The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  With that, the tight sphere of people broke up into smaller clusters, sorted broadly by occupation: physical sciences around Victoria, social sciences with Satoshi, biological sciences with Stephen Thomas. The group around Stephen Thomas included Florrie Brown. When she joined him, he took her frail hand and kissed it gallantly. She smiled, and J.D. realized that beneath her remarkably quaint heavy black eye make-up, beneath the pink and green and white braids drifting around her mostly shaved head, Florrie Brown was beautiful.

  Professor Thanthavong joined J.D. briefly.

  “Are you certain about changing your link?” she asked.

  “Yes,” J.D. said. “I want to enhance it. There still may be time to use it.”

  “Very well,” Thanthavong said. “I’ve made the preparation. See me when you’re ready.”

  “Thank you,” J.D. said, as Thanthavong touched the wall, pushed off, and floated toward Stephen Thomas’s discussion section.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas led his group out of the waiting room, heading down into Starfarer’s main cylinder and out of zero g.

  The group was much smaller than it should have been. Many of the scientists of the multi-national faculty had been recalled by their governments, protesting the threat of change in Starfarer’s purpose. So they had all been left behind when Starfarer fled.

  Stephen Thomas was glad Florrie Brown had joined his group. He liked her; he only wished she and Victoria had not started out on the wrong foot.

  Besides Stephen Thomas, the scientists included Professor Thanthavong, a couple of biochemists and a botanist, and a dozen graduate students: Lehua, Bay, Mitch, Fox —

  “Fox, what are you doing here?”

  Fox was one of Satoshi’s graduate students.

  “Satoshi isn’t talking to me.”

  “What?” he asked, incredulous.

  Both Satoshi and Stephen Thomas had good reason to be annoyed with Fox. She was only twenty, too young to apply for a place on the deep space expedition. She had refused to return to Earth. Stephen Thomas and Satoshi had been in the genetics building, trying to persuade her to get on the transport and go home when the missile hit Starfarer and brought the hillside down around them. But the missile might have hit anywhere. Stephen Thomas found it impossible to blame Fox for staying behind, and he assumed Satoshi felt the same. So what, if they got charged with kidnapping when they got back home? Their prosecution for hijacking the starship would probably take precedence anyway.

  Unless kidnapping the niece of the president of the United States took priority over everything.

  “Satoshi thinks it’s my fault you’re turning into a diver!” Fox said.

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “Don’t make me leave,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  Stephen Thomas was tired and distracted. Most of his body had stopped aching for the moment, but his toes hurt fiercely. He wanted a hot bath. He thought it might help.

  Thanthavong watched him with concern. “Come along, Stephen Thomas. Questions can wait till we’re back on solid ground.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. Everyone was used to his bitching about zero g, but he had spent so much time in weightlessness recently that he had overcome his aversion to it. Or... his body was preparing him for living in water.

  He followed Thanthavong obediently. He was in the habit of complying with her requests. Like everyone else, he admired her to the point of awe. When the changing virus infected him, and she prepared to treat him against it, saying no to her was one of the hardest things he had ever done.

  They made their way to the long hill that formed one end of Starfarer’s campus cylinder. The hill, with its winding switchback paths, led down from the axis to the cylinder floor, the living surface. The air was sharp and cool with rain. Overhead, puffy clouds softened the sharp bright line of the sun tube and, beyond the tube, the cold glitter of lakes and streams on the far side of the cylinder. Starfarer’s small shallow ocean, gray and foggy, circled the opposite end of the cylinder. Stephen Thomas kept waiting to feel some primeval call to the sea, but it did not happen.

  You aren’t turning into a fish, he said to himself, repeating Zev’s distressed protest to a joke about what was happening to Stephen Thomas. You aren’t turning into a fish. You aren’t going to get pulled to the sea to spawn.

  At a hairpin turn of the trail, halfway to the floor of the cylinder, benches clustered in a small circle. The false gravity was about half of Starfarer’s regular seven-tenths g. One could sit without bouncing into the air.

  Thanthavong took a seat and motioned the others to join her. Stephen Thomas limped to a nearby bench, lowered himself gratefully, and stretched his long legs. He curled his toes, pressing them against the soles of his sandals, straightening them quickly when the ache turned to a raw jolt of pain.

  Everybody else joined the circle and watched with anticipation as Stephen Thomas slipped his carrying-case strap off over his head and held the case in his lap. The grad students had been waiting for something new to work on. J.D. had brought Stephen Thomas a crumpled plant from Europa’s ship, but the plant was, as Europa said, of Earth origin. Though the bacteria associated with it were still acting strange, they matched ordinary Earth species. He was glad he finally had something for his students.

  “Stephen Thomas?”

  He opened the sample case. He had not transmitted any of this information, or discussed it on the public access. Europa and Androgeos had made him more cautious — more sneaky — than he had ever been before.

  “The optical fiber J.D. picked up is just a polymer. Organic. Similar to silk, a little stronger.” He shrugged. “Most of its interesting qualities are optical. But it was shed into a living ecosystem. Good and non-sterile. Particles in the range from viral to amoebic. I made some slides, and...”

  He pulled the cushioned isolation chamber out of the case and held it up, letting light flow through the windows of the sample vials.

  Tiny cell colonies traced one inoculation stab.

  He had not expected — not dared to hope for — the growth to appear so quickly. He had been afraid to hope for any growth at all.

  Most of the tubes of growth medium remained clear. No surprise: he had no way — yet — of knowing what to feed an alien cell.

  But something, some alien equivalent of a bacterium, was an autotroph: an organism that could grow and replicate using only simple sugars, oxygen, water...

  He offered the isolation chamber to Thanthavong.

  “No,” she said. “No. You carry it. I’m afraid my hand... might not be steady enough.”

  They had met the alien humans. They had encountered an alien species of intelligence. But this microscopic quantity of life was the first alien cell they could look at, grow, and study.

  “Maybe some of the other microbes feed on the autotroph,” Lehua said.

  “Right.” With a little luck, he could end up with a self-sustaining mixed colony of alien microbes.

  “Did you have enough to do any tests?” Thanthavong asked.

  “Just one.” He paused. “Whatever Nemo’s ecosystem uses to make whatever it uses for genes... it isn’t DNA.”

  o0o

  J.D. and Zev found themselves among a diverse group of faculty and staff, including most of the artists, Jenny Dupre, and Senator Orazio.

  J.D. wished she did not have to meet with them all so soon after getting back. She was tired, and sad. Still, she understood why her colleagues were here waiting for her. She would have been with them, if she had not been a member of the alien contact department.

  “There’s no question of letting the alien into Arachne,” Jenny Dupre said.

  “I don’t think so,” J.D. said sadly. “And I’m beginning to think that’s a mistake.”

  “The web’s still too fragile to risk it!”

  J.D. did not blame Jenny for her concern. She had nearly died in Arachne’s crash, the crash that kille
d Feral. If Feral’s death was murder rather than accident, as Jenny believed, then Jenny had probably been the target.

  Nevertheless, the more J.D. thought about it, the more she disagreed with keeping Nemo out.

  She wanted to be back with Nemo.

  She was still moving through microgravity, so she tried to keep her eyes from closing as she went into a communications fugue. She did not want to crash into a wall while she was not looking.

  She touched Arachne, sending a gentle message to the squidmoth. Nemo made no reply.

  J.D. forced her attention back to the group she was with, to their questions and curiosity.

  All she could do now was wait.

  Chapter 6

  Stephen Thomas leaned his head against the isolation box and drew his hands from the manipulators. For the moment, he had done all he could do, inoculating growth medium with samples of alien cells and sacrificing a few of the precious organisms for microscope slides. Within a day, if the alien bacteria continued to grow at their current rate, he would have enough cultures to give samples to his colleagues.

  He stretched his body against the hot stiffness of his bruises. He wished he were home in bed. He stepped back from the box, and his feet flashed quick pain up his legs.

  “Christ on a crutch,” he muttered, “that’s enough, all right?”

  He shut down the isolation box. The lab was quiet and empty. After the conference, he had sent everyone home. He wanted his students to be fresh when he had something for them to work on.

  He grabbed one of the scanning microscope preparations and an inoculated isolation tube of culture medium, and carried them down the hall to Professor Thanthavong’s office.

  He met J.D. and Zev in the hallway. Zev led J.D., watching her worriedly. A small holographic display, the LTM transmission from Nemo’s chamber, tagged along behind them.

  “Hi, Stephen Thomas.” J.D.’s voice was pitched half an octave higher than normal. Her eyes were bright and very dark, the pupils dilated to the edge of the blue-gray irises.

  “Hi,” he said. “Are you drunk?”

  “I told you, I don’t drink.”

  “Oh, right.” She had even turned down a sip of celebratory French champagne, the day Starfarer’s sail first deployed. God, but that felt like a long time ago.

  “It’s the link preparation,” Zev said, sounding worried. “She just breathed it, and it’s making her weird.”

  “Maybe you better get her home to bed.”

  “I’m trying,” Zev said. “Come on, J.D., okay?”

  “Okay.” She followed Zev obediently down the hallway. When she passed Stephen Thomas, she said, “Your hair’s down.” Now her voice was lower than usual.

  Frowning, Stephen Thomas watched them go. He tucked the straying strands of his hair behind his ears.

  Zev drew J.D.’s arm across his shoulders and led her out of the biochem building, talking to her softly.

  Stephen Thomas shrugged. They were doing fine without his help. He limped into Professor Thanthavong’s office. He could use some help himself.

  “Professor Thanthavong?”

  She opened the recycler and tossed in the prep bottle and the inhaler by which she had administered the link enhancer to J.D.

  “Hello, Stephen Thomas.” Nearby, a couple of holographic images hovered, frozen. When her attention returned to one, it would continue its report.

  Stephen Thomas put the slide and the chamber on her desk. “I should have enough samples for everybody soon. But here’s one, to start.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She gestured to a chair. “Sit down. You look footsore.”

  Footsore was hardly the word for it, but he held back from complaining to Thanthavong. She probably would not say, “I told you so,” but she was not likely to offer much sympathy, either. She had not wanted him to turn into a diver in the first place.

  He sat down, wondering if he would be able to get up again. Professor Thanthavong was small, and all her furniture was too low for him. Sitting down eased the pain in his feet, but renewed the ache in his body. He did not mention that to Thanthavong, either. She had rescued him from the slug. She had probably saved his life. Then she had read him the riot act about his behavior.

  She gestured to one of the displays, the report Stephen Thomas had made on the alien microbes.

  “This is good work,” she said.

  “More questions than answers,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “That’s why it’s good work. You got a lot accomplished while you were gone.” She paused. “You weren’t able to collect more samples,” she said, a question rather than a comment.

  “I was tempted,” Stephen Thomas said. “But I didn’t want to screw J.D. up with Nemo.”

  “Ah.”

  “But maybe...”

  “Out with it, Stephen Thomas.”

  “I tried taking a culture off my shirt. The stuff I wiped up from the pool. Nothing’s growing. Yet. Maybe it will.”

  “We can hope.”

  “Yeah.”

  “These other experiments you’re doing,” she said. “With the soil bacteria from Europa’s ship.”

  “I haven’t figured those out yet. Any ideas?”

  “Their DNA fingerprints are very close to normal. About what you’d expect if they diverged four thousand years ago.”

  “They look the same,” Stephen Thomas agreed. “But the buggers act different.”

  “Have you sequenced them?”

  “Not yet. I was resequencing bacteria from J.D. From all of us in alien contact.”

  “You suspect contamination?” she said sharply.

  “No. I was double-checking. It’s strange, though. You’d expect some exchange between us and the alien humans. Nothing pathological. The normal skin microbes and so forth.”

  “But you found none.”

  “No. Europa told the truth about something, anyway.”

  “Or we’re blessed with unusually robust microbial flora,” Thanthavong said dryly. “Your students could have done the sequencing.”

  “I didn’t have the heart to make the kids stop watching the reports.”

  “Graduate students expect to work,” Thanthavong said. “You’re perhaps a bit too indulgent of yours. The sequencing should be done soon.”

  “Do we have a machine to use?”

  “Biochem’s is at your disposal.”

  “Good. Thanks.” He had not been looking forward to the commute up the hill to use the sequencer in the Chi. “I’ll go —”

  “Go get some sleep, Stephen Thomas! I said ‘soon,’ not ‘instantly.’ Leave instructions for your students to do it. You look worn out.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow. Today. Later.” His time sense was completely skewed.

  Stephen Thomas went outside. He paused in the dawn air, enjoying the coolness. The daytime temperatures on Starfarer had been warm for spring. He touched Arachne and left a message for his students, obeying Professor Thanthavong as far as that went.

  But he did not go home to bed. He had something to do. If he did it now, while everyone was still caught up in the reports from the Nemo expedition, no one would stop him. If he waited, he might not be able to carry out the task at all.

  o0o

  Infinity Mendez dozed on his futon, drifting in and out of sleep, telling himself he should get up and go to work. Beside him, Esther Klein slept soundly, her snore a soft buzz.

  By this time of the morning, Infinity had usually been up for a couple of hours. He liked to be outside in the gray foggy dawn while the light tubes slowly brightened. But he and Esther had sat up late talking to J.D. Sauvage.

  Every so often, Infinity stopped and said to himself, We’ve met an alien being. No matter what happens now, we did what we said we were going to.

  Like just about everyone else on board, Infinity would have liked to tag along with J.D. He wished he could lie here all day, cuddle with his lover, replay the transmissions from the Chi, and wait to see what h
appened next.

  But anticipating what happened next meant anticipating the death of Nemo.

  Come on, he said to himself, suddenly restless. Get up, you have things to do.

  Esther curled on her side, facing him, her knees drawn up beneath his legs, her small square hand draped down between his thighs.

  Light washed the room. Starfarer’s light always came from high noon, straight overhead, from the light tubes along the axis of the campus’s cylindrical body.

  Infinity had gotten used to the unchanging direction of the light before the campus was even finished. He had belonged to the construction crew that built the starship. Infinity knew Starfarer from the outside in. Having helped build its shell, he now helped maintain its ecosystem.

  Infinity covered Esther’s hand with his own. She snuggled closer, still asleep. Moving away from her warm touch, Infinity slid out from under the covers, drew the blanket up around Esther’s shoulders, and looked for his clothes.

  It’s sure harder to keep track of things without the artificial stupids, Infinity thought. They should have been released by now...

  Chancellor Blades had impounded them, but he could not control them anymore.

  Maybe Gerald’s been too busy to let them loose, Infinity thought. He smiled to himself. Big job, being acting chancellor of a bunch of revolutionaries.

  Probably Gerald had just not got around to the task. When Chancellor Blades impounded the machines, he got everyone’s attention. The ASes did the kind of work nobody noticed till it did not get done. It was annoying to order dinner and get nothing; to find dirty clothes still lying around instead of washed and pressed and returned to the shelf.

  What a lot of people did not realize was how important the ASes were to the health of Starfarer. The faculty thought of the ASes and mobile AIs as conveniences. But the machines also watched and maintained and repaired the complex structure of the starship.

  Infinity threw on his jeans and sandals and his leather vest, combed the tangles out of his long black hair, and left the coolness of his house.

  Outside, in his garden, bees buzzed loudly and birds called and chirped and rustled the bushes. The morning was warm for spring. The afternoon would be uncomfortably hot.