The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “You don’t know much history, do you?” Florrie said.

  “Not enough, I guess,” Stephen Thomas said politely.

  “You be careful. If you do anything they don’t like, if you make trouble, they’ll accuse you of using drugs and they’ll ruin you. They take a real problem and they pervert the solution to it to increase their power over you. They’ll take your job away. That happened to a friend of mine, and he didn’t even use alcohol, much less something illegal. But he was a troublemaker! And they destroyed him for it!”

  “I don’t think you need to worry,” Victoria said, keeping her voice gentle, neutral, almost as neutral as Griffith’s expression. “We’re all troublemakers up here, in one way or another. They can’t get us all.”

  “Don’t patronize me, young lady!” Florrie snapped, with a spark of real anger. “If you ignore me because you think I’m a senile old coot, you’ll be sorry!”

  “I don’t think — It wasn’t my intention — ” Victoria’s voice broke. She stopped. Her dark skin flushed. “ — to patronize you.”

  Infinity suddenly shivered. He looked out the window at Griffith, wondering if Florrie was worried over the wrong details, but for the right reason.

  When he glanced back toward Florrie and the alien contact team, Victoria had disappeared.

  o0o

  Victoria hurried to the edge of the garden, out of the light. She felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. Not someone. Floris Brown.

  “Victoria?”

  J.D. crossed the shadows and stopped beside her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just...” She fell silent. “She had a perfect right to react that way, I was being patronizing.”

  “There’s a difference between being patronizing and being reassuring. I thought her reaction was kind of extreme.”

  Victoria shrugged.

  “Why did what she said hurt you so much?” J.D. asked.

  Victoria told J.D. about her own great-grandmother.

  “I tried to get Grangrana to apply to the expedition, but she wouldn’t. She’s older than Ms. Brown, quite a lot. She’s frailer. She traveled all over when she was younger, and now... she’s tired. I’m worried about her. I don’t want to leave her behind. I miss her, J.D., I miss her so much.” Victoria smiled. “Grangrana can give you what-for, but she wouldn’t ever slap you down.”

  “You wanted Ms. Brown to like you, didn’t you?”

  “I did. I think she’s admirable, to apply for the program and come all this way. I thought she did like me. On the transport. But tonight she didn’t even remember me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Isn’t it strange,” Victoria said, “how somebody can say a couple of words to you, and make you feel like a four-year-old?”

  “No,” J.D. said. “Not strange at all. Especially when it’s somebody you want to make a connection with.”

  Victoria squeezed J.D.’s hand. “Thanks. For talking. For... noticing.” She still felt shaken, as much by surprise at the intensity of her reaction as by Ms. Brown’s words. She made herself smile. “What did Cherenkov give you?”

  “Hey, Victoria!” Satoshi joined them. He carried J.D.’s presents in the crook of his arm. “J.D., you forgot these.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Thank you.” She took them from him. “Kolya invited me to lunch,” she said to Victoria. “He offered to make piroshki. I don’t know what piroshki is, but I’m looking forward to finding out.”

  “Piroshki are the Russian version of fried dumplings or pasties or ravioli,” Satoshi said.

  Satoshi put his arm around Victoria’s shoulders. His bare skin touched hers through the open lace of her shirt. She put her arm around his waist, glad of his warmth.

  “He doesn’t spend time with people very often,” Victoria said. “He’s given you a unique gift.”

  “What’s wrong?” Satoshi asked her. “The way you rushed out...”

  “I’m okay now, but I’m going home.”

  “Wait just a minute and we’ll all go.”

  “There’s no reason for you to leave, too — ”

  “Stephen Thomas is already making our excuses. It’s getting late. There he is.”

  Stephen Thomas walked toward them, staring at the ground. When he reached them he stopped and looked up. His fair skin was pale, his blue eyes dark-circled.

  “Stephen Thomas — ?”

  “Let’s go,” he said shortly, and strode into the darkness.

  o0o

  People began drifting home soon after the light faded. Infinity was spared having to urge anyone to go, since everyone had to work the next day. Stephen Thomas surprised him by leaving so early — he could usually be counted on to close out any gathering, no matter how late it ran. He had bid goodnight to Florrie, then he had risen from his kneeling position as smoothly as if he had knelt at her feet only for a moment. Infinity wondered how he kept his feet from going to sleep.

  The AS from the campus kitchen had already collected the bento boxes and taken them away. The housekeeper rolled about, looking for other things to do. As usual after parties on campus, no litter remained. Disposable eating utensils and suchlike did not exist out here. The AS carefully placed crumpled wrapping paper in a stack by Infinity’s feet. Infinity smoothed the sheets out and folded them.

  “You should keep this, too, Florrie,” he said. “It’s as much a gift as anything else you got tonight. Nobody manufactures wrapping paper out here.”

  She hardly heard him. She had not calmed down from her reaction to Griffith. Though she trembled with weariness, excitement and fear brightened her eyes.

  “You will watch him, won’t you?” she said. “Whatever he’s about, you’ll find out and make him stop.”

  “I can’t do that,” Infinity said. “How could I make him stop anything? He’s a government representative, I’m a gardener.”

  “You’ve got to, that’s all. You’ve got to.”

  “Please try to be easy. There’s nothing I can do, and if there were I couldn’t do it tonight. And, look, if he is some kind of a spy or something, maybe you ought to be careful what you say about him, or anyway who you say it to. It might get back to him.”

  She glanced at Infinity, quickly, sidelong, and immediately fell silent.

  “I don’t mean me,” Infinity said. “I don’t like him either.” He stopped, wishing he had kept that admission to himself. “Florrie, do you need any help, or shall I leave you alone?”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “Okay, then, I just live over the next hill if you want to call me.”

  “But... you could brush my hair.”

  “All right,” he said uncertainly. “Sure.”

  Except for the three long locks, she kept her hair cropped so close that he worried about scratching her scalp with the well-worn bristles of her brush. Her papery skin felt fragile. The brush made a soft, whispery noise, like her voice. A bristle caught against one of the unshorn and braided patches. He disentangled it. The shells and small pierced stones rattled together.

  “Go ahead and take those out,” she said.

  Three diamond-shaped patches of hair lay in a diagonal line across the back of her head. There, her hair was heavy and thick. She had divided each section into two hanks and braided them with a soft leather thong from which dangled the shells and stones. He laid the thongs on the counter and brushed the long sections. She let herself relax into the chair; she pushed her foot against the floor, just once, then stopped trying to rock a chair that had no rockers.

  Infinity found it pleasant to brush her hair. He had never done that for anyone before. After a while he thought Florrie had gone to sleep. He stopped brushing. He would have to wake her —

  “Thank you,” she said. She opened her eyes. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” Infinity said. He put the brush beside the shells and stones and left her alone.

  He walked home across the darkened cam
pus, thinking about the strange day. Once he heard a noise: he stopped short and spun toward it, expecting to see Griffith gazing expressionlessly at him, half-hidden by shadows.

  The miniature horse herd’s miniature stallion stamped the ground with its miniature hoof, snorted at him, and reared and whinnied. A moment later the whole herd galloped away into the darkness, making a noise like rain. Infinity smiled. When he got home, he took a blanket into his own garden, to sleep in the reflected starlight.

  o0o

  Griffith returned to the guest house in the dark, knowing he could walk safely anywhere and anytime up here, yet unable to shake off a practiced tension. His aggressive swagger let potential assailants know he was no easy target. Here he tried to tone it down, for it did not fit the character of Griffith of GAO. On the other hand, he was not willing to be accosted even for the sake of his assignment.

  He had complied with the rules of campus — of all the orbital habitations — to the extent of going unarmed. Even Griffith of GAO would never do that in the city. Being unarmed made him uncomfortable, and he wished he had at least tried to circumvent the laws.

  He went to bed in his silent room. Lying on the thin hard futon, he listened. He heard nothing, no sign of the other guest, only the evening breeze brushing through the open windows.

  Cherenkov had talked to him.

  Griffith’s thoughts kept returning to the question of how to persuade the cosmonaut to continue talking to him, to continue answering his questions. Griffith’s mission to Starfarer seemed inconsequential in comparison to his need to learn everything he could about Nikolai Cherenkov. Today was the first time in a long time that he had felt the drive to know everything about anything or anyone. At the party, Griffith had felt as if he wore his nerves outside his skin, sensitive to every stimulus that passed. He gathered everything in: observations of Cherenkov and information about the rest of the faculty and staff of the expedition as well, the kind of indiscriminate data that would collect in the back of his mind, work like fermenting beer, and help him discover a way to complete his mission. But after Cherenkov left, the party bored him, the interactions between the people bored him; their negative opinions about the new administration bored him.

  The agreement he had made with Cherenkov must not stop him. As Griffith lay in bed, he let the prospect of the quest excite him. It pushed away the depression that had settled when he could no longer keep Cherenkov in sight. It recharged him.

  In the darkness, he drafted a quick memo to his superiors. Before he ever came here he had tried to tell them that directly co-opting the personnel would be hopeless. Now he could demonstrate it. The hope had been a foolish one to begin with. The crew of Starfarer, the faculty and staff, as they referred to themselves, would all have to be recalled in one way or another. Then the starship could be converted.

  Griffith encrypted his message, sent it back to Earth, and fell asleep. He dreamed all night.

  o0o

  Kolya wanted to go outside again, but he knew that Arachne, fussing over his radiation exposure, would go so far as to call out human help to persuade him to stay inside. Since he recognized his desire as a selfish one, he refrained from indulging in it. The only result would be that someone would be fetched, probably out of a warm bed, to come and talk to him.

  He feared he had made a tactical error in conversing with Marion Griffith. The intensity of the officer’s questions troubled him. He should have seen the problem coming when the fellow waited in the access tunnels for him. Even before that. Kolya tried to excuse himself on the grounds of having been spared the more obvious forms of hero-worship during the past few years.

  The person he looked forward to talking to was the alien contact specialist. J.D. Sauvage and her profession fascinated him. He thought that if he were younger, if he had a different background, he might have tried to go into her field himself.

  Since yesterday, he said to himself, you’ve added a party and a lunch date to your socializing. Soon your reputation as a hermit will be ruined.

  Do you even remember how to make piroshki?

  o0o

  J.D. enjoyed working at night; she enjoyed the solitude and the long uninterrupted hours of quiet thought. She might have to change her schedule around, though, in order to spend time with the rest of the alien contact team. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas kept awfully normal hours.

  She liked them all, which surprised her a bit. She liked Victoria in particular. The team leader sparked off ideas like phosphorescent waves. Satoshi was quieter, but what he said usually counted. As for Stephen Thomas...

  She decided not to think about Stephen Thomas for a while.

  She stayed awake for a long time after the party, reading, gazing out into the dark courtyard. Once she got up and rearranged the new woven mats on her floor. For all their homemade roughness, they made her happy, and a little scared. The gifts represented a welcome that made her believe she had found a place where she might be at home. This disturbed her, because she had always believed that being an alien contact specialist meant remaining an outsider in her own culture — not just the culture of her country, but the culture of humanity as a whole.

  J.D. took Kolya Cherenkov’s note from her pocket and smoothed it out. He had given her, as Victoria said, a unique gift. She did not understand why he had given it to her, but she knew it was not to be trifled with or abused. In some ways, his was the welcome that meant the most to her.

  Before she finally went to sleep, she checked her mail: the usual tsunami of junk, most of which she filtered out without even scanning; scientific journals; magazines of experimental fiction (interior landscapes, mostly; deliberately, stolidly human, but every now and again a story she could savor, save, and think about); no personal mail. Nothing from Zev. She scanned the news summary, lingering just perceptibly over the Pacific Northwest.

  The divers, as usual, received no mention.

  o0o

  Victoria propped herself on her elbow next to Satoshi, who lay in the middle of his bed with Stephen Thomas on his other side. Stephen Thomas lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed on his chest.

  “Do you think J.D. had a good time?” Victoria asked Satoshi.

  “She seemed to.”

  “I wasn’t about to say anything in front of her, but I’m so mad at the chancellor I could spit — he came early, he left early, he was too rude to stay and welcome her to campus! Gerald was there — did he even speak to her?” She tried to remember seeing the assistant chancellor anywhere near J.D.

  “I don’t think so,” Satoshi said. “We can’t take this stuff personally, Victoria. It’s all politics.”

  “They mean it personally and I take it personally, politics or not.”

  They heard a noise from the front of the house, sharp and loud, quickly stilled. Victoria sat up.

  “What was that?” She started to rise. “Oh — Feral coming in.” They listened as he tiptoed down the hall to the end room.

  Concerned by Stephen Thomas’s uncharacteristic silence, Victoria glanced over at him. The crystal lay dull and black in the hollow of his throat. He had taken off his sexy emerald jewelry, but he had not replaced the regular gold stud.

  “The hole in your ear is going to close up,” Victoria said.

  He shrugged.

  Victoria slid out of bed and went into Stephen Thomas’s room. His jewelry hung in a tangle on a rock-foam stand that someone in the materials lab had made for him. The gold stud was nowhere she could see it, so she picked out a little platinum ring and returned to Satoshi’s bedroom. She stepped over both her partners, sat crosslegged beside Stephen Thomas, and smoothed his hair away from his ear. In the darkness, she had trouble finding the hole to put the earring in.

  “Ouch, shit, that hurt!”

  Victoria leaned down and kissed his ear. “Better?”

  “Give it here, I’ll put it in.” He took the earring from her and put it on. Victoria lay down beside him and put one h
and on his hip.

  “I’m glad to know you can still talk,” Satoshi said. “You’ve been awfully quiet since we left the party.”

  “You remember that conversation we had with Florrie?” Stephen Thomas asked.

  Victoria said nothing, wishing Stephen Thomas had not reminded her about talking with Ms. Brown.

  “You hit it off pretty well with her, didn’t you?” Satoshi said.

  “Yeah, I did. I like her. I thought she’d be reactionary, but she’s more open-minded than half the people up here.”

  “You just like her because she approves of our sleeping arrangements,” Victoria said.

  “That doesn’t hurt. And you don’t have to be careful of every word you say to her. But she goes off at a different angle, sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?” Satoshi said.

  “What she said about Griffith.”

  “He was on the transport,” Victoria said. “But I hardly ever saw him. I almost forgot about him.”

  “He’s weird. When Florrie said he was a narc — after she told me what a narc was — I tried to shrug it off.” Stephen Thomas shifted uneasily. “But I think we ought to pay attention to her intuition.”

  “Oh, no, not another aura reader!” Victoria flopped forward and hid her face in Stephen Thomas’s pillow.

  “I don’t know whether she is or not, but I looked at him. Dammit, that guy doesn’t have an aura.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean he’s dead?” Satoshi asked.

  “I don’t know what it means,” Stephen Thomas said. “Since he obviously isn’t dead.”

  Victoria raised herself from the pillows and propped her chin on her fists. “Maybe they’ve been improving robot technology in secret — ”

  “Laugh if you want. He said he’s with the GAO — that may be worse than being a narc. I think he’s trouble. Even if he’s just an ordinary government accountant.”

  “There’s not much we can do about him that I can see.”