The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Dammit, she thought, we ought to be out here fresh and rested and ready, with everyone behind us. Instead, we’re physically and emotionally exhausted, Stephen Thomas looks like the loser in a barroom fight, and the ship is behind us, all right: limping along with a crater in its side, trailing a cloud of nuclear debris. And then there are the transport passengers.

  She was glad she had been able to divert Gerald from telling her more about how the passengers felt, because right now she did not want to know.

  And even so, it could be much worse. Stephen Thomas could have been killed, not just banged around: the genetics building could have fallen on top of him and Satoshi instead of falling down around them. The missile could have detonated sooner.

  I suppose we ought to consider ourselves lucky, she thought. We’re renegades. We’re fugitives.

  But we’re alive.

  She stared at the frozen transmission, wondering what to do.

  She shook off her distress. After all, being a fugitive was a tradition in her family. Her several-times-great grandparents had escaped from the United States to Canada on the underground railroad. She smiled to herself: she was only following their lead.

  The image from Channel Two faded in beside the alien transmission. Satoshi leaned closer to study Tau Ceti’s second planet, a pretty blue-green world with a single airless satellite, a world nearly a twin of Earth. Victoria wondered where its people were, and she knew Satoshi wondered the same thing. Now that the transmission had ceased, the system remained silent all across the useful broadcast frequencies. Where were the system’s inhabitants?

  Victoria realized that some of her exhaustion was due to hunger. She released her safety straps.

  “I’m going to make a sandwich,” she said. “Anyone else want something?”

  “That would be great,” J.D. said.

  “Filet and baby French carrots for me,” Stephen Thomas said. He smiled, back to his usual self already.

  Victoria returned his smile. “I might be able to fill the order for the carrots.” Starfarer grew no beef, and the starship had left precipitously and lacking a large proportion of its backup supplies. Victoria doubted the starship had any red meat in storage, even for special occasions.

  Victoria floated out of the observation room. “Cordon bleu all around,” she said.

  “I’ll help,” Satoshi said, and followed her.

  o0o

  Kolya Petrovich limped along the edge of a low, wide, grass-covered hill. At its peak the hill dipped down to form an open amphitheater, where Kolya had spoken in defense of the deep space expedition. That was the first time he had ever gone to one of Starfarer’s meetings, the first time he had ever spoken in a public forum on board the starship, the first time since his days as a cosmonaut that he had spoken in front of an audience of living people.

  Many years ago, after he escaped from his invaded homeland, he had spoken for the public record, for cameras. He recalled it as if it were another lifetime. Someone else’s lifetime. He had believed—he still believed—that his recounting would have made a difference if the world had heard what he saw and experienced under the authority of the Mideast Sweep. But the world had never been allowed to know what he had to say, and now it was too late.

  He continued down the trail, favoring his body. He ached all over. He hoped he had only strained his muscles. A muscle strain would heal fairly rapidly, more rapidly at any rate than a torn ligament or tendon. Nothing healed the way it had when he was younger.

  There were times in Kolya’s life when his body had been badly abused. Some of those injuries he never got over, and some of them were to his soul.

  o0o

  Griffith, who pretended to be from the Government Accountability Office of the United States of America, walked fast down a path, his gaze on the ground and his thoughts light-years away.

  He needed to walk. He needed the freedom, the motion. During Starfarer’s crisis, he had been trapped inside a survival sphere for over an hour. It had seemed like days. He still found it difficult to believe that General Cherenkov had overpowered him, immobilized him. He felt embarrassed, upset, and, above all confused. He was not used to feeling confused.

  He did not like it.

  He never would have taken me, Griffith thought, not if I hadn’t begun trusting him. That was a mistake. I let my admiration for him get in the way. If I hadn’t started trusting him, he never would have taken me.

  The landscape looked familiar. He recognized the topography of a small clear stream, a clump of budding white lilacs. He had walked completely around the circumference of Starfarer’s campus cylinder. He was, of course, walking in circles.

  Griffith swore aloud. When he first came aboard Starfarer, he had envied its inhabitants. They lived in a place of beauty, a place that represented limitless freedom. But to Griffith it had come to represent entrapment and isolation and his own failure.

  He reached out to the starship’s computer web and received a null response. This was the worst system crash he had ever observed. He wondered who could have engineered the collapse of the web and its backups. Whoever did it, however they did it, they had achieved a spectacular success. A few days ago, Griffith would have applauded it. Now he regretted it.

  He looked up. A few paces farther on, General Cherenkov rounded a turn in the path. Griffith stopped.

  Cherenkov hurried past him.

  “General —”

  Cherenkov spun around, looming angrily over him.

  “I told you not to call me that!”

  Griffith stepped back involuntarily, poised for a fight. He did not intend to let Cherenkov make a fool of him again.

  Griffith was an unremarkable-looking man; this was one of his strengths. When people described him, they talked in terms of mediums: medium brown hair and eyes, medium complexion, medium build, medium height. Cherenkov was quite tall, especially for an astronaut. A cosmonaut. His height intensified his intimidating presence.

  Cherenkov eased back. “I have no wish for a rematch,” he said. “We may take it as a given, Marion, that you would win a second round.”

  “I don’t like being called Marion any more than you like being called ‘general.’ Can we call a truce on this?”

  Cherenkov turned and strode down the trail. Feeling like a supplicant, Griffith followed. He caught up after a few paces, but he had to lengthen his stride uncomfortably, or trot, to stay level with Cherenkov.

  “You never said you did not like being called Marion,” Cherenkov said.

  “The hell I didn’t.”

  “You said you did not ordinarily use your given name.”

  “We’re arguing semantics! Will you wait a minute? Where are you going?”

  Cherenkov stopped again. “When are you going to keep your promise and leave me alone?”

  The tone in the cosmonaut’s voice hurt Griffith far more than the physical pain of the fight.

  “I risked everything I had,” Griffith said. “Everything. And I lost it. To help this expedition continue.”

  “No one asked you to! No one asked you to help it, and no one asked you to sabotage it in the first place. No one here.”

  “You have no proof of your accusations.”

  “Do I need any?”

  “To turn me in?”

  Cherenkov smiled. Griffith had never noticed before that his front teeth were crooked, one slightly overlapping the other. The flaw startled him.

  “Who would I turn you in to, Marion?”

  Griffith hesitated. Starfarer possessed no security force, a fact that had leapt out at him with startling prominence when he researched the expedition. As far as he knew, these disorganized anarchists had never even discussed what to do with a criminal, much less set up any mechanism to deal with one. The alternative was mob rule, vigilante justice. When he first came on board the starship, Griffith had felt contempt of the personnel. But he had seen enough of their hotheadedness in the last few days. He could be in serious danger if Cheren
kov denounced him in public or in private.

  “You think that if I tell my colleagues who you really are, they will deteriorate into a mob.”

  “I think they already did that,” Griffith said.

  “Perhaps I should tell them what you’ve done. You hurt any number of people by crashing the web —”

  “I did not!”

  “They are still in the health center. Many are in shock.”

  “I know people were hurt. But I didn’t crash the system.”

  Cherenkov started walking down the trail again, this time at a more reasonable pace. Griffith followed him.

  “Who did, then?”

  “I don’t know.” Griffith said, both surprised and grateful that Cherenkov trusted his word. “I figured it was someone in the carrier.”

  “I’m not a systems expert. But I would have thought that to be difficult, if possible at all.”

  Griffith walked beside him in silence for a few minutes.

  “I hope it’s possible,” he said. “Because otherwise I’m the most likely suspect.”

  “But you are innocent?”

  “Of crashing the system, yes, I’m innocent.”

  “But guilty of other things.”

  “They don’t concern anyone on board Starfarer. Only me, if I get back alive. If any of us does.”

  “Why did you change your mind about the expedition?”

  “Because you wanted it—”

  Griffith stopped. Not because his words were a lie, but because they were so true. They made him even more vulnerable. First he had begun to trust Cherenkov, and now he was telling him the truth.

  “I see,” Cherenkov said. “I asked you to think and act for yourself. Instead, you tried to divine my thoughts and you tried to act for me. I don’t understand you. If you have to obey someone, what possesses you to choose me?”

  “I saw the tapes you made...”

  Griffith expected Cherenkov to tell him to shut up, but the cosmonaut continued in silence along the rock-foam trail, where banks of pink and white camellia bushes rose on either side. The two men walked parallel to the long axis of the starship’s main cylinder, along a cool, green path. The air smelled of damp grass, for a shower had passed a few minutes ago. The cloud lay a quarter of the way farther along the cylinder’s circumference, sweeping its course with raindrops.

  “You saw the tapes?” Cherenkov said. “I thought they were destroyed. Long ago.”

  “No. They exist.”

  Cherenkov shrugged. “Too late, by years, for them to do any good.”

  “What you said in those interviews moved me,” Griffith said. “Deeply. I could see you fighting to control your pain and your outrage, but I could feel it all anyway. Your words, your feelings, were like a sword...”

  “I felt nothing.”

  Marion Griffith looked up at him, uncomprehending. “No. What?”

  “I felt nothing when I made those recordings. I knew that I should feel something. I knew it was important to tell what I saw, no matter how terrible it was. But I could feel nothing. I turned all that off, months before, just to survive.”

  “If it wasn’t real, you’re a damned good actor!” Griffith said.

  “Yes,” Cherenkov replied, matter of fact.

  “You’re lying. No. I don’t mean that. You’re making it up to protect yourself from the truth. I know how to do that — to keep it from hurting anymore.”

  “Don’t rewrite my life for me! I remember how it was. I almost refused the interviews, that’s how difficult it was.”

  “You see!” Griffith heard his own voice, urgent, desperate. “It was too painful —”

  “It was difficult,” Kolya said softly, “because I no longer wanted to care. I had to force myself...”

  Griffith could think of no reply. He felt stunned and numb, as Kolya had claimed to feel.

  “Perhaps if they had ever used those tapes as I expected them to be used, if I had seen them again, things might have been different. But I told what I had seen, and no one paid attention. No one believed.”

  “That isn’t true either,” Griffith said. “I know what happened.”

  Kolya chuckled. “Marion Griffith, child spy.”

  “I was a teenager when you escaped. Then, I only knew what was public. The news stories, and the movie—”

  Kolya made a piteous sound of agony.

  “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  “If you tell me that appalling piece of adventure fiction affected your life, I’ll surely throttle you. It had nothing to do with me, and I had nothing to do with it.”

  Griffith skipped over the subject of his own teenage years and the things that had affected him when he was a dumb, romantic kid.

  “When I was in a position to, I made it my business to find out what really happened. That’s how I found your tapes. I talked to people who were involved. It wasn’t that no one believed what you said. They did. They knew others would, too. They were afraid of the public reaction. That’s why they never released your interviews.”

  “A political decision,” Kolya said.

  “Yes. They thought if they didn’t do anything, things would ease up with the Sweep. Unfortunately, they were wrong.”

  “Yes.”

  Kolya reached the foot of the slope that led up the end of the cylinder. He began to climb.

  “At the meeting,” Griffith said, “you told me that no one outside the Sweep could do anything that would help anyone inside. Why did you give those interviews? You were trying to affect the Sweep from outside!”

  “That was years ago!” Kolya said angrily. “Things change! Different actions are appropriate for different conditions.” He glanced over at Griffith. “I think you want everything to be stable, and predictable. But the world isn’t like that.”

  Griffith could think of no reply.

  They were halfway up the hill to the axis of Starfarer, moving along the switchbacks easily while the gravity decreased with every step. Though the physical angle of the slope increased, the perception was of a progressively easier climb.

  “Kolya, where are we going?”

  “I’m going to the liaison office. I don’t know where you’re going.”

  Griffith stopped. He watched Kolya continue up the path and disappear into the access tunnel near the axis of the starship. He hoped Kolya would turn around and laugh, or ask why Griffith had fallen behind. But he glided up the hill and out of sight without another word.

  Just follow him, Griffith said to himself. What can he do, if you follow him? It’s what you’ve been doing all along, and he never did anything to keep you from doing whatever you want.

  Except, of course, Griffith was no longer following Kolya Cherenkov.

  o0o

  J.D. relaxed, relieved that the audio channels back to Starfarer had closed for a while. She never felt comfortable within the view of a camera or the range of a microphone, never grew indifferent to their observation. The public argument had embarrassed her, for herself and for the sake of her teammates. Relieved at the return of her privacy, she pushed herself against her couch, tensing and stretching her muscles.

  Until Victoria mentioned it, J.D. had not realized how hungry she was. They would all probably feel better as soon as Victoria and Satoshi returned with sandwiches.

  To her right, Stephen Thomas stared at the double image, the pretty planet hovering around and through the solid dark shape of the interrupted transmission.

  “Maybe we’re supposed to—” he said. He stopped, and glanced over at J.D. sheepishly. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I keep trying to make up reasons why the transmission stopped. But I can’t think of anything that makes sense except by invoking too much coincidence to believe in.”

  “That could be what’s happened,” J.D. said. “We wouldn’t notice coincidences, we wouldn’t even have a word for them, if things didn’t happen that were too strange to believe.”

  “True,” he said. He sounded more chee
rful. Then he sighed. “But Satoshi’s right, too.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean to snap at you,” J.D. said. “We’ve been through an awful lot in the last few hours. He looks exhausted. So do you.”

  “You aren’t saying I have dark circles under my eyes, are you?” Stephen Thomas said.

  He smiled. J.D. chuckled. He had dark circles, all right. At least the bruises had stopped spreading. The cut on his forehead showed livid under a transparent bandage.

  Stephen Thomas gestured toward the holographic display. “I imagined this so often. Before you joined the team, we practiced in here. Just like the Apollo astronauts before the first moon landing. This was supposed to be another giant leap...”

  “It still is!” J.D. said.

  “I hope so. I hope it’s not just a small misstep. But I wish I knew why the message stopped.”

  As they gazed in silence at the half-completed display, the hard link chimed with a message. It was Kolya Cherenkov.

  “Hello, Kolya,” J.D. said, surprised that he had called her. Like everyone else on board Starfarer, she held him in considerable awe.

  “Do you have a moment to speak with me?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “This alien transmission,” he said, then hesitated. “It makes me suspicious of its creators.”

  “Why?” J.D. found the behavior of the alien message confusing. She knew she did not understand the motives behind it. But it had not occurred to her to suspect that the motives were sinister.

  “I wish I could say for sure. Perhaps I’m only being paranoid, perhaps these are the fears of an old man who has seen too much evil in his lifetime...”

  “The message is strange,” J.D. said. “But... it’s alien, after all. Not evil.”

  “The message feels to me like a trap. Or — bait for a trap.”

  “If the message were bait, why would it stop?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s just...”

  J.D. waited. The silence felt very long, much longer than the transmission delay.

  “Just what, Kolya?” she asked gently.

  “I...” He stopped again, then said, with intensity, “This is a mission of exploration. As I keep reminding myself. I agree with the idea that starfaring civilizations will have given up war. Intellectually, I agree.”