The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Nevertheless, she felt uprooted.

  Though the transport would not dock for an hour, J.D. left her house, empty-handed, and trudged down the path toward the cylinder’s end.

  o0o

  Victoria crept silently into Iphigenie’s room in the health center. The sailmaster lay bundled in a blanket with the edge pulled close around her face. Victoria sat down nearby, prepared for a long wait.

  “What happened?” Iphigenie whispered.

  “Somebody crashed the web. Turned off the safeguards and crashed it. It was deliberate. It...” About to say that it blasted the web to shreds, she stopped herself. It scared her to think what the crash might have done to Iphigenie. “It caused a lot of disruption. But things are getting back together. How are you feeling?”

  “I mean the orbit.”

  “It’s pretty close to what you planned. But without any refinements.”

  “Did it work, Victoria? I want to know if it worked.”

  Victoria drew in a long breath and let it out. “I don’t know yet. We won’t know till we outrun the carrier... or get caught.”

  Iphigenie moved weakly, rising from the bed, wrapping the blanket around herself.

  “I’m going back out.”

  “Do you feel up to it?”

  “I don’t like being in gravity, I’ve got to get out of here.”

  Though everyone else in the sailhouse had been hooked into Arachne through Iphigenie, and had felt the web’s disintegration only secondhand, many other members of the faculty and staff had been routinely hooked in on the web during the crash. The overworked health center staff were treating everything from headache and nausea to coma. No one even noticed when Iphigenie and Victoria left.

  Victoria helped Iphigenie out of the center. The sailmaster looked gray beneath her dark skin, and her hands were cold and clammy. But if she could improve the course by a fraction of a percent, it might make the difference between the continuation of the expedition, and its complete, permanent failure. They had gone too far now to back off from risk.

  o0o

  Once more in the crystal bubble of the sailhouse, Iphigenie glanced at the sail, at the moon, the Earth, the sun, as if she could plot out the best course without any technical support at all. She gazed across at the hard-link, warily.

  “Is Arachne back yet?” she asked.

  A strange question; easy enough to check for herself. Victoria had been querying every couple of minutes, to no avail.

  “No. No answer yet.”

  Iphigenie pushed herself toward the console. Drifting in weightlessness with the blue blanket wrapped around her, she looked like a forlorn baby-blue ghost. She reached the console and worked over it for a few minutes, every so often reaching up to pull a drifting corner of the blanket closer.

  “That’s it,” Iphigenie said. “That’s as good as it gets. You did well, Victoria. Thank you.”

  o0o

  Returning, exhausted, from the sailhouse, Victoria realized that it lacked only a few minutes till the transport’s departure. She had vowed not to go to the waiting room, not to bid goodbye to anyone who chose to leave the expedition.

  But when she reached the corridor that led to the transport access, she realized her vow was a cruel and petty one.

  She pushed off toward the waiting room.

  Ten meters ahead, someone wearing long black garments pulled herself doggedly forward, trying to maneuver with one hand while using the other to hold the excess fabric of her long, drifting skirt. Each time she let it go, the skirt crept up around her knees.

  Such heavy clothing was rare on board the starship, and Victoria could not think who might be wearing it. She caught up and glanced curiously sideways.

  “Alzena!”

  The chief ecologist continued without pausing. Her chador covered everything except her hands and her face.

  “Where are you going? Why are you dressed like that?”

  “I’m going back to Earth. I can take only one set of clothes.”

  “But you can’t leave!”

  “I must. If I remain, illegally, my family will be shamed.”

  “What about your work? The ecosystem depends on your knowledge. The whole expedition could succeed or fail — ”

  “You don’t understand, Victoria. You can’t. All the branches of your family are Western. My family is different. I have obligations that have nothing to do with my work.”

  “So you’re going to wrap yourself up in mourning — ”

  “It is not mourning, and you know it. It is traditional, and I must be wearing it when I reach Earth. It’s one thing to adopt Western dress up here, in private, quite another to appear in public — there will be cameras... My family will see me. I cannot embarrass them.”

  Victoria looked away. This was a facet of Alzena she had never known about. She would rather not have met the Alzena who would abandon a position of respect, authority, accomplishment, and freedom, in order to return to a circumscribed existence and submit herself to rule by accident of birth.

  The ecologist was correct. Victoria did not understand. She could not understand actions that seemed to her more alien than anything she could imagine encountering in a distant star system.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for your decision. I’m sorry things worked out this way.”

  “So am I,” Alzena said.

  Distressed, Victoria hurried on, leaving the ecologist behind.

  o0o

  J.D. let herself hover by the wall of the transport waiting room. She felt limp and distressed; if there had been any gravity at all here she would have been sitting slumped in a chair. Other soon-to-be-ex-expedition members filled the room. The noise level was high and harsh, but the talk and argument and recriminations and last-minute goodbyes often fell into the middle of strange abrupt silences.

  As the transport approached, the public address speaker broadcast the conversation between its pilot and Starfarer’s traffic controller. They had a direct radio link, independent of communications satellites. They exchanged information in a sort of technological ritual, just the same as always, as if nothing had happened.

  J.D. knew about the attempted sabotage of Starfarer by the disruption of the web. The web had safeguards, to protect people hooked in during crashes. Someone had deliberately overridden them. J.D. could not understand the mind of someone who would hurt people on purpose. Worst of all, it had to be someone on board Starfarer.

  The sabotage had angered a number of people to the point of changing their minds about leaving. J.D. would have been among them if she had been departing for any reason but the divers.

  She shivered, closed her eyes, and extended a tentative tendril toward Arachne. If the web was reformed, if the connection to the satellite had been restored, she could ask once more if Zev had been found.

  No reply.

  She was about to go looking for a hard-link to the computer when Victoria entered the waiting room. She paused in the hatchway and looked around. J.D. averted her gaze, wishing Victoria were seeking someone else, but knowing why she must be here.

  The transport docked with a faint low-frequency thud, a faint vibration of the walls.

  Even without looking, J.D. knew it when Victoria touched the wall nearby and brought herself to a halt at J.D.’s side.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  Victoria took J.D.’s hand. J.D. flinched, startled by her touch.

  “Please,” she said. “Victoria, I’m sorry. I have to leave. I can’t — ” Her throat tightened. If she kept speaking she would break down.

  “I know,” Victoria said. “I know it. That’s why I came. To tell you that I do understand. I’m furious, but not at you. I think you’re an admirable person. I wouldn’t have the courage to do what you’re doing.”

  “Thank you for trying to make me feel better...” Her smile felt shaky. “It isn’t working.”

  The hatch door opened and people came out. A crowd had already form
ed around the hatchway. The last transport would be packed. Half its incoming passengers were refusing to disembark. J.D. could not blame them, and besides, as Satoshi said, anyone who could be talked out of being on the expedition for any reason probably should not have joined it in the first place.

  Though J.D. was one of the passengers who actually held a confirmed reservation, she did not expect to claim her couch. The transport could accommodate all its passengers only because freefall gave them three dimensions rather than two in which to place themselves.

  “I hope you find your friend,” Victoria said.

  “Thank you.”

  The last few people straggled out of the hatchway. Hardly noticing them, J.D. hugged Victoria, who embraced her tightly. Finally they drifted away from each other, still holding hands.

  “I guess...”

  J.D. noticed a pair of youths, strangely familiar, moving through the waiting room, among the other new people. She lost sight of them.

  “I guess I’d better go.” Everyone else had already crowded into the transport.

  Victoria put one hand on either side of J.D.’s face, leaned forward, and kissed her lips. J.D. felt herself blushing, but did not pull away.

  Victoria let her hands slip away from J.D.’s face. Reluctantly, J.D. pushed off from the wall, moving backward through the hatchway.

  “Goodbye.”

  The doors began to close.

  “Goodbye.”

  Beyond Victoria, the strange youths headed for the exterior hatch. One, awkward in weightlessness, pushed off too hard. She tumbled toward a group of equally inexperienced people. The other youth, of indeterminate gender, wearing an incongruous baggy business suit and an even more incongruous hat, swam after her, caught her, and steadied her. This youth was an old hand up here, swimming in the air like water —

  Even as J.D. thought, It couldn’t be! she lurched forward through the last crack between the closing doors. They slammed open, then shut again as she barreled back into the waiting room.

  “Zev!”

  The youth in the business suit spun toward her — and continued turning. He pulled off his hat, freeing his astonishing pale hair, and flung the hat hard in the opposite direction of the spin. His rotation slowed. He touched the wall and launched himself toward J.D.

  “J.D.! I did not see you — how did you know I was coming? We thought we kept it a secret. I have a different name now. And I am Chandra’s assistant.”

  J.D. looked at him, baffled. He dodged around her, skimming past her, very close, never touching her.

  Chandra made her way to them, hand over hand along the transport wall. “Thanks for leaving me hanging like that. Is that your idea of gratitude?”

  “This is Chandra. Chandra, I forgot my new name.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You can go back to being Zev.”

  “What happened?” J.D. cried. “I don’t understand any of this!”

  Zev laughed and hovered above them. “What does it matter? We’re here now.”

  Chandra answered her. “It’s like Zev said. He’s my grad student in the art department. My agent got him a temporary new identity.”

  “Your agent must be pretty extraordinary.”

  Zev swooped between them, pushed off gently from the surface beyond their feet, and passed behind J.D.

  “She is. She knows some amazing people. She even knows people who can make publishers pay them their royalties on time.”

  “That is amazing. Zev, stop, slow down!”

  “I cannot help it, this is exciting.”

  She took his wrist as he passed, and drew him toward her. She had forgotten how warm his skin always felt. In the sea, heat radiated from him, perceptible a handsbreadth away.

  “Come here, let me hug you.”

  “But you said, about being on land — ”

  “Never mind what I said. For a minute, we can be divers again.”

  Zev smiled his luminous smile and pulled himself to her and hugged her tight. He hid his face against her neck. His breath whispered against her collarbone. J.D. felt as if she had been dying of starvation and thirst and loneliness without knowing it, until this moment, and now it did not matter because she was no longer dying.

  o0o

  Victoria hovered nearby while J.D. and Zev hugged each other, floating upside down in relation to Victoria’s orientation.

  The artist grabbed onto a handhold. She clung tight, her eyes shut, the weird swellings on her face and hands dark with increased circulation.

  She opened her eyes. They were a dull silver-gray. She seemed to look directly at Victoria.

  “I have to hook into the computer!” she said. She thrust her chin toward Victoria, arrogant, desperate. “Otherwise I’m going to start losing stuff. Why isn’t it responding?”

  “The web’s been disrupted,” Victoria said. “We’re in a lot of trouble, here — are you sure you want to stay?”

  “Of course. How long before you’ve got a functional web?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t afford to wait — do you have portables? Backups? A hard link?”

  Victoria almost snapped at her, almost said, I have better things to do than worry about art.

  But the truth was that she did not have anything better to do, with Iphigenie capable of watching the course, and also being watched over to be sure she did not slip into shock. Victoria had nothing better to do than worry. She might as well worry about something.

  “Where did you get that suit?” J.D. was asking.

  “Chandra had it made for me.”

  “It fit him better,” Chandra said, “before he decided he ought to be able to swim in it.”

  “She says it should fit more closely, but I like it this way. Is it good space-clothes?”

  “It’s unique,” J.D. said. “And so are you.”

  Victoria smiled. “Come on,” she said to Chandra. “I’ll get you to a link.” She reached out to lead the artist, who ignored her hand and pushed off past her, dog-paddling.

  “I’m not blind, you know.”

  Victoria kicked off after her, nonplused, but relieved to know that Chandra had not chosen some form of altered sight, even blindness, in pursuit of her art.

  Instead of ricocheting toward the hatchway, Victoria grabbed a handhold and stopped herself, her attention caught by a change in the familiar tones of the conversation between the transport pilot and Starfarer ‘s traffic controller. Chandra reached the hatch, turned to look for Victoria, scowled, and dogpaddled back toward her.

  “Starfarer control, no go, repeat, no go. Abort undocking procedure.”

  “What’s the trouble, transport? Your pattern’s normal.”

  “EarthSpace orders. The transport isn’t to disengage from the starship.”

  Victoria cursed softly. If the pilot followed orders, if the transport remained with Starfarer, the expedition would have the choice of aborting transition, or vanishing with a transport full of people who did not want to go. At worst, hostages, kidnapping victims; at best, a bunch of very hostile individuals.

  Chandra reached Victoria, still dog-paddling, slow but steady. She clutched Victoria’s arm and pulled. They tumbled until Victoria grabbed the wall and stopped them.

  “Come on!” Chandra sounded as desperate as a child who badly needed a bathroom. For all Victoria knew, the sensation of full sensory recorders was the same as full bladder and bowels.

  “Just a second, this is serious.”

  The discussion between pilot and controller frayed around the edges, the pilot’s voice losing some of its good-old-boy, feminine version, self-confidence, while the controller held desperately to the precise, rigorously unaccented EarthSpace communications English.

  “Transport, you are cutting your window very thin. Starfarer will not, repeat not, approach another before transition. You will be at risk of needing a tow.”

  A transport pilot would never live down making a mistake that required a tow, but this pilot�
�s actions were deliberate.

  “Hurry!” Chandra wailed.

  “Shut up!” Victoria whispered, out of practice with doing the math in her head, hampered by being cut off from Arachne. Just how long did Starfarer have, to persuade the pilot to change her mind and disobey EarthSpace orders? If Chandra felt uncomfortably full, Victoria felt desperately empty.

  J.D. and Zev swam over to her, Zev already smooth and graceful in freefall. He had taken off the suit coat, but still gave the impression of swimming within his clothing.

  “Will they be stranded?” J.D. asked. “If they undock late — will anyone rescue them?”

  “They’re probably coordinated with the carrier, hoping to stop us. The real question is, what if they don’t undock? I don’t want to go into this as kidnappers.”

  “That’s what they’re counting on,” J.D. said. “It must be.”

  “No!” the pilot shouted at the controller. Her angry voice sounded even more startling coming through a speaker which ordinarily transmitted the most civilized of exchanges. “I’ve got my orders. We’re staying.”

  The controller replied. “I hope you are all prepared for a very long trip.”

  Abandoning the sensory artist, Victoria headed for traffic control.

  o0o

  Griffith retraced the route he had followed with Nikolai Cherenkov, to the outer skin of the starship’s campus cylinder. He had no need of Arachne’s guidance, for he never permitted a computer hook-up to substitute for his acute memory. He moved with quick caution. Everyone still on board must have plenty of things to worry about, but he did not trust their preoccupation to protect him from their anger. He doubted he would have time to explain if he were cornered by an infuriated mob; he doubted anyone would believe him anyway.