Vonda McIntyre: Metaphase

But she found it very hard not to think of the bulge as the squidmoth's head, the tentacles as its organs of manipulation.

Slow down, she told herself; she was giddy with joy and apprehension. Hold on. Remember how embarrassed you were, when you were a kid and you finally looked up horseshoe crabs in the field guide: the long pointy thing was the tail, not its sensors or its whiskers.

J.D. took another hesitant step toward the alien being.

"Hello," she said again.

A voice transmission whispered into J.D.'s suit radio.

,, Do not fear me," said the same flat voice that had invited Starj~rer to visit it.

"I don't," J.D. said. "Yes, I do. A little. Can you hear me?" She was broadcasting through her suit radio, but broadcasting might not be necessary if the squidmoth could hear her through her spacesuit.

Do squids have ears? she asked herself. She had no idea; even if they did, that would not mean the alien being followed any similar specifications.

"My vibratory sense responds to very low frequencies."

"Then you don't hear me-but you receive my radio transmissions." "I receive your transmissions."

J.D. moved a few steps closer to the squidmoth, fascinated. She wanted to ask a hundred questions at once. Remembering how disinclined Europa and Androgeos had been to answer any questions at all, she decided to take things slowly.

She understood the "squid" part of the being's name, but not why Europa had called the being a squidmoth. Moth, because of its vestigial legs? Then why not form the second part of its name from some sea-living arthropod, a crab or a shrimp or a lobster?

The being's eyelid opened widest in the direction facing J.D. Beneath it, several small round faceted eyes peered steadily at her. More of its eyes-J.D. could not help but think of them as eyes-glittered through the half-closed edges of the eyelid. J.D. deliberately moved to the side as she approached the being. Instead of shifting its position, the squidmoth rippled its eyelid open farther toward the back of its head. It must have vision in a complete circle.

"How do you communicate with other sq-" J.D. caught herself in time-"with others of your kind?"

"I communicate with all intelligences as I communicate with you."

Its tentacles moved. The row of short tentacles quivered, and their tips oscillated in a wave that began at one side before it ended on the other, so that two different waves moved along its shorter proboscises. The squidmoth looked like it had a thick, rubbery mustache.

The tips of the three long tentacles rose like the heads of snakes. One moved absently to the pouch on the floor, guiding a small silk-spinning creature across its surface to lay new threads in a bright pattern.

J.D. was nearly ten meters from the squidmoth. Its tentacles shifted and untangled, coiled and writhed.

She thought she had stopped well out of its reach.

She was wrong.

The tentacles whipped toward her. J.D. gasped and jumped back, surprised and frightened. The tentacles

stopped short. They were not yet fully extended; they could reach her. Trembling, J.D. forced herself to stand still.

A month ago, a week ago, she would have been surprised, but she would not have been scared. Meeting Europa and Androgeos had profoundly changed J.D.'s assumptions about what the citizens of an interstellar civilization would be like.

Did you expect them to be perfect? she asked herself, with a tinge of sarcasm. She answered her own question: Yes. I did.

She took a deep breath and moved a step closer to the squidmoth.

"I'm sorry," she said. "You frightened me."

The ends of the tentacles rose, weaving like mesmerized cobras. J.D. held her ground. The tentacles bore no obvious sensory organs: no eyes or orifices, no hands or fingers. Instead, the tips looked soft, furry, feathery, cloaked in a corona of iridescent purple fur.

Sensory cilia? J.D. wondered.

"I frightened you by moving toward you."

The squidmoth's voice remained flat, expressionless, and uninflected.

"You frightened me by moving without warning me," she said, treating its statement as a question. "You frightened me by coming so close, so fast." The tentacles drew back.

Great, J.D. thought. Now I've offended it.

"You prefer more distance."

"I prefer more warning. What do your tentacles do?"

"They touch."

"My hands do that for me." She extended her arms, spreading her gloved fingers.

"I know that."

"Do you know everything about us?" She could not help but think, What's the point of my coming here, what's the point of the deep space expedition, if Civilization already knows more than they ever wanted to know about us?

J.D. had spent her adult life preparing to be the first human to meet aliens. But she was not the first. Europa and Androgeos had preceded her, by thirty-seven hundred years, and that distressed her more than she wanted to admit.

"No, but I want to," the squidmoth said.

J.D. smiled. She still had some knowledge to offer the alien being.

"We're even, then."

"You want to know everything about you."

"That, too. But I meant I'd like to know everything about you."

She hesitated, wondering how forthright she could be in what she said. In all the years she had thought about making contact with an alien intelligence, she had never thought that the first time she stepped into a room with it, it would be able to converse in English. Back on board Starfarer, J.D. kept programs and diagrams, introductions to humans based on physics, on math, on biology, on art. She had thought about communicating with a being that conversed by color, by smell. Her colleagues had done similar work, even before she joined the department a few weeks back, experimenting and speculating on the difficulties of communication. Some people believed alien beings would be so different from humans that they would never be able to communicate at all.

She could speak with the being, but she might not always understand it.

They could easily misinterpret each other.

"Androgeos said you were . . . reclusive."

"Androgeos never visited me," the squidmoth said.

Lacking the clue of voice inflection, J.D. could not tell whether the squidmoth spoke with regret, with relief, or to offer a neutral point of information.

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

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 peacock 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 analyze 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.