The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  It was too bad she would be leaving. She ought to be home packing. The EarthSpace transport a few hours ahead of the armed military carrier would be the last civilian vessel to approach until Starfarer’s situation was resolved one way or another. EarthSpace had already sent out orders for no one to disembark, but it had no way of enforcing the demand or calling the transport back. The transport had to pick up more reaction mass from Starfarer. Otherwise it would have to power itself home with only emergency reserves: a tricky, risky maneuver.

  “He was there again last night. He’s always there. Can’t I make him stop?”

  “You mean Griffith?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know. You could report him to the chancellor for harassing you.”

  “I’m sure he’s figured out something to report me to the chancellor for, and you know who’d be believed.”

  “I know he scares you. But, Florrie, you know, he isn’t really interested in you or me or anybody except Kolya. That’s why he’s always in your garden at night.”

  “He hasn’t actually done anything...”

  “Isn’t it kind of pointless to worry? You’ll be going back to Earth on the transport. I guess he will be, too, but once you’re home you’ll probably never see him again. Are you packed? There isn’t that much time. You do understand that it’s the last chance to leave?”

  She sagged in his chair as if she had suddenly reached the limit of her energy.

  “Are they sending me away?” she said, so faint he could hardly hear her.

  “No, not sending you, exactly...”

  “Why should I have to go, when I didn’t even have anything to do with the meeting? Nobody even told me it was happening!”

  “Don’t you want to go home?”

  “This is my home now! I came all the way out here — why do you think I’d want to leave again?”

  “Because everything’s changed,” Infinity said.

  “Not for me,” Florrie said.

  o0o

  One of Starfarer’s telescopes trained itself on the military carrier as it accelerated toward the starship. It hung in the center of the screen, apparently unmoving, but pushing forward at twice the delta-vee of a regular transport.

  Victoria found her gaze and her attention drawn to the image no matter how hard she tried to concentrate on all the other things she had to think about.

  The prospect of nuclear weapons on board Starfarer angered and distressed and saddened her more than any other element of the attempted takeover, even, strangely enough, the possibility that the starship would be turned into a low-orbit watchpost. The battle against arming the starship was the hardest fight the alien contact team had taken on. Victoria still sometimes felt astonished that they had won it.

  The one good thing the approaching military carrier had done was unify the faculty and staff. There were plenty of members who believed the expedition could present itself as peaceful while carrying defensive weapons, but even they were angered by the means being taken to arm the ship.

  Victoria stared at the screen, at the dark ungainly carrier with its exterior cargo of shrouded missiles.

  “They’ve been planning this for a long time,” Stephen Thomas said. “They must have. They can’t have gotten it all in place and made the decision just since our meeting.” He glanced at the image on the screen.

  Feral stood beside him. They both looked at the carrier.

  “I’m not so sure,” Feral said. “I think they realized they had to work fast. I think I would have heard something, rumors...”

  “Like about the meeting?” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Thanks very much,” Feral said. “Rub it in. Wait till I get my sources lined up, there won’t be anything on this ship I don’t know about.”

  “Sounds intriguing.”

  “And see if I tell you any good gossip.”

  Victoria pulled her attention away from the image of the carrier.

  “Stephen Thomas, please, I can’t stand that. Will you turn it off? Or let me use the screen for a few minutes, then I’ll go somewhere else and you can watch some more.”

  “Sure.”

  Stephen Thomas and Feral stood aside for her.

  “Is this private?” Feral asked.

  “I’m calling my great-grandmother. She’ll have heard what’s happening, she’ll be worried.”

  Stephen Thomas glanced away, his expression frozen. He had to make a call to Earth, too...

  “What’s the carrier’s latest ETA?” Feral asked. “Will it get to us before we reach transition point?”

  For a second Victoria could not figure out why Feral would ask Stephen Thomas a question to which he already knew the answer.

  “We can’t tell,” Stephen Thomas said. “It depends on how efficient Iphigenie’s orbit is and how much extra acceleration the carrier’s got — which is classified information.”

  Some animation returned to his face and entered his voice. Feral had asked just the right question to distract him, and he had given him an opportunity to lecture a little.

  As Victoria requested an Earth connection through the web, she wondered if Feral knew about Stephen Thomas’s rocky interactions with his father, or if he had simply noticed his unease. Stephen Thomas did not often open up to anyone on such short acquaintance. She wondered, absently, if Stephen Thomas and Feral had slept together last night. Probably not: no one in the partnership found much attraction in one-night stands. It would be uncharacteristic of Stephen Thomas to start something that would have to end so soon, with Feral leaving on the transport.

  “The satellite relay is currently overloaded. Please wait, then try again.”

  Impatiently, Victoria complied with the unusual request.

  “We’ll get to the cosmic string before the carrier gets to us,” Feral said.

  “How the hell do you know that?” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Because it wouldn’t be aesthetically pleasing the other way around,” Feral replied. “And besides, if the carrier gets here before we hit the string... I won’t be allowed to report the story.”

  “Feral,” Victoria said, “do you know the old joke where the punch line is ‘What do you mean “we,” white man?’“

  “You’re right,” Feral said, grinning. “That is an old joke.”

  “So, what do you mean, ‘we’?”

  “You don’t think I could leave now, do you? This is the best story I’ll ever get the chance to cover! I’m one of you.”

  “You can’t sign on at the last minute — ”

  “The last minute! I only applied about eight hundred times!”

  “And you were turned down. I’m sorry, but — ”

  Feral laughed. Stephen Thomas started to chuckle.

  “It isn’t funny!”

  “But it is, love. I’m sorry, it is.”

  “You’re trying to pull off the biggest theft in the history of humanity,” Feral said, “and you want me to worry about application rules?”

  That brought her up short.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. Maybe it sounds nuts, but if we use this rebellion as an excuse to throw out our laws and customs, we’ll be in worse trouble than if we’d let Starfarer be taken over.”

  Returning to Arachne, she tried once more to make the connection. Once more she received the “All lines busy” message.

  Stephen Thomas and Feral, both made somber by her comment, looked over her shoulder.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Everybody calling out, just like me. Explaining why they’re going. Or why they’ll be back sooner than they expected.”

  All the members of the team, and everyone else on the faculty, had spent the whole morning making sure that everyone knew that they had to decide, immediately, whether to go or stay. Satoshi was off trying to reason with his graduate student, Fox, who had to leave and did not want to.

  It was only a few hours till lunar transit, a few more hours till intersection with the cosmic str
ing... or takeover by the military carrier.

  Victoria made a third attempt to connect with the web.

  “Your communication request is in the queue. Please be patient.”

  Victoria frowned. “This is weird, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Stephen Thomas said. “Even if everybody up here called at the same time, Arachne’s got plenty of channels.”

  They looked at each other.

  “We’re being cut off,” Feral said.

  “I don’t...” Victoria let her voice trail away.

  “It’s easy. Just interfere with our access to the relay satellite. Damn! I got two stories out, but the third — and the one I haven’t done yet, the live report on reaching transition...” He tangled his fingers in his thick hair and turned away with a shout of anguish.

  Victoria stared at the blank screen. Not to be able to talk to Grangrana, maybe ever again... She slumped on the bench.

  Stephen Thomas knelt behind her, put his arms around her, and enfolded her.

  “She’ll understand,” he whispered. “She’ll know you tried. She’ll understand.”

  Victoria put her hands over his and held him tight. A tear splashed down and caught where their fingers meshed, between his fair skin, her dark skin.

  Chapter 12

  Victoria kicked off from the mouth of the entry tunnel and swam into the sailhouse. Iphigenie, entranced in Arachne’s web, drifted in the center of the crystalline cylinder, in the midst of the eerie harmonies of the sail’s controls. Only a few other people floated, scattered, within the sailhouse. This should have been a celebration. The changes made a celebration impossible.

  The moon’s shadow sped toward Starfarer as the moon caught up with the starship. With Starfarer‘s orbit widening, the moon would pass below. By then the enormous solar sail would have deflected the starship from its original course, setting it to skim the surface of the moon and arc out of the plane of the solar system, straight to the nearest point of the local strand of cosmic string.

  Observers on Earth saw the full moon about to occlude a bright new star.

  Victoria waited in silence until Iphigenie’s eyelids fluttered. The sailmaster gazed around, disoriented.

  “Victoria...”

  “All set?”

  Iphigenie’s mouth quirked up at one corner, a wry smile. “I sure wish I had some ground support.”

  “You can do it without.”

  “Of course I can,” Iphigenie said.

  She let herself spin, visually checking the starship cylinders, the sail, the moon, and beautiful blue-white Earth in the distance.

  “I keep imagining I can see the carrier already,” Iphigenie said. “And the bombs...”

  “Soon.”

  “Too soon. It’s going to be close. And the transport, Victoria — the pilot’s got to take on reaction mass and undock as soon as she can. Otherwise we’ll have a civilian transport along for the ride. The last thing we need is a ship full of kidnapping victims.” She pressed her hands against her tight, smooth braids. “Can we even communicate with the transport? Or are their systems ‘overloaded,’ too?”

  “We’re realigning an antenna,” Victoria said. “The transport will hear us. We might get one voice link to Earth. But that’s it.”

  “I wanted a test,” Iphigenie said. Her eyelids fluttered.

  “How close do we have to cut things?”

  “I won’t know until after lunar passage. We won’t have more than a couple of hours. Everybody who’s leaving is going to have to cram themselves onto the transport fast. Are there a lot?”

  “Not as many as I was afraid there would be.”

  “They’ll all fit on one transport?”

  “It will be crowded.” Victoria shrugged. “They’ll manage.” She did not want to think about who was leaving. It made her too unhappy, too angry.

  “I’ve got to concentrate,” Iphigenie said. “Do you want to link in?”

  “Yes!”

  She slipped into Iphigenie’s multidimensional mathematical space. Images poured through her connection with Arachne. Starfarer fell behind the moon.

  Iphigenie drifted in her accustomed position, all her senses focused on the sail and the connection between Arachne and the sail, measuring control in micrometers.

  The craters and maria on the sunlit limb of the moon vanished abruptly into darkness at the terminator.

  The sun disappeared behind the Earth; the Earth disappeared behind the dark limb of the moon. Darkness overtook the starship. The bright sail dimmed. In starlight, it began to collapse. In the illumination of Iphigenie’s instructions, Victoria felt the slackening sail’s control strands tighten and shift and move.

  The dark moon looked huge, a great black shadow in space. Starfarer plunged toward it.

  Then the ship passed over it, as if over the dark depths of a sea. For a strange, unsettling time Victoria felt as if she were traversing the airless surface in a hot-air balloon, impossibly high.

  As Victoria’s eyes grew accustomed to the change in contrast, she saw features in the shadows, faintly illuminated by starlight.

  Suddenly Iphigenie shouted in anger and in pain. An instant later Arachne jerked the web’s connections from Victoria, flinging her into darkness and emptiness. Victoria gasped for breath and fought for consciousness.

  The light was very dim. Far beyond the spinning cylinders of the starship, the moon lay shadowed with starlight, craters black at the rim, fuliginous inside. On the other side of the sailhouse, Victoria could see the sail only as a shadow against the starfield. But she knew that without Iphigenie’s control, without the solar wind to stabilize it, it would collapse, tangle, destroy itself.

  The starship plunged toward the surface of the moon. The illusion of stillness changed abruptly into the reality of tremendous velocity.

  The harmony of the control chords collapsed into dissonance. Victoria heard the other people in the sailhouse, all shadows, shouting in confusion, moaning in pain. They, too, had been hooked in.

  Awkward with shock, she dog-paddled toward Iphigenie, who tumbled, rigid and quivering, through the air.

  “Iphigenie!”

  She had a pulse, but she did not respond to Victoria’s voice or touch. She had taken the brunt of Arachne’s abrupt withdrawal. Outside, the sail began to collapse upon itself. Iphigenie’s eyelids flickered.

  “Hard connection...” the sailmaster murmured.

  Victoria grabbed her shirt and towed her toward the backup console at the edge of the sailhouse. She had never seen anyone use it, for the interface with Arachne made it obsolete. Unthinking, Victoria sent Arachne a signal to enliven the console. Of course nothing happened. Victoria felt foolish, and crippled. Losing her connection with the webworks was like losing a limb. Its phantom remained, perceptible but useless.

  Victoria slapped the controls of the console. It registered activity. It connected with the starship’s computer. Victoria let out her breath. If it had been Arachne itself that was damaged, rather than the computer’s connections to the outside world, the expedition would have ended right there.

  “Iphigenie, are you all right? It’s on, it’s here, what should I do?”

  “Just... feed in the numbers...”

  Iphigenie reached for the interface, but her long slender hands trembled. Her eyes rolled back and she fainted.

  “Iphigenie!”

  First Victoria had to remember her password, which she had not used in months. With the direct connection, the web recognized the pattern of her brain-waves. At the first try she mistyped it. Whoever had to type anything anymore? Victoria never typed. On the second desperate try she got it right. Then she had to search for the files in which she had so easily immersed herself, under the sailmaster’s tutelage. All Victoria could do was change Starfarer’s path by rote, without the minute alterations Iphigenie would have made as she flew.

  The other people in the sailhouse, recovering, paddled toward her through the dissonant notes of chaos.
/>   “What happened? Is she all right?”

  “I hope so,” Victoria said. “She talked. Get her to the health center. Anne, please, would you log in and try to keep the tension even on the lines? Maybe there’s a control program here somewhere, I don’t know.”

  She heard at the edge of her hearing and saw at the corners of her vision that others were helping, working, taking Iphigenie to aid. Letting them go, she disappeared into the mathematical space that controlled the starship, seeing only the strange dimensions and hearing only a cacophony that she urged toward harmony.

  o0o

  The moon’s gravity drew the starship out of the plane of the moon’s orbit. In the original plan, Starfarer spent the next six months in a shakedown cruise. The alternate path drove the ship immediately to the nearer but more complex transition point.

  If the new plan succeeded, Starfarer would escape before the military carrier arrived with its nuclear arms.

  The tones blended. To Victoria’s ear the music lacked the simple beauty of Iphigenie’s solutions.

  The moon passed beneath the starship. The moon’s sunlit limb changed from a bright flaring line, to a bow, to a crescent: dark of the moon to new moon to half moon in the space of a few minutes.

  The sail caught the sunlight again, silver, shimmering. The wrinkled center filled; the edges straightened.

  Starfarer passed beyond the moon.

  o0o

  Within the cylinder, J.D. paused when the moon’s shadow cut off the light to the sun-tubes. She looked out the window of her house to watch the eerie midday eclipse pass over the land. It lasted too brief a time for the auxiliary power to kick in and illuminate the campus.

  The light returned. Everything had, J.D. assumed, gone smoothly.

  She glanced around the main room of her house. Mats given to her at the welcoming party remained rolled up and stacked. She had put off laying them out till she finished building her shelves. Slabs of rock foam lay just inside the door, unused, perhaps never to be used. Her books remained in their boxes. She could not take them back with her, for the transport would be too crowded. Many of the people leaving felt like refugees, forced to abandon everything. J.D. had heard the sadness and distress and anger in their voices. She sympathized with them, and knew she should feel lucky, if she had to leave, to be leaving before she could put her roots down very far.