The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “What about the people who are planning to stay behind? What about the rest of us? Everyone has agreed to a certain plan. If we do this secretly, the expedition members will be people who have been lied to and abducted. They’d rebel, and I couldn’t blame them.”

  “I don’t intend to do this in secret. A transport docks tomorrow, just before lunar passage.” Victoria discussed outrageous possibility with deliberate calm. “After passage it can leave again, right on schedule. Anybody who wants to can go.”

  Iphigenie gazed blankly through her.

  “The alternative,” Victoria said, “is getting slapped down to low Earth orbit.”

  “Are you sure of your solution?”

  “Yes.”

  Victoria held out her hand and opened her fingers. As if in slow motion, Iphigenie reached out and took the module.

  “That is,” Victoria said, “I’m as sure of those numbers as I was of the others.”

  Iphigenie snorted. She, like everyone on board, was aware of the inherent uncertainty in cosmic string solutions. The uncertainty was small... but it existed.

  “I’ll look at it,” Iphigenie said.

  “Thank you.”

  Iphigenie started away. A few paces on, she turned back.

  “You know, Victoria, if I agree to this, we’ll be at Tau Ceti without a complete test of the sails. Navigating will depend on a propulsion system that’s nearly experimental.”

  “But you built them. You’re the best.”

  “Yes. Except once you get beyond a certain size, solar sails are all different. You cannot know for sure how they’ll behave.” She tossed the module in the air and caught it.

  “That’s the only copy of those numbers,” Victoria said.

  Iphigenie caught the module and lowered it carefully. The modules were abuse-resistant, but they had limits.

  “I didn’t have to join this expedition, you know,” she said grumpily. “I could have stayed home and spent my money.”

  “I know. Why did you join?”

  “Because just building the sails wasn’t enough. Nor was spending money.” She put the module in her pocket and patted it. “I make no promises.”

  o0o

  J.D. gave Feral access to her credit account so he could get in touch with his mysterious sources. J.D. herself made a call she wished she could put off.

  She expected to have to leave a message for Lykos through the web. Instead, she reached the diver quickly, voice and screen both. Lykos looked strange with her pale hair dry, standing out in loose ringlets instead of soaked with sea-water, slicked against her skull.

  “You haven’t heard from him, have you?”

  J.D. waited through the annoying, awkward pause.

  “No,” Lykos said. “I would have let you know. I have been searching.”

  “Lykos, I think it’s possible that he’s been kidnapped.”

  When J.D.’s message reached Lykos, the expression on the diver’s narrow, wild face changed from distraught to confused to angry.

  “Only one entity would do such a thing, and ‘kidnapped’ is not the proper word for it. Let us speak plainly, J.D. Because of his family’s actions, he has been taken into custody, arrested — he is under restraint.”

  “It’s possible — but if they offer to trade his freedom for your return, you’ve got to say no and you’ve got to make it public. You’ve got to make everything public.”

  “At the risk of Zev’s life?”

  “The one thing they can’t afford is to hurt him! If we can get any proof — even any evidence — that he’s under arrest, they’ll have to let him go. He hasn’t done anything!”

  “He has refused to spy for them.”

  “He’s got no obligation to spy for them, and they have no authority to make him. Oh, Lykos, don’t let them use your loyalties against you.”

  The diver spread her fingers and smoothed her springy hair with the translucent swimming webs. J.D. had seen divers on their return from weeks-long trips with the whales, and she had never seen anyone as drained with exhaustion as Lykos.

  “We cannot abandon him, J.D.”

  “I know it. I do know it. I can’t either. I promise you — ”

  “No more promises! I am finished with humans’ promises.” Lykos cut the connection. Her image faded.

  J.D. collected herself. She could not blame Lykos for her reaction, but it upset her nonetheless. She glanced over at Feral. He had only been working for a few minutes. Nevertheless, J.D. wanted to ask if he had found anything yet. She knew he would tell her when he did. If he did.

  J.D. spent the afternoon running up a large debit against her account, trying to track Zev down. She was afraid to spend too much. If she went back to Earth, she would have to pay for it herself.

  After several hours’ useless work, she canceled all the communications and cut herself off from Arachne. She looked over at Feral, who had barely moved in an hour. His eyelids flickered. He was lost in the web, lost in a fugue of communication.

  o0o

  Infinity sat cross-legged under a spindly aspen sapling. The light faded around him as the sun-tubes changed from daytime orientation to night.

  He felt discouraged. Maybe nothing would have been settled at the meeting tonight, or maybe everyone would have agreed that Starfarer should be given over to the military. But at least they would have come to some resolution if there had been a meeting.

  He smelled smoke. Burning was dangerous on the starship, so he followed the smell. The scent was vaguely familiar, but not a grass-fire.

  Kolya Cherenkov sat on a boulder beneath the overhanging branch of a magnolia tree. He held a thin burning black stick cupped in his hand. As Infinity watched, Kolya tapped the cigarette on a projection of the boulder, adding a few feathery flakes to a small pile of ashes. Infinity watched, fascinated, as Kolya lifted the cigarette to his lips and drew smoke into his mouth, into his lungs.

  Infinity had found other tiny scatterings of ashes and, now and then, smelled a wisp of smoke. But he had never actually seen anyone smoke a cigarette, not for real, only in very old, unedited movies. Back in Brazil, when he was a child, his adult relatives had passed around a pipe of tobacco on rare occasion. The smoke made them act as if they were mildly drunk. He wondered if Kolya would act drunk; he could hardly imagine it.

  Kolya breathed curls of smoke from his mouth and nose.

  The smell was unpleasant, much harsher and stronger than what Infinity recalled of the pipe smoke. He wondered why people in old movies blew smoke at each other. He would not like it if a lover blew this smell into his face. Suddenly he sneezed.

  Startled, Kolya turned. He closed his cupped fingers around the cigarette. He let his hand hang idly down. He blushed.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Infinity said. “I just...” It was all too obvious that Kolya preferred no one to know about his cigarette.

  The cosmonaut brought the cigarette back into view.

  “I suppose I had to be discovered eventually, but I hope you won’t say anything about my... vice.”

  “Everybody has vices.” Infinity believed in leaving people alone. Nevertheless, he was shocked to see Kolya doing something as dangerous as smoking. You could get cured of the damage nowadays, but the damage was unpleasant, as was the cure. So was the cause, as far as Infinity was concerned. Nobody had ever succeeded in removing all the factors that caused lung damage and still ending up with something anyone wanted to smoke.

  Kolya drew in one last lungful of smoke, then stubbed the half-smoked cigarette out against the black lunar stone. He put the cigarette away.

  “I only have a few of these left,” he said wistfully, “and then I’ll have to stop, for I won’t be able to get any more. And I’m an old man. I doubt I’ll come back from our trip.”

  Not meaning to, not wanting to, Infinity felt a sudden anger at the cosmonaut. Kolya never participated in campus meetings, never made his preferences public, never criticized the attacks on Starfarer. He
did not care that tonight’s meeting had been canceled, that meetings had been forbidden. He probably did not even know. He would not have come to the meeting if it had been held.

  “Maybe there won’t be any trip!” Infinity exclaimed.

  “What? Why?”

  “Don’t you know? How can you not know they want to turn us into a warship? How can you spend all your time with that Griffith guy and not know he’s trouble? Florrie took one look at him and knew he was after us!”

  “Ah. I did wonder why he was here... But all he seemed interested in was plunging me into nostalgia.” He rubbed his fingertips across a smooth place on the rock; he raised his head and gazed across the cylinder, past the dimming sun tubes. Far-overhead lakes, ruffled by a breeze, sparkled gray with the last light.

  “If you want this expedition to happen,” Infinity said, “you’ve got to help us. Only I don’t know how you can. Maybe it’s too late.”

  Kolya made a low, inarticulate sound of understanding, perhaps of acceptance.

  “Infinity,” he said kindly, “you are making it most difficult for me to retire as a hermit.”

  Infinity said nothing.

  “There is a meeting tonight?”

  “There was. It’s illegal, now.”

  “Truly? I have not done anything seriously illegal in many years. Shall we attend this meeting?”

  He rose and headed for the amphitheater. After a moment, Infinity shrugged and followed him.

  Chapter 10

  “Feral!”

  J.D. shook the reporter’s shoulder.

  “Feral! Come out of it!”

  Hooked deep into Arachne’s web, he jerked upright as if awakened from a deep sleep.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to have to stop.”

  “Why? No, J.D., I’ve got some good leads. A little more time — ”

  “I’m sorry. It’s impossible. This is costing too much, and it isn’t doing any good. I’m reserving a place on the next transport to Earth. They won’t sell me a ticket if I’ve run my credit past its limit.”

  “But Stephen Thomas said — ”

  “And I said I have to go!”

  “Okay.”

  Dejected, they stared at each other.

  “You like him, don’t you?” Feral said suddenly.

  “What? Who?” J.D. was confused by the abrupt change of subject.

  Feral grinned. “Stephen Thomas. You like him.”

  “I like almost everybody I’ve met up here so far.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  J.D. shrugged, uncomfortable. “I think he’s a very attractive man. What has that got to do with anything?”

  “Are you going to do anything about it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” J.D. felt herself blushing. “What kind of a question is that? Are you a stringer for gossip magazines, too?”

  Feral laughed. “No. I was just curious.”

  “I have more important things to think about!”

  Feral grinned at her, unabashed. “I think he’s beautiful, myself.” He jumped to his feet. “I’m starving! What time is it?”

  “It’s almost eight. The time the meeting would have started, if we were still having a meeting.” Just in case, she checked to see if the new rule had been reversed. It had not.

  “I didn’t get any lunch,” Feral said. “I’m going to go find something to eat. Want to come along?”

  “No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”

  “Don’t give up, J.D. I put out a lot of feelers. Some of them might touch something.”

  “I hope so.” He regarded the search for Zev as a game to be won, and no great tragedy if he lost it; nevertheless, J.D. appreciated his help. “Thank you, Feral. Whatever happens.”

  “See you later.”

  He can go on to the next story, J.D. thought. But I can’t.

  She rose and paced back and forth. She wished she were near the ocean, where she could swim until she was exhausted. Sometimes exhaustion helped clarify her thoughts: it left her with no energy for confusion or extraneous information.

  She made contact with Arachne again and requested a place on tomorrow’s transport. It was full. Almost empty coming in, full going out. Under any other circumstances she would have taken the news with resignation and waited for the next ship. This time, she used her status, demanded a place, and got it.

  She smiled bitterly. The chancellor’s refusal to accept her credentials had worked to her benefit, if being helped to leave Starfarer was a benefit. As far as the records were concerned, she was still attached to the State Department, still an associate ambassador.

  She had nothing to do now except wait, and worry. She tried to put Zev out of her mind.

  She could not help but think about what Feral had said. She wondered if she were as transparent to anyone besides the reporter. Another blush crept up her neck and face. If Victoria had noticed, or Satoshi... they must have thought her reaction to Stephen Thomas terribly amusing. She did not worry particularly that Stephen Thomas had noticed. Extremely beautiful people learned to blank it out when ordinary people found them attractive. J.D. supposed it was the only way they could manage.

  She would have to get over his extraordinary physical beauty. He was a real person, not some entertainment star she would never have to worry about meeting.

  Maybe it won’t matter, she thought, downcast again. I have to go to Earth. I may never make it back into space; I may never see Stephen Thomas, or Victoria, or Satoshi, again after tomorrow.

  “J.D.!” Victoria said.

  J.D. jumped.

  “Hi, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Victoria said. “Do you want to come to the meeting with me?”

  “I thought there wasn’t going to be one.”

  “There isn’t supposed to be one. But everybody I’ve talked to is going anyway.”

  “I don’t know... are you sure — ? I mean — damn!” She stopped and blew out her breath. “All right.” What else can they do to me, she thought, even if they do decide I’m a troublemaker?

  “Did you find your friend?”

  “No.” J.D. started to tell Victoria that she was leaving in the morning, to find Zev and try to free him, but she could not bring herself to say it.

  They crossed campus. As they walked up the last small hill before the amphitheater, they heard voices welling up and tumbling past like water.

  “Maybe we should outlaw meetings more often,” Victoria said drily. “Usually we only take up the first few rows of seats.”

  J.D. followed her along a path cut around the hillside. The daylight was slowly fading.

  “Couldn’t you run the meeting electronically, rather than having to get everybody together, having to build a place — and what do you do if it rains?”

  “If it rains, we usually postpone the meeting. If it rains tonight, I suspect we’ll all sit here and put up with getting wet. Every hill had to be sculpted; we designed one as an amphitheater. Sometimes people put on plays. As for meeting electronically... you haven’t been to a lot of electronic meetings, have you?”

  J.D. remembered in time not to shake her head. “A few. They worked all right.”

  “Small groups?”

  “Five or six people.”

  “That’s about the limit. Somehow it’s easier to interrupt somebody’s image than to interrupt them face to face.” She gestured at the flat crown of the next hill, coming into sight as they circled the smaller rise. “Besides, if people have to put in some physical effort to attend, the ones who come are more committed. The meetings are smaller, and believe me that makes a difference.”

  “Not tonight, though.”

  “No. Not tonight. Satoshi! Stephen Thomas!”

  Victoria’s partners, twenty meters ahead, stopped and waited for Victoria and J.D. to catch up.

  The path brought them to the foot of a circular slope, grass-covered, shaped like an ancient crater. Trails led up its sides to tunnel openings, where a co
uple of dozen people milled around on the hillside.

  “What are they doing?” J.D. asked.

  “Beats me,” Satoshi said. “I thought it was the custom to go inside and then mill around.”

  About half the people already there wore either standard-issue jumpsuits or t-shirts and reg pants. J.D. wished she had taken Thanthavong’s advice and found some regulation clothing to put on, but the whole subject had vanished from her mind while she searched for Zev.

  Neither Victoria nor Satoshi had changed: Victoria wore a tank top and shorts that had started out as reg pants but were no longer recognizable; Satoshi had on baggy cammies with all the pockets, and another, or the same, sleeveless black t-shirt. Stephen Thomas wore his formerly regulation clothes as an insult to the orders. Though he had turned the t-shirt right-side out, he had obliterated “EarthSpace,” and he had painted designs on the legs of his trousers as well.

  They joined the group outside the entrance to the amphitheater.

  “What’s the matter?” Victoria asked Crimson Ng.

  “Look.” The artist nodded toward the opening of the entry tunnel.

  A piece of string blocked the amphitheater.

  “All the entrances are like that.”

  Whoever had put up the string had chosen a symbol far more powerful than any gate or lock, a symbol for the fragile rule of law.

  Victoria pulled down the string. One part of her tried to justify her actions, but another knew she had passed a boundary she had never wanted to cross. She felt neither anger nor triumph, only sadness.

  She walked into the amphitheater. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and the others followed.

  Victoria had never been the first person inside the amphitheater. It felt bigger than usual. The sound of her sandals scraping the ramp echoed in the silence.

  The amphitheater, completely circular with rising ranks of stone benches all around, contained only a small platform in its center. All the plays presented here had a limited number of cast members.

  Victoria headed toward the left entrance and Stephen Thomas went to the right. Satoshi loped down the ramp, across the stage, and up the other side to the opposite entrance.

  o0o