The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Good lord, look,” Satoshi said. “They’re transmitting.”

  J.D. leaned forward so quickly that she bounced against her safety straps. She grabbed the arms of her couch.

  “It’s the maze again,” Victoria said.

  The complicated twining of light and shadow formed before them, three-dimensional, transparent on its outside surface, paths marked with fragile brush-strokes that became more and more solid as they neared the center. J.D. could see the relationship between this maze and the original, two-dimensional one, as if the two-dimensional shadow had traced a true course through the three dimensions.

  “Maybe they can look at your broadcast,” Victoria said to J.D. “What they’re sending us is coming straight through. It didn’t need any more processing than a transmission from Starfarer.”

  J.D. looked directly at the camera that observed the alien contact team.

  “We’d like to talk to you, face to face,” J.D. said.

  Stephen Thomas gestured with his chin toward the three-dimensional maze.

  “Maybe that is their face,” he said, bitter and mocking. “Maybe they’re already trying to talk to us.”

  “I’m aware of that possibility, Stephen Thomas,” J.D. said. It distressed her to hear him speak in such a tone. “That’s why I think we should meet in person.”

  Her calm dismay silenced him. J.D. felt anything but calm.

  “They may have figured out our broadcast system in a couple of days,” Victoria said, “but it seems unlikely they could have picked up enough English to understand what you just —”

  The image projector produced a rich, full voice.

  “We would like to meet you face to face, too.”

  Chapter 11

  J.D. waited in the airlock of the Chi. In a few minutes, she would be the first human being to set foot on a living alien world.

  Her heart pounded.

  She wore neither protective suit nor breathing apparatus, only an LTM, for broadcasting to Chi and to Starfarer, on her collar. The alien beings assured her that it was safe to go outside, and she chose to believe them.

  Satoshi’s voice reached her through the exterior speaker.

  “They’re right about the air, J.D.,” he said. “It’s breathable. Chemically it’s almost identical to Earth’s. That is, Earth’s before the Industrial Revolution.”

  “Yes,” J.D. said. She had not doubted it.

  “That doesn’t say anything about bugs.”

  “I don’t like your exposing yourself to alien pathogens,” Victoria said. “I think it would be better to let Stephen Thomas finish testing —”

  J.D. felt anxious, but excited, too. She restrained her impatience. She understood Victoria’s uneasiness, her uncertainty. She would feel the same if she were in her teammate’s place, just having watched a friend die. Having to watch another friend walk into the unknown, alone, would be intolerable.

  “They have experience with this,” J.D. said. “We have to trust them.”

  “Let her do her job,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “I’m going outside now.” J.D. was unwilling to wait through more delays, to be forced to stand fast through any more discussion. She opened the airlock door.

  Warm, fresh air enveloped her, dissipating the inevitable stale odors of shipboard life. The air smelled like roses, like growing grass.

  She stepped down.

  The Chi had landed on a wide patch of white stone, irregular in outline but uniform in smoothness. J.D. had not been able to tell from above if it were natural or manufactured. Standing on it, she still could not tell. It radiated warmth. She took a few steps across the even stone. She left no mark behind her.

  The air was so clear it sparkled. The curved horizon lay close; she could walk all the way around this worldlet in a couple of days. Sirius A was high, small and bright and intense in the purple sky. The atmosphere was shallower than that of Earth, so the light from Sirius A was less filtered, less scattered. The result was a strange, cold daylight, and a sky like evening. The brighter stars shone, intense against indigo. Sirius B, small and dim, was barely larger than a distant star.

  The worldlet spun, not fast enough to perturb its gravity, but fast enough to give it days and nights, fast enough to keep one side from cooking, the other side from cooling to the temperature of its warmth-emitting surface.

  Satoshi had measured the period of rotation. It was twenty-four hours. Not twenty-three and a half, or twenty-four hours, six minutes, forty-nine seconds: not some number close to Earth’s day, some number J.D. could consider an interesting coincidence. The period of rotation was, precisely, twenty-four hours.

  She walked away from the Chi and onto the land, walking gingerly on the ground cover. She was on an alien world and she expected alienness. The last thing she wanted to do was blunder around and step on the inhabitants.

  In itself, the worldlet was strange, but its environment made her feel nearly at home. J.D. found it difficult to believe in such a coincidence; she considered the cost of such extraordinary hospitality.

  A soft breeze ruffled her short hair and passed through the velvety leaves beneath her feet. She stooped down and brushed her fingertips across the tops of the plants, but did not pick any. She took the cautious course of waiting till she had some idea of what she was doing, whom and what waited to meet her. She did not want to do anything to abuse her welcome.

  The landing stone lay in the midst of a wide meadow. The vegetation was short and bushy, a springy herbaceous species with small round leaves. Her footsteps made no more mark on it than they had on the landing stone.

  The meadow spread across a shallow valley that vanished quickly over the horizon. A forest filled the upper end of the valley, but stopped abruptly, leaving a sharp edge of meadow. A narrow stream cut precise loops from the forest, past J.D., and around the curve of the world. Low hillocks rolled away on one side, never rising to foothills or mountains. To the other side, a field of scree rose steeply to a plateau.

  Behind her, the Chi creaked and pinged, cooling and settling. A musical low hum was the only other sound. J.D. wondered if the sound came from this world’s equivalent of birds or insects.

  She waited, ready for anything. She waited for the hum to turn to a voice, for the plants beneath her feet to take on sentience, for the entire worldlet to be a living, intelligent creature, the ultimate Gaia.

  A puffy cloud passed overhead, only a bit higher than the weather systems on board Starfarer.

  J.D. pushed aside the assumptions that her mind kept making about the beings she would meet: they had spoken in English, so they must be flesh and blood, they must have mouths, and ears, and language. But the medium of their communication was electronic signals sent through space, giving no clue to origin. The beings no more had to have mouths, verbal language, ears, faces, than Arachne did.

  She sent a brief, direct message to her teammates.

  “Any reaction? Instructions?”

  “Nothing,” Victoria said softly in her mind.

  “Thank you for welcoming us,” J.D. said aloud.

  At the same time, she instructed the Chi’s computer to transmit her statement electronically. It occurred to her that the alien beings might not recognize her any more than she could be sure of recognizing them. Who could know how the beings would interpret the alien contact team’s message, or J.D.’s greeting, or their regular transmission, or even her appearance?

  I’m prepared for misunderstandings, J.D. thought. I think. I hope they are, too.

  She turned slowly, looking around, gazing up the slope of tumbled rock, wondering if she should climb to higher ground for a better vantage point, or follow the stream...

  Something moved.

  At the edge of the plateau, a group of small beings stood on their hind legs, their paws crossed delicately over their stomachs, and stared down at her.

  She waited.

  The meerkats, J.D. thought. They look like meerkats. Like the stone creature I
found in the museum. Are these the alien beings? Is that why their statue was the only thing left after the destruction?

  If the meerkat beings were the alien beings, a lot of theories about intelligence and body size, brain size, would go out the window. The beings stood no higher than her knee.

  Meerkats are communal, she told herself. Maybe meerkat aliens have a communal intelligence.

  Oh, stop, she thought, aggravated with herself. Stop making assumptions. It isn’t even safe to assume their brains — whatever functions as a brain in an alien creature — are in their heads!

  She walked toward the scree, her gaze on the meerkats. They stood perfectly still, staring at her.

  “J.D., look out!”

  As Victoria shouted a warning, as the ground rumbled beneath J.D.’s feet, movement caught the corner of her eye. She spun around.

  Roaring with outrage and anger, a huge piebald bull galloped out of the forest and across the meadow, snorting, tossing its head and its long, curved horns.

  The Chi was too far away.

  J.D. sprinted onto the scree, scrambling up the sharp, precarious rocks. Tiny avalanches spilled down behind her, clattering. The bull slid to a stop at the edge of the slope. Its hooves dug deep grooves in the soft, damp earth. It pawed and snorted and advanced a few wary paces onto the scree.

  It stopped. Twenty meters above it, J.D. clambered onto the edge of the plateau and lay there panting.

  Are you all right? Electronic transmission did nothing to temper the shock in Victoria’s voice.

  “I’m fine,” J.D. said aloud. The LTM on her collar would pick up and transmit her voice to the Chi and to Starfarer. The visual transmission of her climb must have given everyone quite a jolt. “I’m a bit... startled.”

  She climbed to her feet. The meerkats had vanished.

  She looked over the edge of the cliff. Seeing her, the bull snorted again. Its amazing horns curved up and forward, crowning it.

  Like a longhorn, J.D. thought, then, No, like an aurochs.

  It looked like a great wild European ox, a creature hunted to extinction, then experimentally back-crossed into existence again. It stood taller than J.D. at the shoulder, and its curved horns added another half meter to its height.

  The aurochs’s red-and-white spotted coat gleamed as if it had been groomed. The enormous creature sorted a third time, but it had backed off the scree and into the meadow. Looking up at her, it bounced on its forelegs. The playful motion startled her.

  J.D. considered climbing down the scree to face the piebald bull, but lacking any communication from the alien beings, she decided to choose discretion over valor for the moment.

  A shrill cry shocked the quiet.

  J.D. looked across the plateau. Up here it was dryer. The trees twisted together, windswept and dark.

  Shadows beneath the gnarled trees moved like ghosts. The shadows could be what she was seeking. So could the trees; they might be Ents, as in Tolkien. She stopped searching, and walked, completely open, into the high forest.

  She stepped into the shade, expecting coolness. But it was warmer beneath the tangled branches. The trees insulated the heated ground. The air smelled of hot pine-pitch. J.D. blinked, waiting for her eyes to become accustomed to the dimmer light.

  The meerkats appeared again, their skinny feet and legs moving quickly, their bodies staying at the same level. In life they were not nearly so cute as in sculpture, but, rather, strange, alien prowlers. They skittered off together, then stopped and leaped up to watch her.

  Beyond them, two figures walked toward J.D.

  They paused; the woman came forward.

  “Welcome,” she said.

  J.D.’s knees buckled. She staggered, falling, catching herself on her hands. Her fingers clenched the hot, dry ground. She pushed herself upright, though she felt too shocked to stand.

  After a moment’s surprised hesitation, the man spoke to the woman.

  “I told you she wasn’t ready.”

  “She’s just frightened. We should have sent the aurochs to the other hemisphere.”

  The woman hurried to J.D.’s side.

  “I didn’t think — I’m so sorry. The bull wouldn’t have hurt you; he only wanted to play. Should we call your colleagues?”

  At the same time, Victoria was sending a concerned message. The image J.D. was sending to the Chi must have swooped and tumbled.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” J.D. said to the woman, and to Victoria. “It wasn’t the bull.” She was ashamed to have reacted with such shock. But she had been expecting something — anything — so strange, and she had received something so apparently ordinary.

  The woman sat beside J.D. The man remained standing.

  “I must have...” J.D. decided not to lie to them, even about so trivial, and embarrassing, a matter. “I was surprised to see you,” she said. “Because you look so much like us. I was prepared for anything, except human beings. I mean,” she said quickly, “other people who look like human beings.”

  They were small, no taller than Victoria, slender, narrow-waisted but muscular, particularly through the legs, dark eyed, their skin dark in the red tones, like Zev’s, but more cinnamon than mahogany. The man was young, the woman old. Both wore their hair in ringlets, the man’s black, the woman’s silver-gray, its tighter curls streaked with metallic silver decorations.

  The woman wore a skirt and shirt and vest of a simple cut and simple weave. It looked like homespun, natural-dyed cotton in shades of tan and sand and umber, light and cool.

  The youth wore a kilt that flowed around his legs, brilliant white against his skin, glowing in the shadows of the forest. His clothing gave the impression of free-moving liquid not because of some alien fiber or unique weave, but because of the hundreds of narrow, sharp, vertical pleats in the silky cloth.

  Like a Fortuny gown. J.D. started to laugh, restrained herself, and thought, High fashion.

  The two people were exquisitely beautiful. They were the only people J.D. had ever met who were as beautiful as Stephen Thomas.

  “But we are human beings,” the man said.

  J.D. had been about to stand up again. Instead, she stayed where she was, the woman kneeling beside her, the youth gazing down with his arms crossed on his smooth bare chest.

  “We’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” the woman said.

  “Then why —” J.D. stopped, before a thousand questions tumbled out of her mouth without any pause for answers. “Maybe we could start again. With proper introductions. My name is J.D. Sauvage. I’m from Earth, more recently from Starfarer, the starship that...” She hesitated, not sure what to call the worldlet. “That this place avoided hitting... How did you do that?”

  “My name is Europa,” the old woman said. “I’m from Earth, too, more recently from this place, which is our starship.” She did not answer J.D.’s question.

  “My name is Androgeos,” the youth said. “How did you come here?”

  “We followed you. We saw your transition spectrum. I have to explain what happened when we arrived at Tau Ceti — at the star system we just left.”

  “We know its name,” Androgeos said.

  “We came as fast as we could.” J.D. frowned. “Were you waiting for us? Looking for us? It seemed to us that we arrived here first. Why did you leave Tau Ceti?”

  “Androgeos meant, why did it take so long for the people of Earth to build a starship?” Europa said.

  J.D. had no idea how to answer that. “How long have you been waiting?”

  “Thirty-seven hundred years,” Europa said. “Wouldn’t you like to stand up now?”

  J.D. was not entirely sure she could trust her legs, but she gathered herself and rose. She was steady enough. The meerkats peered out from behind tree-trunks. Their curiosity overcoming their wariness, they pit-patted toward her, stood up in a group just out of her reach, folded their hands, and watched.

  “Come,” Europa said, taking J.D.’s hand. “Let’s go sit in the sunli
ght, where it’s cooler. I do like the light of Sirius, don’t you?”

  “I... haven’t had much chance to sit in the light of Sirius,” J.D. said, nonplussed.

  The light of Sirius was bright and white, but the star was much smaller than the sun as viewed from Earth. Europa led J.D. to a group of boulders near the edge of the plateau. She perched on one. She drew her legs up and rested her elbows on her knees, her chin on her fists. J.D. sat on the warm rock.

  “Tell us everything,” Europa said.

  “Everything? About Earth? Don’t you already know it?”

  “There’s only so much we can learn from remotes,” Europa said. “Things change... in three and a half millennia.”

  Androgeos stood apart from them, his arms still folded. His demeanor made J.D. uncomfortable; she wondered if her surprise, or her comment about aliens, somehow had offended him.

  “Tell us about your starship,” Androgeos said. “How you came to be here.”

  “We came looking for you,” J.D. said simply. “For centuries — I don’t know, probably as long as humans were humans — people back on Earth wondered if people lived among the stars.”

  “So we did,” Europa said. “And here we are.”

  “Why did you run away before?” J.D. asked.

  “Because you arrived in a startling manner,” Europa said dryly.

  “I want to explain about that. It was an accident.”

  “How did you come here?” Androgeos asked again.

  J.D. started to explain the method by which Starfarer had detected the worldlet’s departure.

  “Yes, yes, we know how to do that,” Androgeos said, impatient. “Interesting that you do. But you were a distance from the — what were you calling it? — the transition point, that will suffice. Your ship is ungainly. Yet you travelled very fast.”

  “I don’t know,” J.D. said honestly. “Your starship can accelerate much faster than Starfarer. As you saw. I’m sure Victoria could explain it. Would you like to go meet her, and my other teammates?”

  “Yes, soon,” Europa said. “But let’s speak a bit more first.”

  “Where do you come from?” J.D. asked. “What I mean is, if human beings have been out here for more than three millennia, how did your ancestors get into space? Where did they live all this time? How many human beings are out here? How did you build your starship?”