The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  The docking port opened and the transport passengers entered Starfarer. The more experienced travelers came first. A couple of helpers went in to assist the novices.

  Satoshi and Stephen Thomas greeted their friends and acquaintances. The people who had traveled all the way to Earth stood out from those who had just visited one of the O’Neill colonies; all the veterans returning from Earth wore bright new clothes.

  Victoria appeared, wearing a gold scarf around her hair, a matching vest, and a swirly black split skirt. She soared toward him, hand in hand with a plain, heavy-set woman who must be J.D. Sauvage, though Sauvage was supposed to be a novice in space. This woman moved with the assurance of a veteran. Behind her she towed a young red-headed man whom Satoshi could not place.

  Victoria let go of J.D.’s hand and floated toward Satoshi. They clasped wrists, tumbled one around the other, and drew close enough to embrace. Victoria kissed him.

  “Oh, I missed you.”

  “Me, too,” Satoshi said.

  Victoria fended off the wall with her foot, and, in doing so, damped most of their spin and changed their direction back toward Stephen Thomas. A second touch stopped them in front of him. He embraced Victoria with his free arm, but kept hold of the grip with his other hand.

  “Welcome home.”

  “Thanks,” she whispered, not trusting her voice any louder. After a moment holding them both, she opened the circle to include the two newcomers. “J.D.,” she said, “these are my partners, Satoshi Lono and Stephen Thomas Gregory. Guys, J.D. Sauvage, our alien contact specialist. And this is Feral Korzybski, the journalist. He’s come to do a story on the expedition.”

  “Welcome to Starfarer.”

  Stephen Thomas glanced at J.D. quizzically.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, of course.” She stared at Stephen Thomas. “Why do you ask?”

  Satoshi hoped Stephen Thomas would leave auras out of the introductions. Sauvage apparently had some reservations about joining the team and the expedition. The last thing they needed was to have her decide Stephen Thomas was too strange to work with, and go straight back to Earth on the same transport that had brought her. Never mind talking about auras in front of a reporter.

  “Oh — no reason,” Stephen Thomas said. “You looked worried, that’s all.”

  “Have you been up here before?” Satoshi said.

  “What?” She looked away from Stephen Thomas. “No, never.”

  “You look like an old hand in zero g. But everybody knows everybody out here, and I know I’ve never met you.”

  “It must be because of diving, though there are a lot of differences. You move a lot faster than underwater.” She took them all in with her glance. “Thank you for inviting me into the team. I know I’m going to like it. This feels... natural.”

  “Not to me,” Stephen Thomas said plaintively. “Can we get back to solid ground?”

  o0o

  J.D. followed her new teammates from the transport waiting room, anxious for her first view of Starfarer.

  Stephen Thomas disappeared over the lip of the tunnel entrance, hurrying toward the floor of the cylinder and Starfarer’s normal seven-tenths gravity.

  J.D. stopped short at the outlet of the tunnel, amazed by Starfarer. She sank toward the floor in the low false gravity, at the last moment remembering to get her feet under her.

  The sun tubes, reflecting and dispersing sunlight from the solar mirrors, stretched along the axis of the cylinder, from above her to the distant far end. Their heat warmed J.D.’s face and shoulders, and their light dazzled her.

  Victoria glanced back at her from a few meters down the hill.

  “J.D., don’t stare at the tubes!”

  J.D. looked down fast. An abrupt wave of dizziness overtook her as the cylinder rolled back and forth around her. Victoria bounded to her side and grabbed her arm before she lost her balance.

  “Stay still. It’ll stop in a minute.”

  “I’m sorry.” J.D. felt foolish. “I know better — about looking at the tubes and about nodding or shaking my head.”

  Victoria smiled and patted her shoulder. “It’s all right. Everybody ‘knows’ when they get up here that the light is direct from the sun, and that the inner ear reacts to the spin of the station. But the sun-tubes look like great big fluorescent lights, and the acceleration feels just like gravity, so it takes a while to develop the new habits. Have you stopped spinning yet?”

  “I think so.” The dizziness had begun to disperse. It was a very strange sensation, one that would change depending on whether she nodded or shook or tilted her head, and depending on her relative orientation to Starfarer’s spin. For the moment she had no wish to experiment with it.

  Victoria let go of her elbow. “The light’s filtered, so it’s safer than looking at the sun, but it can damage your eyes. You have to be more careful in the wild cylinder, if you cross over for a visit. The light’s even less filtered there.”

  “I’ll remember.” J.D. looked around, her gaze oblique to the sun tubes. “I know Starfarer is big — I knew exactly how big it is before I came up here. But I didn’t realize how big it would feel.”

  At the foot of the hill, the ground curved upward to her left and to her right. Far overhead, hazed by distance, the sides of the cylinder curved toward each other. The sun tubes obscured the side of the cylinder directly opposite, but the rest lay spread above and around her like a map.

  “Almost everybody has that reaction, their first time here.”

  “Come on, you guys!” Stephen Thomas shouted from halfway down the cylinder’s end-hill. Below, the interior of the starship stretched out into the distance. Feral and Satoshi waited, ten meters down the slope. J.D. and Victoria joined them.

  Feral squinted past the sun-tubes toward the cylinder’s far side. “Amazing how the people up there can keep their balance, walking upside down and all.”

  Victoria glanced sideways at him.

  He grinned. “You’ve heard that one before, huh?”

  “It’s about the first oldest joke.”

  “I love your accent,” Feral said.

  “What accent?” Victoria said.

  “You say ‘oot’ and ‘aboot’ instead of ‘out’ and ‘about.’“

  “I don’t have an accent,” she said. “It’s all you Americans who talk funny. Parlez-vous français?”

  “Huh?” Feral said.

  “Un peu,” J.D. said.

  “You do?” Victoria said to J.D., surprised. “I don’t remember it from your vita — ”

  “It isn’t academic French,” J.D. said. “I picked it up the last few months. Most of the divers speak it.”

  They reached the bottom of the hill, and joined Stephen Thomas. On solid ground he was at ease, and he moved with grace and certainty. As Victoria and Satoshi came off the hill, Stephen Thomas kissed Victoria intensely, and drew Satoshi into the embrace. J.D. envied them a bit, and she felt glad for them, and a little embarrassed.

  “I’ll see you all tomorrow,” she said. She started away.

  “J.D.,” Victoria said, “do you know where you’re going?”

  “Um, no, but I’m sure Arachne will get me to where I’m supposed to stay.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’ll show you, and get you settled.”

  Victoria and Satoshi went with J.D., while Stephen Thomas set off with Feral to show him to the guest house.

  Thick, weedy grass and flowers covered much of the land of the campus. At first J.D. could not figure out why it looked so familiar to her, until she realized that the ecosystem of Starfarer, planned as a natural succession, reproduced the first growth in a forest after a big fire. Of course the campus lacked the black tumble of half-burned trees, snags, uprooted trunks.

  They followed a small stream. J.D. tried to trace its course along the inside of the cylinder, but soon lost it among hedgerows. Above, on the other side of the cylinder, a network of silver streams patterned the raw ground and sprou
ting grass.

  The interior radius of one end of Starfarer’s cylinder was slightly shorter than that of the other end. The resulting slope formed a gentle gradient of artificial gravity that caused the streams to flow from this end of the cylinder to the other. They erupted at the base of the hill and flowed in spirals around the interior of the campus. Every so often a stream spread out into a clear lake, or a bog or swamp thick with water hyacinths and other cleansing plants. At the far end of the cylinder lay a salt marsh, the main buffer of the ecosystem. Evaporation and transpiration and rain recycled some of the water, and some flowed underground through pumps and desalinizers, back to its starting point.

  At first Victoria and Satoshi followed a resilient rock foam path, but after a few hundred meters Victoria turned down a dirt trail that had been worn into the grass.

  “Do you have deer on campus?” J.D. asked.

  “Not in this cylinder. These are people-trails. If one gets awfully popular, we foam it.”

  J.D. looked around curiously. Along the length of the cylinder she could see clearly only a few hundred meters, because windbreaks of saplings or bushes separated the fields.

  She stopped short. “What’s that?”

  Several dog-sized animals bobbed toward her through the high grass of the next field. Back on the island, a pack of half-wild dogs ran free, far more dangerous than any wolf pack or coyote band.

  “That’s the horse-herd,” Satoshi said.

  “Horse herd!”

  Their tiny hooves tattooed the damp ground, the thick grass. Five miniature horses skidded to a stop in front of J.D., whinnying in highpitched voices, snorting at each other. A pinto no taller than J.D.’s knee squealed and kicked out at a bay that crowded too close. They whuffled expectantly around her feet.

  Victoria reached down and scratched one behind the ears.

  “I’m fresh out of carrots,” she said. “Satoshi, have you got anything for them?”

  He dug around in the side cargo-pocket of his pants, underneath a crumpled map print-out, and found a few peanuts. He opened them, rubbing the shells to powder between his fingers before letting them fall to the ground. The miniature horses crowded closer. Satoshi gave J.D. the peanuts. The horses lipped them softly from her hands. They nuzzled the backs of her knees, her ankles, and her shoes.

  “I didn’t know horses liked peanuts,” J.D. said.

  “They might prefer apples,” Satoshi said, “but the trees aren’t established yet. Next year we may get some fruit. Sugar’s still fairly expensive up here, since we haven’t started processing it. Lots of carrots, but peanuts are easier to carry. Drier.”

  Victoria chuckled. “He left a carrot in his pocket once, for I don’t know how long. The laundry sent it back.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Satoshi said to J.D. He shrugged. “It was more or less fossilized before anybody found it.”

  “Why are they here?”

  “The minis, you mean, not the carrots?”

  “People do better with pets around,” Victoria said. “And they keep the grass from getting completely overgrown.”

  “I see,” J.D. said. “The mini-horses are easier to keep track of than cats or dogs or hamsters — and easier on the ecosystem, too, I suppose.” She sat on her heels and rubbed the soft muzzle of a seven-hand Appaloosa.

  “Right. Alzena — Alzena Dadkhah, she’s the chief ecologist — is trying to get some birds established. A lot of people would like to have dogs or cats — I’d like to have my cat. But I can see her point about predators. And domestic rodents are too adaptable. According to Alzena, once you’ve got them, you’ve got them everywhere. So far we haven’t had any rats, but it could happen. Then there’s the waste problem.”

  “Sorry, little one, that’s the end of the peanuts,” J.D. said to the Appaloosa. “I see the point about waste. Herbivore waste isn’t quite as unattractive as carnivore waste.”

  “Easier to compost, too,” Satoshi said.

  J.D. patted the Appaloosa one last time. She straightened up. The mini tossed its head, looking for another handout. It was a cute little animal.

  Something about it made J.D. uncomfortable, and that was exactly the problem: it was cute. In being bred down from magnificence, the horses had been made trivial, converted from strong, powerful animals to lap-dogs.

  She clapped her hands sharply. The minis snorted and started and galloped away. They scattered, galloping and bucking, and reformed their herd a hundred meters across the field.

  Chapter 5

  J.D. saw her new house for the first time. She had known the houses formed part of the topography, built into hillsides with one wall of windows. But she had not expected hers to be beautiful.

  “I love it,” J.D. said. “It looks organic, somehow. But why do it like this? Not to conserve energy, surely.” While Starfarer still flew within the solar system, the sun would provide all the power it could possibly use. Once it clamped itself to the universe’s web of cosmic string, the problem would be to keep from being overwhelmed by the energy flux.

  “Not here and now,” Victoria said. “But we can’t know all the conditions we’ll face after we leave. The basic reason is aesthetic and ecological. The more plants on the surface, the less ground we cover with buildings and pathways and so forth, the more stable and resilient the ecosystem will be. The plants keep the air fresher, they soak up the runoff from rain — ”

  J.D. glanced up. Starfarer was large enough to have its own weather patterns, including rain. Two different systems of clouds drifted over the land on the other side of the cylinder.

  Victoria pointed at the most distant cloud system. “That far-overhead system will be near-overhead in half a rotation. The ecosystems analysts encourage rain in the cylinders — it’s easier and cheaper than air conditioning. Smells better, too.”

  “No thunder and lightning, though, I’m sure,” J.D. said wistfully. That would be too risky, both because of all the electronics within Starfarer, and because of the amount of energy even a small lightning bolt can let loose.

  “No, you’re right.” Victoria laughed. “That, they discourage.”

  “It’s the one thing I missed in the Pacific Northwest,” J.D. said. “There was lots of rain, but hardly ever any thunder.” She hesitated. She wanted to ask so many questions about Starfarer and the alien contact department. But she would have time. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”

  “First thing,” Satoshi said.

  “We’ll come and get you and go watch the solar sail test.”

  They bid each other good-night. J.D. watched Victoria and Satoshi walk away, hand in hand.

  o0o

  Griffith glanced back at Earth one last time before leaving the transport. This was his first trip into space. He had known, intellectually, how far he would be from the planet, but the distance struck him emotionally only when he could hold out his hands and cup the world between them.

  At this distance, it would take the very best surveillance equipment — perhaps even the next generation of surveillance equipment — to get fine detail from Earth. The starship would have to move to a lower orbit.

  Griffith hated waste. Starfarer should never have been built this far out to begin with. A great deal of time and money and reaction mass had gone into its construction. Even though most of its mass came from cheap lunar material, O’Neill colony leftovers, it had required a significant number of Earth-to-orbit payloads.

  Griffith moved into the starship, hand-over-hand along the grips. He was getting the hang of zero-g navigation, but he envied people with the experience to move naturally and gracefully.

  He left the docking gate and entered the main body of Starfarer. He stopped at the center of the slope where he could look out into the cylinder.

  Where Earth had been too small to believe, the cylinder was far too large. He was amazed and appalled by the amount of space. From where he held himself, the end of the cylinder appeared to slope up to meet the walls of the cylinder, th
e living space of Starfarer. He knew, though, that when he started to travel along one of the numerous paths leading away from the gate, the apparent gravity would increase. He would perceive himself climbing down to the floor.

  Disorientation dizzied him. He closed his eyes, but that only made it worse. Keeping his gaze away from the weird slope and the enormous cylinder, he found the path leading to the proper section. He drew himself onto it and gripped the rail.

  Lower on the slope, the artificial gravity held him on the stairs. He released his death grip on the railing. Other people on the path at the level he had reached were leaping up and down the slope like gazelles, like moon-walkers, ignoring the switchbacks, but Griffith moved slowly and steadily and cautiously. He felt dizzy. He supposed it was a psychosomatic reaction that resulted from his knowing that the cylinder was spinning, for he was below the level at which his inner ear ought to be able to detect the spin. The dizziness bothered him, for he was not much given to psychosomatic reactions.

  He made some quick calculations about the population density of the starship. Though he knew he had done the calculations correctly — he made a policy of exercising his mind in this way, so as not to become too dependent on outside data-bases — the number struck him as so absurdly low that he sent out a line to the web and had it check his arithmetic. It was accurate. Then his amazement at the size of the cylinder — and there were two of them, one completely uninhabited, designed and intended to remain that way — changed to resentment and envy. The people who lived here had all the space in the world...

  He laughed, a quick sarcastic bark. Back in the world, there was arable land, there was useless land, there were restricted wildernesses, and there were cities. Not much space remained for stretching out. The spoiled academics who lived up here had no idea how fortunate they were. Or, more likely, they knew perfectly well. No doubt they had planned it this way.

  They had better enjoy their luxury while it lasted. Soon everything would change.

  The path forked. He let Arachne guide him to the proper track. Below him, on the slope, the pathways branched and branched again, like a river splitting and spreading its fingers across a delta. Otherwise the pathways that had begun so close together, in the center of the cylinder cap, would end at great distances from each other. By following the correct branch, Griffith could reach the proper longitude of the cylinder.