The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Who knows, it might be the rule in the interstellar civilization. Tau Ceti is near our sun, and its world is uninhabited. So maybe they left it alone so we could have it.”

  “Pretty damned altruistic,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Or so many planets are temperate that a few more or less aren’t any big thing.”

  “And they expect us to colonize the place?”

  “It’s a possibility,” J.D. said. “Though if it’s true I’m a little surprised. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of upsetting the evolution of an independent ecosystem. And that’s what humans would do.”

  “Other humans,” Satoshi said. “Not us. Human colonists will have to come on some other ship.” Colonization was against Starfarer’s charter, the agreement every expedition member had signed. This was a research expedition, and it would do its best not to introduce Earthly contamination — protozoan, plant, or animal, sentient or not — to new living worlds.

  “Everyone accepted the charter,” Victoria said. “That doesn’t keep folks from getting into arguments about it. Fairly passionate arguments. People who disagree with the charter consider the expedition the opening of an outer frontier.”

  “I’m glad I’m not in charge of settling that argument,” J.D. said.

  Tau Ceti burst above the horizon, and the Chi emerged into daylight as suddenly as it had plunged into night.

  The little ship trembled as the engines fired. The team members waited and watched. The ship took them down.

  J.D.’s couch moved beneath her, gradually tilting into gravity mode, turning into a chair. The gravity of Tau Ceti II’s satellite took hold of the Chi as its engines engaged and decelerated the craft from free fall. Victoria and Satoshi settled into their new positions as if they barely noticed the change. Stephen Thomas relaxed for the first time since they left Starfarer. Zev looked around and under his lounger, slipping out of the safety straps, then slipping back in and stroking the soft arms of the chair. J.D. enjoyed a moment of watching him discover and analyze something new about his new environment.

  “So much has changed... “ Stephen Thomas said. “I wonder how many of us will decide that the most sensible thing is to settle here? Assuming the place is habitable. Maybe that’s preferable to going home — and going to jail.”

  “What an appalling suggestion,” Victoria said.

  “Going to jail? I agree.”

  “Settling here instead of going home with what we’ve learned. If we disappear, it will be a generation or two before anybody on Earth considers another starship. I’m glad to be here — but I’m not willing to give up Earth in order to stay. I’m not willing to break my word.”

  “It’d sure make my life easier,” Stephen Thomas muttered, as if he were speaking to himself. He might as well have been; neither of his partners replied.

  As the Chi approached its destination, the image of the dome faded out and left the view through the transparent floor unobstructed.

  A cracked and jumbled landscape sped beneath the Chi. Volcanic and gravitational activity had created a wasteland of exploded stone, severe lava-fields, and great volcanoes.

  “If there is anybody on Tau Ceti II,” Satoshi said, “this satellite must give them quite a show.”

  “It’s not locked with one face to the planet,” J.D. said. “There’s a theory, that if human beings had been able to see their moon turning on its axis, early cosmology would have been much different. We would have known the moon was a sphere. We might have skipped the Copernican model of the universe altogether and gone straight to Galileo’s ideas. We might have had calculus and even quantum mechanics a couple of millennia earlier.”

  Stephen Thomas slouched forward in his couch. “Nnnggg, Grakileo see moon.” He imitated a Neanderthalian Galileo. “E gurrr si muove. Earth moves! Grakileo deduce E=mc2!”

  J.D. giggled.

  “Very funny,” Victoria said.

  “I thought so,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “But it’s such a great idea,” J.D. said. “We could have had Renaissance spaceships.”

  Victoria grinned. “And Regency ones. Can you imagine a spaceship in the style of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton?”

  “How about T’ang dynasty?” Satoshi said. “That’s when people started printing books, and it got a lot easier to spread information around.”

  The Chi slowed its forward speed and gave up some altitude. It skimmed over the high, uneroded peaks that surrounded the dome. A wide plain stretched out beyond. The dome rose gently from the smooth surface, then blended gently back. The Chi decelerated, hovered, descended.

  As the Chi landed, the dome changed.

  J.D. pushed herself forward in her seat, straining against the safety straps, reaching out toward the dome as if she could grasp it and hold it in place.

  The radiation shields darkened the observation chamber to opacity. Just before the transparent chamber changed to reflective black, just before the protection cut off the outside light along with the dangerous, higher-energy frequencies, the top of the dome sagged and crumpled.

  “No!”

  J.D. thought: Kolya was right.

  The Chi touched down hard. The landing feet scratched and scraped against the surface, and the sound transmitted itself through the ship.

  The faint sound disappeared beneath a long, shuddering vibration that ended with a subsonic rumble. In the darkness, J.D. felt it to her bones.

  She slumped against her couch, stunned. She put her hand to her face, afraid she had been blinded by whatever activated the shielding screens.

  “Is everyone all right?” Victoria asked.

  “Is it dark in here?” J.D. tried to keep her voice as steady as Victoria’s, but failed.

  “Extremely,” Victoria said.

  “Then... I guess I’m all right. Physically. Zev?” She fumbled toward his couch. He found her hand, without hesitation, and squeezed it. Divers could see farther into the infrared than ordinary human beings.

  “I am all right, J.D.” For the first time since arriving on board Starfarer, Zev sounded uncertain. The silky webs of his hand warmed J.D.’s palm.

  “Stephen Thomas? Satoshi?”

  “Yeah.” Stephen Thomas sounded as shaken as J.D.

  “But what the hell happened?” Satoshi said.

  He had been sitting with his back to the dome; he could not have seen what J.D. saw. If she had seen it at all. It was such a brief, shocking sight. She tried to make herself believe she had made it up.

  “The dome collapsed,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “What!”

  “You saw it, too,” J.D. said.

  “Fucking right I saw it. I was looking right at it.”

  “I saw... something... out of the corner of my eye,” Victoria said. “Motion. But I couldn’t be sure...” She fell silent.

  “I’m sure,” Stephen Thomas said. “Hey, is the view coming back? Or are my eyes adjusting?”

  Emergency lights glowed on, circling the ceiling and floor of the observation chamber. The alien contact team sat in the center of a room of black mirrors reflecting gold light. The walls and floor and ceiling had not yet begun to clear.

  J.D. squeezed Zev’s hand. She was worried about him, but he had recovered from his fright. He looked more eager than apprehensive.

  “This is very pretty,” Satoshi said, “but I’d rather see outside.”

  “Not right now, you wouldn’t,” Victoria said. “There’s a heavy radiation flux. Fading fast, though.”

  “Wonderful,” Stephen Thomas said sarcastically. “We meet the galactic civilization and they present us with firebombs.”

  “It isn’t that different from what we presented them,” J.D. said.

  Sensor patterns formed at the center of the circle. They sang quietly to themselves, disharmonious. J.D. could read some of them. A precipitous temperature rise accompanied a seismic spike of considerable magnitude.

  “If we’re not sitting on the edge of a crater, about to fal
l in, we’re pretty lucky,” Satoshi said.

  “The Chi is solid,” Victoria replied. “But I’ve asked it to respond immediately if we start to shift.”

  “Come on, Victoria, let’s see what’s outside.”

  “Give it another minute, Stephen Thomas. I don’t want to burn out any receivers.”

  Satoshi gazed across the circle at Stephen Thomas. “It collapsed.”

  Stephen Thomas nodded.

  Like a good-luck piece, or a meditation aid, the globe of Tau Ceti II appeared before Satoshi. He stared into the image. Not a good-luck piece. A crystal ball.

  “I’m going outside,” Stephen Thomas said. He threw off the safety straps, got up, and started for the hatch. Forgetting that he was in a low-gravity environment, he lurched forward with his first step, then caught himself and proceeded in a more dignified fashion.

  “Can I come with you?” Zev opened his safety straps with his free hand and stood up, but J.D. pulled him back.

  “Zev, you’re not going anywhere. Stephen Thomas!”

  He did not even hesitate.

  “Victoria, you aren’t going to let him!”

  “I may go with him,” Victoria said. “Whatever collapsed the dome, it was very clean. The flux will be down to background by the time he gets into a suit.” She frowned at the mass of information, her head cocked in concentration. The songs had evened out nearly into harmony. “In fact...”

  As she spoke, the lights went out and the black mirrors vanished. The observers’ circle might have been built on a small platform open to the sky and the air and even the ground.

  Except that there was no air. The sky was black and filled with stars.

  The dome had fallen into a heap of slag.

  o0o

  As soon as the radiation shields cleared, the Chi once again began receiving transmissions from Starfarer.

  “Starfarer to explorer, Starfarer to explorer. Explorer, please reply.” Gerald Hemminge’s upper-class British accents rolled into the circle.

  “We’re here, Gerald,” Victoria said.

  The distance between the starship and the Chi delayed his reply.

  “We lost your signal.”

  “We’ve... got a complication. Are you getting our outside pictures—”

  “Good lord!” Gerald exclaimed.

  “I guess he got them,” Satoshi said.

  “You’d better return,” Gerald said. “Immediately.”

  “No!” J.D. whispered.

  “I don’t think so,” Victoria said.

  “It’s clear we have no idea what we’re getting into,” Gerald said. “You must return so we can decide how to deal with this, without making the situation any worse.”

  Victoria’s short, sharp laugh was full of irony. “Excuse me, Gerald, but I don’t see how it could be any worse. I’ll call back after we’ve taken a look. Explorer out.” She ended the transmission before he could reply. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Was it such a good idea, to cut him off like that?” J.D. followed Victoria and Satoshi out of the observers’ circle. Zev tagged along behind.

  Victoria shrugged. “I know what he’ll say, he knows what I’ll say. We don’t even need to say it anymore. Sometimes I think we communicate by telepathy.” She sighed. “Isn’t telepathy supposed to work between people who like each other?”

  “That’s often the case. In fiction.”

  “You ought to write a story where the opposite happens. Where you can communicate by telepathy only with somebody you absolutely loathe.”

  J.D. followed Victoria into the changing room beside the airlock. Stephen Thomas was halfway into his suit. The artificial stupid with the holo equipment crouched nearby, inactive, waiting patiently to accompany them. The AS looked like a cross between a spider and a wheeled virus particle, about the size of a housecat.

  “Couldn’t resist, huh?” Stephen Thomas said to Victoria.

  “Resistance doesn’t come into it,” Victoria said. “Going out there is our job. And I might remind you, you’re the one who didn’t even want to land.”

  “True. But now that we’re here —”

  J.D. took her suit from its hook. She had never worn this one. She had put on a space suit only once before, when, in desperation, she responded to Kolya Cherenkov’s plea for help when the missile struck. The other suit was back on the starship, scraped and scratched, heavily used by other people before J.D. came along and abused it in her turn. She had left a layer of her own sweat inside that suit, and perhaps it had also absorbed her fright and exhilaration.

  She wondered what kind of emotions this suit would absorb from her. At the moment she felt unhealthily excited, like some nineteenth-century Victorian lady preparing to swoon from nervous exhaustion.

  “Which one is mine?” Zev asked.

  “You don’t have one, Zev.”

  “But there are enough.”

  “You have to stay in the Chi,” Victoria told him.

  “But why?”

  “For the same reason you didn’t have a vote on whether we came here in the first place. You aren’t a member of the team. You aren’t even a member of the expedition.”

  “Yes I am,” he said. “I’m a member of the art department. I’m Chandra’s graduate student.”

  “You still can’t go outside.”

  Zev turned to J.D. “I want to go with you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Victoria’s right. And we should do what she says, Zev. She’s the team leader.”

  “Like Lykos, you mean.”

  “Like Lykos.”

  “But Lykos let me go with you.”

  Victoria and Satoshi had nearly finished suiting up.

  “Are you coming with us?”

  “Yes.” Though J.D. felt sad to leave Zev behind, she could not abdicate her responsibilities. She did not want to, even for Zev. She stepped into the legs of her suit and pulled the rest of it up around her shoulders. “Zev, Lykos let you come with me because she knew we’d talked about the expedition. She knew you had some idea what you’d be getting into. But here, now — this is something we haven’t talked about.”

  “All right,” he said, downcast.

  “Go on up to the observer’s circle. You’ll be able to hear us just like everybody on board Starfarer, and see us even better.”

  “If you can’t trust me to go with you, how come you can trust me to stay here alone?”

  Victoria glanced toward him, her patience exhausted.

  “This isn’t a good time for jokes,” J.D. said before Victoria could respond. She had seen the mischievous twitch to Zev’s lips as he spoke.

  “Every time is a good time for jokes,” Stephen Thomas said. “Particularly now. Let’s go. See you, Zev. Sorry.”

  “Swim with sharks, Stephen Thomas,” Zev said.

  The airlock doors sealed. Through the small window J.D. watched Zev bouncing gently down the hallway toward the observers’ circle, light and lithe in the low gravity, his baggy suit pants waving around his slender legs.

  The sound around her faded. The threshold interference of her radio receiver shushed in her ears.

  “‘Swim with sharks’?” Stephen Thomas said. “What the hell does that mean? It sounds like a threat.”

  “It isn’t,” J.D. said. “It means he hopes you have an exciting excursion.”

  “It’s already that,” Satoshi said.

  “I’m going to bring the broadcast back to us,” Victoria said. “They’re probably tired of watching rock slump, back home. Is everybody ready?”

  “I hate this,” J.D. whispered.

  “That isn’t an answer.”

  “I didn’t mean to transmit it. I’m ready.”

  The outer airlock doors opened. Victoria led the way. J.D. followed her down the stairs of the Chi.

  Victoria’s foot silently touched the surface of Tau Ceti II’s satellite. The scene reminded J.D. of the foggy film of the first landing on Earth’s moon, back in the l
ast century. But Victoria left no footprints on the hard, dustless ground.

  When J.D. stepped down, the sound of her booted foot scraping against the rough stone traveled through her suit. She felt both thrilled and dismayed, to be standing for the first time on an alien world.

  “I’ve never even been to our moon.” Then she realized her words had been transmitted, and she blushed violently and in silence. It was, she thought, Victoria’s place to speak the first words here. The AS had followed them down the ladder. J.D. hoped it could not transmit a picture of her face.

  “Neither have I,” Victoria said, her tone wry. “None of us has.”

  She set off across the rock plain toward the slumping, settling dome.

  As they approached it, J.D. could feel its radiant heat soaking into her suit. She trusted Victoria’s analysis, and believed that the radiation had peaked and vanished. Nevertheless, it scared her to approach a structure that had destroyed itself so recently. For all J.D. knew, it might decide it had not finished its task, and set off another blast of radiation.

  The job has risks, she told herself. You knew that when you applied. That’s why you’re here, that’s why you’re not essential to the existence and maintenance of the starship. You’re here to take the risks.

  “What do you think, Satoshi?” Victoria said.

  He stopped and settled back, studying the collapsed dome.

  “I think it’s possible that whoever constructed the dome actually got programmed microbuilders to work. That would be quite an achievement. There’s no evidence of heavy machinery.” He scuffed his boot hard against the stone. It left a mark. “It’s tough to imagine a bunch of people — beings, of whatever kind — living here for very long without leaving more evidence of their presence. Tracks. Liftoff burns. Some general mess.”

  “That’s exactly what’s wrong with it,” Stephen Thomas said. “The place is too damned clean.”

  J.D. could imagine alien people who picked up after themselves better than human beings did. But it seemed likely that they would at least have left some scuff marks.

  Victoria led her teammates around the edge of the dome. They had to stay some distance away, because heat still radiated from it. It continued to settle upon itself. The rock sagged from the sides inward, making a terraced platform with a hemispherical bulge on top. The bulge, too, drooped slowly, flattening, but held up here and there by some strange infrastructure, or some heat-resistant bit of its contents. J.D. imagined what might be inside, what plans an alien civilization might make to welcome a peaceful, if equally alien, visitor, and she wanted to cry.