The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  If they could signal through transition, at the very least they could let their friends and relatives know they had survived the missile attack.

  “I am mobile,” Nemo said, “like all my people.”

  “Oh,” J.D. said, as suddenly disappointed as she had been elated. “Then you can’t signal through transition?”

  “No.”

  “Can anyone?”

  “No one I know of.”

  “You go visiting.”

  “I go visiting,” Nemo agreed.

  J.D. sighed. It had been a long shot. Cosmic string theory allowed only large masses to enter transition. No one — no one human — had figured how to chitchat across the transition threshold. Apparently no one non-human had made such a discovery, either.

  Talking about cosmic string reminded her of something she had put off discussing for too long.

  “I understand your wanting to get used to meeting people,” she said to Nemo. “But if you want to meet any other human beings, you have to do it soon. Starfarer has to move out of the star system before the cosmic string withdraws. If it does withdraw — you’ll have to move, too, or you’ll get stranded.”

  “I will not allow myself to be stranded,” Nemo said.

  “Good... I was afraid...” She shrugged. She was ambivalent about bringing up the subject. “I’m surprised you’ll talk to us. Aren’t you afraid of being contaminated by us? You’ve talked to me more than Europa and Androgeos did altogether, I think.”

  “They were disappointed that you failed the test.”

  “But it was a mistake! We weren’t armed with nuclear weapons. Or with anything else, for that matter. Nemo, we were attacked in our own system. We dragged the missile through transition because it hit us.”

  “That is a shame,” Nemo said.

  “And the only thing that will keep us from being attacked again, if we go home, is proof that Civilization exists.”

  “Your own people would kill you because you failed,” Nemo said.

  Another silk-spinner crept out of a fold in the wall and joined the silk worm in the new circle of fabric. The second spinner scrambled across the disk, leaving a radial trail of thread that secured the delicate, tight spiral.

  “They wouldn’t kill us, but they’d put us in jail.” Nemo’s attention to the handwork exasperated her.

  Is there any way to get Civilization to listen to us? she thought.

  “Maybe you should neither go on, nor go home, but allow yourself to be stranded,” Nemo said.

  “We’ve thought about it,” J.D. said. The ecosystem could support far more people than the ship carried; it could support them indefinitely. “We could turn Starfarer into a generation ship, and form our own little isolated world...” The whole idea depressed her. It meant abandoning Earth. She could not imagine anything more selfish. “I’d rather go back and get put in jail!” she cried aloud, and her voice broke. She struggled to calm herself.

  “I did not understand that,” Nemo said.

  J.D. repeated herself. Her electronic voice sounded so calm, so rational.

  “Imprisonment is preferable to freedom.” Nemo’s eyelid opened all the way around, and the tentacles extended to J.D. and touched her forehead, her shoulder. The silk-spinners, deprived of guidance, wandered across the fabric and trailed threads that left flaws in its surface.

  Nemo’s tentacles drew away from J.D. and returned to the spinners.

  “No! But... we didn’t come out here to found a colony. That’s against everything we agreed on, everything we dreamed of! We came out here hoping to join an interstellar community. We came out here to meet you! And now you tell us we have to go back, or abandon Earth, because of a mistake — !”

  “Five hundred years isn’t so long,” Nemo said.

  “Not to you! You and Europa and Androgeos will still be here when five hundred years have passed. But I’ll be dead. Everyone on board Starfarer will be dead. And if we go back to Earth with nothing but the news that we’ve failed... I’m afraid human beings won’t survive at all.”

  “Many civilizations have destroyed themselves.”

  J.D. looked away from Nemo’s brilliant, colorful form, with two long tentacles shepherding the spinners, the third waving delicately in the air.

  “I’d hoped...” She started to take a deep breath, felt the tickle of acrid gases in the back of her throat, and instead blew her breath out in frustration. “I hoped you might tell me that no civilizations are ever lost. That somehow we always manage to pull ourselves out of destruction.”

  “Civilizations are lost all the time, J.D.”

  “I meant... a whole world’s civilization.” The culture she lived in had reached out for the stars, and had attained them, however temporarily. Why should that be proof against extinction?

  Nemo’s tentacle brushed her toe, her shoulder.

  “So did I,” the squidmoth said.

  Chapter 2

  J.D. sat crosslegged beside Nemo, the silk beneath her warm and soft. She could happily stay here for a week, just talking. She shifted her position, resting her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand, looking at Nemo, amazed and enthralled by the being. She watched, in silence, as Nemo guided the silk spinners. The disk had become an iridescent pouch, like several others lying at the edge of the chamber.

  “Tell me about Civilization,” J.D. said.

  “Beings exchange their knowledge,” Nemo replied.

  The two spinners, one wormlike, one resembling a starfish crossed with a lace handkerchief, met nose to nose.

  “But there’s more than that!” J.D. said. “How many worlds are there? How many people? How many kinds of people? What are they like? What kind of governments do they have? I want to know everything, Nemo, about Civilization and how it works, about the movements of the cosmic string — !”

  The worm reared up, the starfish twisted. They touched. Each extruded a spurt of silk.

  “The people of Civilization will want to describe themselves to you.”

  “What do they do when they meet? How do they reconcile their differences?”

  The bursts of thread caught together and tangled. As the creatures danced, Nemo urged them easily around the pouch. Their motions formed the silk into a fluted rim.

  “They make peace, or the cosmic string withdraws.”

  “That’s simple,” J.D. said dryly. “A little Draconian, but simple.”

  When the silk worm and the starfish returned to their starting point, Nemo flicked them both off the edge and into the pouch.

  “Tell me what you’re looking for,” Nemo said.

  “We’re looking for answers,” J.D. said. “Answers... and more questions.”

  “Tell me what answers you’re looking for.”

  “We already found one — a big one. You. We built Starfarer to find out whether other civilizations exist. Or whether we were alone. Now we know that answer.”

  “The answer to your question is self-evident,” Nemo said.

  “Not to everyone. At least not to a lot of human beings. Their philosophy depends on their being alone in the universe.”

  “Earth has passed through a decline,” Nemo said.

  “I — what do you mean?”

  “Europa and Androgeos knew of other beings.”

  “After they were rescued, after they left Earth and joined Civilization —”

  “When they lived on Earth, they spoke to others.”

  “They had myths. They believed in gods and demigods and fantasy creatures. That doesn’t count as knowing about space-faring beings.”

  “Yet their myths were more accurate than Earth’s current myths of solitude.”

  “There are lots of different myths on Earth right now. But... you’re right. Europa and Androgeos came from a sophisticated culture. That’s probably why they fit in so well with Civilization.”

  Nemo’s feet drummed softly on the floor, a complicated rhythm. Seven against five? J.D. could not quite tell.

&nbs
p; “If we do go back to Earth — I’m not saying we’ll accept the exile, but if we do — there are lots of people who won’t believe we’ve met alien beings.”

  “You’ll tell them you met alien beings,” Nemo said.

  Several attendants scuttled and swooped nearer. Nemo rounded them up and herded them into the pouch.

  “I’ll tell them, but they won’t believe me. They’ll say we faked the records. They’ll say it’s all a monstrous hoax.”

  “You wouldn’t fake information.”

  J.D. thought she heard shock in Nemo’s voice.

  “But they’d say we did. So we could claim we succeeded. So we could claim they shouldn’t put us in jail because we were right all along. They’ll want proof that we’re right.”

  She waited, but instead of replying, Nemo lifted the delicate pouch and placed its fluted edge against a silk-draped wall, where it stuck.

  “You could prove we were right, Nemo,” J.D. said.

  “If they saw me, they’d believe you’d met alien people.”

  “They sure would.”

  “If they saw me, they wouldn’t put us in jail.”

  J.D. laughed. “They wouldn’t put you in jail, that’s for sure.” She stretched out her hands to Nemo. “It’s a lot to ask, I know, but five hundred years isn’t long to people like you and Europa. Wouldn’t you at least think of visiting the solar system? You could learn everything there is to know about human beings.”

  “Your invitation’s tempting,” Nemo said.

  “You’ll do it?” J.D. exclaimed, astonished.

  “I’m sorry, I have another commitment.”

  “I understand.” The thrill J.D. had felt dropped abruptly into disappointment, with sad amusement that people gave the same excuses everywhere. “Five hundred years is too long.”

  “This time it is, I am sorry.”

  J.D. rose and stretched.

  “I’ve been here for hours,” she said. “I have to go back to the Chi for a while.”

  “You are leaving.”

  “I have to rest, and eat —” She shrugged. “Things that are easier back on the Chi.”

  “I can offer you food,” Nemo said.

  Nemo snaked out one long tentacle to the far side of the chamber. The curtain there was a mass of iridescent bubbles of silk. Nemo’s tentacle quivered across the surface.

  It moved. The bubbles fluttered and bobbed and separated, the whole mass expanding, opening like a flower.

  Each sphere was a living creature, depending from the curtain by three long slender limbs. The creatures had no heads, no other appendages, only a circular ring of spots.

  Eyespots, J.D. thought, knowing she was making another assumption without much evidence.

  Nemo chose one at the edge of the mass and stroked it. It released its hold on the silk and wrapped its legs around Nemo’s tentacle.

  Nemo extended the creature toward her.

  “A decorative food,” Nemo said.

  J.D.’s helmet radio emitted a noise, not Nemo’s voice, but Victoria’s, a quick sound of protest more quickly cut off. J.D.’s friends worried when they thought she was in danger, but they were beginning to understand that facing the danger was her responsibility. They were beginning to understand that they had to let her do her job. Stephen Thomas had once offered to take her place, but he had only offered once: her reaction assured that. The other members of alien contact thought of her as mild-tempered, even meek, and she was. But when Stephen Thomas suggested that he go out instead of her, she lost her temper.

  “The food will not hurt you.”

  J.D. accepted Nemo’s offer.

  It touched her lips. The jointed legs fluttered against her tongue; the abdomen disappeared like sea foam or cotton candy, bursting with a flood of strange flavor: sweet and gingery, spicy-hot enough to make her draw a startled breath. The air passing over her tongue dissolved the spicy taste into a cool musky flavor like perfume. She crunched the delicate legs, but when she swallowed even the legs had evanesced.

  The evanescence dissolved straight into J.D.’s blood, straight to her brain.

  J.D. broke out into a sweat, she flushed from collarbone to forehead, and her heart began to pound. As J.D. gasped for breath — and coughed violently in reaction to the air — Victoria’s voice rumbled from J.D.’s suit helmet, rising in pitch. A spot of heat appeared in the back of J.D.’s mind, a signal from Victoria. J.D. let it in.

  “J.D., I’m coming after you!” Victoria said directly into her mind.

  “Nemo, what’s happening?” J.D. said.

  Trying not to sound panicked, she sent a message back to Victoria and the Chi: “No, don’t, not yet. I’m all right... I think I’m all right.”

  “It’s the effect of decorative food,” Nemo said.

  Nemo’s long tentacle manipulated another creature from the wall and carried it beneath Nemo’s mustache of shorter tentacles. The creature disappeared, with a faint crunch.

  Veins in the gauzy fins over Nemo’s legs darkened, and the fins rippled rapidly. The long tentacles twined around each other, leaving the silk-spinners to their own direction. The tips of Nemo’s legs pattered erratically against the floor. Nemo’s eyelid opened completely, then closed, then opened again in J.D.’s direction.

  J.D.’s flush passed, and her heartbeat steadied. Only a quiver of sexual excitement remained, pleasurable and comforting and startling.

  “Some effect,” J.D. said.

  “That’s the decoration.” Nemo’s fins returned to their normal color, and settled back into their usual gentle wave. Instead of replacing the spinners on the rim of the silken pouch, Nemo let them wander in patterns across the surface.

  “Did you know how I’d react to it?” J.D. asked.

  “Tell me how it felt.”

  “Like ninety-proof champagne. Like excitement.”

  “Yes,” Nemo said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Human biochemistry.”

  “Is that how it feels to you?”

  “If excitement feels the same to me as it does to you.”

  “Is this what you live on all the time?”

  “No one can live on decorative food,” Nemo said.

  “What do you live on?”

  “Starlight,” Nemo said. “Radiation.”

  “Photosynthesis — ?”

  The theory had always been that the metabolism of animals was too high to be sustained by sunlight alone, that fictional creations like giant, walking, talking plants could not exist — or at least that they could not walk very far, very fast, or think very much.

  “The light of Sirius helps sustain me.”

  That would explain the other crater-nests, the ones filled with smooth silver silk in parabolic shapes: solar collectors, focusing the starlight, converting it, and funneling it to its users.

  Nemo touched the silk spinners and guided them to the rim of the pouch. They had created a pattern of scarlet and indigo.

  J.D. wiped her forehead. Her hair was damp with sweat. The first effects of the decorative food had passed, but her hands were shaking. She wondered if the food acted with a wave effect, or if it was about to give her a flashback.

  I’m hungry, she thought. I’m hungry and I’m exhausted and I have a bad case of sensory overload. And like Nemo said... nobody can live on decorative food.

  “Nemo, I must go back to the Chi for a while. I have a lot to think about, and I’m tired — aren’t you?”

  “No, I don’t tire.”

  “You’re fortunate. Would you like to visit with someone else while I’m gone?”

  “I will think, until you return.”

  She took that as a polite refusal.

  As she put on her spacesuit, she wondered how to persuade the alien being to let her colleagues come into its nest. They would be horribly disappointed if they could not.

  Several of Nemo’s attendants whispered past her on tiny invisible feet, and clustered around the gossamer thread that h
ad led her in. When they passed over it, it parted. They hunkered down over the pieces, drawing in the threads.

  “May I have a piece of your silk?” J.D. asked Nemo, gesturing to one of the threads.

  “Tell me what you’d do with it.”

  “I’d give it to one of my colleagues to analyze. He studies genetics.”

  “You may have it.”

  J.D. pulled the sampling kit from the thigh pocket of her spacesuit and used the sterile tongs to pick up a thread. One of the attendants lunged, arching upward to snap with shiny jaws. Startled, J.D. snatched the sample away.

  “It doesn’t want me to take it,” she said to Nemo.

  “It doesn’t have much tolerance for change.”

  The attendant flopped back to the floor, forgot about J.D., and headed for another loose bit of silk.

  J.D. put her prize in a sample bag and sealed it.

  “Thank you, Nemo,” she said. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  “I will wait.”

  “Shall I leave my life-line here? Then I could follow it in when I come back.”

  “One of my attendants will spin you to me,” Nemo said.

  “But that’s so much trouble for you, when I could just follow the line.”

  “The line is essential to you,” Nemo said.

  “No, not really. It’s for safety, for backup.”

  “J.D.,” Nemo said, and J.D. thought she heard a hesitation in the squidmoth’s voice, “the line is uncomfortable.”

  “It — what?”

  She thought about the line, snaking back and forth through Nemo’s body, pressing against, even cutting into, Nemo’s tissues and organs.

  “I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed. “Nemo, why didn’t you say something before?” She blushed, mortified at having thoughtlessly caused Nemo pain.

  “I want you to feel welcome,” Nemo said.

  J.D. grasped the end of Nemo’s tentacle gently. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. “I won’t bring the line when I come back.”

  “Thank you,” Nemo said.

  As she left the bright sphere of light in the center of Nemo’s nest, the long tentacles slithered after her, touching her heels. She paused at the opening between two inner curtains, glanced back, and waved. Nemo’s mustache vibrated.