The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Stephen Thomas still grieved for Merry, the member of the partnership he had always been closest to, the first of the three he had met. When Merit first took him home to meet Victoria and Satoshi, the experience was disturbingly like being taken home to meet a date’s parents for the first time. Never mind that Merry was considerably older than Victoria and Satoshi, who were both older than Stephen Thomas.

  It was a long time before he could think fondly of the awkwardness of that first afternoon.

  “Are you done now?” he muttered. “Enough maudlin reminiscences?” The tears dried into salty tracks, stinging his skin.

  Once in a while one of his students came into his office and cried. For those times, Stephen Thomas kept a couple of clean scraps of silk, remnants of a worn-out shirt. He dug around until he found one, then scrubbed at his face. He wished he could splash cold water over his head without having to see anyone first. But that was impossible.

  Now that he had stopped crying he could bring the relaxation techniques into play. He practiced until he felt certain he would not break down again.

  He returned to the lab. His students worked steadily, pretending he had not been upset when he arrived and disappeared, pretending not to notice his reappearance.

  He crossed to the water fountain, bent down for a drink, and let the stream of water splash over his face. As he straightened, he ducked his head to wipe the droplets away on the shoulder of his shirt. The water plastered a cold patch of thin silk to his skin.

  Now everybody in the lab was looking at him.

  “They’ve given us some new problems from groundside,” he said, as he should have said that morning. “We’d better sit down and talk about them.”

  o0o

  Griffith wandered through the places aboard Starfarer where people congregated. Everyone expressed complaints and outrage; gossip not only flowered, but formed seeds and dispersed them to sprout anew. Ignored in his guise of Griffith of GAO, Griffith traveled among the members of the expedition, pleased with himself for the chaos his minor suggestion had already caused. Yet the chaos bothered him, too, a little: finally he realized he was disappointed in the reactions he saw. He had assumed everyone would react this way; he had assured his superiors they would. But somewhere he held a suspicion — or had it been a hope?—that they might not.

  Without meaning to, he found himself near the hill where Brown and Cherenkov and Thanthavong lived. He walked into the garden. He could always claim to have come by to pay his respects to Ms. Brown. She had acted weird at her party. Maybe she was tired. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was senile. She must have taken health exams to be allowed to join the expedition, but maybe the stress of the trip from Earth had affected her. Or maybe the exams had made a mistake in passing her. Maybe Griffith could find a use for that.

  “Did you need something?”

  Griffith leaped around, startled, crouching, ready to react. Immediately he knew he had threatened his cover. He pretended to stumble, catching himself awkwardly.

  “Good god, you scared me,” he said, forcing a petulant tone into his voice.

  “Didn’t mean to.”

  Infinity Mendez stood, brushing the dirt from his ragged knee-pads. The rose bush at his feet had laid thin red scratches across his hands and wrists. He avoided looking into Griffith’s eyes, and this made Griffith suspect that he had not fooled the gardener in the least. He scared Infinity far more than Infinity scared him, and he knew that if he decided to, he could terrorize the gardener into keeping secrets for him. Maybe even into working on his behalf. Griffith preferred to work alone, and though he would use a terrified ally, he would never trust one.

  “I just thought I’d stop by and say hello to Ms. Brown.”

  “There’s some folks already visiting her.”

  Griffith could not tell if he was being invited in or warned away. He looked toward the hill-house, over Infinity’s shoulder, seeking even a glimpse of Cherenkov.

  “And Kolya’s out,” Infinity said in a flat, neutral tone.

  “Kolya? You mean General Cherenkov?” He feigned disinterest.

  “What are you doing up here?”

  Griffith frowned at Infinity Mendez. He was not accustomed to being questioned by gardeners. Come to think of it, he was not accustomed to going to parties to which the gardeners were invited, either. It occurred to him that the starship’s extreme democracy had probably gone too far. The word “anarchy” came to mind, and gave him another opening against the expedition.

  “What business is it of yours?” Griffith said sharply.

  “Sorry,” Infinity said, confused and scared. “Just a friendly question.”

  Griffith thought of saying that he was interested in more important things than whether the service staff put in all their time, but decided to withhold even that much reassurance. Sending somebody all the way to lunar orbit to check on trivia was exactly the sort of thing one of EarthSpace’s associates might decide to do.

  He gave Infinity a cold, wordless glance and walked away.

  o0o

  Victoria crossed the courtyard and headed toward the cool main room of her house. She hesitated on the threshold, narrowing her eyes with a twinge of annoyance. In the low light, the distillation equipment hunkered on the mats like a giant spider.

  She found Stephen Thomas, bare to the waist, sitting crosslegged on the floor in a tumble of silk shirts, carefully picking each one out of the pile, smoothing it, and folding it. He lifted the last one, the turquoise one Victoria had just given him. He stroked his fingertips across the fabric, changing the patterns of reflected light. He folded it fast, tossed it on the stack, picked the stack up and stuffed it into a cloth bag.

  All Victoria’s annoyance at him evaporated.

  “Stephen Thomas.”

  He jerked the ties shut and knotted them, stood up, and threw the bag in the corner.

  “No point in wearing everything out before we even go,” he said. “Who knows how long it will be until I can get anymore — before we come back, I mean.”

  What he meant was that he could no longer afford to buy new clothes. No one in the family could, but the restriction would hit Stephen Thomas worst. He looked upon clothing as decoration. It troubled Victoria to see him packing away his pretty shirts. She wished she had something to say to encourage him.

  He had on regulation pants, gray twill with a Starfarer patch on the front of the thigh. EarthSpace maintained the tradition of its predecessors in designing a patch for each new space mission. Starfarer’s was an eight-pointed star, flaring wide at its horizontal points, with the EarthSpace logo above and the starship’s name below. Stephen Thomas picked up a gray t-shirt from his rumpled bed and dragged it on over his head. It carried the Starfarer logo across the chest.

  On board the starship, a few people wore the patch, but only newcomers wore the t-shirt. She was surprised to see Stephen Thomas in it because he had been annoyed by it: the design was all right, he said, but who wanted to wear a gray t-shirt?

  The real benefit of regulation clothing was that it was free.

  “Stephen Thomas,” she said. “About this afternoon — ”

  He interrupted her. “What I said was inexcusable.” He reached out to her; Victoria took his hand.

  “I love you,” she said. “Maybe I don’t say so often enough.”

  “You do,” he said. “You tell me, you show me... But sometimes I can’t hear it and I can’t see it and I can’t believe it.”

  He put his arms around her and leaned his forehead on her shoulder. She spread her fingers against his back and patted him gently.

  When she stepped back, she appraised him. “I must say, you look all right in mufti.”

  “This isn’t mufti — ”

  “It is for you,” she said. “Who’s going to recognize you, out of uniform?”

  At that, he smiled.

  o0o

  J.D. sat in Nakamura’s office, which Victoria had somehow contrived to have opened for h
er. She tried to work on her novel, but mostly she worried. Too many things had happened too fast; most of them scared and depressed her. She knew too much about the perversion of technology to be confident that the expedition would fend off this assault. She wished she had half Victoria’s courage or Stephen Thomas’s outrage or Satoshi’s calm.

  She leaned back and closed her notebook. Her shoulders hurt from leaning over it. The office had no desk, only mats and cushions. If she got her own office, she would ask for one with a desk.

  Because of the shortage of wood and the absence of plastics, the furniture on campus looked odd to newcomers. If she got an office with a desk, the desk would be made of rock foam, a built-in extrusion of floor or wall. The fabric sculpture that served as a chair was far too soft to sit in for long. At first it was comfortable, cushiony; then her back started to hurt. She supposed she could requisition a bamboo chair like the ones in the main room of Victoria’s house. Or maybe she would have to make it herself.

  She had no reason to have office furniture, because she had no reason to have an office. Her work required no lab or special equipment; she could even get along without Arachne if she had to. She was attached only to the alien contact team, unlike her teammates who also held departmental positions: Victoria in physics, Satoshi in geography, and Stephen Thomas in genetics.

  J.D. had asked to be in the literature department, which could have used a few more members. Like the art department, it was far too small to represent the cultural diversity of Earth.

  Her request had been turned down. An alien contact specialist did not qualify to be a professor of literature. What she did was too much like science fiction.

  J.D. existed in limbo as far as the academic hierarchy of the campus was concerned. None of that bothered her. No matter how democratically the expedition tried to run itself, every department would have its office politics. She felt herself well out of them.

  The chancellor had not yet accepted her credentials. J.D. wondered if that was campus politics, or something bigger; or an oversight: nothing at all.

  J.D. had to admit that she liked having a place of her own where she could go out and talk to other people if she wanted; and right down the hallway from Victoria’s lab, too.

  She had no office hours because she had no graduate students, not even students of Nakamura’s to take over. It had been decided, somewhere in the planning of the expedition, that it would be premature to train more alien contact specialists before anyone knew if any aliens existed to be contacted. Even the half-dozen specialists left out of the expedition, back on Earth, had — like J.D. herself — begun to diversify.

  Her stream of consciousness brought her, as it often did, to the divers. She closed her eyes and asked Arachne for an update.

  The news sent her bolting awkwardly from the low, soft chair. She stood in the middle of her bare office, her eyes open, the line to the web broken, but the information still hanging before her like the afterimage of a fire.

  Chapter 9

  J.D. sank into the chair, pillowed her head on her crossed arms, and demanded that Arachne make a full search on the subject of the disappearance of the northwest divers.

  She was still there, shivering, when Victoria came looking for her.

  “J.D.? A bunch of us are getting together to talk — J.D.? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s the divers... They’ve moved out of their reserve.” She managed to smile. “To Canada.”

  Victoria smiled back. “That’s a fine old tradition for political exiles — but why the divers? What’s political about living with a pod of porpoises?”

  “Orcas,” J.D. said. “Nothing, from their point of view... Oh, Victoria, I can’t talk about this. Maybe Lykos will make some kind of statement, but unless she explains in public — I promised.”

  “This is why you almost didn’t accept my offer to join the team, isn’t it?” Victoria said suddenly.

  “It was involved.” She chuckled sadly. “It’s an involved story. It’s rococo. One might almost say Byzantine.”

  Victoria patted her arm. “They made it to Canada, eh? Then they’ll be all right. Don’t worry about them.”

  “It’s hard not to. They’re wonderful, Victoria. They’re so completely innocent. I mean that in a good sense. They’re untouched by fears that twist us up, they’ve learned from the orcas what it means to live without hating anyone. But when they come in contact with our world, the innocence turns to naiveté.”

  Victoria let herself rock back so she was sitting on the floor beside J.D.’s chair.

  “That could get dangerous.”

  “I know it. Oh, I hope they’re all right.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “Most of them are shy — much shyer than the orcas. I got to know one of them well — that was Zev — and I met nearly everyone in his extended family. Zev is different from the others. He’s much more extroverted. He used to visit me at my cabin. He likes ice cream. Victoria, I’m making him sound like a pet, and that isn’t right at all. He’s smart and well educated in the things that matter to the divers. He’s the diver I told you about, who wants to travel into space. I miss him... At one point we talked about his applying to the expedition.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “No. I advised him against it. There isn’t any ocean up here. I think he would have been miserably unhappy. The divers need their freedom. They travel a long way every day. I couldn’t keep up unless they chose to let me. No ordinary human can.”

  “Did you ever think what it would be like to be one of them?”

  J.D. hesitated. “All the time. But it’s illegal.”

  “In the States, it’s illegal.” Victoria gazed at her quizzically.

  J.D. wanted to tell her more, but held her silence instead.

  “Did your friend apply to Starfarer?”

  “I’m sure he would have called me if he decided to. He must have left with his family.” She sighed. “It’s just as well. I guess.”

  “It would have been interesting to have a diver along with us,” Victoria said. “I wish he’d thought of it earlier. And done it.”

  “He wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “Maybe some of us won’t like it. But we’ll be here.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you want to come along to this meeting?”

  “I guess so,” J.D. said doubtfully.

  She pushed herself out of the chair and followed Victoria into the hallway.

  “I still can’t get through to the chancellor,” Victoria said. “It irks me not to be able to get you into your own office.”

  “The one I have will do fine,” J.D. said, following Victoria’s lead in making conversation. “Except the furniture. Is it all standard, or can I get something different? Should I build it myself?”

  “You can if you like. If you know how. Or call the maintenance department. They’ll furnish your office for you.” She paused. “Or they would until yesterday. Who knows what today’s rule is?”

  They left Physics Hill and headed down a flagstone path, side by side.

  “I expected the starship to be more automated than it is,” J.D. said.

  “With things like robotic furniture factories?”

  “Yes.”

  “Starfarer isn’t big enough. We’re planning to take along quite a few spare parts, for the ASes and so on. But we won’t have the capability of building them from scratch. With an automated factory you need another whole level of maintenance, either human or machine, to fix it when it goes wrong. No matter how advanced your robotics, human beings are more flexible. A lot of people who aren’t scientists wanted to be involved in the expedition. The planning took that into account.” She grinned. “Besides, can you imagine how boring it would be if nobody was on board but scientists?”

  J.D. made a noncommittal noise. It would be bad manners to point out that most of the scientists on board associated mostly with other scientists.

  Victoria st
opped short. “A moment — ” Her eyes went out of focus and her face relaxed into a blank expression.

  Her attention returned. “Damn!” she whispered. She looked shaken. “Come on, let’s go!” She sprinted across the grass, ignoring the path.

  J.D. pounded along beside her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I set Arachne to signal me if we got any more orders. The chancellor has forbidden gatherings of more than three people. This is outrageous!” She slowed so J.D. could keep up.

  Like most people, J.D. needed to stand still and focus her attention inside her mind in order to communicate with Arachne. She would have to wait till they reached her destination to read the orders.

  She had never noticed before that swimming and running used muscles differently, and she was used to swimming. She induced a pulse of the metabolic enhancer and gasped for extra air as the adrenaline hit.

  “It really burns me,” Victoria said, sounding not the least out of breath. “The U.S. demanded that we run the expedition under your Constitution, and now it’s breaking its own articles left and right. Who do they think they are?”

  At the large hummock that covered the genetics department, she slowed and stopped. J.D. stopped beside her, still breathing heavily, her heart pounding from the enhancer. When she had caught her breath, she straightened up.

  “We think we’re powerful and rich, I’m afraid,” she said. She felt both attacked and embarrassed because she had no defense. “It’s an old habit.”

  Victoria looked abashed. “I shouldn’t jump down your throat about it,” she said.

  They hurried into Stephen Thomas’s office. Satoshi and Feral Korzybski had already arrived. Professor Thanthavong stood by the window, staring out, her arms folded. Iphigenie DuPre let herself gently into a worn bamboo chair, moving with caution outside zero g.