. The morning was warm for spring. The afternoon would
be uncomfortably hot.
The quality of the light made him uneasy. Arachne filtered it so the
radiation of Sirius resembled the light of the sun; still, its white
harshness remained. It worried him. He belonged to the staff, not the
faculty, so under
METAPHASE III
normal circumstances his responsibility was low and his authority
negligible. Alzena Dadkha, the director of the ecology department, should
have been in charge.
But Alzena was gone. Unable to reconcile her conflicting loyalties to her
family on Earth with her responsibility to the deep space expedition, she
had fled with Europa and Androgeos. Europa had taken pity on A]zena's
despair.
Infinity touched Arachne through his link, asking for access to the
interior spectrum. The computer gave it without hesitation.
A bee whizzed past him, flying fast with an angry buzz.
Whether Arachne would or would not permit him to alter the light filters
made no difference at all. The filters pegged out at their limits. He
could have less light, or more. But he could not get a spectrum any
closer to real sunlight than he already had.
The bee circled wildly. The frantic buzz stopped short. Infinity frowned.
The fat honeybees were usually as placid as cows. He worked around them
all the time, moved the hives, collected the honey. He had never even
been stung.
He moved cautiously toward the last place he had heard the bee, expecting
to find it nuzzling the center of a flower for pollen and nectar. But the
flowers were still in the breathless morning.
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