Vonda McIntyre: Metaphase

Thirty meters down, the slope curved to a nearly horizontal level and she could again walk upright on its springy inner surface. Sweat beaded on her forehead. The spacesuit's systems evaporated the sweat away.

Within the webbing, thick silk strands glowed brightly, filling the corridor with a soft pink light that imitated some other star than Sirius. J.D. knew, by inference, that the squidmoths had.not evolved beneath this star. Other than that, she knew very little about them. They were intelligent beings, reticent. They drifted through the galaxy in their small massive star-

ships, ignored and apparently despised by the interstellar civilization. Maybe they're outcasts, just like us, J.D. thought.

The squidmoths had, at least, invited humans to visit them. The rest of interstellar civilization had ordered Starfarer to return to Earth, so human beings could spend the next five hundred years growing up.

This they had declined to do. In response, in retaliation, the cosmic string by which Starfarer traveled had begun to withdraw. If Starfarer stayed in any one place too long, it would be stranded there forever.

The passage curved and branched. The guide thread passed into the central tube. J.D. followed it. Behind her, her safety line snaked along the floor and pressed against the convex wall. The line creased the silk, an anomalous, coarse dark strand.

J.D. thought she saw the guide thread move. She hurried forward, but the tunnel's curve straightened and she saw nothing but the guide thread lying motionless on the floor, disappearing into the tunnel's next descent.

But her spacesuit replayed for her what she had seen. The thread had moved. She stopped and leaned sideways, pressing her helmet against the tunnel wall. Could she hear a faint scuffling, or was it her imagination? Replayed and amplified, the phantom sound vanished into background noise.

Increasing her pace, she tried to catch up to whatever was laying the guide thread. But the delicate strand grew even thinner, dangerously thin, as if it were being stretched as it was created. J.D. slowed down, afraid she would cause the thread to break.

She rounded a curve and confronted a complete constriction of the passageway. She stopped. The end of the guide thread lay in a tangle at her feet.

"Damn," J.D. muttered.

She asked for a visual display of the radar traces of the tunnels around her. Her suit obeyed. Up until a few minutes ago, this tunnel had continued, leading deeper into the web.

"Victoria?" J.D. said.

"I'm here." Victoria spoke softly into her ear through her suit radio. "Shall I follow you in?" Victoria was J.D.'s backup; she waited outside the Chi, the explorer spacecraft, at the home end of J.D.'s lifeline.

"Not yet. There's no threat of danger." Disappointed and confused, J.D. smiled sadly. "Maybe I just misunderstood what I was supposed to do." Recently they had misunderstood, and been misunderstood, more often than not.

"J.DT' Zev exclaimed.

The backward-watching recorder, a little tiny machine that clung between J.D.'s shoulder blades, flashed an image to the Chi and to J.D.'s display.

Zev whistled a sharp warning in true speech, the language of the orcas and the divers. The shrill sound raised the hair on the back of J.D.'s neck. She spun around.

The tunnel was slowly constricting. She took one step toward it.

Outside the translucent wall of the tunnel, creatures moved.

J.D. stopped, her heart pounding. She glanced at the LTM display in her helmet, but the recorders saw the creatures no more clearly than she did. Around her, vague shapes made deliberate motions. Legs or feelers or tools pressed the tunnel inward, cinching it with a narrow band that grew progressively smaller.

The tunnel puckered, lifting her lifeline and the guide thread off the floor till they hung in the air, drooping from the closed sphincter.

"J.D., get out of there!" Victoria said.

She was trapped in a silken cocoon, a twist of the tunnel.

"No," she said. "Not yet. Victoria, Zev, I'm all right."

She was frightened, but she calmed herself and slowed her thudding heartbeat. The creatures that had immobilized her came no closer.

"I'm coming in after you," Victoria said.

"No. Stay there."

"But-"

J.D. pressed her hands against the wall. It yielded. Unlike the floor of the chambers higher up, it remained supple. The constricting band stretched. Thinking about what this must look like to all her colleagues, J.D. blushed and released the band. She dreaded hearing Stephen Thomas make one of his offhand, off-color remarks.

But when he remained silent, it troubled her even more. He had been silent a lot, since Feral's death.

"I think I could force my way out," J.D. said to Victoria. "In either direction. But I'm not quite ready to try. I don't think I'm in any danger-"

"You're in the middle of the world's biggest spiderweb, that's all! And the spiders are closing in!"

"I don't feel like a fly just yet. It wouldn't make sense. You'd get awfully hungry, orbiting Sirius and waiting for dinner to come along, what-? Once every million years?"

"Especially if you cultivated a reputation for not being intpresting to visit," Satoshi said.

"Satoshi's right. And Europa said the-" It occurred to her suddenly that her hosts had not referred to themselves as "squidmoths." Europa, representing the interstellar civilization, had done so, but she had spoken of them with contempt. For all J.D. knew, "squidmoth" was civilization's version of an ethnic slur. She decided not to repeat it. "She said the beings here wouldn't talk to us-she didn't say they were dangerous."

"Quite true," Victoria said dryly. "But she was wrong about them talking to us, eh?"

"Urn, yes." The alien human was wrong about a lot of things, J.D. thought, but she felt, stubbornly, that she should wait and see what happened.

"I don't want you to compromise your safety," Victoria said.

J.D. chuckled. "But Victoria . . . this is my job."

A hissing sound, a classic raspberry, interrupted her. At first she was embarrassed, then startled.

Oh, no, she thought. A leak in my suit-?

Instead of fading out, the noise of the raspberry increased.

The suit ought to seal-! J.D. thought.

"Behind you again," Victoria said again, more calmly this time.

More creatures surrounded the other end of the bubble where she was trapped. They loosened the constricting band. J.D. could not be sure, but she believed their shapes were different from the creatures who had trapped her. The sphincter had relaxed enough to let gas spurt into JDA cocoon.

She giggled, involuntarily.

"What?" Victoria said.

"Nothing," J.D. said quickly. The first image to come to her mind was hardly something she wanted to admit to her colleagues, to the records Starfarer's control computer was making, and by way of Arachne, to history. The image was far too undignified.

For once, Stephen Thomas was giving some thought to propriety, for he remained silent too.

J.D.'s giggling fit vanished.

"It's an airlock!" she said. "I'm in an airlock!"

"Could be . . ." Victoria said.

"It makes sense-Satoshi, you said this place must have a reservoir of oxygen and nitrogen. I just found the reservoir."

"The craters do show a lot of outgassing," Satoshi said. "Enough to give the asteroid a very thin atmosphere. Nothing like Europa's ship."

Europa's starship, similar in size and gravity to the starship of the squidmoths, had looked like a miniature Earth: land masses, surface water, a normal atmosphere, plants and animals and topography.

The tunnel before J.D. relaxed, opened, and smoothed. The forward constriction disappeared; beyond the translucent wall, the creatures receded and vanished. The constriction behind her remained tight.