The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “We never even talked about it,” he said.

  Esther looked at him askance.

  “Not even, ‘What do we do if a couple of people punch each other out?’”

  “Not even that,” Infinity admitted.

  “What were you thinking of?” Kolya said.

  “I guess we were thinking this is a utopia,” Infinity said.

  They reached the crest of the hill. From it, they could see the ugly, blocky administration building. Other people had already begun to gather outside it.

  Infinity took a deep breath. “I guess we were wrong.”

  o0o

  Professor Thanthavong stood outside the edge of the crowd, watching Iphigenie, distressed and dismayed. Infinity and Esther and Kolya joined her.

  “The doors are barricaded,” Thanthavong said. “If they rush the building... more people are going to get hurt.”

  “Be easy,” Kolya said. “Blades has to come out eventually, and what can he do in the meantime? All Iphigenie need do is wait.”

  “And when he comes out, then what? Will we become murderers, too? Why is Iphigenie doing this?”

  On the other side of the crowd, Iphigenie continued speaking.

  “I’m living on borrowed time,” she said. “My life cannot be mine again unless I find justice.”

  “Send the ASes after him,” Infinity said. “They can stop him.”

  “I can’t do that,” Thanthavong said.

  “But —”

  “It’s impossible! He never released them. They’re all in the basement of the administration building, the ASes and the mobile AIs. If he has enough time he can program them by hand. If he’s good enough, he could program them to protect him.” Without giving Infinity a chance to reply, she hurried toward the crowd. Kolya strode after her.

  “Miensaem —” He touched her shoulder.

  Turning back, she flung off his hand. “Do you have a better idea?”

  He hesitated. “No. I’m sorry, no.”

  “Then don’t stop me!”

  Infinity followed her.

  “Infinity!” Kolya said,

  Infinity glanced back.

  “She’s right,” Kolya said. “Let her try — If this continues — I’ve seen —”

  Kolya looked far more shaken now than he had in the face of his own death.

  “I think I can help!” Infinity could not take time to explain. He ran after Thanthavong.

  She mounted the stairs.

  “We must prevent —” Iphigenie saw Thanthavong. Her voice faltered, then strengthened. “ — prevent more sabotage, more deaths!” Thanthavong walked up to her. At the same time, the senators pushed their way through the crowd.

  “Nothing’s to be gained by creating a mob,” Thanthavong said.

  Iphigenie drew herself up, fighting the gravity, her eyes narrow.

  “These are our friends and colleagues, not a mob, and I’m a victim of assault, not a demagogue!” Iphigenie said. “The chancellor must surrender himself.”

  “He’s given me his parole, to stay in his office and his house,” Thanthavong said.

  “You believe him?” Iphigenie said, incredulous.

  “Does it matter, Iphigenie?” Thanthavong asked. “Arachne is rejecting his neural node. We’ve suspended his hard link. He’s cut off. Harmless.”

  “And what if he has another way into the system?”

  “That’s impossible,” Thanthavong said.

  “So was crashing the web!”

  Thanthavong started to answer, then fell silent. She had no reply.

  Iphigenie turned to the crowd again. “Blades has the whole administration building at his disposal, all the ASes and the mobile AIs! Who knows what he can do to us from here?”

  Senator Derjaguin took the steps two at a time. He was panting. Senator Orazio, smaller, less efficient at pushing through the crush, followed a moment later.

  “Chancellor Blades is a U.S. citizen,” Derjaguin said. “I warn you, if anything happens to him, my country will prosecute.”

  “Jag, calm down,” Orazio said. “Ms. DuPre —” She walked toward Iphigenie, her hands outstretched.

  Iphigenie brushed her aside with indifference borne of desperation. “Your country’s kidnap squads can’t reach us here.”

  “I’m offering him sanctuary in the consulate,” Derjaguin said.

  “Sanctuary?” Iphigenie laughed bitterly. “Or a staging area to make war on us?”

  “Let us take charge of him,” Orazio said, pleading. “What’s happened is tragic. But vigilante —”

  “You’re making things worse, senators,” Thanthavong said. “You have no authority here.”

  Iphigenie turned her back on Derjaguin and Orazio.

  “Blades can’t remain here,” she said to Thanthavong. “You must see that. If we have to storm the building —”

  “Storm the building! Batter it down with your bare hands?”

  “This is anarchy!” Derjaguin exclaimed. “Good god —”

  “There’s another way,” Infinity said.

  They all stopped talking and stared at him. He looked down. He had just interrupted a multimillionaire, a United States senator, and a Nobel laureate.

  “What is it, Infinity?” Thanthavong said.

  “Who the hell are you?” Derjaguin snarled.

  “He’s a member of this expedition!” Iphigenie turned on Derjaguin. “He has a right to speak. You do not.”

  “The chancellor doesn’t have all the ASes,” Infinity said.

  “But he does. He called them in.”

  “Not the outside workers — the silver slugs.”

  “What use are they in here?” Thanthavong asked.

  Infinity realized that everyone thought the silver slugs could only work outside. He supposed the chancellor had made the same assumption, or he might never have freed them.

  Infinity gestured to the plaza.

  “Here they come.”

  Responding to his call, the big silver slugs pressed themselves through the access tunnels to the interior of Starfarer, through the ground-level hatches and up into the field around the administration building. The plaza glittered with the smooth shiny glow of the lithoclasts’ skin. They were slow, for each one gripped the ground tightly, flowing into its front end and securing itself before it eased its back end forward. On the starship’s outer surface, losing hold meant being flung off into space.

  They were slow, but they were steady. Inexorable, the slugs oozed toward the administration building.

  Is this right? Infinity wondered. If I’d kept quiet, would everybody have gotten tired of waiting, and gone away?

  He glanced at Iphigenie, then at Thanthavong. Iphigenie could have kept everyone at a pitch of anger. Professor Thanthavong watched the slugs, speechless.

  Derjaguin glared at him. “What will those things do to him?”

  “Nothing,” Infinity said.

  The immense slugs hoisted themselves up the stairs. One crawled up the door, obscuring it. Infinity stood back, motioning to the other people not to crowd the slugs too closely. A haze of acid and vaporized stone spurted from the entryway. As the door collapsed, the slug slumped with it, then crawled into the building.

  Iphigenie, impatient, was first to slide through the slug-sized hole. In a moment the halls were full of people. They surged past the slugs and upstairs to the chancellor’s office, only to be faced by another set of mechanically locked doors.

  Infinity and Esther paced the silver slugs. Thanthavong remained with them, still anxious, and Kolya followed, bemused.

  “We may avoid our own Bastille yet,” Thanthavong said softly.

  The mood, inevitably, had eased. Iphigenie no longer controlled a mob that might pull down a building bare-handed, not to free the person within but to make him a prisoner. Perhaps that was the result of the leisurely pace of the slugs. Perhaps it was because the expedition members were peaceable people, pushed to extremes. Or perhaps everyone had realized th
e absurdity of having to stand aside while artificial stupids, each the size of a boneless rhinoceros, humped their way up the stairs.

  The door to the waiting room dissolved as easily as the front door. As Infinity threw open a window to help disperse the corrosive haze, Iphigenie slipped through the hole. Again the crowd surged through; again everyone had to stop and wait for the slugs to come and eat through the door of the chancellor’s office proper.

  The first silver slug crawled into the waiting room. The leading edge of the slug encountered the trailing edge of the good carpet. The carpet bunched up under the slug’s flat belly, the surface that served as its foot, and the slug crawled in place for several minutes, rumpling the rug and forcing it backwards.

  Fox tried to stifle her giggles, but could not keep from laughing. Others began laughing, too: the crowd changed into a group of individuals. It was as if, before, their anger made them faceless.

  The slug passed the leading edge of the rug and resumed its forward progress. Esther grabbed the carpet and pulled it aside before the next slug ran afoul of it.

  The slug dissolved a hole in the third door.

  This time, Iphigenie held back.

  “Come out!” she shouted.

  No one answered. The slug continued to nibble away at the door. The bolt dissolved; the door collapsed to dust.

  The office was empty.

  “He was here!” Iphigenie cried. “He was here! Where did he go?”

  “Into the passages,” Infinity said.

  “What passages? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “You didn’t ask. I thought everybody knew about them.”

  She grabbed him by the shoulders, but before she could shake him he put his hands on top of hers. He moved quickly, freeing himself, keeping hold of her wrists.

  “You let him get away? Why? He’ll do it to us again!”

  “You wanted him out of here —”

  She tried to fight him, tried to pull away. He pressed her hands toward her and downward, bending her wrists in their natural range of motion but also in such a way that she could neither free herself nor struggle. Her knees bent and she leaned forward to escape the pressure.

  “Stop it,” Infinity said softly. “Please. Stop it. Listen to me.”

  “What are these passages?” she asked. “How do you know about them?”

  “I helped build them,” Infinity said. “I thought they were common knowledge. But I never understood what they were for. This, maybe.”

  Her shoulders slumped. Infinity let her go. She straightened up and flung herself away from him.

  The slug began to munch at a door that opened into a cabinet that in turn concealed a passageway.

  Their work finished, the slugs that had come up the stairs had congregated in a rest mass in the middle of the office.

  “Look.”

  Beyond the dissolved cabinet door, where the hidden passage began, another silver slug appeared.

  The moiré pattern of its skin identified it as a lithoblast. It created new rock foam rather than clearing away damaged material. It backed (or perhaps crawled forward; Infinity had never been sure, and was not entirely certain it made a difference to the slugs) out of the passageway, extruding a great frothy mass of light, strong rock foam that filled and blocked the passage.

  “Holy christ, have you buried the chancellor in that stuff? You’re worse than he is!” Derjaguin looked sick. “He didn’t plan anyone’s death!”

  The rock foam sagged from the mouth of the passageway, then solidified, pale gray, like moldy whipped cream.

  The slug left off emitting rock foam, crept over to its fellows, and snuggled in with them. Except for the diffraction-grating pattern of its skin, rainbowing the light, the lithoblast was indistinguishable from the lithoclasts. The lithoclasts began to feed it, transferring dissolved rock mouth-to-mouth.

  Burying the chancellor would simplify the future, for everyone except Infinity. The point was moot: he had no idea how to program the silver slugs to bury a living creature.

  “He isn’t buried,” he said. “He’s just blocked off from all the passageways. Except the one that leads to his house.”

  Iphigenie stared at him.

  “We did decide we wanted him out of here,” Infinity said. “Didn’t we?”

  o0o

  Chancellor Blades had escaped to his house. He would be safe there, but he would be cut off from the rest of the starship, and he would be without resources.

  Like almost everyone on the starship, the chancellor lived in a house built beneath a sculpted hill. His residence, including as it did rooms for putting up visiting academic dignitaries, plus a large kitchen and dining room for entertaining them, was three stories high, with balconies and bay windows, terraces and small gardens at several levels.

  Silver slugs, mostly lithoblasts, clustered around it. Half the windows had already disappeared beneath thick, irregular, overlapping layers of rock foam. Beneath the house, out of sight, lithoclasts severed the house’s connections with the rest of the campus, and lithoblasts filled in the resulting spaces.

  “Send in one of the eating kind,” Iphigenie said. “Bring him out.”

  “And then what?” Derjaguin said. “Hanging? Or maybe you’ll burn him at the stake?”

  “You shut up!” Iphigenie shouted.

  “Why do you want him out?” Infinity asked.

  After a long shocked silence, Esther began to laugh.

  “What kind of a stupid question is that?” Iphigenie was offended and angry.

  Esther recovered her composure. “Leave him in there! All alone, and cut off...”

  “Infinity,” Thanthavong said, with sorrow and appreciation, “you have got it exactly right.”

  Infinity was grateful to Esther for speaking up for him, glad that Professor Thanthavong understood and agreed with what he intended. He disliked controversy; he disliked acting in important matters without the agreement and support of the community he had joined. But everyone had been so angry, so ready to rush off with assumptions rather than information, that this was the first time anyone had been willing to listen to his solution to the problem.

  “Leave Blades in there, Iphigenie,” Professor Thanthavong said. “Send him food, send him water. The lithoblasts will block him from the passageways — the secret ones and the public ones.” She glanced at Infinity for confirmation.

  “They already have,” he said.

  “Look.” Thanthavong gestured toward the house. “They’re closing the windows. After that, a few ASes will be able to guard him. He won’t be a danger anymore.”

  “What about his access to Arachne?” Iphigenie asked, doubtful, suspicious.

  “Arachne has rejected him. He can’t form another node.”

  Iphigenie started to object again.

  “The slugs dissolved the hard link connections,” Infinity said quickly. “He can’t touch Arachne at all.”

  Silence fell. Every person there used Arachne a thousand times each day, automatically, as if it were an extra sense and an extra limb. And everyone had felt what it was like to lose contact with the powerful entity.

  It was like dying a little. For Blades, the perception of dying would not end.

  “Very well,” Iphigenie said abruptly. “For the time being, that is satisfactory.”

  She passed Infinity without looking back, intent on returning to the sailhouse, zero gravity, and stars.

  o0o

  The faculty and staff of Starfarer, no longer an enraged crowd, hurried toward the end of the campus cylinder where the Chi and the alien humans were about to dock. People scattered over the path, alone, in pairs, in small groups.

  Kolya watched them go.

  They are, I hope, he thought, wondering what possessed them for the little while. They are, I hope, making the decision never to let it possess them again.

  He would follow in a moment. He was equally anxious to meet the alien humans, but he had a task to perform first.


  Kolya turned to Infinity and offered him his hand. Infinity took it. Infinity’s hand was hard, calloused.

  “Thank you,” Kolya said.

  Infinity had no reply. Esther tapped his arm.

  “Let’s go up to the dock. I don’t want to miss this.”

  “No,” Infinity said, “I don’t either.”

  “Go ahead,” Kolya told them. “I’ll be along soon.”

  When they had left, Kolya crossed the lawn. A solitary figure leaned against the rock outcrop that bordered the yard.

  Griffith gazed at the foam-enshrouded cocoon that had been the chancellor’s house. Three silver slugs sprawled like huge shapeless lions in front of the single opening that remained.

  Kolya approached. Griffith turned toward him, his expression wary. He was too well trained to reveal that he was ready either to run or to defend himself. But Kolya knew.

  Kolya leaned on the rock next to him. He kept his silence for some minutes.

  “I was wrong,” he said finally.

  “About what?” Griffith said.

  “About a great number of things,” Kolya said. “But at this particular time, I was wrong to threaten you.”

  “Maybe it was lousy etiquette,” Griffith said. “But you got through to me.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  Griffith glanced at him, sidelong, quizzical.

  “‘Unfortunately’?”

  “If you had forced someone to tell us how Arachne could be crashed, Feral would be alive. If I hadn’t stopped you.”

  “Maybe.” Griffith shrugged. “I would have had to pick the person who knew. I might have hurt someone who just got in the way. That’s what happened to Feral. He just got in the way.”

  “I wouldn’t have chosen correctly, either.” Kolya gestured toward the cocoon-house. “And you would have had the difficulty of reaching the chancellor.”

  “Difficulty?” Griffith shrugged again. “No. No difficulty.”

  Chapter 13

  The Chi reached Starfarer and settled into its dock. The alien humans’ tiny short-distance craft, following in the Chi’s wake, moved up next to it.