The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  oOo

  Each house in the campus cylinder of Starfarer lay underground, partly hidden by a low hill, daylit by one whole wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. In the house where Victoria lived, her partner Satoshi Lono trudged into the main room, looking for coffee, anticipating its smell. Grass mats rustled under his bare feet. He yawned. He had stayed late at a lab meeting, with no solution in sight to the problem of one of his graduate students. Fox could not apply for a permanent position on the expedition because her twenty-first birthday fell six months after the starship’s departure.

  When the meeting ended, knowing he would not be able to sleep, he had spent several more hours on the web, analyzing map complexes. When he finally slept, he dreamed those maps. Bright images of stacks of contour descriptions still filled his mind.

  He stopped.

  A weird piece of equipment stood in the middle of the main room. The AS that cleaned the house circled the contraption, like a cat stalking a gigantic insect. The AS rolled forward, its antenna outstretched. It backed off and circled again.

  The piece of equipment, complicated in form but primitive in design, consisted of twisted glass tubes fastened together and supported by a metal rack. The feet of the rack dug into one of Satoshi’s better grass mats.

  The AS, hovering, tapped the glass tubes again.

  “It’s all right,” Satoshi said. “Look at it and remember it and leave it alone.” The AS hesitated, assimilated the information, then rotated and rolled away. When the partnership first got it, it had had the same reaction to, and the same instructions about, the shirts Stephen Thomas stored on the floor. Satoshi wondered how Stephen Thomas so often contrived to leave things lying around that the cleaner could not figure out what to do with. Satoshi liked living in a neat environment. It irritated him to be put in the position of having the urge to pick up after one of his partners.

  “It’s too early for this,” Satoshi muttered. Deciding to assimilate his own advice, he detoured around the mess in the middle of the main room and stopped in the kitchen nook, wondering what had happened to his coffee.

  He was not at his best in the morning.

  Everything did not always go exactly as planned on Starfarer. The campus was rough and new, the equipment at the shakedown stage. But the kitchen nook was hardly leading-edge technology. It should have had his coffee ready for him. Instead, the pot stood on the counter, half full of cold, malodorous dregs. He poured it out and started over.

  Stephen Thomas strolled into the main room, put his arms around Satoshi from behind, and rested his chin on Satoshi’s shoulder. His long blond hair tickled Satoshi’s neck.

  “Good morning.”

  “Did you drink my coffee?”

  “Huh? I drank some last night when I got in, why?”

  “Dammit — !” Satoshi woke up enough to be irritated. “You could have left it the way you found it.”

  “I didn’t think of it. It was late and I was tired.”

  “It’s early and I’m still asleep!”

  “God, all right, I’m sorry. I’ll make you some.”

  “It’s done now.” Satoshi took the cup to the table and sat in a patch of sunlight by the sliding windows. He deliberately ignored the contortion of glass tubing.

  For the thousandth or the millionth time, he missed Merit. Times like these reminded him of before the accident, when the everyday details of the partnership ran smoothly, practically unnoticeably, under Merry’s management. It was weird how something as inconsequential as a cup of coffee could bring back the grief. He hunched his shoulders and sipped the bitter coffee and tried to put the feelings away.

  Satoshi loved Stephen Thomas, of course, but living with him the past couple of weeks had not been easy. Satoshi could not figure out why his youngest partner’s idiosyncrasies and occasional blithe self-centeredness bothered him more with Victoria away.

  “You’re mad at me,” Stephen Thomas said.

  Satoshi took a gulp of coffee. “No, I’m not. Yes, I am. I don’t know. It’s early and I’m still tired and I just wanted some coffee.”

  “I offered to make you some.”

  “You give strangers more respect than you give the people you sleep with.”

  Stephen Thomas laughed and kissed him. “I respect you in the morning. Except maybe right after you wake up.” He left Satoshi sitting in the sunlight, returned to the kitchen nook, and started opening drawers and cupboards looking for something for breakfast.

  Satoshi made allowances for Stephen Thomas. He thought of Victoria as the strongest one in the partnership, and of himself as the calmest in a crisis, and of their younger partner as the most flighty. But only Stephen Thomas had kept his center after the accident. Satoshi doubted the partnership would have survived without him.

  He wished he could get coffee to taste right. Starfarer was not yet self-sufficient for food; half of what they used they had to import, not from Earth but from the O’Neill colonies. Maybe coffee plants could grow properly only on Earth, the way some types of vegetables and fruit grew properly only in certain places. Like Walla Walla onions. No amount of research or experiment ever reproduced that sort of biological synergy.

  Satoshi found it some comfort to suspect the existence of unknowable secrets, like perfect coffee, Walla Walla onions, and his younger partner’s lab equipment.

  He would be glad when Victoria got home. It seemed like forever since they had talked. Before she left they had all agreed to communicate via the web, which was relatively cheap, rather than by voice link from Starfarer to Earth, which was expensive. What with the eagle eye being kept on campus expenses, everyone was on their best behavior about keeping personal calls on their own accounts.

  She’ll be back soon, Satoshi reminded himself. She’ll even be back in time for the solar sail’s first full test.

  Stephen Thomas returned from the kitchen nook carrying a bowl of white rice with a raw egg on top, a plate of pickles, and a cup of milky tea. He knew better than to offer any of it to Satoshi.

  “I miss her, too,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Satoshi said, then, “dammit, I wish you wouldn’t do that. It bothers me, and it drives Victoria crazy.”

  Stephen Thomas laughed. “You guys act like I was reading your minds. I don’t read minds — ”

  “Of course not, but you do answer questions before people ask them, and you comment on things people haven’t even said yet.”

  “ — I read auras.”

  Satoshi groaned. He wished Stephen Thomas would stop this silly joke, even if he believed it, because it did nothing either for his credibility or for that of the alien contact team. Stephen Thomas was unusually sensitive to other people’s moods and feelings — when he wanted to be. That, Satoshi believed. But he did not believe Stephen Thomas could see something nonexistent.

  “Let’s splurge and call her,” Stephen Thomas said.

  Satoshi sipped his coffee, tempted.

  “Come on,” Stephen Thomas said. “She’s on the transport, it won’t cost that much.”

  “Okay.”

  They connected with Arachne.

  Because the hypertext link was on, as usual, the web boxed recent references to Victoria Fraser MacKenzie. The screen refreshed, adding a new article about the banquet that British Columbia’s premier had hosted in Victoria’s honor. Curious, Satoshi brought it up to read.

  “Oh, my god,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  “Dr. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, when asked whether she could describe the scientific advances we may expect to achieve from the voyage of the Starfarer, replied with a single word: ‘No.’

  “Last night, British Columbia’s premier hosted Dr. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, the Canadian physicist-astronaut who heads the deep space expedition’s alien contact team, at a formal dinner. This is Fraser MacKenzie’s last trip to Earth before Starfarer departs for an alien star-system, overcoming relativity’s limits on speed and achieving superlumi
nal transition energy via the ‘cosmic string’ that has moved within range of our solar system during the past decades.”

  “Cosmic string” and “superluminal transition energy” were highlighted, indicating that the reader could obtain fuller explanations of the terms through the hyper. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas continued reading the main body of the article.

  “After dinner, Fraser MacKenzie conversed informally with the premier and others about the expedition. The first question put to her concerned the U.S. proposal that Starfarer be converted into a mini-O’Neill colony, to help relieve Earth’s population pressure. Fraser MacKenzie acquitted the starship’s cause well, pointing out that the O’Neill colonies were constructed not as population valves, but as bases which would create and supply the necessities: food, water, air, and shelter from the vacuum, in order to permit human beings to live in space without draining Earth’s resources.

  “‘Starfarer,’ Fraser MacKenzie stated, ‘is much smaller than the existing O’Neills, neither of which have made any difference whatever in the population of Earth, nor were ever intended to.’ She also explained cogently why the starship had to be large enough to sustain its own ecosystem. ‘Sending the expedition out in a traditional ship would be extremely costly,’ she explained. ‘The starship was created out of leftover lunar material from the O’Neills. By living within a functional ecosystem, we can plan to be self-sufficient. Madame Premier, we hope to return within a year or two, but the truth is that we have no idea how long we might be gone. We don’t know what we’re going to find or how far we’re going to have to go to find it. If we set out with nothing but processed stores, we run the risk of running out of everything: food, water, and air. Mechanical recycling, as on a traditional ship, isn’t efficient enough.’

  “It was at that juncture that the premier asked Fraser MacKenzie for a description of the benefits to be gained from the expedition, and Fraser MacKenzie declined to offer one.

  “The premier, reacting with surprise, pressed her for a more complete reply to her concerns about what the country might expect to gain from our enormous investment.

  “‘Madame Premier,’ Fraser MacKenzie said, ‘I cannot tell you what scientific advances will result from the deep space expedition. If I could, there would be no need for us to go on the voyage at all. I could speculate,’ Fraser MacKenzie continued. ‘So could anyone with a minimal level of scientific literacy. But speculation is a game. The history of humanity is a record of explorations intended for one purpose that have completely different effects. People didn’t walk east across the Bering land bridge, or sail west across the Atlantic, because they expected to find North America. We didn’t go to Mars expecting to break through to superconducting bioelectronics.’

  “The premier pointed out that we did go to Mars with a purpose in mind. Fraser MacKenzie agreed, and suggested that anyone who wished could access a library database and inspect half-a-thousand gigabytes of information on the experiments already planned for Starfarer. However, Fraser MacKenzie would not describe any benefits that would surely accrue to society on account of these experiments.

  “The head of Starfarer’s alien contact team offered two reasons for her refusal. The first was the pure science mode of many of the proposals. ‘Science,’ she insisted, ‘is not meant to create useful applications of scientific knowledge.’ Her second reason was more esoteric. ‘A proven hypothesis may have useful applications,’ Dr. Fraser MacKenzie stated. ‘However, a scientist does not do an experiment to prove a hypothesis. A scientist does an experiment to test a hypothesis. You may guess about the answer that nature might give back to you. You may even hope for nature to give you a particular answer. But you can’t know what answer you’ll get until you’ve performed the experiment. If you did, or if you thought you did, you’d be back two thousand years when experimentation was looked upon as unnecessary and vulgar, or, worse, back a thousand years when belief was more important than knowledge, and people who challenged beliefs with knowledge were burned at the stake.’

  “The premier observed that the new president of the United States, Mr. Distler, occasionally behaved as if he would like to consign research scientists in general and scientists attached to Starfarer in particular to precisely that fate. Fraser MacKenzie admitted that she had, on occasion, felt singed by some of his comments. ‘Science involves risks,’ she explained. ‘One of the risks involved is that of failure. President Distler, unfortunately, chooses not to acknowledge the possibility of risks, or of failure.’ Fraser MacKenzie added that she did not expect the expedition to fail — after all, her life will be at risk if it does fail. But the risk of failure is a possibility.

  “The premier then asked Dr. Fraser MacKenzie if one risk could be that Canada’s investment in the starship might result in no benefits at all.

  “Victoria Fraser MacKenzie replied with a single word: ‘Yes.’“

  Satoshi read the article, frowning, but Stephen Thomas laughed with delight.

  “About time somebody said straight out that we’re not up here to discover the twenty-first century version of Teflon!”

  “The Teflon hypothesis slides down more easily.”

  “No, it’ll be great. People love mystery, and that’s what we’re heading for.”

  “I wish you were right,” Satoshi said. “But you’re not.”

  “Hey, Satoshi?” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Does Victoria really talk like that when she’s in Canada, or was it just the reporter?”

  “A little of both. You’ve been to Vancouver with Victoria, didn’t you notice she uses more Canadian and British speech habits there?”

  “I noticed her accent got stronger, but I was putting most of my energy into trying to make friends with her great-grandmother. For all the good it did me.”

  “Grangrana’s okay. She disapproves of the partnership in theory but she likes us as individuals.”

  “She likes you. She’s not so sure about me,” Stephen Thomas said, with his usual certainty about the accuracy of his perceptions. “Why did the article keep calling Victoria ‘Fraser MacKenzie’?”

  “They don’t much go for middle names — that’s a British tradition, I think. They figure Victoria’s got one of those unhyphenated double last names. Like Conan Doyle.”

  “Wonder what they’d do with my name?”

  “Probably figure you didn’t have any last name at all.”

  Stephen Thomas laughed and hit him, light and playful, in the ribs.

  The message filter suddenly beeped and started to fill up with call requests, mostly from strangers, mostly from people outside Starfarer, and mostly for Victoria. Satoshi sifted through them.

  “Good lord,” he said. “If we call these people back, we’ll use up our communications budget for the next six months.”

  “Call them collect,” Stephen Thomas said. “And tell them Victoria isn’t here.”

  “How to win reporters and influence public opinion, by Stephen Thomas Gregory,” Satoshi said.

  oOo

  The message filter in Victoria’s cubicle signaled and then sang. Still half asleep, disoriented by darkness, Victoria tried to sit up. The restraints of her sleeping-web held her gently in place and she remembered where she was. A streak of light fell across her; the fabric door did not quite close.

  “Answer,” she said. “Hello?”

  After the short time-delay, Satoshi spoke.

  “Love, have you seen the news today?”

  “I’m not even awake yet.” She was surprised to hear his voice. “I think I slept the clock around. What time is it? Never mind, what’s up?” she said quickly, not waiting through the reply delay of Starfarer communications laser-to-satellite-to-transport and back. She did not want to waste expensive time on trivialities.

  “You have a huge slug of messages from admirers of your interview,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “What interview?”

  “I’m not sure you can call t
hem all admirers,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Some are from people up here,” Satoshi told her, “but a lot are from Earth.”

  Victoria waited through the delay. She and Satoshi had perfected the technique of holding two simultaneous conversations on the communications laser, letting their comments cross and recross, one exchange being held during the reply delays of the second. To his own irritation, Stephen Thomas had not quite got the hang of it. Keeping him in the discussion, Victoria restricted herself to one line of thought and talk.

  “The web’s reporting on your banquet,” Satoshi said. “And your conversation with the premier. You’d better look at it. They emphasized your not wanting to speculate on what benefits Starfarer might bring back.”

  Victoria felt a hot flush of embarrassment spread across her face.

  “I’ll read it, of course. I thought I was having a conversation, not doing an interview for the record. Nobody was introduced to me as a reporter, and who ever reports Canadian news, eh?” She sighed. “I never met the premier before. She’s honorable, I admire her. I wanted to tell her the truth, so she could understand what it is we’re about.”

  With growing unease, she waited out the delay. Despite her cynical remark about Canadian news, she should have realized that anything the head of Starfarer’s alien contact department said to the premier of British Columbia was fair game for reporters.

  It was late and I was tired and keyed up, she told herself. And then there were those toasts...

  But I know better, she thought. I know better than to let my guard down, ever, and still sometimes I do it. What is it about people? Why do they prefer it when we claim we know everything? What’s wrong with the truth, that not everything’s been discovered?

  “I understand what you were trying to do,” Satoshi said. “But I wonder if there’s any way to downplay it after the fact?”

  “Oh, bull,” Stephen Thomas said. “Don’t do that! You said just what needed to be said, Victoria, and anybody who doesn’t back you on it has shit for brains.”