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from the start.
He and Feral had stood in the doorway. The room was comfortable and
attractive. It had better furniture than Merry's room, the unused room,
back at the partnership's house. But Stephen Thomas did not want to leave
Feral here all alone.
"You don't have to stay here," Stephen Thomas said. "Come home with me.
We have a spare room."
"That would be great." Feral smiled. He had a great smile. "It's tough
to get involved in a community when you're staying in a hotel. Thanks."
-Stephen Thomas still wondered if, somehow, Feral's association with the
alien contact department-or with Stephen Thomas and his family-had
contributed to his death.
Someone had used the room since Stephen Thomas was here last. The bed had
not been slept in, but scraps of paper lay on the desk in the bay window.
Arachne
268 VONDA N. McINTYRE
maintained a small display nearby. Bright sunlight washed out the display's
colors; Stephen Thomas could not decipher it from here.
He crossed to the window, sat at the desk, and glanced up at the display.
It contained a copy of the alien maze that had-they thought-been humanity's
welcome into the interstellar civilization.
Stephen Thomas smiled sadly. Lots of people had kept a copy of that maze
around, trying to decipher it. Until Starfarer encountered Europa and
Androgeos, and discovered that their welcome had been withdrawn. The maze
was just a maze.
Arachne informed Stephen Thomas that Feral had set the maze image in the
window.
Feral used this room as an office, Stephen Thomas thought.
That made sense; all the members of the partnership had offices outside the
house. A separate office made it easier to concentrate on work, and to get
away from work at home.
Stephen Thomas wished he had known about this place. He had no particular
reason to know; Feral had no particular reason to tell him or not to tell
him. He just wished he had known.
Stephen Thomas picked up the scraps of paper. They contained a couple of
handwritten scribbles.
"Family.,,
"Maze."
Passwords, Stephen Thomas thought. Feral wrote down passwords till he was
sure he had memorized them.
He asked Arachne for Feral's locked files.
He tried the word "Maze" as a password.
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It was a public key. Not the key itself, of course, which was too long to
remember, but a vector to the key.
Arachne responded with a message from Feral.
Please record your observations about the deep
space expedition. I'll use your replies in the book I'm
METAPHASE 269
writing. I hope everyone will choose to sign their
comments, but you can remain anonymous . . .
. . . but if you want to remain anonymous . . .
. . . but if you insist on . . .
Stephen Thomas frowned. This was getting him nowhere. He could send a
message, but it would go oneway into Feral's file, encrypted through the
public key, and only Feral would be able to get it out. He wondered why he
had not known about it.
You don't know about it because it isn't finished! he thought. What else
could those last lines be? Feral was tinkering with his announcement,
trying to balance his preference for signed contributions with his
willingness to respect privacy. He never had a chance to release his
project. He set it up, but he never polished it, never told anyone that it
existed, never released the public key.
"Shit," Stephen Thomas muttered. "Oh, shit, what a goddamned waste. . . ."
A public key implied a private key. Stephen Thomas fingered the second
scrap of paper. "Family."
He was afraid to try ii. "Maze" had given him a tantalizing glimpse.
"Family" might give him Feral's private key. Or it might give him nothing.
Stephen Thomas turned the soft ragged scrap of paper over and over in his
fingers, afraid to speak the word to Arachne, afraid to encounter the same
bleak emptiness that had surrounded him when he first learned of Feral's
death.
He rubbed his eyes; he spread his fingers across his face and looked at the
world distorted by his amber swimming webs.
Closing his eyes again, he spoke to Arachne.
" 'Family' is the private key," he said.
Arachne opened a hidden room to him, a room filled with Feral's log files.
Stephen Thomas stretched out on the bed, and went exploring.
270 VONDA N. McINTYRE
Feral kept lists. A list of places he had been. A list of his articles, of
course. A list of the pieces he wanted to write, the places he wanted to
go, the people he wanted to interview.
A collection of references he planned to look up: Technical reports on
Starfarer, on Arachne. The thesis Stephen Thomas had defended in order to
earn his Ph.D.
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Stephen Thomas smiled sadly. No wonder it was on the "to be read" list. It
was technical and specialized, tough going for a member of the field, much
less a lay person.
We're even, Stephen Thomas thought. I haven't read much of his stuff and
he hadn't read any of mine.
He moved on through the reference list.
Professor Thanthavong's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for medicine,
for creating viral depolymerase. That one was an important, touching
historical document, written years before Feral was born. Before Stephen
Thomas was born. It was a shame Feral had never gotten to it. Maybe he had
heard it, on one of the documentaries made about the professor. He had
known a lot about her; he had admired and respected her.
J.D.'s first novel. Stephen Thomas felt an embarrassing flash of
satisfaction that Feral had not read it. It was neither dry nor technical,
but it was hard going: obscure and unbalancing, disturbing. As hard to read
in its own way as the Ph.D. thesis. When Stephen Thomas had tackled it, he
had given up halfway through.
He left the list of work Feral would never see, and glanced into the file
of work that Feral had read. It extended back to Feral's early teens. It
ranged far and wide over subjects and technical level. Right at the top,
most recent, was a book on braiding hair. That struck Stephen Thomas as
strange. Feral's chestnut hair had been medium length and curly. Not as
curly as Victoria's, but tight enough to keep it out of his face.
He left that file and explored farther, deeper.
He could hear Feral's voice in every sentence. Ste-
METAPHASE 271
phen Thomas forced himself to listen, to stay calm. He could not manage
to remain unmoved.
Fantasies made him ache with regret and physical pain; observations made
him laugh, and wince, in the darkness. He saw himself through Feral's
eyes.
Arrogant and charming, physically compelling,
his sexuality insistent and innocent . . .
Stephen Thomas resisted "innocent." Insistent, maybe, though he hoped he
was civilized about his affairs. He thought he was. He was capable of
backing off, of taking no for an answer, though hardly anyone ever said
no to him.
Stephen Thomas is vulnerable . . .
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