"Tell all," replied Cat's Eye. "But little to tell. We think one way, thought is private. We think another way, thought is transmitted on radio-one. We think a third, harder way, and thought is transmitted on radio-two."

Keith laughed. "It's like asking a human to explain how speech works.

We just do it, that's all. It's-"

"Forgive me for interrupting, Dr. Lansing," said PHANTOM, "but you asked me to remind you and Dr. Cervantes of your 14:00 appointment."

Keith's face fell.

"Damn," he said. "Damn." He turned to Rissa. "It's time."

She nodded. "PHANTOM, please get Hek down here to continue the dialogue with Cat's Eye."

As soon as Hek had arrived, they both rose from their chairs and left the room.

Keith and Rissa exited from the elevator and walked the short distance to the oversized black door with the giant fluorescent orange "20" painted on it. The locking bolts pulled aside. The noise they made had always been faintly familiar to Keith, but this time he finally placed it: it was just like the sound of a rifle being cocked in an old-time western movie.

Most doors aboard ship split down the middle with the two panels moving into pockets on either side, but' this heavy one slid as one piece to the left — safety demanded there be no seams or weak points in the seal.

Rissa gasped. Keith felt his jaw go slack.

There were well over a hundred Ibs in the docking bay, lined up in neat rows — like a parking lot filled with wheelchairs. "PHANTOM, how many are there?" Keith said softly.

"Two hundred and nine, sir," replied the computer. "The entire ship's complement of Integrated Bioentities."

Rissa shook her head slightly. "She said only her closest friends would attend."

"Well," said Keith, stepping into the room, "Boxcar is very personable.

I guess all the Ibs aboard consider her a close friend."

There were six other humans present, all members of Rissa's life-sciences staff. There was also one lone Waldahud, whom Keith couldn't quite place. Keith glanced at his watch: 13:59:47. No doubt whatever was going to happen would begin on time.

"Thank you all for coming," said Boxcar's voice, over

Keith's implant. It was easy to spot her: hers was the only web flashing. It was eerie, in a way. PHANTOM's translation was piped into his left acoustic nerve; the other ear heard nothing — even a room this size full of raucous Ibs would be dead silent.

Boxcar was fifteen meters from where Keith and 'Rissa were standing.

In front of the plated space door, PHANTOM was projecting a giant hologram of Boxcar, so that all the Ibs could see her flashing web.

Something strange, there: The strands of her web were bright green.

Keith had never seen any Ib's web that color before.

He turned to Rissa, but she must have guessed his question. "It represents a deeply emotional state," she said.

"Boxcar is choked up over the show of support from her people."

Boxcar's web flashed again. The translation said, "The whole and the parts — of one, and of them all. The gestalt has resonances on the macro scale and the micro. It binds."

Obviously, Boxcar was addressing her fellow Ibs. Keith thought he got the gist of what she was saying — something about being part of the Ib community having meant as much to her as being a community of parts herself. Keith prided himself on his acceptance of aliens, his run-ins with Jag notwithstanding. But this was all a little too surreal for him; he knew he was about to watch someone die, but the emotions he should be feeling hadn't yet come to the surface. Rissa, on the other hand, had that look she got when trying not to cry. She and Boxcar had been closer than he'd known, Keith realized.

"The road is clear," concluded Boxcar. She rolled several dozen meters away from the others, out into the center of the bay.

"Why's she doing that?" whispered Keith.

Rissa shrugged her shoulders, but PHANTOM replied into both of their implants: "During discorporation, components-especially wheels — may panic, and seek to bond with any other Ib in the area. It is customary to move far enough away so that if such a thing is attempted, there's plenty of time to react."

Keith nodded slightly.

And then it began. In the middle of the bay was a standard Ib comfort mound. Boxcar rolled over it so that the hump supported her frame from underneath. Her web — visible in PHANTOM's giant hologram — turned an almost electric purple, another color Keith had never seen before. The light points at the web's countless intersections grew brighter and brighter, a dense constellation map with every star a nova.

Then, one by one, the lights winked out. It took perhaps two minutes for them all to go dark. Boxcar's frame tipped forward, and her web slid off to the bay floor, landing in a loose pile. Keith had thought the web was already dead, but it arched up sharply, as if a fist were pushing it up from underneath. The strands had now lost all their color; they looked like thick nylon fishing line.

After a moment, though, the web finally did expire, collapsing into a heap. Boxcar was now blind and deaf (she had once had a magnetic sense, too, but that had been neutralized through nanosurgery when she'd left her home-world; it caused severe disorientation aboard spaceships).

Next, Boxcar's wheels disengaged from the axles on the frame. Wheel disengaging wasn't unusual in and of itself.

The system that allowed nutrients to pass from the axle into each wheel didn't provide enough food for the wheels, and in their native environment they would periodically separate from the rest of the gestalt for feeding. Thick tendrils, similar to the Ib's bundle of manipulatory ropes, popped out of the sides of the wheels, preventing them from falling over (or righting them if they did).

Almost immediately after it separated, the left wheel tried to rejoin the frame. Just as PHANTOM said it might, it panicked when it realized that little bumps had risen up all around the axle's circumference, preventing it from reconnecting.

It rolled around the bay, the grabbing projections around its rim extending and retracting at a great rate. The wheel had a few vision sensors of its own, and as soon as it caught sight of the huge collection of Ibs, it made a beeline for the closest. That Ib spun away, avoiding the wheel. One of the others — Butterfly, Keith assumed, the one Ib doctor on board — surged forward, a manipulatory rope extended, a silver-and-black medical stunner held at its tip. The stunner touched the wheel, and it stopped moving. It stood for several seconds, then the rootlike appendages coming out of its sides seemed to go soft, and the wheel toppled onto its side.

Keith turned his attention back to the center of the bay.

Boxcar's bundle of ropes had slid to the floor, near the discarded sensor web. They were reaching up to the frame and disengaging the blue pump from the central green pod, and gently lifting the pump to the floor. Keith could see the pump's large central breathing orifice cycling through its usual four-step sequence of open, stretch, compress, and close. After about forty seconds, though, the sequence started to get distorted as the pump seemed to lose track of what it was doing. The orifice movements became jumbled — opening, then immediately compressing; trying to stretch wide after closing. There was a small gasping sound — the only sound in the entire bay. Finally the pump stopped moving.

All that was left was the pod, sitting on the saddle-shaped frame.

Keith whispered to Rissa: "How long can the pod survive without the pump?"

Rissa turned to him, her eyes wet. She blinked several times, dislodging tears. "A minute," she said at last. "Perhaps two."

Keith reached over and squeezed her hand. Everything was still for about three minutes. The pod expired quietly, without movement or sound — although somehow, apparently, the Ibs knew when it was gone, and, as one, they began to roll out of the bay. All their webs were dark; not a word was passing between them. Keith and Rissa were the last to leave. Butterfly would return shortly, Keith knew, to take care of jettisoning Boxcar's remains into space.