The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

“Thanks,” she said. Trying not to move the cup, she leaned forward and took a sip so she would not spill it. It was hot. She had to slurp it so she would not burn her tongue.

  “You looked like you could use it,” he said. He sat in his couch one place to Zev’s left.

  Now the members of the alien contact department were all in their places, quartering the observer’s circle like the cardinal points of a compass. Zev broke the pattern, but J.D. was glad beyond words that he had joined the expedition, and grateful that Victoria had not objected when he accompanied her on board the Chi.

  Zev enfolded her hand with his long webbed fingers. In the sea, he would have touched her more closely. He was learning land manners. J.D. was learning that on land, land manners were not always preferable. Even when they were more appropriate.

  He cared more about her than about her success with Nemo, she thought. His curiosity had brought him to the expedition — that, and missing her. Maybe missing her had been the most important factor. He participated with delight in the expedition, but the most significant part of life, for divers, was the connection among friends, family, and lovers. J.D. and Zev were all three to each other.

  She squeezed his hand gratefully, sipped her tea, and collected herself for the conference. She felt like she had crashed from the high of an intense long-distance swim. Besides the physical effort, the emotional exertion had taken its toll.

  In principle, she supported the idea that her colleagues should be able to accompany her vicariously. She welcomed the ability to call on their knowledge and ideas and questions. In practice, she hated every minute she spent in front of cameras and recorders.

  “Did you have a chance to look at my LTM recording?” Stephen Thomas asked.

  “No,” J.D. said. “I’m sorry.” They had only been back on board the Chi for a few minutes. She had not had a chance to look at what any of her colleagues had seen on their excursions into Nemo.

  “I think you should. It was weirder than shit. Hard to figure out what it meant, or what Nemo intended to tell me.”

  “I’ll look at it as soon as I can. And we can ask about it, as soon as Nemo starts communicating again.”

  “Okay.”

  J.D. folded her hands around the tea mug. A comforting warmth seeped through its insulation.

  “I guess I’m ready. Shall we start?”

  “Okay.” Victoria’s eyelids flickered and she went into a brief communications fugue to notify Gerald. “We’re on.”

  All their colleagues from Starfarer could now see and hear and speak to everyone on the Chi.

  “J.D.,” Victoria said suddenly, “Nemo will probably listen to everything we say.”

  “Of course,” J.D. said. “Yes. I hope so. Listen, and maybe join the conversation.”

  “We shall all bear that in mind,” Gerald Hemminge said. “We’ll start the questions with Senator Orazio. Senator?”

  Victoria sat forward — about to object, J.D. thought, because the two United States senators were not members of the deep space expedition. They were unwilling guests. They had been on a fact-finding tour of Starfarer when it plunged out of the solar system, fulfilling its charter, but disobeying the orders of EarthSpace and the U.S. military.

  Instead of speaking, Victoria sat stiffly back. J.D. glanced at her with a sympathetic expression.

  The holographic image of Ruth Orazio, junior senator from Washington State, appeared before J.D.

  “J.D., you must try again to persuade Nemo to return to Earth with us.”

  “Senator... my question to Nemo was hypothetical. We aren’t on our way back to Earth.”

  Orazio had always supported the deep space expedition, and against all probability, she still did. How long her support would last was another question entirely. J.D. would not blame her when it waned; she had never agreed to leaving her family, her profession, her home world.

  “We have to go home,” Orazio said. “You came away unprepared, undersupplied, and understaffed, with an undependable computer web. It’s dangerous to go on this way.”

  “And more dangerous to go back,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “The expedition members have already decided that question.” Victoria did not soften her cold tone with the Canadian speech habit of raising the inflection of a sentence at the end of a question, inviting the listener to agree. “It isn’t appropriate to argue it again now.”

  “Dr. MacKenzie, we all know you’ll never agree to any plan that furthers the interests of the United States.” William Derjaguin, the senior senator from New Mexico, spoke out of turn. “At least let us discuss the subject!”

  Derjaguin had always opposed the expedition bitterly. Being kidnapped on a hijacked starship did nothing for his temper.

  “We discussed it at length,” Victoria said.

  J.D. broke in. “It wasn’t fair of me to ask Nemo to go to Earth in the first place,” she said. “The cosmic string has receded from the solar system. We can still go home. But we can’t leave again until the cosmic string returns.”

  “Unless it returns,” Victoria said.

  “Europa said squid — Nemo’s people just orbited stars and listened and watched,” Orazio said. “And Europa said nobody even did that once we could detect them.”

  The interstellar community had paid Earth very little attention at all, Europa claimed. Civilization never involved itself in the affairs of non-spacefaring worlds. Europa had found the idea of UFO reports quite amusing, which was an interesting reaction considering that she herself had been abducted by a UFO. But Civilization limited itself to the secret rescue of a few doomed individuals, including Europa and Androgeos. It saved them from natural disasters in order to train them to greet the first expedition of starfarers from their own home world.

  Other than that courtesy — a courtesy J.D. thought not only questionable but condescending — the interstellar community ignored new intelligences until they proved they were interesting enough, advanced enough, to bother talking to. So far, human beings did not qualify.

  “They’ve had to avoid us for two generations,” Ruth said. “What better star to orbit now than ours?”

  “What better star to avoid,” Stephen Thomas said, “than the home of warlike barbarians?”

  J.D. chuckled ruefully. “Good point.”

  Ruth smiled. “But who could resist trying to convert a bunch of barbarians? Victoria, I’m not letting you off the hook about going home. If we can persuade Nemo to go with us, then the deep space expedition will have accomplished the aim of its charter. You’ll be able to prove an interstellar community exists.”

  “The senator makes an incontrovertible point,” Gerald said. “Under those circumstances, we’d have no other ethical choice than to go home. Whether we could leave again would be completely immaterial.”

  Gerald Hemminge was one of the few expedition members who thought the starship should go home. He was one of the few who had argued for following EarthSpace orders, for converting the campus to an orbiting spy platform.

  But what he said was true.

  “Nemo’s already said no,” J.D. said.

  “But people sometimes change their minds,” Ruth said. “I intend to try to persuade Nemo to go home with us, if I get the chance.”

  J.D. smiled back. She had admired Senator Orazio before she ever met her; having met her, she liked her.

  “When we do go home,” J.D. said, “whenever it is, nothing would make me happier than to have Nemo come along with us.”

  “I have a question,” Gerald said, in the round, high-class British tones that always managed to sound more or less disapproving, “if I may step out of my liaison position for a moment.”

  “Go ahead,” J.D. said.

  “I was rather surprised... that you ate a live animal.”

  J.D. grinned mischievously. “It was good, Gerald. Essence of fresh shrimp, with honey-orange sauce. Quite a rush, too. It wasn’t any stranger than eating an oyster.”

  “If you say
so,” Gerald said. “There is a question from the astronomy department. Avvaiyar?”

  The tall, elegant astronomer appeared in the circle. She gestured, her hands as graceful as a dancer’s, and the image of the Milky Way also appeared. It turned, revealing the unmapped area beyond its core.

  “We have a matter of policy to decide,” she said. “Can we afford to turn down Nemo’s offer to exchange information?”

  “Can we afford to accept it?” Stephen Thomas said, sounding grim. J.D. wished she had had a chance to see what he had encountered in Nemo’s crater. She could not spare the attention, now, to look at it, but it had spooked him badly. Her impression was that Stephen Thomas Gregory did not spook easily.

  “What do you think, J.D.?” Victoria asked.

  “I...” She took a deep breath. “I want to say yes. I trust Nemo —”

  “That fact is self-evident,” Gerald said dryly.

  “But we aren’t just talking about me. I think... I think we still have time to think about it and decide.”

  “We have only a few days till we enter transition,” Avvaiyar said.

  “I know.” J.D. reached out briefly through her link toward Nemo. This is your chance to persuade my colleagues, she thought.

  But Nemo did not reply.

  “I think it’s too dangerous to give Nemo access to Arachne,” Victoria said.

  “You’re suggesting that we give up a great deal in order to protect your new transition algorithm,” Gerald said.

  “That’s right,” Victoria said.

  “In other words, you feel your work may be the only thing human beings will ever have to trade that the interstellar community will want.”

  “What’s your point, Gerald?” Stephen Thomas carried his voice with an edge.

  Gerald ignored Stephen Thomas. “Rather arrogant, perhaps, Victoria.”

  “Yes,” Victoria said.

  “There’s no need for personal animosity,” Professor Thanthavong said.

  “I meant no animosity. I’m merely suggesting that if we gain this new knowledge, we can go home — with or without Nemo — and consider the expedition a success. If Nemo takes the transition algorithm, what of it? We’ll have five hundred years to develop something equally impressive.”

  “I can’t believe you’re so anxious to give up and go home!” Victoria said.

  J.D. leaned back in her seat. This was an important discussion, and she was an important part of any conclusion. She had to pay attention to it.

  She closed her eyes. Just for a moment.

  o0o

  Satoshi woke. Victoria snuggled against him, one arm beneath her cheek, the other draped around his waist. They had dozed, waiting for Stephen Thomas. The bed felt empty without their younger partner.

  When J.D. fell asleep in the observer’s circle, Victoria had decided not to awaken her. No one was ready to make a decision about Nemo and Arachne, so they ended the conference. Everyone, on the Chi and back on Starfarer, was as grateful for a few hours’ rest.

  Everyone, apparently, except Stephen Thomas.

  I wonder where he is? Satoshi thought. Sleeping alone in his cabin?

  Not likely.

  Stephen Thomas liked to sleep with his partners. He liked to sleep in the middle, the way Merry used to.

  Not that Stephen Thomas had taken Merry’s place, or even tried. No one could ever do that. But after Merry’s accident, only a few months after Stephen Thomas joined the family partnership, the triad had comforted them all.

  I wonder if our family would have survived after Merry died, Satoshi wondered, if not for Stephen Thomas? I don’t think it would have. I fell apart pretty badly, and so did Victoria.

  The old ache and the numb shock returned. He hugged Victoria fiercely, desperately. The pain had barely diminished in the time since Merry’s death. It hit less frequently, but it hit just as hard.

  Victoria woke. She held him, stroking his smooth short hair, murmuring comfort in his ear.

  “I love you,” Satoshi whispered. “I don’t know what I’d do without you and Stephen Thomas.”

  “I love you, too,” she said. “And if I have anything to say about it, you’ll never need to find out what you’d do without me. But where’s Stephen Thomas?”

  “Maybe he thought we were sleeping in his room tonight.”

  Victoria looked at Satoshi, askance. They seldom all slept in Stephen Thomas’s room. He had a lot of good qualities, but neatness was not one of them. His room back on Starfarer was bad enough. The Chi’s forays into free-fall turned his cubicle into a disaster area.

  “I’ll go see,” Satoshi said.

  He crossed Victoria’s cabin and his own, pushing the connecting door the rest of the way open to create a single space. The door into Stephen Thomas’s room stood ajar. Satoshi pushed it open. Stephen Thomas was not there. His patchwork quilt, a wedding gift from Merry’s family, lay rumpled across his bed.

  He can’t still be in his lab, Satoshi thought. Can he? Maybe he fell asleep there.

  Satoshi pulled his own ratty bathrobe out of the storage net on the wall, put it on, and crossed to the laboratory section of the Chi.

  At the doorway of Stephen Thomas’s lab, Satoshi stopped. His partner tilted his chair to its limit, his hands behind his head and his feet braced against the lab table. Stephen Thomas gazed, frowning, at the magnified image of growing cells.

  “Hi, Satoshi,” Stephen Thomas said without turning around. He took his feet off the table and let his chair drop forward.

  Satoshi put his hands on Stephen Thomas’s shoulders.

  “Coming to bed?”

  Stephen Thomas shrugged.

  If Stephen Thomas had asked him to go away, he would have complied. Stephen Thomas could be moody, and he could say, often bluntly, what he wanted. But he had been so quiet recently that Satoshi worried. They had been through a lot. Maybe it all was catching up with Stephen Thomas. Maybe he was still in shock because of Feral’s death.

  Or maybe turning into a diver was not as benign a procedure as Zev thought.

  It troubled Satoshi that Stephen Thomas had chosen to let the changes proceed. They had begun by accident, by mistake. Satoshi wished the accident had never happened.

  You don’t have any right to tell him what to do with his body, he told himself sternly.

  Don’t I? he replied to himself. I love him. I care what happens to him.

  And I think this is crazy.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on with these cells,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Which ones are they?”

  “From Europa’s weed. Ordinary soil bacteria. Same as back on Earth, she said.”

  “But?”

  “But not quite. They’ll grow on dirt from Starfarer, if I sterilize it. Not otherwise. I must have missed something.”

  “It’s late, you’re tired. You’re working too hard.”

  “I’m not working hard enough.” Stephen Thomas slapped the lab table with a sharp, shocking strike. “Or I’d be able to figure this out. Everything I’ve done since we left home has been crap.”

  “Come to bed.”

  “I wouldn’t be good company.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Twitchy. Achy. I’ll probably thrash around. I’d keep you both awake.”

  “I don’t care,” Satoshi said.

  Satoshi looked at Stephen Thomas for a long moment. He was as susceptible to his partner’s extraordinary beauty as anyone. As everyone. He stroked Stephen Thomas’s long blond hair. It had, as usual, come untied. It curled around his partner’s face and tangled down over his shoulders.

  “Is your hair going to change color?”

  “Probably not,” Stephen Thomas said. “No reason it should. Zev says I should cut it, to be a proper diver.”

  “You never cut it to work in zero g, why should you cut it now?”

  “I’m not going to. Starfarer doesn’t have a proper ocean, so I can’t be a proper diver no matter what.”


  Most divers had dark eyes. So far, Stephen Thomas’s eyes remained brilliant sapphire blue. Satoshi hoped they would not change. He started to ask. But if they were going to change, he did not want to know.

  Satoshi slid his hand beneath the collar of his partner’s shirt, a deliberately arousing touch. His fingers stroked the soft new fuzz of fine, transparent diver’s fur.

  Satoshi froze. He willed himself to leave his hand where it was. He could not tell if Stephen Thomas noticed his reaction.

  Stephen Thomas put his hand on Satoshi’s. The swimming webs felt warm against Satoshi’s skin. Satoshi shivered. Stephen Thomas tensed and closed his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Satoshi asked.

  “I’ve just beat my body up pretty good the last few days,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “But Zev said —”

  “I had a run-in with a silver slug, all right?” Stephen Thomas said angrily.

  “What? How? When?”

  “When I tried to get into the chancellor’s house.”

  “Why?”

  “Why the hell do you think? He killed Feral! I wanted... I don’t know what I wanted. I don’t know if I would’ve killed him. But the slugs make fucking good watchdogs. They just about squashed the crap out of me. For a while I thought they broke my pelvis.”

  “Are you sure —”

  “It’s just bruises.”

  “Good lord,” Satoshi said. The lithoclasts guarding Blades were the size of rhinoceroses. “You could have been killed.”

  “I know. I won’t do it again.” He moved Satoshi’s hand away, gently but firmly. “I want to sleep alone tonight.” His voice was careful, neutral.

  Satoshi hesitated. “Okay,” he said. He was upset and confused and he had no idea whether he was relieved or disappointed that Stephen Thomas would not come to bed with him. “See you in the morning.”

  He started out of the lab.

  He could still feel the fur against his fingers.

  “Satoshi!”

  “Yeah?” He turned back.

  “Don’t tell Victoria,” Stephen Thomas said, his voice intense. “About the slugs.”

  Satoshi frowned. “I hate it when you ask me to keep things from Victoria.”

  “I shouldn’t have told either one of you, dammit! I knew it would just upset you both —”