The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Then don’t suggest we deform our society to try to please some other culture. They’re going to have to take us as we come.”

  “If you take that argument as far as it can go, we ought to bring kids along.”

  “There’s a case to be made for that suggestion,” Victoria said. “Maybe you should bring it up at the next meeting.”

  “Maybe this is a dumb argument. The age-mix decision’s made now, we have one grandparent in space and maybe more to come. That’s that.”

  “You’re awfully passionate about it, now that it’s too late. Why didn’t you say anything at the committee meeting when we talked about age mix in the first place?”

  “Native shyness.”

  Victoria laughed.

  Stephen Thomas gave a small and self-deprecating shrug. “Everybody sounded so enthusiastic. I didn’t want to break consensus.”

  “If you weren’t concerned enough about the subject to talk about it at the meetings, I don’t think you should second-guess it now.”

  “I’m not going to embarrass you at the party, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You haven’t had good experiences with grandparents. Give Floris Brown a chance before you convince yourself she’s going to be more of the same.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t psychoanalyze me.”

  “And I wish you wouldn’t read my aura, but that doesn’t stop you.”

  Quite a way ahead, Satoshi turned back and beckoned to them.

  “Come on, we’re going to be late!”

  He and J.D. waited till Victoria and Stephen Thomas caught up. Various tributaries had brought other people to the path. They passed the fossil bed, which was much farther along than the last time Victoria had seen it. She wondered if Crimson Ng intended to leave even a bit of bone showing, to indicate the bed’s presence, or if hiding it completely was part of its aesthetics.

  o0o

  The party was going great. Infinity had never run a big party before. Small ones, a few friends and strangers, sure, but nothing on the scale of an open invitation to everyone left on campus. If Florrie and J.D. Sauvage had arrived a few transports before, it would have been much larger, but as far as Infinity was concerned it was plenty big enough. Guests crowded the main room, listening to Florrie tell stories in her feathery voice; other folks had spilled out into the garden. Professor Thanthavong, the geneticist, and Alzena Dadkhah, the head ecologist, stood in the garden drinking fruit juice and chatting. Even the new chancellor had made an appearance, though he had already left. Infinity had hoped Kolya Cherenkov might come, but maybe that was too much to ask.

  An hour before, Infinity had watched a cloud form diagonally far-overhead, close to the spiral path that would bring it over the hill garden just as the party was about to start. Rain had not been predicted anywhere on campus till later tonight, but even inside a starship, weather remained wild and free. Inside a starship it was only gently wild, but a drizzle would dampen a party as badly as a downpour.

  The cloud drifted by, shadowing the garden. Infinity stood outside, watching it and talking to it in an undertone. Perhaps it listened. As its edge trailed past, it sprinkled a few drops onto the hill, leaving the air fresh and the flowers sparkling and the grass barely damp. Infinity thanked the cloud.

  Arachne had arranged to leave bright one section of the sun tubes. A great shaft of sunlight washed down over the hill, keeping the garden full day while the rest of the campus lay dark, spangled here and there with light. Infinity would have preferred lanterns, strung light bulbs, even darkness and fireflies, but the attention, the trouble someone had gone to — even if the someone was a computer — clearly thrilled Florrie.

  Infinity took a glass of fruit juice and wandered out into the garden. The area around the hill lay in bright sunshine. Sunshine on campus was always noon in direction; only its intensity varied as the day progressed. Darkness encircled the pool of light.

  Most everybody stood in clusters more or less on the paths, either because of the dampness or because they understood that the grass needed a few more weeks of growth in which to become established. Wildflowers glowed with jeweled colors. They had bloomed just in time, and Infinity felt pleased.

  As far as Infinity could tell from the conversations he overheard, the guests had made a tacit agreement, just for tonight, not to discuss the troubles facing the expedition. They sounded more cheerful and relaxed than almost everyone had been for a long time.

  He had worried that the guests might be bored with nothing but snacks and fruit juice, but no one appeared to mind the lack of mood altering refreshments. The campus kitchen would supply food and drink for any reasonable gathering, but did not consider beer or wine to be nutritional necessities.

  Infinity found alcohol uninteresting as a recreational drug, so he had never bothered to learn to make either beer or wine, nor had he gone out of his way to make friends with anyone who did. As for importing anything stronger from the O’Neills, that was out of the question on his salary even if he had had time to arrange it. The expedition paid him better than any job he could get on Earth, but nothing like what it cost to import luxuries.

  He sipped his fruit juice and sidled through the flower garden till he stood among the cactuses, in the penumbra between light and dark. He hoped people could see well enough out here; pulling cactus spines out of somebody’s hand, or their butt, was no picnic.

  Voices approached, disembodied by the darkness. A group of four people appeared out of the shadows. The alien contact team stood at the edge of the garden, still chatting with each other as they blinked and squinted and waited for their eyes to accustom themselves to the illumination. Infinity knew Stephen Thomas slightly; the geneticist had asked him for advice on planting grapevines. J.D. Sauvage was an unknown, and Satoshi and Victoria he had barely met. The personnel of the expedition liked to believe they avoided dividing themselves along class lines, but gardeners and scientists had very little to do with one another.

  The team members strolled through the garden toward Florrie’s house. Victoria carried a carnation plant, Satoshi a reed mat, Stephen Thomas a paper scroll.

  Infinity took note of the alien contact specialist. She was plain and heavyset, pleasant enough but unmemorable. He wondered what alien contact specialists did.

  The three old hands took J.D. through the garden, introducing her to everyone they passed. People greeted her and welcomed her and gave her small gifts.

  “Victoria!” Someone Infinity did not know loped across the yard toward the team.

  “Hi, Feral. Enjoy your first day on Starfarer?”

  “It’s fantastic — !”

  Kolya Cherenkov’s voice spun toward Infinity out of the darkness, that odd, low, powerful voice. Kolya, too, paused at the edge of the light to let his eyes adjust. He continued talking, though he stared straight ahead and never glanced toward his companion.

  Griffith stepped into the light and stopped beside Cherenkov.

  Griffith gave Infinity the weirdest feeling. An easy-going man, Infinity seldom took an immediate dislike to anyone. In Griffith’s case, he was willing to make an exception. He disliked his pushiness, he disliked his rudeness and his disrespect toward Florrie. Infinity admired Cherenkov, too, but Griffith’s reaction bordered on worship. Such intensity in any area of life struck Infinity as dangerous.

  Infinity had been on campus since before there was a campus, and had never met Cherenkov before today; Griffith, having just arrived, had spent the whole day with the cosmonaut. Disgusted with himself for feeling jealous, Infinity turned away from the pair and headed for the house to make sure everything was going smoothly.

  Florrie sat in the window seat with her guests arrayed in concentric circles around her. She wore black pants, and red ankle-boots over them, a long fringed black tunic, and black eye makeup.

  The alien contact team approached her. J.D. turned aside to put the awkward handful of presents people had given her in a neat stack in the corner.

&n
bsp; Victoria handed Florrie the carnations.

  “I hope you’re getting settled in,” she said. “I hope you like Starfarer.”

  “Yes...” Florrie said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name — ?”

  “Victoria — from the transport?”

  “Oh... of course.” Florrie bent down to sniff the carnations.

  Looking puzzled, Victoria stepped back.

  Satoshi handed her the mat.

  “It’s not the same as having a rug,” he said apologetically. “The mats last for quite a while, though.”

  “Thank you. You made this yourself?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Stephen Thomas knelt formally at her feet. Bowing slightly, he offered her a scroll that he held in both hands.

  She untied the ribbon, unrolled the paper, and read it. Perplexed, she looked up at him. “A tea ceremony? I don’t think I...”

  “I’m trying to add the cultural roots of my family to my own personal landscape,” he said. “Tea ceremony is an ancient Japanese custom. I’m learning it, and I’d like to do it for you sometime.”

  “Are you... Japanese?”

  “No, but that’s part of Satoshi’s background. I keep trying to get him to study it, too, but he doesn’t want to.”

  “My family is pretty well Americanized,” Satoshi said.

  “And I’m trying to trace Victoria’s family so I know what to study from Africa.”

  “Dream on,” Victoria said, in a tone that sounded to Infinity just a shade bitter. “It would make more sense to study some Canadian customs, eh?”

  “I would,” Stephen Thomas said, “but I don’t like beer.”

  Victoria and Satoshi laughed.

  “You are all three in the same family?” Florrie asked.

  “Right, a family partnership.”

  Infinity thought the family partnership was a fairly weird arrangement. No necessity existed anymore to promise sexual fidelity to one person or to a group. He wondered if J.D. Sauvage had to join the partnership in order to become a member of the alien contact team.

  Florrie smiled, accepting the old-fashioned system.

  “Goodness,” she said, “I had no idea young people did that anymore. I was born in a commune. Sit here near me. I’m sorry I don’t have any chairs.”

  Stephen Thomas continued to kneel at her feet, like the hero of a martial arts interactive attending the dowager empress of Japan. Stephen Thomas looked pretty good, sitting seiza, Infinity thought, though he ducked his head too far when he bowed.

  Satoshi sat on the floor crosslegged, shifting uncomfortably now and then. At a little distance, Victoria drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. J.D. sat beside her, arms folded on her chest, her legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles.

  Infinity listened contentedly as Florrie recounted her parents’ story, in which a group of people tried to form their own rural tribe, despite being culturally maladapted to communal living and inexperienced at subsisting off the land. Of course it ended badly, when Florrie was very young, but Infinity had a high aesthetic appreciation for well-meaning tragedies.

  Suddenly the atmosphere changed. Infinity felt it as surely as a change in temperature or a sudden wind. Stephen Thomas turned. Infinity looked toward the door. Kolya entered, carrying a small package.

  Griffith paused in shadows, right behind him.

  Infinity moved to one side of the room, farther from Griffith, trying to act natural rather than surreptitious about his desire to get as far away from the other man as possible. Without meaning to he glanced back, and found Griffith gazing after him, the complete, deliberate neutrality of his expression more frightening than any degree of emotion. Anger, or hatred, or contempt, Infinity might have confronted. The neutrality could not even be commented upon, though Infinity knew, and Griffith knew, that it meant: I notice you. I’ll watch you, if it pleases me.

  Someone toward the front of the room noticed Kolya. Florrie continued to tell her story, but people were distracted by the unexpected appearance of the cosmonaut. They began nudging each other, glancing back, exclaiming softly in surprise.

  As far as Infinity could tell, no one else paid the least attention to Griffith.

  Kolya acted as if he never noticed that anyone had noticed him. He hunkered down in a clear space and listened. Infinity wondered if Kolya found it amusing to hear Florrie’s tale of a failed fling with communism in the mid-20th-century United States. If he did, he was too well-mannered to laugh in any of the wrong places.

  When Florrie finished, her audience applauded and Kolya unfolded to his feet. People made way for him. He stopped beside Stephen Thomas, who still knelt in front of Florrie.

  “I brought you both small gifts of welcome,” he said to Florrie and to J.D. He handed Florrie the package. “It is rather delicate.”

  As she opened it, her fingers trembled. Infinity was afraid she would slip and drop it, whatever it was, but the wrapping unfolded and floated to the floor, leaving a delicate, intricately painted eggshell in her hands.

  “A souvenir,” Kolya said. “I believe that they do not make them in my country anymore. Or, if they do, they do not export them.”

  “Why, thank you, Mr. Cherenkov,” Florrie said.

  Kolya handed J.D. a slip of paper. J.D. unfolded it, read it, and looked up.

  “Thank you,” she said softly, and buttoned the slip of paper into her shirt pocket.

  Florrie held the eggshell up and looked at it against the light. Infinity wondered if she understood what giving gifts meant here. Gifts were, more often than not, non-physical: offers of help or time or the gift of a skill. The kind of thing Kolya, apparently, had offered to J.D. People did not have many things to give, up here. Kolya probably had fewer than most. He had not, as far as Infinity knew, been back to Earth in two decades. Other people returned to Earth on leave and came home with full allowances; Kolya lacked this luxury. Perhaps he had brought the egg into space with him on an early trip. Or the last one.

  Florrie looked around. “I don’t know where to put this,” she said. “If I were back home I’d put it on the mantelpiece, but I have none here.”

  “There is a thread strung through it, to make it easy to hang up.”

  “In the window, then.”

  “Oh — ” Kolya stopped. He looked uncomfortable, unhappy, but he said nothing more. Infinity had no idea what troubled him.

  Florrie rose and turned toward the window, looking for a place to hang the egg. Before she found one, Griffith appeared. Infinity had not even noticed him move. Griffith took the egg from her hand.

  Florrie reacted to Griffith even more negatively, more noticeably, than Infinity had. She drew back; the egg would have fallen and shattered if Griffith had not taken it carefully from her hand. He was more concerned about the eggshell than he was about Florrie, for he showed no reaction to her fright.

  “Sunlight will fade it,” Griffith said. He took the eggshell to the corner farthest from the window, stretched up, and hung it from a hook set into the ceiling.

  Florrie’s aesthetic sense was better than Griffith’s. The eggshell looked odd and lonely high up in the corner, where it was safe. It would have looked fine in the window, but not at the expense of its existence. Infinity could see that someone would have to build Florrie a table or a stand or a little cabinet for the egg, maybe with a bit of mirror behind it.

  “Well!” Defending herself with indignation, Florrie sat stiff and straight on the window seat.

  Both relieved and embarrassed, Kolya offered Florrie a small bow.

  “I hope you will be happy on our expedition,” he said. “I hope you will be happy, too, J.D.”

  “Thank you, Kolya,” J.D. Sauvage said.

  In a moment the cosmonaut was gone.

  Though the party inside took a little while to ease again, the party outside had loosened up considerably. As the light faded to dusk, people put lines out to Arachne for music. Couples and groups
danced on the grass, unsynchronized, each to a different interior melody. Infinity would have to reseed the center of the yard after all. He did not mind too much.

  He kept an eye on Griffith, trying to figure out what bothered him about the man. After Kolya left, Griffith acted like everyone else, mingling, chatting. But every so often, when Infinity glanced around, he found Griffith gazing at him with that scary neutral expression.

  Infinity went inside. Florrie sipped lemonade. Stephen Thomas still knelt at her feet — as far as Infinity could tell, he had not moved. They chatted.

  Infinity admired Stephen Thomas’s new earring. He wondered who had made it and whether they would make a similar one for him, only with synthetic rubies instead of emeralds.

  He joined Florrie and Stephen Thomas.

  “You let me know if you get tired, Florrie,” Infinity said, “and I’ll chase all these folks home.”

  She peered out the French doors. “Who is that man?”

  Griffith stood alone on the porch.

  “He said he’s with the GAO,” Infinity said.

  “The GAO!” Victoria frowned, doubtful. “What’s he doing, auditing our books?”

  “Could be, I guess.”

  “He’s a narc,” Florrie said.

  “What?”

  “A narc.”

  “I heard you, I just don’t know what that means.”

  “Is the government going through anti-drug hysteria again?” she asked. “I gave up reading local news years ago.”

  “The main tantrum the U.S. is going through right now is about Starfarer and the expedition,” Infinity said. “Florrie, please, what’s a narc?”

  “Be careful around him,” she said. “If you use any kind of drugs, he’ll put you in jail.”

  Infinity and Stephen Thomas looked at each other, confused. What kind of drugs could get you put in jail? Most recreational substances were designed so their effects wore off quickly, and anyone who chose something more powerful ought to have the sense to check out their tolerance for it and make adjustments. Infinity had known people who too frequently sought out effects that were too strong — watching them was one of the reasons he did not drink — but he could not imagine involving the law in the problem. A supervisor, or a doctor, sure. Even the community council. But the law?