The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  The quality of the light made him uneasy. Arachne filtered it so the radiation of Sirius resembled the light of the sun; still, its white harshness remained. It worried him. He belonged to the staff, not the faculty, so under normal circumstances his responsibility was low and his authority negligible. Alzena Dadkha, the director of the ecology department, should have been in charge.

  But Alzena was gone. Unable to reconcile her conflicting loyalties to her family on Earth with her responsibility to the deep space expedition, she had fled with Europa and Androgeos. Europa had taken pity on Alzena’s despair.

  Infinity touched Arachne through his link, asking for access to the interior spectrum. The computer gave it without hesitation.

  A bee whizzed past him, flying fast with an angry buzz.

  Whether Arachne would or would not permit him to alter the light filters made no difference at all. The filters pegged out at their limits. He could have less light, or more. But he could not get a spectrum any closer to real sunlight than he already had.

  The bee circled wildly. The frantic buzz stopped short. Infinity frowned. The fat honeybees were usually as placid as cows. He worked around them all the time, moved the hives, collected the honey. He had never even been stung.

  He moved cautiously toward the last place he had heard the bee, expecting to find it nuzzling the center of a flower for pollen and nectar. But the flowers were still in the breathless morning.

  A faint sound, not even a buzz, caught Infinity’s attention. He found the bee lying on the ground, upside down, its wings battering uselessly against the earth. Its short life span ended in a burst of angry energy; its motion stopped and its legs curled up against its body.

  I’d probably run around yelling, too, Infinity thought, if I realized I was about to die. But bees don’t usually act like that...

  In the driest corner of his garden, he stooped to look at a barrel cactus. For a while it had flourished in this microenvironment. Something about it troubled him: the spongy feel of its skin when he carefully slipped his finger between its hairy spines.

  Infinity’s mother came from the American southwest, but she had fled to Brazil, a refugee, before Infinity was born. Infinity had never grown a cactus before, never lived where cactuses grew wild. His memories from childhood, before he came into space, were spotty and disjointed, of eroded land struggling to re-establish itself as forest, of displaced people grieving for land they had loved and disconnected from the new land where they now scraped out a living.

  Information on cactuses was only one of the many things Arachne had lost when the system crashed. He wondered if anybody had hard references, if Alzena had left anything in her office when she fled. With plants, hands-on experience was best. But references were better than nothing.

  He remembered what Esther had told him about her potted cactus. She only realized it had died when her cat knocked it over and it had no roots. He pushed gently at the barrel cactus. Was it releasing its grasp on the soil? Or was the soil just loose? He could not tell.

  Better to leave it alone and keep watch on it. If he worried at it, he might damage it.

  He headed for the administration building, trying again, as he walked, to ask Arachne for information about the artificials.

  Arachne replied, but the reply contained no information.

  It’s like they don’t even exist, he thought. What if Blades destroyed them, or threw them out into space? That would be crazy... but a lot of crazy stuff has been happening recently.

  o0o

  A holographic triptych, a replay of J.D.’s alien encounters, occupied the center of Chandra’s large living room, hovering above the thick Berber carpet.

  While most people on board Starfarer lived austerely, Chandra lived in a house full of stuff. When she decided to join the deep space expedition’s art department, she had ordered a lot of expensive furniture and sent it on ahead. Other people built their own furniture of bamboo and rock foam and canvas. They covered the floor with woven mats. Chandra saw no reason to limit herself to local materials and amateur labor. She made plenty of money; she could afford to indulge herself. Back on Earth, her name on a new production guaranteed attention, reviews, and more royalties than she could spend.

  Crimson Ng sat companionably beside Chandra. She watched the replays of Nemo’s nest, toying idly with a model bone, part of her newest sculpture. Crimson held the bone up between her and the holographic replays. When she moved the bone, Chandra could see the muscles, the skin, the soft sleek pelt of the animal in Crimson’s imagination.

  The remains of dinner littered the mosaic table. Chandra had also imported a supply of exotic food; she had been afraid that the meals on board Starfarer would be pedestrian. She had been right. And now, the campus was in such disarray that the central cafeteria could not produce even pedestrian meals.

  “Did you get enough dinner?” she asked Crimson.

  “I sure did. It was great.”

  One of the displays repeated J.D.’s first meeting with the squidmoth.

  Chandra sprawled naked on her leather couch. She could take in her surroundings with her whole body, if she chose, but there was absolutely no point in recording J.D.’s experience secondhand.

  Chandra felt jealous of J.D.: not simply envious, wishing to have the experience herself, but flat out jealous.

  I should have been there instead of her, Chandra thought. Holographic recordings. Big deal.

  Visual and audio recordings could never convey exactly what J.D. had experienced, the way a sensory artist could.

  I should have been there, Chandra said to herself. I can see and feel and taste and hear and smell everything, and everybody could experience it again, through me.

  No one else on board resented the alien contact specialist’s position. They were all perfectly happy to back her up, to support her, to be good obedient members of the team.

  Fine for them. Chandra always worked alone.

  She had barely recorded a thing since coming on board Starfarer, since giving her life up to this pastoral, small-town campus. Starfarer was as boring as a village back home, despite being a stone cylinder four light-years from Earth. As soon as it was too late to change her mind, Chandra had realized her mistake.

  The other experience she would have wanted to capture had also passed her by: transition. When Starfarer fled Earth, she had been connected by hard link to a backup computer, storing a full load of sensory recordings. If Arachne had been up, she could have been ready for transition, and for Starfarer’s arrival at Tau Ceti. But she had missed that chance. The Tau Ceti to Sirius transition had been just as bad. Arachne crashed again, Feral died, and Stephen Thomas and J.D. caught Blades at sabotage.

  I should have been part of the hunt, too, Chandra thought. But J.D. didn’t even consider trusting me.

  Chandra’s body still had not recorded transition. She needed a calm, controlled approach to the transition point, not the chaotic flights they had made so far, with the computer web crashing around them.

  When J.D.’s recorded image took off her spacesuit and let Nemo touch her, Chandra groaned in exasperation. The swollen nerve clusters all over Chandra’s body throbbed and engorged with anticipation.

  “Why didn’t you take off your clothes, you stupid bitch?” Chandra shouted. She flung herself against the back of the couch.

  “Chandra!” Crimson exclaimed. But at least she spared a little of her attention from the replay, and from her sculpted bone.

  “She should’ve,” Chandra said irritably. “She’s seen too many old sci fi movies. She thinks aliens want to have sex with human beings, and she’s scared.”

  “That’s silly. Would you’ve taken your clothes off?”

  “You bet I would.”

  “Wouldn’t you be embarrassed?”

  “No. Why should I? I let people experience my body from the inside out. Damn! They should’ve let me go along! Or at least made her make a sensory recording.”

  “Now I under
stand,” Crimson said.

  “What?”

  “Why you kept trying to scare J.D. into not going back.”

  Chandra shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

  “No, it wasn’t. If you wanted to be in the alien contact department, why didn’t you apply there instead of the art department?”

  “I joined Starfarer at the last minute, it was too late,” she said belligerently.

  Crimson gave her a skeptical glance.

  “I didn’t think they’d take me — all right? But I knew I could get in the art department. Will you stop playing with that?”

  “I’m not playing.” Crimson did not press the point of Chandra’s Starfarer affiliation, or her ambitions. “I’m figuring out what it ought to look like. I have to hold it and carry it around and change it till I get the model right. I can’t fossilize it till I get it right.”

  But she put the strange model bone aside and knelt on the couch beside Chandra, gazing at her with concern.

  “It would have made more sense for them to let me go than for them to let Zev tag along,” Chandra said. “It isn’t fair! He’d never’ve gotten up here if I hadn’t smuggled him on board.”

  “I’d like to go on the Chi, too, you know,” Crimson said. “Everybody would. But J.D.’s the alien contact specialist.”

  “So she’s first.”

  “You’ve done a lot of other things first. And recorded them for us.”

  “I’ve recorded a lot of things best,” Chandra said. “But not first. I don’t think there’s anything left on Earth to do and be, first. That’s why I came out here!”

  “I don’t care if you’re first or not.”

  “I’m glad you like my stuff,” Chandra said. “Nobody else on this heap pays it any attention. Maybe three whole people have accessed it in the past two weeks.”

  “You are in a bad mood,” Crimson said, out of patience. Then she laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Chandra, who’s had a chance in the last two weeks to spend any time —”

  Chandra thought Crimson was about to say “to spend any time playing.” Bristling, she readied a retort.

  “ — on anything but the real world?”

  Chandra cut off the sharp words she had planned when she heard what Crimson really said. Finding another reply took her a moment.

  “Yeah,” Chandra said, reluctant to be placated. “I guess you’re right.”

  On the crater replay, J.D. scrabbled her way up a steep silky slope. The LTMs had caught a glimpse of several of Nemo’s attendants, but the recording pitched and yawed till Chandra closed her strange all-over-gray eyes.

  “It’s making me seasick! They’ll have to edit that to death!”

  “Shh, look, there’s another one of those spider things. I want to watch it.”

  The creature left off creating a shimmery sheet of new white silk, rappelled to the floor, and snaked off on half a dozen ropy limbs. It looked like a cross between a brittle star, with long whiplash tentacle-legs, and a crustacean, with a shrimplike head and a ring of eyes.

  Crimson stroked her model bone again. She examined it intently, turned it over, put it down, glanced at the image of Nemo’s attendant.

  “It’s too conventional,” Crimson said.

  “Huh? My stuff?”

  “No, mine. The fossils. They’re all on an ordinary vertebrate body plan.”

  “Oh, right. Six-legged, winged, fanged, twelve-eyed vertebrates.”

  “Even if I did that all at once, they’d be too much like us.”

  Chandra sat crosslegged on the sofa, enjoying the soft warmth of the leather, and the way the leather stuck to her skin.

  “You sure pissed Gerald off when you told Europa you’re a paleontologist,” she said. “I think you really got her to believe we’d found alien bones on the moon.”

  “Gerald just doesn’t get it,” Crimson said. “I am a paleontologist.”

  Chandra laughed. “I like the way you never go out of character.”

  “Seriously. My degree’s in paleontology. But it got so I couldn’t do field work. When the Mideast Sweep started expanding again.”

  Chandra sobered and looked at Crimson, tilting her head thoughtfully to one side. She was not sure if Crimson was pulling her leg or not.

  “Androgeos took one of my fossils,” Crimson said.

  “What? Why’d you let him get away with it?”

  “Because that’s what they’re for.” Crimson laughed with delight. “I hope I get to find out what he thinks of it.”

  “He probably got the twelve-eyed fanged one. He’ll just think it was one of our ordinary ancestors.”

  Crimson laughed again, then fell silent.

  Gazing into Chandra’s eyes — most people did not gaze into Chandra’s featureless silver-gray eyes — Crimson touched Chandra’s wrist, stroking the bright blue rope of vein that throbbed just beneath her translucent tan skin. Crimson’s hands were rough from sculpting, from digging in Starfarer’s coarse new ground to bury her fossils in an artificial but convincing stratigraphy. Her fingers circled gently in the sensitive hollow of Chandra’s palm.

  The nerve clusters pulsed.

  Chandra drew away.

  Crimson let her hands fall into her lap. She frowned, confused and disappointed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t do that.” Chandra was tempted. But Chandra had made a career of resisting temptation.

  “What do you mean? With me? With women?”

  “I don’t do it at all.”

  “Why? Why not?” Crimson asked, shocked.

  “Every sensory artist in the universe does sex scenes,” Chandra said.

  “You don’t have to record it!” Crimson exclaimed. “I didn’t want you to record it!”

  Chandra squinted at her, trying to see her in a different way, trying to see her even more clearly. She decided Crimson was serious about not recording.

  “You’d better go,” Chandra said.

  Crimson sat back. She picked up the model bone, clenching her fingers around the shaft. Chandra wondered if Crimson would try to hit her with it. That might be interesting.

  But instead, Crimson rose slowly, turned, strode across the rich carpet, stooped down and picked up her shoes, and walked out the door without a backward glance.

  o0o

  When Stephen Thomas reached the entrance of the health center, he hesitated. He did not want to go into the deserted, silent place.

  He wished he could go back to Blades’s home, push past the silver slugs, drag the chancellor out, and force him to come here and see what he had done. Did he even care that his sabotage had killed an innocent man?

  I liked Blades, Stephen Thomas thought. How could I be so wrong about someone? His aura was clear and bright, transparent and guileless. I thought. I stuck up for him, to everybody, even Satoshi and Victoria.

  Stephen Thomas remembered the chancellor’s welcoming party.

  It had been several weeks ago. Victoria had been back on Earth, giving a speech at the Houses of Parliament in British Columbia and meeting with the Canadian premier. Everybody thought she was lucky not to have to go to the party, because most of the faculty believed Blades had been forced on the deep space expedition in order to dismantle it. No one had more evidence than campus gossip, but most people believed it anyway. Stephen Thomas believed it. Gerald Hemminge swore it was not true, which was almost enough in itself to make Stephen Thomas believe it. Satoshi did not take much stock in campus gossip.

  Stephen Thomas and Satoshi had to go to the party. It would have been an inexcusable breach of academic etiquette not to. It would have been a direct insult.

  Gerald, of course, had indulged his prerogatives as assistant chancellor and hosted the welcome party. He had even gone to the expense of importing decent wine from one of the O’Neill colonies. In a few years, Starfarer’s vines might produce a drinkable vintage, but for now the homemade brew was beer.

  S
tephen Thomas went to the party expecting to despise Chancellor Blades. Satoshi went with an open mind. To his surprise, Stephen Thomas found the new chancellor pleasant and interesting and rather shy. But Satoshi took an instant and uncharacteristic dislike to him. Satoshi got along with everybody. Satoshi even got along with Gerald.

  When they went home, late, Stephen Thomas was cheerfully drunk. Even drunk, he noticed Satoshi’s irritation. He could hardly miss the angry blue sparks.

  They lay together in bed. The moonlight reflected through the open French doors of Satoshi’s room. Carnations scented the cool breeze.

  “You didn’t like the chancellor much,” Stephen Thomas said. “And you were about the only one who didn’t arrive intending to hate him.”

  “He’s a snob,” Satoshi said. “He stood off in the corner and watched us like we were experimental animals.”

  “Not when he was talking to me, he didn’t.”

  “He didn’t talk to you all evening.” Satoshi stroked Stephen Thomas’s hip. “Just most of it.”

  “Is that what bothered you?” Stephen Thomas asked, surprised. “That you thought he was coming on to me?”

  Satoshi smiled. “He was.”

  “Yeah, true, but he wasn’t obnoxious about it. He can take no for an answer.”

  “If it bothered me every time you got involved with somebody,” Satoshi said, “I’d be bothered all the time. And if it bothered me every time somebody made a pass at you — I’d be nuts. Why would I pick Blades to get jealous of?”

  “How should I know? You won’t tell me why you don’t like him. So I’m making wild guesses.”

  “I wasn’t jealous,” Satoshi said. “But Gerald was.”

  “Of the pass?” Stephen Thomas asked, skeptical.

  “Of the time he spent with you.”

  That made more sense. One of Gerald’s duties, a duty he relished, was to squire dignitaries around. He would expect to introduce Starfarer to the new chancellor.

  “Great,” Stephen Thomas said. “One more reason for Gerald to dislike me.”

  “Let’s forget about Gerald.”