“You’d best do the same,” said the CG, wryly noting his discomfiture. “Clothing becomes crusted and stiff if it dries, or takes on a heavy build up. Only skin sheds it well.”
“As you say.”
Janer left the Chief Geneticist in his cabin — a cyst in the body of the Graaf — and headed down the glistening artery of a corridor, half-lit by bioluminescent globes clinging to the fleshy walls and sucking their juice. Everywhere these things. Janer had not realised they were alive until he saw one detach its tick mouth and scuttle along the wall to a new feeding spot. For a day after that the skin on his back crawled whenever he walked underneath one. But in the end one must get used to the presence of life: it was everything around him.
Soon he saw that many of the crew of the Graaf had dispensed with their clothes. Eller, naked on a hyaline strut bone, rested her chin on her knee and grinned at him. She slowly and deliberately parted her other leg to one side as he slowed to make some passing greeting or wry comment. He found he had no words and quickened his pace, aware of the flush rising in his face. The diamond of white wormflesh on the front of her body included her hairless genitalia and ended at a narrow point by her anus. There was something incredibly erotic about it. Behind him he heard her chuckle. Damn. He would have to do something about her. There were stories about what went on inside a snairl when the walls slimed. The creators of holofiction became quite sweaty-palmed about the subject. Janer wanted to find out. He wanted to find out a lot of things — for himself for a change.
In his dry and civilized cabin Janer stripped off his clothing and pulled on the rubber trunks of his surfsuit. He didn’t want to wander about the Graaf with a permanent erection waving about in front of him. That kind of thing delimited serious conversation. Admittedly, he did intend to screw Eller at the first opportunity. Finally into his trunks and considering what else he might take out with him he turned to the sudden buzz from beside his compscreen. Jumpy today — very jumpy.
The hornet rose into the air above the antique plastic keyboard — a blur of wings suspending a severed-thumb body and dangly mosquito legs. Faceted eyes glittering. All over its body the hornet was painted with intricate designs in red and yellow-green fluorescent paint.
“I thought you were exploring,” said Janer. The hivelink behind his ear buzzed for a moment before the mind replied.
“The slime could kill this unit and I only have five on the Graaf.”
“Where are the others?”
“They are in Upper Shell, but even there the conditions are inimical.”
“How come? There’s no slime there.”
“No, but there are rooks.”
“How inconvenient.”
“They require instruction.”
“Are they intelligent enough to learn?”
“You were.”
Janer sighed. The ‘you’ in this case was the human race. It wasn’t having another dig at him, for a change. It had come as one shock in many when arrogant humanity had discovered it wasn’t the only sentient race on Earth. It was just the loudest and most destructive. Dolphins and whales had always been candidates because of their aesthetic appeal and stories of rescued swimmers. Research in that area had soon cleared things up. Dolphins couldn’t tell the difference between a human swimmer and a sick fellow, and were substantially more stupid than the animal humans had been turning into pork on a regular basis. Whales had the intelligence of the average cow. When a hornet built its nest in a VR suit and lodged its protests on the Internet it had taken a long time for anyone to believe. They were stinging things, creepy crawlies, how could they possibly be intelligent? At ten thousand years of age the youngest hivemind showed them. People believed.
“You want to come out in the box, I take it?”
The buzzing of the hivemind seemed contemplative. Thoughts that once took the time of a hornet’s flight between nests flicked at the speed of light between hivelinks. Janer held out his hand and the hornet settled on it, vibrating, its legs pressing into his skin like blunt pins. His flesh rebelled but he controlled the urge to shudder and fling the insect away from him. He was getting better at it now: his payment, his service to this mind, for killing a hornet that had tried to settle on his shoulder in a crowded ringball stadium. It had been tired that hornet; searching for somewhere to land and rest, tempted by the beaker of coke Janer had been drinking. His reaction had been instinctive; the phobic horror of insects had risen up inside him and he had knocked the hornet to the ground and stamped on it. The police had come for him the next day. Killing a hornet was not precisely murder, as each creature was just one very small part of the mind. There were stiff penalties, though.
“It would be interesting to observe the interior during the storm. Yes, the box,” the mind eventually told him. The hornet launched itself from his hand and hovered above his bed. The box was there: a shaped perspex container with one skinstick surface. It landed by this and crawled inside. Janer picked the box up and pressed it against his shoulder where it stuck.
“There are no phobes on this ship,” the mind observed, as if picking up on what Janer had been thinking. He wasn’t the only one who had trouble with the idea of allowing huge stinging insects to fly around them unmolested. There were others whose service to a mind had to be without contact with its hornets, who became hysterical in their presence, some who just paid over a large amount of money, and some who required… adjustments.
“Not surprising,” Janer replied casually. “Spend your life inside a floating mollusc and you’re sure to lose some of your aversions.”
The mind replied to this with something like a snort as its hornet rattled around in the box and settled itself down in the shaped pedestal provided for it. Like this was better for Janer. Now the hornet was no more to him than a camera for the remote and disperse mind, and the voice a disembodied thing. If he didn’t look at it he could convince himself that there was only a machine perched on his shoulder. That anus-clenching shudder left him and he could concentrate on other matters. He stooped and picked up a pair of grip shoes, then discarded them. The crew did not wear them so he would try to do without as well. He stepped out of his cabin into a slime-coated artery.
“Why does it produce it?” he wondered loudly.
“A defensive measure for molluscs. It senses the storm and prepares itself.”
“How does the slime help?”
“Retroactive reaction. It would have helped if it was being attacked by a predator.”
“So the Geneticists didn’t straighten every kink in the helix.”
“Never say that here,” the link hornet warned.
“Would I be so foolish,” said Janer dryly.
There was no reply but Janer seemed to get the impression of a feeling something akin to a raised eyebrow. Yes, so I stepped on a hornet in a moment of panic. It won’t happen again. In ten years when my service contract is finished I should be well inured to them. Cunning bastards those minds. Under his bare feet the floor was rough and sticky, not at all slippery as he had expected. When he lifted his foot it was still attached by a thousand hair-thin strands.
“They got part of the way there… the Geneticists,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
Janer bowed his shoulder down so the link hornet could see his feet and the tacky mess on the scaled floor.
The hornet said, “Partial adaptation. Unable to get rid of the slime they convert it into a more acceptable form.”
“On the floors anyway,” said Janer. “Elsewhere it’s just as thick and slippery as your usual mucous.
“Of course, they may have made the floors the slime absorption points and what you are encountering here is the residue. The moisture would go first.”