The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Iphigenie looked ill. “It nearly killed me once!”

  And it could try to kill her, or anyone, again, J.D. thought. Overload the autonomous nervous system, blast your blood pressure into the stratosphere, crush your brain... She shivered.

  “We’re assuming,” she said, “that the crash was deliberate. There’s no possibility of a random mutation?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Stephen Thomas said. “But that’s an awful lot of coincidences to believe in before breakfast.”

  “Lacking such convenient coincidence,” Professor Thanthavong said, “the mutation would require a mutagen. You’re the bioelectronics expert, Stephen Thomas. What could trigger the change?”

  “Most of the mutagens that can damage carbon-based biological systems —” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Oh, lord,” said Victoria.

  “ — as well as any of the processes that can trigger a virus or a Trojan horse in an ordinary computer.”

  “You must keep it from happening again,” Iphigenie said.

  “We can’t,” Thanthavong said. “Not unless we can trace the source of the mutagen.”

  Stephen Thomas grimaced. “That’s what I love about you, Dr. Thanthavong. You never bother with the easy problems.”

  She paused, considering. “The mutagen will have broken down by now.”

  “It would have broken down a few seconds after it appeared. The physical part of the computer acts like a living system. Its enzymes detect mistakes and correct them. Its immune system reacts to foreign toxins. But the oncogene propagates so fast, the repair mechanisms can’t quite keep up. If the web crashes again, the mutagen will exist. For a few seconds. Until Arachne creates antibodies against it and neutralizes it and breaks it down.”

  “But we’d have a few minutes to follow the immune response. If Arachne built marked antibodies. We could backtrack.”

  “Right.”

  Thanthavong considered. “We ought to be able to mark the precursors in time... Even without the genetics lab.”

  Stephen Thomas shrugged. “Sure. It isn’t certain that it’ll work. But if it does, we could follow the trail straight to the neural node of whoever released the mutagen.”

  “In that case, you’d better get to work, hadn’t you?” Professor Thanthavong said.

  “You’re going to let the web crash again?” Iphigenie cried. The undertone of her complexion was gray with fatigue and distress.

  Victoria floated closer to her and put her arm around her. Iphigenie pushed her away.

  “It isn’t comfort I want! I’ll have no comfort till I know the web is secure!”

  Stephen Thomas frowned, insulted and hurt that his theories and solutions had not met with approval and agreement.

  “We’re no closer to knowing who crashed the web than we were when we went into transition!” he said. “If you have any great ideas about how to track the person down, I’d sure like to hear them.”

  “It was Griffith,” Iphigenie said. “Who else could it be?”

  “It could be anyone,” Thanthavong said. “I’m sorry, my dear, but it could be anyone. This is a deliberate flaw, designed to be accessible through the lowest levels of use. Anyone who can touch the web could trigger the mutagen. Even one of us.”

  “It wasn’t. You know it wasn’t. We all know who it must have been. We’ve got to stop him!”

  Stephen Thomas had let himself drift out of the sphere. Now he did a backward roll, touched one foot to the wall of the sailhouse, and cut through the air toward the access tunnel.

  “Fuck it,” he said angrily, “I’m doing the best I can.”

  The sound-dampers turned off and the beat of the sensors washed over J.D. She flinched and reached out to Arachne to turn down the volume. The web touched her. Frightened, she winced away. At the request of someone else, the sensor volume fell. Embarrassed at her reaction, J.D. grasped the web firmly, stroked it, tested its gleaming strands.

  Arachne looked and felt to her as strong and willing and flexible as it had before the crash. Waiting patiently for her requests, her demands, it stretched out in all directions, in directions she could not name, clean and beautiful and elegantly complex.

  Chapter10

  J.D.’s imagination created a scene that bore no relation to the inside of a computer or to the inside of an organic system. She had wondered what she would see when her attention left the main room of the partnership’s house, whether she would enter a phantom world of hugely magnified digital gates or pulsing translucent neural tissue.

  Instead, she closed her eyes and found herself upon the exterior of Starfarer’s campus cylinder.

  The first time, the only time, she had walked on the outside of Starfarer, she had nearly been killed. Her mind had recreated a setting of imminent danger. She shivered.

  The metaphor was, unfortunately, perfectly appropriate.

  She sat on the inspection net, her feet dangling, the starship looming overhead, a curving low stone ceiling. Starfarer’s spin pressed her outward, downward, toward the stars that sped past her feet. If she slid between the strands of the net, unfastened her safety line, and let go, she would be flung off into space.

  But she was not wearing a safety line; she was not even wearing a spacesuit. In her imagination, she could live and breathe in the vacuum of space.

  She walked around and looked around, without any constraints, wondering what, exactly, she was supposed to be looking for. Stephen Thomas had not been able to tell her what form her perception would take, how her mind would interpret the information or the search. He had said, Look for something unusual. Follow it. Follow it fast. And then get out.

  Stephen Thomas and Avvaiyar and Satoshi and Professor Thanthavong were somewhere nearby, perhaps — probably — all seeing entirely different surroundings, all waiting for the same undefinable event. Victoria had gone out to the sailhouse to help Iphigenie, if she could. Feral had gone with her, still trying to persuade her to let him join the antibody chase. He was not an official member of the expedition; she refused to allow him to expose himself to danger.

  J.D. wished Victoria had relented about Feral. The hunt could use more help. Stephen Thomas said he could finish only the five antibody interfaces before Starfarer reached the cosmic string. Maybe that was true. Maybe he had only finished as many interfaces as he had trustworthy people to use them. He would have trusted Feral.

  Standing, J.D. balanced on the cable. Starfarer loomed above her. If she stretched, she could reach the surface with her fingertips.

  The cable vibrated against the soles of J.D.’s feet. She followed the wave-form, moving along the length of the starship, parallel to its axis of rotation.

  The last time she was out here, Starfarer had plunged into transition. She wished she could have stopped everything and simply watched it, experienced it. That had not been possible, and it would not be possible this time, either.

  The rotation brought her into the valley between the campus cylinder and its twin, the wild cylinder; the motion plunged her toward the endless quivering silver sky that lay beyond the valley. Between the starship and its sail, the crystal bead of the sailhouse hung as if suspended by invisible tethers. The framework that secured it to the starship, that held the cylinders in their parallel orientation, blended in and disappeared against the moving background of the sail.

  Reflected light from the sail’s surface dazzled her. She closed her eyes and turned away.

  J.D. felt a shiver through her body, through her mind, through the rocks above her and the cables beneath her feet. She waited, wishing she knew exactly what she was waiting for. Should she try to follow the tremor, chasing invisible vibrations?

  She opened her eyes again. The rotation of the cylinder had brought her back out among the stars. Soon it would spin her into the light of Tau Ceti.

  The blaze of the sail’s reflection had died away. Sparks gathered at J.D.’s feet. At first she thought they were illusory, an artifact of moving from brightness
to darkness. But they were real, as real as anything in this mind-created world. The sparks flowed in thread-thin streams past her feet, running like water along the cables of the inspection net, spiraling like vines up the net’s supporting rods, skipping from point to point on the rough stone overhead.

  J.D. followed the flow of the sparks, running like a tightrope walker along the springy cables. The glittery line was so tenuous that she feared she would lose sight of it, but every time it dissipated, like a stream spreading into a wide flat meadow, it recreated itself farther on.

  When Stephen Thomas spoke of seeing auras, this was the sight he described. J.D. wondered if his perceptions had influenced her, helping her create a reality like the one he saw. Perhaps she had created it this way in an attempt to understand him.

  It did not matter how she saw what she was seeing. She did see it.

  Griffith was right. The web was going to crash again. And Stephen Thomas was right about the method. Somewhere within Starfarer, someone had released a foreign chemical signal. Arachne, detecting it, formed antibodies to it from the store of precursors Stephen Thomas had marked.

  The marked antibodies, which she perceived as sparks, could be tracked to the source of the chemical signal.

  If she could reach it before Arachne crashed and threw her back out into the real world.

  The sparks scattered around the curve of Starfarer’s skin. J.D. chased them, breathing as hard as if she were surrounded by air instead of nothingness. They congregated in a rising whirlpool, a flickering whirlwind, and vanished through the portal of an inspection hatch. J.D. climbed up into it and cycled through the airlock, wondering, as she did, why she had to use the airlock if her imagined reality thought the starship was flying in air, why she could not dissolve through the starship’s skin like the sparks.

  The airlock hatch opened. She hurried out. In the distance, the end of the spark trail vanished around a curve. She ran after it, chasing the sparks through the tunnel.

  The sides of the corridor roughened. They no longer looked manufactured, but natural. J.D. felt as if she were running through a cave. The passage bore the sour tang of limestone, though there was not a natural piece of sedimentary rock to be found anywhere within the starship. She reminded herself that she was making it all up; her surroundings were metaphor.

  She had survived in space, unprotected by a suit; now she ran through dark underground tunnels, able to see without any illumination. She caught up to the spark trail. It glowed, an actinic yellow streak only a few molecules wide. It skittered along, now on the floor, now the wall, now the ceiling, occasionally fading out, only to reemerge as a trace of light a few meters away. J.D. followed the sparks through the darkness that was not truly dark.

  The tremors around her strengthened. When she touched the wall, she could feel the starship quake and quiver.

  She could not stop to figure it all out. She ran as fast as she could through the dream-world. When the sparks fluttered from the stony wall to the rippled surface of an underground lake, she dived in after them without hesitation.

  The frigid water embraced her, sliding around her like a caress. She swam, naked, pushed along by her powerful legs, her feet with their webbed, clawed toes. She had made herself a diver.

  She swept through the water, feeling no resistance to her sleek-furred body. The metabolic enhancer kicked in and she followed the sparking signal of concentrated antibodies at an exhilarating speed.

  The lake narrowed to a river, a great mass of water compressed into a steep cleft. The water rose and billowed into rapids. Waves crashed with a rushing roar, tumbling her through the channel. In real life, without her artificial lung, without a life vest, she would be dead: drowned or crushed against boulders that tumbled and rumbled beneath her, drumming the rhythm of their own inexorable stone dance.

  The rapids crashed over a shelf in the riverbed and dragged and pushed her underwater. The pressure forced her to the bottom; her hands brushed naked bedrock scoured into long smooth ripples by the current. The water was icy green. She struggled against its weight, against its crashing chaos. She leaped upward across the current. The translucent green gave way to roiling white. She broke the surface and gasped for half a breath before another wave slapped her in the face and sent her downstream again, tumbling and choking. But she had escaped the hole. The antibody sparks skipped along the edges of columnar basalt.

  The river washed her, exhausted, into an eddy. The flow, opposing the main current, carried her in a half-circle toward shore. Staggering, she waded onto the beach. In real life, even a diver might not have survived that transition.

  The sparks flickered from sand grain to pebble. J.D. boosted her metabolic enhancer to its limit, to her body’s limit. Suddenly she was dry.

  Her feet dug into the wet cold gravelly sand, sank into the dry coarse sand just above the high-water mark, scuffed through the powder-fine sand at the highest edge of the beach. She clambered onto the trail and plunged after the antibodies again.

  She moved across a landscape of black basalt, an ancient lava flow, tubes and caves of hollow stone that pounded like drums in response to her steps. Long tendrils of basalt stretched out from a distant rise, like tree roots, like the sprawling tentacles of a beached octopus.

  The antibodies congregated, glowing, on one of the tendrils.

  The tendrils began to move.

  J.D. became aware of the passage of time. The danger increased with each second. She pushed herself into a run, wishing she had remained water-borne. She was an excellent long distance swimmer, a poor runner, and her imagination had not extended to changing that.

  The rock tubes writhed beside and around and over her, lifting from their substrate of black rock, twining together in labyrinthine patterns. This stone octopus had far more than its share of tentacles.

  The tentacles looped and knitted together overhead. J.D. found herself running through another tunnel, like the access veins in the skin of Starfarer. The antibodies had collected in puffy, shining streaks along the walls and ceiling. They traced the outlines of some of the lava tentacles, though all the tentacles had melded to form a glossy, textured surface. The antibodies flowed like the tributaries of tiny streams, running together all in one direction.

  J.D. knew she should get out, but she was so close, the antibodies were so thick here, such perfect markers, that she kept going. The flowing sparks continued to cluster and clot, till they formed glittering arteries around her, pulsing rivulets of flowing organic gold.

  She rounded a turn in the maze of tunnels, and entered a central chamber.

  Stephen Thomas plunged out of a tunnel on the other side of the cavern and ran toward her.

  Between them, all the lines of antibodies flowed together, forming an organic mass of translucent spark-shot gold, pulsing and throbbing and drawing the heat out of its surroundings. J.D. shivered.

  “Got you, you fucker!” Stephen Thomas shouted.

  “Oh, my god,” J.D. said.

  She recognized the node.

  It belonged to Chancellor Blades.

  Stephen Thomas recognized it, too.

  “Son of a bitch!” Stephen Thomas’s voice was full of anger and betrayal. “You treacherous bastard!”

  He was blushing, embarrassed and humiliated in a way J.D. had never seen him. He kicked the neural node as hard as he could, a practiced martial-arts side-kick with all the impact projected through his heel. The blow hit full force with a crushing thud. The force shuddered through the node’s golden body. The footprint turned silver, then darkened to blood-red.

  Stephen Thomas drew back his foot to kick the node again. J.D. grabbed his arm and jerked him away. He staggered.

  “We don’t have time for this!” J.D. had to raise her voice to be heard. The sounds around her were increasing: the pulse of pumps, mechanical and organic, the flood and flow of nutrients, the dissolution of outworn connections, the high-strung harp note of new connections made. And underneath it all, the
sinister baritone hum.

  Stephen Thomas stared at her, as astonished by her actions as she had been by his embarrassment.

  “We’ve found what we needed! We’ve got to get out of here!” Even as she shouted at him, she was sending a message to the others, to Satoshi and Thanthavong and Avvaiyar, to anyone still connected with the web: Get out fast, the web’s going to crash! We found it. We found it, get out fast.

  Stephen Thomas pulled himself away from anger, from revenge. He nodded once, sharply, and opened a door with a fan-shaped top. The door had appeared from nowhere — or had it always been there, and J.D. had not noticed it? Stephen Thomas stood aside for her to pass through before him.

  They stepped out into the main room of the partnership’s house.

  o0o

  In the sailhouse, Victoria doggedly brought the sensors into tune.

  Feral hovered nearby, making her nervous.

  It’s okay, she told herself. Let him stay here where you can keep an eye on him.

  Her attention left the control strands for an instant, and when she caught them up again, she had a sail-shimmer to damp down.

  He drifted to her side. “Let me help.”

  Victoria eased the sail into equilibrium. When it lay quiet in her mind, she gave Feral another moment. The sensors balanced on the edge of harmony

  “No. You’re a guest.” She spoke with odd pauses between her words, turning her mind’s eye from Feral to Iphigenie to the sail. “I want you out of the web and out of danger until we get things resolved.”

  “But —”

  “I can’t talk to you now!” As soon as she spoke, she regretted her tone.

  The sensors moaned a minor fugue.

  She put her attention entirely on the sails, the approach, the limited transition point. Iphigenie crouched over the hard-link, working furiously but slowly. Lacking a direct connection, she could not hope to keep up with the changes.