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Arachne must be fixing the weather, she thought. Glad to hear it.
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Stephen Thomas returned home, dirty and sore. It was very late-or very
early-and he guessed Victoria and Satoshi had already gone to bed.
Instead oftaking a shower, he told the house to fill the bathtub. As he
watched the water rise along the sides of the azure tub, he tried to
remember when the
METAPHASE 157
last time was that he had taken a bath. He usually showered, preferably with
one or both of his partners. Sometimes they sat together and soaked
afterwards, lounging in clean hot water.
He dropped his shorts and shirt on the floor and stepped into the big blue
tub.
The mud swirled away from his dirty feet.
Oh, shit, he thought, I should have at least rinsed off. . . .
But the hot water felt so good, rising around his hips, sliding up his back
and belly and chest as he lay down, that he could not bring himself to
start over again. He stretched out and let himself relax.
He spread his hands out on the surface; the translucent webs between his
fingers nearly disappeared. Today his skin was the color of strong tea. He
pulled his hand through the water, feeling the new power of his swimming
stroke.
Like his hands and his skin, his lungs were changing. Soon he would be able
to store more oxygen, and hold his breath much longer than normal. If
"normal" meant anything anymore, in relation to Stephen Thomas.
When the changes were complete, he would possess an ability unique among
aquatic mammals: he would be able to extract oxygen directly from the
water. In an emergency, breathing like a fish would support the life of a
mammal for a little while.
Stephen Thomas balfway expected to be possessed by an overwhelming urge to
return to the primordial sea, but that had not happened.
Except, he thought, I'm taking a bath.
"The call of the sea," he muttered sarcastically. "Maybe I ought to add
some salt."
Zev talked about swimming all the time, but the talk was habit, and
homesickness. Staying dry did not harm his health; he had no gills that had
to stay wet.
Air bubbles caught beneath the fine new hairs on Stephen Thomas's arms and
legs. They tickled. As they escaped and rose to the water's surface, they
made a faint, cheerful crinkling noise. Stephen Thomas rubbed
158 VONDA N. McINTYRE
his hands down his legs, down his arms, down his belly, currying the bubbles
away.
His skin did not itch so badly, now that his transparent gold pelt had
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finished growing. His joints had stopped aching, though his shoulders hurt
from digging Feral's grave.
He was beginning to wonder if the pains inside his body were all from his
encounter with the silver slug. They should be fading. Instead, they had
intensified. His pubic bone hurt with a sharp, hot stab and even his penis
felt sore. Would he grow fur there, too? That would be too weird.
He knew as much about divers, or as little, as any average ordinary human
being. He had never been fascinated with them, as J.D. was, and none of his
work as a geneticist had included Changelings. No one worked on Changelings
anymore. First it became impossible to get grants for the research, and
then the changes themselves became illegal in the United States.
Stephen Thomas told the house to warm the bath. Warm water gushed from the
faucet onto his feet.
His toes shot pain up his leg. He snatched his foot away, thinking the tub
had burned him. But the water was only comfortably hot. He sat up in the
tub and raised his foot to look at it.
Dark bruises arced across the base of each toenail, and the nails felt
loose. Stephen Thomas wiggled the nail of his big toe. He grimaced.
It hurt, but it hurt in a way he remembered from his childhood. It was the
itchy pain of a loose baby tooth.
Zev's feet had sharp semiretractile claws that curved over the ends of his
toes, recessed into the flesh. Stephen Thomas had not thought much about
how his nails would turn to claws, and he found that he did not want to
think much about it now. He stopped wiggling his toenail and let his foot
sink back into the heat.
The idea of being able to breathe underwater intrigued him. He wondered how
far the changes had gone. He lay back in the bath, letting the water rise
around his head. His hair fanned out, tickling his neck,
METAPHASE 159
drifting between his shoulder blades. Warm water crept up his face,
covered his lips, covered his eyes. He could hardly tell the water from
the steamy, humid air.
Stephen Thomas plunged his head the rest of the way underwater and took
a fast, deep breath.
The water filled his throat and gushed into his lungs, choking him. He
erupted from the bath, gasping. He leaned over the side of the tub,
coughing water onto the floor. He nearly threw up.
Finally he collected himself, and hunched in the cooling bath. His chest
and his throat hurt. The ache travelled downward and lodged in his belly.
I guess I'm not a diver yet, he thought.
He opened the drain, stood up, and splashed out of the tub. Droplets of
water sparkled all down his body, trapped by the gold pelt. He curried
off the water as he had curried away the air bubbles. He needed a sweat-
scraper, the kind grooms used on horses or on Bronze Age athletes.
Rubbing himself with a towel, he went down the hall to his room. But in
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the doorway, he hesitated. He turned away from his comfortable, familiar
mess and went to the end of the hall, to the room that would have been
Merry's, to the room Feral had slept in. The partnership had never used
it before Feral came to visit.
The futon was made up; the shelf doors were closed. It was as if no one
had ever stayed here. As if Feral had never existed.
Stephen Thomas slid open the door to the built-in shelves. Feral's few
extra clothes lay in a neat stack.
Stephen Thomas closed the shelf door again. He hung his towel carefully
on the rack, got into Feral's bed, curled up around the deep pain of his
pelvic bone, and fell asleep.
CHAPTER 8
LIKE THE STROKES OF A BRUSH PAINTING, beach grass covered the soft dunes.
Beyond the dunes lay Starfarer's ocean.
J.D. walked along a path too narrow to have been made by human feet. She
wondered who or what had formed the path-and saw a tiny hoofprint, a small
pile of horse droppings. The tough, sharp-edged grass would be little temp-
tation for the miniature horses, but they might like the salt, and the flat
freedom of the beach.
J.D. climbed the gentle rise of the dune. At the top, she paused to look
across the shore.
The ocean circled the park end of
METAPHASE 161
Starfarer's campus cylinder. It was the pulse of the starship's ecosystem, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]