The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  She could speak with the being, but she might not always understand it. They could easily misinterpret each other.

  “Androgeos said you were... reclusive.”

  “Androgeos never visited me,” the squidmoth said.

  Lacking the clue of voice inflection, J.D. could not tell whether the squidmoth spoke with regret, with relief, or to offer a neutral point of information.

  J.D. felt very calm. Her rush of fear had subsided, leaving enough adrenaline behind to make her hyper-aware, sensitive, as if all her nerves extended beyond her skin.

  “I’m very grateful for your invitation, and very glad to visit you,” J.D. said. “We haven’t made proper introductions. My name is J.D. Sauvage.”

  “I have no verbal name,” the squidmoth said.

  “Call it Nemo!” Zev’s voice whispered in her ear.

  “Shh, Zev!” Victoria said.

  “Tell me what that meant,” the squidmoth said.

  “One of my colleagues suggested that I give you — that I offer you a name,” J.D. said. “The name of a famous fictional character.”

  “I will be Nemo,” the squidmoth said.

  “I’m glad to meet you, Nemo,” J.D. said. “May I come closer?”

  In response, the squidmoth drew its long tentacles toward itself. They twisted and tangled, their tips coming together and parting. J.D. followed, till she was barely two strides away. Even this close, she could see no reason for comparing the alien being to a moth. Up close, it did not look all that much like a squid.

  It was exquisitely, strangely beautiful. Bits of every iridescent color flecked its peacock skin. Its slender jointed legs splayed out into tiny pointed feet, alternately concealed and exposed by the rippling gills.

  For all her resolution, J.D. had begun to analyze the being in familiar terms.

  “I would like to touch you,” the squidmoth said. Its long tentacles, untangling themselves smoothly, coiled before it, their tips waving as if in a gentle breeze. Its mustache of short proboscises continued to ripple.

  Again, J.D. hesitated, and she realized just how deeply the alien humans’ duplicity had changed her.

  Dammit, she said to herself, you may not be able to trust everybody out here completely; you may not be able to be as open as you’d hoped. But you cannot be afraid all the time.

  “Very well,” she said coolly.

  The being extended one long tentacle toward her. The tip hesitated at her foot, then curved over her toes and down around her instep, meeting the floor where her boot sank into the thick soft silk. A second tentacle moved toward her, arching up till it reached the level of her face. The fine hair of the tip brushed her helmet, with a sound as soft as dust.

  “This is not your body.”

  “It’s my space suit,” J.D. said. “It carries my air.”

  “You may breathe this air.”

  “I know. But the suit also protects me from unfamiliar infections — and protects you from contamination.”

  “Nothing here will infect you.”

  “Androgeos said the same thing — but he wouldn’t tell me how he was so sure. You’ll forgive my fears, I hope. I trusted Androgeos, but my encounter with him was... unfortunate, in many ways.” Androgeos had tried to steal Victoria’s new work on cosmic string. He had tried to take away all Earth had to offer to claim respect within the interstellar community.

  “Androgeos is young, and zealous.”

  “Young! He’s thirty-seven hundred years old!”

  The squidmoth’s tentacle brushed back and forth across J.D.’s faceplate. The pattern of the rippling of its proboscises had changed: from a single wave-form, moving regularly across its mustache, to a double pattern, two waves starting one at each side, clashing in the middle, adding to each other, canceling.

  Could I have perturbed it? J.D. wondered. But the question of contamination must be the first one everybody wants the answer to, and the first question these people must have solved. They’ve been interacting with each other for millennia.

  Maybe I made it mad because I don’t want to put my life completely in its hands.

  “Androgeos is young,” the squidmoth said again.

  J.D. wondered if she heard a tinge of amusement or irony in its voice. Surely not; it was her imagination.

  Strangely enough, Androgeos had struck her as young. He was physically young, while Europa had chosen a more mature physical presence.

  “Androgeos acts young sometimes,” J.D. said.

  “We have nothing to fear from each other’s symbiotic microbes,” the squidmoth said, and waited.

  J.D. hesitated. The potential danger was very low. She and Nemo were products of completely different evolutionary backgrounds. It would make more sense to worry about catching Dutch Elm disease from a tree.

  J.D. reached for the seal on her helmet.

  “J.D. —” Victoria said, and then fell silent.

  J.D. had walked out onto Europa’s planetoid, unprotected. She had hesitated then, too, but she had made the decision to trust the alien humans. In several respects, Europa and Androgeos were not trustworthy at all. But when they assured J.D. she was in no danger of catching, or transmitting, a human or environmental pathogen, they had told her the truth. They had probably eliminated every disease in their environment; they were probably in more danger from Starfarer than Starfarer was from them. And all Stephen Thomas’s tests had come out negative.

  It would make no sense at all, besides, to throw Earth a lifeline in the form of cosmic string, and then wage biological war on whoever responded. The interstellar community had been keeping an eye on the solar system for generations; if they had wanted to eliminate humanity they could have done it long since, easily, without ever being detected.

  The only difference between walking unprotected onto Europa’s planetoid and taking off her spacesuit in the squidmoth’s presence was that here, her surroundings were strange, and there, they had been familiar. And, perhaps, that then she had not known what her hosts would look like, and now, she was in the presence of a supremely alien being.

  Her only reason to refuse was fear: xenophobia.

  Recognizing such a reaction troubled J.D. deeply.

  Too many bad alien-invasion movies, she said to herself, and then, Bad joke.

  She unfastened her helmet. She took it off.

  She drew a deep breath.

  J.D. started to cough. The air was pungent, musty, reeking of hydrocarbons. It stung her eyes. She breathed shallowly, tempted to seal herself back up with her own clean air supply. The high oxygen content of Nemo’s atmosphere made her giddy.

  Once she got used to it, it was about the same as back home in one of the more polluted regions. Spending so much time in the wilderness had spoiled her and weakened her resistance to fouled air.

  J.D. unfastened her suit and climbed out of it. She put it carefully on the floor. The LTMs clambered around so they could still see and record her actions. She hoped their resolution was insufficient to capture the trembling of her hands.

  Nemo’s voice, tinny and indistinct, droned from the helmet. In order to converse, J.D. would either have to wear the helmet without the suit, which struck her as ridiculous, or communicate with Nemo through her direct link. Ordinarily she used the direct link only to communicate with Arachne.

  J.D. reached out, cautiously, tentatively, into her link. She could talk with her colleagues via the direct electronic transmission, if she wished, but she usually did not do so. Like many people, she found it discomforting. She did not like the sensation of other people’s voices in her head. It took a considerable effort of will to overcome her reluctance and speak directly to Nemo.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  “I can hear you.” Nemo’s voice whispered in her mind.

  The tentacles of the squidmoth hovered nearby, raising and lowering themselves from the silken floor, twisting and turning as they waited. J.D. faced the squidmoth, moved a step closer, and held out one h
and.

  The tentacle brushed her palm lightly with its tip. The sensory hairs, soft as fur, quivered against her skin.

  J.D. closed her hand gently around the tip of the tentacle. Its motion stilled. Nemo waited, saying nothing.

  The tentacle moved up her arm, curling around her wrist like a snake. Its skin, beyond the fur, felt like suede. Its warmth surprised her. The squidmoth must have a body temperature well above hers, if its appendages felt so warm to the touch. She had unconsciously expected the slick wet coldness of a real squid, the sharp pull of predatory suckers.

  Nemo touched her sleeve, exploring it, probing beneath the cuff.

  “This is clothing,” J.D. said, touching her shirt, her pants. “It’s the custom of human beings to wear it most of the time.”

  Maybe I should strip down, J.D. thought, but I’m not quite ready for that yet.

  Nemo touched her palm, her sleeve, her palm again, testing the differences between skin and fabric.

  The tip of one tentacle brushed her throat, her lips. She closed her eyes. Fur caressed her eyelids. A second tentacle curled around her waist, gently embracing her. The tip probed at her, tracing the texture of her shirt, touching each button, following the curve of her heavy breasts and coiling softly down her arm. The third tentacle wound around her leg, then its tip traveled up her spine, touching the bump of each vertebra through her shirt.

  She opened her eyes. Her lashes brushed against the sensory cilia.

  “You detect sensations with these hairs,” Nemo said.

  “No.” She smiled. The squidmoth was trying to make the same kinds of assumptions about her that she was making about it. “That is, I can feel your tentacle, but my eyelashes are for protecting my eyes. Um — do you call this a tentacle?” She brushed her fingers across the soft peacock skin.

  “In English, I call it a tentacle.”

  This time J.D. thought she heard a flash of humor in Nemo’s voice. Again, she told herself she must be imagining it.

  “I meant, is ‘tentacle’ an accurate translation of what you call it in your language? What do you call it in your language?”

  “I have no language.”

  “I don’t understand,” J.D. said.

  “Our communication does not consist of sounds.”

  “I know, you told me: you use transmissions. But what do you transmit? Words? Visual images? Sensations?”

  “A surface of meaning and perception.”

  J.D. frowned. “A neural visual image?”

  “Position, and change of position, within a multi-dimensional surface of meaning, intensity, rapport between the speakers.”

  “Multidimensional? More than three dimensions?”

  “Many more.”

  J.D. tried to imagine a more-than-three-dimensional surface; she tried to imagine being shown a more-than-three-dimensional surface in her mind. An acquaintance of hers claimed to be able to imagine rotating a sphere around a plane, but she had never been able to explain to J.D. how to do it.

  “It sounds beautiful,” J.D. said.

  The squidmoth tentacles twined and curled before her; their tips touched her cheek, her breast, her hand.

  “It is beautiful,” it said.

  “Do you have art forms associated with your communication? The way humans have singing and stories and poetry?”

  “It is an art form in itself, whenever a talented one extends the limits and forms new regions and new shapes.”

  “May I... Will you show it to me?”

  Without warning, a flash of perception tantalized her brain. She heard sugar dissolving, smelled the pink clouds of a brilliant sunset, sensed the position of a billion raindrops like muscle fibers. She saw a melody of Nemo’s vision. Each sensation had its own particular place, its own connections with all the others. More information poured into her. But her internal link acted like the narrow end of a funnel. Nemo’s transmission filled the funnel to the brim, and spilled out into nothingness.

  J.D. gasped acrid air. She sneezed, and began to cough. Nemo’s transmission faded away, and J.D. found herself sitting sprawled on the floor. She buried her nose in the crook of her elbow, breathing through the fabric of her shirt, forcing herself to take shallow breaths, until her coughing stopped. She wiped her teary eyes.

  Nemo lay placidly before her, short tentacles ruffling slightly, long tentacles guiding a frilled, wormy little creature as it spun silver thread in concentric circles.

  The radio in her helmet rumbled with a faint hollow sound. J.D. sent an “I’m okay” message back to Victoria and the Chi. The rumbling ceased. J.D. pulled herself together and sat crosslegged near Nemo.

  “I didn’t understand what you sent me,” J.D. said to Nemo. “But you’re right, it was beautiful.”

  “You cannot absorb enough information to gather the complete communication surface,” Nemo said.

  “Internal links aren’t one of our natural senses,” J.D. said sadly. “They’re pretty limited.”

  “It is too bad,” Nemo said.

  “But any of us can use them to talk to you,” J.D. said quickly. “And my colleagues would like to meet you. Would that be possible?”

  “I want to become acquainted with one human being, first,” Nemo said. “I want my attendants to become familiar with you.”

  “Your... attendants?”

  Nemo’s fragile legs drummed on the floor. J.D. felt the vibration, and heard a faint thrumming.

  She heard the same sound she had heard farther out in the webbing, tiny feet scratching against soft silk. Several small creatures scuttled from beneath the curtains, moving on many legs, and another slithered down a steep slope. They gathered around Nemo, crawling up the iridescent skin. Their dull colors changed and brightened. Like chameleons, they blended into their background. If she watched carefully she could make out their shapes, malleable and indistinct, reaching out with long pincered fingers to groom Nemo’s skin. One clambered up the feathery gill-leg, and vanished beneath the fluted fin.

  “The attendants are not used to the presence of other beings.”

  “Oh,” J.D. said. She did her best to be diplomatic. “How long will it take?” She wondered if she would get a useful answer; she did not even know if Nemo reckoned time in long spans, or short ones.

  “I don’t know, I’ve never received a guest before,” Nemo said.

  “Never?”

  “We’re solitary beings,” Nemo said.

  “Does it — does it bother you to have me in your crater?”

  “I enjoy unique experiences.” Nemo guided the circling creature around the edge of the disk of silk.

  “Would you like to visit Starfarer? I don’t know if you’re mobile or not —” And I have no idea what you might be sensitive about, either, she thought, doubting the brilliance of her spontaneous suggestion. I only know that human beings are most sensitive about what’s hardest, or impossible, to change. “You — you or any of your people — would be welcome on board Starfarer, if you cared to visit.”

  The squidmoth’s mustache ruffled, from left to right, then back again.

  “You inhabit the inside of Starfarer,” Nemo said.

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t fit inside Starfarer,” Nemo said.

  “Oh.” She glanced at Nemo’s iridescent back, the tail section disappearing into the floor. “How much of you is out of sight?” Anything that could fit inside the crater would fit inside Starfarer, though the logistics could be difficult.

  “You see all of me.”

  “I don’t understand,” J.D. said.

  Nemo’s long tentacles touched the silk, the walls.

  “All you see is me,” the squidmoth said.

  “The whole crater?”

  “Everything,” Nemo said.

  “The whole ship?”

  “What you call the ship.”

  That stopped her. She wiped one more unexamined assumption away, embarrassed to have made it without even noticing, and revised her perce
ption of the squidmoth. J.D. had assumed Nemo was her counterpart, the individual who volunteered, or was chosen, to meet an alien being. She had assumed each of the silky craters held a being like Nemo, each in its own web.

  “You’re all alone here?”

  “I am myself,” Nemo said without inflection.

  Great question, J.D., she thought. What would you say if somebody asked if you were all alone in your own body? “No, I’m here with a bunch of white blood cells and a liver”? But — no wonder Europa and Androgeos said squidmoths were reclusive!

  She looked around with an even finer appreciation of her environment and all the other species living here, helping to repair and remake the structure, adapted or co-opted to a perfect interaction...

  Were they symbionts, or did they correspond to blood cells, or organs? She was still trying to put names from her own frame of reference, from her own linear language, into a system that corresponded more closely to Nemo’s multidimensional communication.

  “Who do you communicate with?” she asked abruptly.

  “I communicate with whoever speaks to me.”

  “I meant... if you’re the only one of your people in the Sirius system, how do you communicate with others? We haven’t found any way of sending electronic signals through transition. Can you — ?”

  She stopped her excited rush of questions and waited impatiently for Nemo’s reply. She imagined the anticipation of her colleagues pressing against her link to Arachne.

  If Nemo knew how to communicate through transition, the deep space expedition would be able to tell Earth that it had met alien beings. That could change everything.

  If we could let them know back on Earth, J.D. thought, that an interstellar civilization really exists...

  J.D. knew it was Utopian to believe human beings would come to their senses, and end their interminable and dreadful power games, if they knew of a civilization beyond themselves. She knew it was Utopian... but she believed it anyway.

  And if Starfarer could send back word that it had met other intelligences, the members of the expedition might be forgiven for taking Starfarer out of the solar system against EarthSpace orders.