The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  No one had come to meet him, which was as he had planned. He preferred being left to himself. He would observe in anonymity and make his recommendations without any fuss.

  The departure of several of the associate nations could only help in the conversion he planned. It could be made to look as if they were grasping at a convenient excuse and cutting their losses, finding the starship project to be too big, too expensive for their budgets. And, who knew? That might even be true.

  A few associates might hold out, but the change had begun and it could not be stopped. At this point, objecting to the use of the starship as a military base came close to treason. Unfortunately it would not look good to arrest half the faculty and staff of the expedition even if Griffith found evidence against them. Never mind. Arrests would be unnecessary. By the time he finished his work, the scientists would give up and go home.

  Griffith knew there must be people on board who disagreed with the majority view, but who feared to speak up against it. He hoped to discover them.

  He took a mental glance at a map of the campus transmitted by the web. His perception of the transmission made it overlap his sight, like the tactical display on the window of a fighter jet. Most people had to close their eyes to receive visually oriented information from the web.

  The map led him to the guest house. He climbed the path and walked under the hill and through the open doorway. It irked him that he would be forced to stay in an underground room. Back on Earth he lived high in a skyscraper, and he had waited a long time — and paid several bribes — to get an apartment looking over the city and the flat stark plains beyond. Having paid the bribes still troubled him.

  The lobby was deserted and empty. Not even an AS waited to serve him.

  “Hello!”

  No one replied. Griffith went behind the desk, intending to go into the back and rout out whoever or whatever was supposed to be in attendance.

  A sheet of paper rustled beneath his shoe. He picked it up: a sign, blown to the floor by a breeze. It carried a notice in several languages, beginning with French. He glanced farther down and found the English version.

  “We regret that we are not here to aid you. Our government has called us home for consultations.”

  Griffith snorted at the idea of hotelkeepers’ being called home for consultations. His briefing had neglected to mention that France held the guest house concession and that all its personnel would be gone by the time he arrived.

  “Please choose a chamber from our diagram and consider our house yours during your stay. We have no locks so no code is required. Please put soiled linen into the laundry chute. Fresh linen may be retrieved from the armoire in the hallway.”

  The lack of locks irked him even more than the idea of staying underground. Not that he was stupid enough to bring anything sensitive with him, but if anyone found out who he was they would not know that, and they might search his belongings. Besides, some people would snoop even without suspicions to go on.

  Griffith was a very private person.

  He glanced at the diagram. Two rooms out of ten had been spoken for. He left signing in till after he had seen what the guest house had to offer.

  He strode along the ramp leading to a second-story hallway. The interior wall was blank. Doors to the guest apartments opened from the exterior wall. Each end of the hallway led out onto a balcony and exit ramp.

  The guest-house was more pleasant than he expected, and, though it was indeed underground, each room flowed into its own small terrace just beneath the crest of the hill. All the rooms were similar, with one wall of windows. The hillside sloped to a stream and a small grove of trees. The furnishings were Spartan: a futon, a small desk, woven mats on the floor. His shoes crunched on the floor coverings.

  To give himself the most privacy, he chose the room next to the most distant exit. He dumped his things, apparently at random, on the futon, then left to take a long exploratory walk.

  o0o

  Floris Brown waited in the transport until someone came along to help her. The excitement of the trip had begun to catch up with her, and she felt tired. She dreaded the return to gravity. Weightlessness was a blessing, easing the aches of lift-off as well as the aches of age that she had suffered for twenty years.

  As she waited, she looked out the dorsal port.

  The bow of the transport obscured her view of the inhabited cylinder, but the wild cylinder spun slowly in the distance. Even farther away, the furled sail lay waiting for its test deployment. It looked like a huge, tautly-twisted silver cable.

  A young man dove into the transport, sailed through the aisle, and stopped himself just above her. She smiled at him. Everyone on the transport had been so clean-cut. This was the first person she had seen who dressed in a manner she found familiar and comfortable. He was a big man, with dark skin and hair so black it had blue highlights. He wore ragged blue jeans and a black leather vest; he was clean-shaven but his hair was long, tied back in a pony-tail, fanning out behind his head. Despite his youth, sun-squint lines radiated from the corners of his eyes.

  “I’m your liaison. Infinity Mendez.”

  “Hello.” She extended her hand. “My name is Floris Brown.”

  He took her hand and held it rather than shaking it. His hand completely surrounded her skinny, wrinkled fingers. She felt embarrassed by the gnarled blue veins.

  “We don’t shake hands much in zero g, Ms. Brown,” he said. “One more force to counteract.”

  “Please call me Floris.”

  He unfastened her seatbelts with deft and impatient movements, then turned his back to her. The fringe on his leather vest dangled raggedly.

  “Grab your stuff and grab hold,” he said.

  The fastenings stuck. She fumbled at the net.

  He made a peculiar motion of his hands and shoulders that caused him to rotate toward her. Without comment, he unfastened the net, stuck it under his arm, and presented her with his fringe again. She wound her hands in the cut leather. It felt warm and slippery. He gathered his strength, like an animal about to leap.

  She was afraid he would wrench out her arms, but he pushed off carefully and glided with surprising smoothness between the seats of the transport, drawing her after him. They were the last people to leave the passenger compartment. Even the waiting room had cleared out.

  “How are you on hills?” Infinity asked.

  “Slow,” she said.

  “Okay.” He took her to an elevator. “Hold on, and keep your feet near the floor.”

  He pointed to one surface, which Floris would not necessarily have chosen as the floor except for the orientation of the grasps and the painted outlines of footprints.

  “This’ll feel weird. Something to do with the spin. You need a physicist to explain it, but you get used to it. Down,” he said to the elevator. It complied.

  At first she thought he must have told her the wrong surface to keep her feet near, for she felt a force drawing her toward the surface of the elevator at her back. Gradually, as the elevator slid toward the floor of the cylinder, the force slid, too, pulling from a more and more horizontal orientation till it felt and acted like gravity, staying steady and “down.” The elevator stopped.

  “Most folks don’t come this way,” Infinity said. He set off toward the bright end of the tunnel.

  Floris stepped out of the elevator. She stumbled. Strange how she could have gotten so used to weightlessness in two days. She steadied herself and followed Infinity Mendez, trying to keep up.

  Returning to gravity was not as hard as she had feared. Starfarer’s seven-tenths g made walking easier than back on Earth.

  She stepped cautiously out into the cylinder, into fresh cool air. She looked around, then up. For a moment she shrank back, as if the whole incredible construction might collapse upon her. Pictures failed to reproduce the feeling of observing one’s world from the inside, from above. Floris felt as she imagined a fifteenth-century explorer might have, had he crossed the equat
or and discovered the people on the other side really did walk upside-down on the far side of the world. She stepped gingerly out of the tunnel, crossed the semicircle of rock foam at its base, and stood on the new grass.

  She glanced at her liaison.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Not many old people on board Starfarer,” he said. “Not as old as you, anyway. I hardly know anybody who’s old.”

  She tried not to be offended. She wondered how many other people on board Starfarer had grown up in space, in a society that was missing the entire eldest generation.

  “Don’t you have grandparents back on Earth?”

  “Somewhere. I don’t know. Come on.” Carrying her things, he strode off across a bright green lawn that lay between rougher fields. His unshod feet barely marked the grass. She followed, wondering if she, too, should take off her shoes. When she glanced back, the tender new blades had sprung back from his tread, but she had left marks on the grass and on the ground.

  He had already crossed half the field. She gave up trying to match his speed; it was impossible. Instead, she walked at her own pace. She wondered if the people on board Starfarer would be able to accept her limitations.

  Her limitations were one of the reasons for her being here: to help people remember the variety of human beings.

  Infinity turned and watched her from a distance.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Then why are you going so slow?”

  “This is as fast as I can go.”

  “Oh.”

  She hoped he would come back and help her, but he simply waited, watching with puzzlement rather than impatience. When she reached him, she wrapped her thin fingers around his elbow before he could stride off and outdistance her. Though his forehead furrowed when she took his arm, he tolerated the touch.

  Floris found it astonishing to walk inside a starship in the same way she would walk through a meadow. She tried to remember the last time she had walked through a meadow. She had been living in the city for many years.

  The starship seemed empty. Occasionally she would see someone at a distance, but Infinity took her to the next meadow, a rougher, wilder one, and after that she saw no other people.

  Floris kept up as long as she could. When she was young she loved to take long walks. She hated to admit that even in low gravity she no longer could do it. Finally she let go of Infinity’s arm and sank down on a boulder with a sound of distress and exhaustion.

  “I’m going to get you a cart.”

  Floris remained silent until her heartbeat steadied. “You said it wasn’t very far. But we’re in wilderness! Where are the people?” Above, on the other side of the starship, there were tracks and paths, streams and buildings, and the movement of small spots that she took to be human beings.

  “There’s lots of open space, but plenty of people live around here. Some of them have, you know, left, but they’ll be back. We’re almost there.”

  She pushed herself to her feet.

  They walked through a wide, shallow valley that cut diagonally across the cylinder floor. A creek ran through its center, bubbling over jagged cracked stones to a confluence with a larger stream. Bushes grew in ragged scatters. Straight bare vertical branches crowded together along the creek bank.

  “Pretty, huh?” Infinity said.

  “It’s half-finished. Like everything else I’ve seen.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. That’s true. You should’ve seen it before the ground cover sprouted. Mud. What a mess. When the lilacs grow some more, it’ll be solid green over there. They’ve already got buds. And look at the willows. See the pink and red and yellow at the tips? That’s where they’re growing.”

  Floris tried to find comfort in the faint haze of color that tipped the bare willow twigs, but the ragged landscape depressed her.

  “How do you know so much?” She did not mean her tone to be so sharp.

  “I planted most of it,” Infinity said mildly. “There’s not much call for station builders anymore, but I didn’t want to go back to the O’Neills. I like working outdoors. So I transferred to gardening.”

  She barely heard him. The far curve of the cylinder loomed overhead, and the bright reflected sunlight dazzled her. She wanted to get inside, beneath a roof. She wanted to rest.

  “Do you even have roofs here?” she said. Her voice was faint.

  “Sure,” Infinity said. “How else would we keep the rain off?” He stopped. “And here’s your roof itself.”

  Floris stared, appalled. “They promised me a house,” she said. She felt near tears.

  It looked like pictures she had seen of ancient pueblos, abandoned for centuries. This one had been abandoned so long that even the climate had changed, and the clean dry rock was covered over with dirt and moss and growing things. It was full of windows and doors and pathways and stairs. She knew she would have trouble getting around in it.

  “Here you are,” he said. He opened a sliding window and led her inside.

  “I don’t want to live in a cave,” she said. “They promised me a house.”

  “This is a house. What’s wrong with it? It’s as good as anybody’s got, and better than most. The chancellor lives down the path a way.”

  He led her across a treacherous carpeting of slippery woven grass mats to a stone windowseat. She sat, gratefully.

  “All these mats are gifts,” Infinity said. “People on campus made them for you. There’s a welcome party for you tomorrow night.”

  The underground apartment felt dank and cold. Floris shivered.

  Hearing footsteps, she glanced up. A tall figure strode past her outer doorway and vanished.

  Infinity stared out the window.

  “You know who that was?” Awe took his low voice down another half octave.

  “I have no idea,” Floris said.

  “It was Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov. He lives here, but I’ve only seen him a couple of times. You know, the Russian — ”

  “I remember.”

  Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov had defected when the Mideast Sweep recalled the Russian cosmonauts. Now he lived permanently in space. He was nearly Floris’s age, and very famous. He could not return to Earth because the Sweep had convicted him of treason, in absentia, and sentenced him to death.

  “He lives here? In my house?”

  “No, sure not. The way it works, it’s easier to put together a bunch of houses at a time, then put a hill over top of them. You’re in kind of a triplex arrangement, and Cherenkov has the one highest up.”

  “Who lives in the third part of the triplex?”

  “Thanthavong. The geneticist.”

  Floris frowned. The strange name sounded familiar, but she could not place it.

  “They say she came up here because she couldn’t get any work done back on Earth. She was too famous, and the publicity just kept going on year after year.”

  “Publicity about what?”

  “The anti-virus. She invented it. Before I was even born, but don’t you remember?”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “Ms. Brown — ”

  “Floris. Florrie.”

  “ — I’m sure they won’t bother you. I’ve been planting here for weeks and this is the first time I’ve seen Cherenkov. Thanthavong leaves for her lab at dawn and hardly ever comes back before dark. I bet you won’t see Thanthavong any more than you see Cherenkov.”

  “But I want to see people! That’s why I came up here! Do you think I want to be all alone?”

  She might as well have stayed on Earth. Only two things prevented her from demanding that Infinity Mendez take her back to the transport. The first was that she felt so tired. The second was that though the starship would fly into the darkness and disappear, it had a good chance of returning. Back home, entering the darkness forever was a possibility she had to face every time she worked up the nerve to leave her apartment.

  “I didn’t mean nobo
dy would talk to you. Sure they will. I meant nobody would bother you if you didn’t want to be bothered.”

  Floris turned away from the window and huddled on the seat. When she applied to the program, it had all sounded wonderful. A house of her own, and people to talk to anytime she wished, and no worry about being sent away. Instead, here she was in an unfurnished concrete apartment, with only two neighbors, both foreigners, both so famous they would probably not even deign to speak to her, and one of them a hermit.

  And both of them, she suddenly realized, elderly.

  She tried to remain calm.

  “You’ve brought me here and put me in an old people’s home,” she said.

  “What? No, I didn’t, I mean, there isn’t any such thing on Starfarer.”

  “I don’t believe you. My children wanted me to go to an old people’s home. I can’t. I’ll die.”

  Floris pushed herself to her feet and crossed the slippery mats.

  “I don’t want to live here anymore,” she said, and walked out into the valley.

  o0o

  The net bag full of presents bounced gently against Victoria’s side, and the muscles of Satoshi’s back moved smoothly beneath her hand. As she walked beside him toward their house, she slid her fingers under the black tank top that showed his shoulders to such good advantage. The heat of his skin made her shiver. He tightened his arm around her waist. Victoria covered his hand with her free hand, and laced her fingers between his.

  Everything around her felt and looked and smelled and sounded sharp and clear and vivid, as if happiness had intensified all her perceptions, as if she possessed more than the normal number of senses. For tonight, she would put aside both her desire for some uninterrupted work time, and her worries about the expedition.

  The low round hills had gone gray in the shadowless twilight. The sun tubes dimmed nearly to darkness as Victoria and Satoshi turned off the main path and strolled up the gentle slope toward the house. Hills formed the interior topography of both the campus cylinder and the wild cylinder. Hills increased the sense of privacy as well as the usable surface area, but they made Victoria feel closed in. Despite her years in Vancouver, she had spent much of her childhood in and around Winnipeg. She always expected to be able to see long distances to the horizon. Starfarer had no horizon.