The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  She suspected it was ubiquitous.

  Strangely enough — for someone had arranged to broadcast the alien message — neither living planet showed any obvious marks of civilization.

  The alien message, still increasing in density, yet still incomprehensible, emanated from a structure on Tau Ceti II’s large satellite.

  Directly ahead, the satellite expanded perceptibly as Chi sped toward it.

  Like its planet, it was three-quarters full. It was bigger than Earth’s moon, younger, rougher, wilder. It spun on its axis, rather than rotating with one face locked toward its world. It was too small to retain any atmosphere. It had craters and plains, maria, like Earth’s moon, but it also had active volcanoes and great canyons where faults had cracked and opened. At the top of the satellite’s dark limb, a pinpoint of light marked an expanse of glowing molten rock. J.D. recalled a line of poetry, written by Coleridge, disdained by astronomers for describing an impossible astronomic arrangement.

  “‘The hornèd Moon, with one bright star/Within —’”

  “‘ — the nether tip...’”

  Victoria Fraser MacKenzie completed the line of poetry. Entering from Chi’s main body, the director of alien contact for the deep space expedition dived through the holographic image of the maze and joined the observers’ circle.

  J.D. grinned at her colleague. Victoria grabbed the top of her couch and spun around into it, graceful and comfortable in weightlessness. The most intense of J.D.’s teammates, the physicist moved with economy and precision. Her presence was so powerful that people were always surprised, when they met her, to discover that she was quite small. J.D. was a head taller than she.

  Planet-light sparkled in her very curly short black hair, and created delicate highlights on her dark skin. She fastened one of the safety straps and smiled across the circle at J.D.

  “Coleridge, vindicated,” J.D. said.

  Victoria chuckled ruefully. “And revenged — he sent his albatross along with us.”

  J.D. laughed, too. She could laugh, now that the danger was over. Laughter might be the only sane reaction to what had happened.

  “I did sort of feel like that missile was an albatross around my neck,” she said. “Especially when Kolya said not to let it go.” Her arms still ached from wrestling the nuclear warhead out of Starfarer’s thick, rocky skin, from holding on to it until she could safely let it go.

  If it had exploded a few minutes sooner... she thought. If I’d slipped, and it crashed into the wild cylinder...

  She shivered, remembering.

  The missile’s strike and detonation had left Starfarer alive, damaged but repairable. Now, the starship followed Chi at several hundred thousand kilometers’ distance, escaping a cloud of nuclear debris.

  “I wonder,” J.D. said, “how the alien beings feel about albatrosses.” It worried her, what they must be thinking. A nuclear bomb was a lousy calling card.

  “I wonder what they think about our simple-minded signal. Their first one is so complicated, and this one—” Victoria shrugged with perplexity. She turned her attention to the half-formed pattern, gazing at it hungrily, as if she were starving and it was nourishment.

  The alien contact team had speculated about the proper first message to send to alien beings. They had tried to create a Rosetta stone, a key to human language and science and culture that could be translated and comprehended by an alien intelligence. But they had to do it without the other half of the stone, the idiom into which the knowledge must be translated. They used universal constants, the table of elements, representations of electron orbitals: all the resources of a technological culture.

  Soon they would know if their attempts had succeeded. Chi heralded its approach with a broadcast: a high-speed, compressed, multi-copy burst of information in laser light. But compared to the alien labyrinth, their message was simple, graphic, straightforward.

  J.D.’s pulse beat through her body, and excitement sparkled in the corners of her vision. She ran her hands through her short straight brown hair and made herself relax, pressing the tension out of her heavyset body, letting it flow away through her fingers and toes. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was swimming in Puget Sound with the orcas and the divers. Zero g had a similar, freeing effect.

  A breeze brushed her cheek as Satoshi Lono dove through the labyrinth and passed on her left. The team’s geographer touched the transparent far wall, pushed off and somersaulted, and came to rest against his zero-g couch. He loosely fastened a safety strap, his athletic body curving forward against the restraint as he scrutinized the alien message.

  “God, it’s slow,” he said impatiently. “You have to wonder if they think we can read.”

  “Maybe we can’t, as far as they’re concerned,” J.D. said.

  “You’re so calm about this,” he said.

  J.D. did not feel calm. She glanced over at Satoshi, wondering if she should have heard irony in his voice. But he smiled at her with genuine regard.

  It was too complicated to try to describe the truth of what she felt.

  Zev, the young diver, floated into the observer’s circle backward, slipping through the labyrinthine hologram as if it were the surface of the sea.

  “Come on, Stephen Thomas,” he said. “Just swim.”

  “Swim, huh? Swimming in air is a pain in the ass.”

  Stephen Thomas Gregory broke through the curtain, paddling awkwardly from the main body of Chi. His awkwardness in zero g was a shock, for under ordinary conditions he moved with assurance, poise, and self-confidence. If Satoshi was the most resolute athlete of the team, Stephen Thomas was the most gifted.

  “Are we there yet?” Stephen Thomas asked, putting on a cheerful voice.

  “Almost,” Victoria said, smiling at her other partner.

  The geneticist grabbed the headrest of the couch in the quadrant to J.D.’s right, dragged himself into position, and fastened both restraints. His body language contradicted his tone, his joke. He lay within his couch, looking uncomfortable. He hated zero gravity. The alien contact department balanced on the brink of snatching success from dispute and failure; even that could not erase Stephen Thomas’s tension and apprehension.

  His long blond hair drifted loose across his face, hiding the cut on his forehead. Both his eyes had blackened remarkably since the accident. The livid bruising of his pale skin almost made it possible for J.D. to forget how strikingly beautiful he was. He tucked his hair behind his ears, absently, impatiently, muttering an offhand curse.

  Zev let himself drift near J.D. She reached out and touched his hand. He clasped her fingers. If they had been in the sea, their touching would have been more intimate. Zev had just begun to learn land manners, and sometimes J.D. had to remind herself of hers.

  “Please strap in, Zev,” Victoria said.

  J.D. gave Zev’s hand an encouraging squeeze and let go. Obediently, but reluctantly, he took the auxiliary couch to her left and strapped himself in.

  Victoria, Satoshi, Stephen Thomas, and J.D. occupied the couches at the cardinal points of the observer’s circle. That was as it should be. But Zev’s presence was quite contrary to plan.

  Zev is so young, J.D. thought. He’s too young to be on board Chi, too young even to have joined the expedition. Still, I’m glad he’s here, I’m glad he’s with me.

  Fascinated yet dispassionate, Zev gazed around, as interested in the reactions of the four ordinary human beings as he was in the slowly changing alien image, or in the stars beyond the transparent shell of the observation chamber.

  Zev lounged between his couch and the loose safety straps, as easy in zero g as any twenty-year veteran. He let his arms hang relaxed before him, with the palms of his unusually large hands turned toward him and his long, strong fingers gently curved, gently spread. The swimming webs between his fingers looked like delicate sheets of amber. His skin was a deep mahogany color, several shades lighter and redder than Victoria’s. His hair was very blond, lighter tha
n Stephen Thomas’s.

  The message shivered again. It was now almost solid to the eye, yet still it contained no perceptible information. J.D. did not understand why the alien source transmitted with such excruciating slowness. The message arrived at a slow, unchanging rate, without any acknowledgement of the message the team broadcast in response.

  Maybe it’s just a beacon, J.D. thought. Or — maybe the alien message is acknowledging us, and we just don’t understand. Maybe they’re slow, deliberate, dignified. Maybe the constancy of the message means, to alien consciousness, that we’re noted and anticipated.

  “Victoria,” J.D. said, “what if we pull out one copy of our message and slow it down? Broadcast it at the same rate this one is arriving?”

  “Couldn’t hurt to try,” Victoria said.

  Tentatively, warily, J.D. let her eyelids flicker.

  “Be careful!” Victoria said, her voice tense and apprehensive.

  J.D. glanced toward her. Victoria grimaced and shook herself all over.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” J.D. said. “Don’t worry. I don’t want to get caught in another web crash, either.” She closed her eyes and reached through her link to check the information and communication computer that formed the nerves and brains of Starfarer. She had not been deeply involved with Arachne during the crash; when the web fell apart she had not been emotionally and intellectually bruised, as had Victoria, as had Iphigenie DuPre, the master of Starfarer’s solar sail. Nevertheless, J.D. approached the web cautiously. Since the crash remained unexplained, its cause undiscovered and unrepaired, it might happen again, at any time, for any reason. Or no reason.

  J.D. reached out, but Arachne remained self-involved, intent on the repair of its web.

  J.D. opened her eyes. “Arachne’s still out,” she said.

  “Never mind, eh?” Victoria bent over the hard link that extended from the arm of her couch. “I’ve got Chi working on it, it’s almost done.”

  Touching Starfarer’s auxiliary computer systems did give J.D. some feel for the status of the starship. The parallel spinning cylinders sailed into the Tau Ceti system. The solar sails reoriented the starship, pressing it into a course that led to the second planet, decelerating it.

  Back in the solar system, Starfarer had approached its transition point at dangerously high velocity, fleeing the military carrier sent to stop it. Without Iphigenie DuPre’s experience with solar sails, without her preparations and Victoria’s backup, the starship would have failed to connect properly with the cosmic string. It would have failed to reach transition energy; it would have lost its path to Tau Ceti. The expedition was lucky to have Iphigenie along. Whether she was lucky to have joined it was another, more difficult, question.

  J.D. felt a great relief, observing the course changes.

  Iphigenie must be all right, she thought. She must have recovered from the shock if she’s in control of the solar sail.

  I should start thinking of it as the stellar sail, J.D. thought, now that we’ve left our own system.

  “One copy of our message,” Victoria said, touching a key on the hard link. “Now, a control program...”

  “Be sure you tell them we didn’t bring the bomb along on purpose,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Any suggestions on just how I should do that?” Victoria said.

  “I wish,” Stephen Thomas said. He glanced across at the labyrinth. “I wish I could translate that, too.”

  Their schematic, simple greeting was hardly designed to convey complicated explanations, such as “We didn’t mean to explode a nuclear warhead inside your system. Some people back home didn’t want us to leave Earth orbit. The missile we dragged through transition was an attempt to stop us.”

  “Maybe they’re waiting for a message from our leader,” Satoshi said. His pleasant low voice turned uncharacteristically bitter. “Our silent leader.”

  “Oh, come on,” Stephen Thomas said. “Chancellor Blades is okay.”

  Satoshi made an inarticulate sound of distaste. J.D. had observed, even on short acquaintance, that Satoshi got along with everybody. He even got along with the assistant chancellor, Gerald Hemminge, though most people found Gerald abrasive. It startled J.D., as it startled Stephen Thomas, for Satoshi to take an instant dislike to anyone. But he did not like Starfarer’s new chancellor.

  “He is,” Stephen Thomas said. He glanced around, as if for confirmation.

  “I’m sure he is,” J.D. said. “But I’ve never met Chancellor Blades.” Though he had put in an appearance at her welcome party, he had left before she arrived.

  “He’s a little shy,” Stephen Thomas said. “Reserved. He comes off looking aloof. And I’ll bet he felt off balance, coming on board and knowing everybody suspects his motives.”

  “You can hardly blame us,” Victoria said, glancing up from the link. The United States had put tremendous pressure on EarthSpace to appoint Blades as chancellor. Everyone assumed his real task had been to oversee the dismantling of the deep space expedition, and of Starfarer.

  “He stayed with the expedition,” Stephen Thomas said stubbornly. “He didn’t get on the transport to go home. That says something for him. And it’s more than you can say for Gerald,” he said to Satoshi. “You ought to at least give him a chance.”

  “I shall,” Victoria said. “As soon as he gives me a chance. As he never troubled to return my call, I have no way of judging him.”

  Victoria set back to work, every so often glancing at the alien transmission.

  J.D. watched it, too. Any pattern it might be forming continued to elude her. Her mind kept trying to make sense of the speckled image, but so far all its structure remained in her imagination.

  I think I see something the way people used to think they saw faces and buildings on Mars, J.D. realized. The way Stephen Thomas thinks he sees auras. But I’m making it all up.

  “That’s it,” Victoria said. “One copy of our greeting, transmitted at the same rate as the alien message.” She touched the keyboard. “Sent. Sending, anyway.”

  “It sure is slow,” Satoshi said again.

  “Maybe its batteries are running down,” Stephen Thomas said dryly, “and there’s nobody to replace them.”

  “Oh, don’t say that!” J.D. said, distressed.

  “Our luck has been ridiculously good,” Stephen Thomas said. “It’s too much to hope that nothing will go wrong.”

  J.D. started to laugh. When she heard the high note of hysteria in her voice, she struggled to control herself.

  “J.D., what’s so funny?”

  After a moment, J.D. stopped laughing long enough to wipe the tears from her eyes.

  “Nothing’s funny! Stephen Thomas, how much bad luck do we have to have, to balance out any good? Half the faculty is back on Earth while their governments sulk, Arachne’s operating on the level of an artificial stupid, you and Satoshi nearly got squashed, and we had to steal Starfarer to get out here at all—”

  “We didn’t steal it!” Victoria exclaimed. “We just... kept going as if nothing had changed.”

  “That isn’t how they’re looking at it back on Earth,” Stephen Thomas said. “It isn’t how the folks on the transport who are stuck here are looking at it.”

  Victoria’s gaze caught his, then broke away.

  “We had no choice,” she said.

  J.D. wished she had not brought up the subject of stealing the starship, at least not in those terms. She knew perfectly well that Victoria felt sensitive and defensive about their means for continuing the expedition. It had been Victoria’s proposal to defy their instructions to drop into a low Earth orbit, where the starship would become a military watching post. At Victoria’s instigation, Starfarer had continued on course to transition.

  J.D. wiped her eyes again, trying to think of something to say to ease the tension.

  “There’s definitely some structure forming in this thing.” Satoshi kept his attention on the transmission; h
e kept his voice quiet and low and calming.

  J.D. forgot her embarrassment; she forgot Victoria’s aggravation with her and Stephen Thomas.

  J.D. searched for the structure, the evidence of sense, that Satoshi claimed to see.

  “I’m not getting anything out of it,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Me, either, I’m afraid,” J.D. said.

  “No, look, there, it’s a very fine pattern, a kind of filmy configuration...”

  “Maybe,” Victoria said doubtfully, hopefully.

  “Why has it stopped?” Zev said. “It isn’t changing anymore.”

  “What? It—” J.D. protested, then fell silent, fearing that what Zev said was true.

  Victoria grabbed for the hard link again.

  “He’s right,” Victoria said. “It’s the message. The antenna’s okay. So’s the receiver, and the hologram imager. The message has stopped.”

  “Shit,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “No kidding, Stephen Thomas,” Victoria said. “You had to wish for more bad luck.”

  o0o

  Feral Korzybski felt like an old-fashioned serial computer trying to solve a parallel problem. The free-lance journalist was drawn in so many directions that he could easily spend most of his time moving from one story to the next, instead of with the stories themselves.

  Intellectually, he could handle several lines of thought at once. That was not the problem. The problem was that without Arachne’s web, the only place he could be was wherever he was physically. One place at a time. The place he most wanted to be, the place that drew his heart and his wishes, he could not reach. He would have given anything to be on board the Chi with Stephen Thomas and the rest of the alien contact team. The best story in his lifetime, in the lifetime of human beings, and he had to cover it from a distance.

  The limitations were driving him crazy. He could not go with the team. Nor could he participate by way of virtual reality, immersed in a holographic broadcast of the alien contact team’s experience, an unseen colleague observing everything from the point of view of a camera. The ship’s computer was not yet up to it. Feral could only participate through a hard link, wishing he were in the observers’ circle beside Stephen Thomas, in one of the empty auxiliary couches.