The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  He wolfed his breakfast, hungry after two days in zero gravity. Leaving by way of the emergency exit rather than the front door, he set off to continue his exploration.

  Griffith had read all the plans, all the speculations, all the reports. He knew why Starfarer resembled a habitat instead of a vehicle. He understood the reasons for its size. He even understood the benefits of designing it to be aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, both his irritation and his envy increased as he strode along paths that led through what for him was, even in its raw and unfinished form, a paradise. He had no chance at all of living in a similar environment back on Earth. He did occasionally work with — more accurately, for — people who were extremely wealthy or extremely wealthy and extremely powerful. They owned places like this. But regular scientists, regular administrators, regular government employees, lived in the city and liked it. They figured out ways to like it, because they had no choice.

  People who had lived here would never consider going back to the crowds and noise and pollution of Earth. Not willingly. Back on Earth, Griffith had been skeptical of the suggestion that the personnel of the starship intended to take it away and never bring it back, either turning it into a generation ship and living on it permanently, or seeking a new, unspoiled planet to take over. That suggestion smacked too baldly of conspiracy theories for Griffith. Now, though, he found the idea more reasonable to contemplate.

  The contemplation made his analysis easier.

  He looked up.

  The sun-tubes dazzled him. He blinked and held out his hand to block off the most intense part of the light. To either side of the mirrors, the cylinder arched overhead, curving all the way around him to meet itself at his feet.

  He had seen such views looking down from a mountain, during brief training exercises outside the city. Looking up for a view was disorienting. A multiple helix of streams flowed from one end of the campus to the other. Here and there the streams flowed beneath the green-tipped branches of a newly-planted strip of trees, or widened and vanished into a bog of lilies and other water-cleansing plants; or widened into silver-blue lakes or marshlands. A wind-surfer skimmed across one of the lakes. The brightly-colored sail caught the morning breeze. Small gardens formed square or irregular patches of more intense green in the midst of intermittent blobs of ground cover.

  It would all be very pretty when the plants finished growing together over the naked soil. But it was unnecessary. Machines could clean the water and the air nearly as well as the plants could. Well enough for human use. A ship a fraction this size could store years and years’ worth of supplies. Griffith found the claim of the necessity of agriculture to be questionable at best. Wind-surfing was a quaint way of getting exercise, but treadmills and exercise bikes were far more efficient in terms of the space required, not to mention the time. If the scientists had intended to set out on a proper expedition they would have designed a proper ship.

  Griffith tried to imagine what the cylinder would look like when all the plants reached their full growth. As yet the intensely green new grass remained thin and tender, brown earth showing between the blades. Other ground cover lay in patches, not yet grown together, and most of the trees were saplings, branchy and brown. Some of the vegetation in the wild cylinder, according to the reports, had been transported from the O’Neills, but most came from single-cell clones engendered on board Starfarer. It was far too expensive to import bedding plants or trees all the way from Earth. The cell banks of Starfarer boasted something like a million different kinds of plants and animals. Griffith thought it extravagance and waste.

  He kept walking, following a faint, muddy path worn through new grass. They should at least pave their paths. He saw practically no one. Half the people working on Starfarer had been called back by their governments in protest over the changes the United States was proposing in Starfarer’s mission.

  Griffith had drafted most of the changes.

  Now that he was here, he could see even more possibilities. If he had to, he would accede gracefully to the objection that the cylinder was too large to use as a military base. He would turn the objection to his advantage. The body of the cylinder was a treasury of raw materials, minerals, metal ore, even ice from deposits of water that had never thawed since the moon’s formation. Starfarer could be mined and re-created.

  He would rather see it used as an observation platform and staging area. That way its size would be useful. It could be as radical a training ground as Santa Fe, the radiation-ruined city. Griffith had spent a lot of time there, wearing radiation protection, inventing and testing strategies against urban terrorism and tactical weaponry. He imagined working up here under similar conditions. It would be easy to evacuate the air from the cylinders. A space suit could hardly be more cumbersome than radiation garb.

  He did not see any problem in taking over the starship. Now that Distler had won the election, Griffith’s political backing was secure. MacKenzie’s ill-considered comments could only speed things along.

  When he first started studying the starship, he could not believe it was unarmed, that its naive philosophy allowed it — required it! — to vanish into the unknown without weapons.

  Getting weapons on board was Griffith’s next priority.

  o0o

  Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas walked over to J.D.’s house. Victoria wished she had invited her to breakfast. She would have, if she had known that Feral would be around.

  None of the paths on board Starfarer, even the paved ones, had been designed for three people walking abreast. In this the starship was much like Terrestrial towns. Satoshi was in the middle, so Victoria and Stephen Thomas alternated walking on the verge. Knee-high bushes sprinkled dew against Victoria’s legs.

  “Hello!”

  They paused at the edge of J.D.’s yard. She appeared in the open doorway and beckoned them inside.

  “Good morning.”

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Just fine. Sometimes it takes me a few days to get used to a new place, but this feels like home.”

  They followed her into the main room. Her boxes of books stood in stacks; books from opened boxes stood in stacks. J.D. had set several of the packing boxes together to form makeshift shelves. Starfarer’s houses contained few bookshelves, since everyone used the web or temporary hard copy.

  “This will have to do till I can get something more substantial. What do I do to requisition some boards?”

  “Plant a tree,” Stephen Thomas said.

  J.D. looked at him curiously.

  “Wood is scarce,” Victoria explained. “The trees are still growing. What you want is some slabs of rock foam.”

  Stephen Thomas picked up one of the old books, handling it gingerly, as if it would disintegrate in his hands. As it probably would.

  “Why do you have all these?”

  “For research. They give me ideas that I try to build on.”

  “Nothing a human being is going to think of is going to match a real first contact,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “No,” J.D. said. “It’s not. But the ideas are for mind-stretching, not script-writing.”

  She picked a book out of an open box. The cover painting looked like a peeled eyeball.

  “Here’s one,” she said. “It’s got a story in it called ‘The Big Pat Boom,’ by Damon Knight. Aliens visit Earth and decide that cowpats are great art. They want to buy them and take them back home — to alien planets. So everybody on Earth tries to corner the market in cowpats. What would you do?”

  Victoria laughed. “What would I do with a cowpat? Yuck.”

  “What,” Stephen Thomas asked plaintively, “is a cowpat?”

  Satoshi explained. Stephen Thomas snorted in disbelief.

  “I can’t even think how I’d move a cowpat,” Victoria said.

  “I haven’t read the story in a long time,” J.D. admitted. “I forget the exact details. I think they let the cowpats dry before they try to move them.”
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br />   “What did they do about the dung beetles and the maggots?” Satoshi asked.

  “I don’t know,” J.D. said. “I didn’t know about the dung beetles and the maggots.”

  “Your science fiction writer must have used some poetic license,” Satoshi said.

  “How did you get to be such an expert on cowpats?” Victoria asked.

  “I’m a font of wisdom,” Satoshi said, doing a subtle imitation of Stephen Thomas in his occasional pompous mode. He grinned. “And I used to spend summers on Kauai herding cattle. I saw a lot of cowpats. Or steerpats, as it happens.”

  “Come on,” J.D. said, “what would you do?”

  “I’d go looking for some different aliens,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “I guess I’d let them buy the cowpats,” Satoshi said.

  “I think we should try to get the cow farmers — ”

  “Ranchers,” Satoshi said.

  “Okay, ranchers — to give the aliens the cowpats as a gesture of friendship.” Victoria chuckled. “Though I don’t know how that would go over with the proponents of free trade.”

  “That’s a good idea,” J.D. said. “I hadn’t thought of that alternative.”

  “The government would buy them and form a whole new bureaucracy to decide which aliens to give the shit to,” Stephen Thomas said.

  Everybody laughed.

  “I’d nominate our new chancellor to be the minister of that department,” Satoshi said.

  J.D. glanced at him quickly, startled. Victoria found it interesting that the chancellor had earned Satoshi’s dislike so quickly. Satoshi was notoriously slow to take offense.

  “Here’s one,” J.D. said. “About some kids who smuggle a cat onto a space station.”

  “Don’t show that one to Alzena,” Victoria said. “She swore she’d draw and quarter anyone who smuggled a predator on board.”

  One of the makeshift shelves collapsed. J.D. tried to catch the books as they spilled out in a heap on the floor.

  “Oh, this is hopeless,” J.D. said. “But it’s been so long since I had my books out. I was afraid they’d mildew at the cabin.”

  Satoshi picked up some of the fallen books and put them back in the box, setting it on its base rather than trying to use it as a shelf.

  “I’ll walk you through requisition,” Victoria said. “The supply department can’t be busy these days... You can probably get some real shelves in a day or two.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  “No problem,” Victoria said. “Come on, let’s go watch the sail test!”

  o0o

  Infinity led Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov toward the guest house, trying to explain the problem about Floris Brown. The trouble was, he felt so intimidated about talking to the cosmonaut that he kept getting tangled in his words.

  “I took her to the guest house last night. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t just leave her in the garden. I sleep there sometimes, but you can’t let an old person sit out all night in the dew. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I do have some experience speaking English.”

  “I know that, I mean, I didn’t mean — ”

  “I suppose you could not leave her to sit in the garden, but she might have come to her senses and moved back into her house if you had.”

  “She’s pretty stubborn.”

  Infinity glanced sidelong at Nikolai Petrovich. This was the first time he had talked to the cosmonaut. Physically, Cherenkov was still vigorous. He had been tall for a cosmonaut, nearly two meters. The bone loss of years in space, in zero-g, had given him a pronounced stoop. His posture caused him to peer out at the world from beneath his brows. Exposure to sun and radiation had weathered his skin as severely as if he had spent his life in the desert. His dark brown hair was turning gray in discrete streaks. Gray striped his bushy eyebrows.

  He turned his head and caught Infinity looking at him. His gaze locked with Infinity’s.

  His age was in his eyes. Infinity felt a chill, a prickle of awe.

  Nikolai Petrovich smiled.

  “Why do you think an old stranger like me would change her mind, when you could not?”

  “You can tell her it isn’t a nursing home.”

  “That is what she fears?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “She thinks Thanthavong and I are geriatric cases.”

  Embarrassed, Infinity tried to think of something to say. “She doesn’t understand...”

  Cherenkov chuckled.

  “Where does she wish to live?” the cosmonaut asked.

  “She wasn’t quite clear on that. It sounded like she wanted to live in her own house by herself, but she also wanted her family around. I guess she couldn’t have either one back on Earth.”

  “So she came here. Alone.”

  “Right. She said they’d put her in a nursing home, and she’d die.”

  “I see. I remain here... for similar reasons.”

  “I know,” Infinity said.

  It was not a nursing home that would kill Nikolai Petrovich if he went back to Earth. The executioners of the Mideast Sweep did not wait for their victims to turn themselves in.

  “Why did you come to me, instead of going to the housing committee?”

  That was a good question. Infinity realized that the answer was, he wanted an excuse to meet the cosmonaut face to face. He was embarrassed to say so.

  “There are lots of empty houses, but they either belong to people or they’re just shells. Nothing’s been finished in a couple months. There’s hardly anybody left on the housing committee to do the finishing. Just a few Americans and a Canadian and a Cuban.”

  “You are still here. You are Cuban, perhaps?”

  “No. I use the U.S. passport mostly, but my father was Japanese and Brazilian and my mother was United Tribes, so depending on what rules I pay attention to, I can claim four citizenships.”

  “And four political entities can claim your allegiance. Complicated.”

  “It could be, but political entities don’t spend much time claiming allegiance from metalworkers turned gardener.”

  “More fools they,” Nikolai Petrovich said.

  “Anyway,” Infinity said, “I can’t ask the committee to put her in somebody’s house, because we’re all pretending everything is going to be all right and they’re coming back and the expedition will go on the way it’s planned.”

  “Pretending?”

  “Yeah,” Infinity said. “What else? If the defense department decides they want us, they’ll have us, just like they get everything else they want.”

  “You are cynical.”

  “I know how it works!” Infinity said. He fell silent, wishing he had not spoken with such bluntness.

  Nikolai Petrovich walked along beside him in silence for a while. “You said... your mother was from the United States? The Southwest?”

  Infinity shrugged. It did not mean much to be from one of the southwest tribes anymore. He wished he had not given Cherenkov the key to his background by bringing up the department of defense. They had ripped the southwest land away from the people who inhabited it, and in doing so they had ripped the heart and soul out of most of the people Infinity had been closest to.

  “We will not speak of it further,” Nikolai Petrovich said, “and we will continue to pretend. So Ms. Brown has the choice of the guest house, or the first level of our hill. You wish me to help you persuade her to live in the hill.”

  “I thought she’d like it. Especially the garden... I think the best I could get for her, for a while, would be a place with no windows yet, and mud puddles outside.”

  “The garden you made for her is beautiful,” Nikolai Petrovich said. “I notice the changes.”

  “I saw your footprints sometimes, where you stood to look at things. I wondered what you thought about it,” Infinity said, feeling unreasonably pleased. “It’ll look better when it’s finished. When it has time to settle in and grow for a while. The other thing is, t
here’s a welcome party tonight and if it isn’t going to be at her hill I need to tell people where to go. Or whether to go at all. Um, are you coming?” The invitation was general, but he had done a special one for Cosmonaut Cherenkov, and left it not only in electronic form on the web but in written form on his doorstep.

  “I seldom accept invitations these days,” Nikolai Petrovich said in a neutral tone. Infinity did not know if that meant he was going to make an exception, or if he was put out to have been invited. “A party, you say. Is this sort of thing to become a common occurrence?”

  “I don’t know. Depends on her, I guess.”

  “Perhaps I should encourage her to stay in the guest house,” the cosmonaut said drily. “I value my privacy.”

  “Oh,” Infinity said. “I didn’t... I mean — I’m sure it won’t get too noisy. I’ll tell people to keep it down.” He stopped. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nichivo,” Nikolai Petrovich said. “The truth is I am seldom at home and I probably would not notice. I had planned to go away later.”

  “Then you will talk to her?”

  “I am here with you, after all,” the cosmonaut said.

  o0o

  Griffith returned to the guest house. He had ten kilobytes of notes filed away in the web, scrambled and guarded, and plans for a tour of the infrastructure tomorrow. An inspector for the Government Accountability Office had complete freedom, and no one on board to answer to.

  In the hall, he hesitated. Beyond the central stairway, one of the occupied rooms stood open. Several people laughed, and someone spoke. Griffith frowned, trying to place the familiar voice.

  He strode quietly down the hall.

  “You see that I would not be such a disaster as a neighbor.”

  “No one will come to visit,” a second voice said, a voice that was quivery, feathery.

  “Give it a chance, ma’am.” The third voice belonged to someone who had grown up speaking Spanish and English both, and at least one other language that Griffith, to his annoyance, could not pin down. He walked past the open doorway and glanced inside.