The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “No,” Victoria said. “I guess I wasn’t in the nest long enough.”

  They talked for a while about Victoria’s analysis of Nemo’s center. Zev sat between them. Despite his youth, his exuberance, he was content to listen and watch in silence and without trying to draw their attention to himself. He impressed Victoria more and more, the longer she knew him.

  “Is it what you thought?” J.D. asked. “Neutronium?” Something had to give the planetoid its mass. A normal asteroid its size would have negligible gravity. A person would be able to leap off its surface and orbit it before coming down again.

  “I don’t think so,” Victoria said. “I think the gravity source... the power source... is even more dense.”

  “A black hole?” J.D. exclaimed.

  “Economy quantum sized.”

  “Pick one up in any hardware store,” J.D. said dryly.

  “Right. Plus a nice iron shell for it to eat, a drip charge... and what the hell do you do to it to make it carry you around the galaxy.”

  “A trifle,” J.D. said.

  They fell silent. A pleasurable tension rose between them; the affection and possibility Victoria always felt around J.D. increased. She extended her hand to J.D. J.D. gazed at her, then enclosed Victoria’s long dark fingers in her strong square hand.

  “Is everything all right?” J.D. said. “I mean...” She gestured with her free hand, encompassing all of Starfarer.

  “I wanted everything to be perfect,” Victoria said softly. “We’d take off with a fanfare, and explore, and come back with... I didn’t know what, but some treasure. Not a material treasure, an intellectual one.” She rested her forehead against her knees. “Some fanfare. Some treasure.” She looked up again; if she did not hide her face maybe she could keep from crying. “And I’m worried about my family back home, my great-grandmother especially. I wish you’d gotten to meet her. I wish she’d come on the expedition.”

  “She’ll be all right,” J.D. said, her voice reassuring. “They won’t blame our families for what we’ve done. Surely.”

  “Grangrana has no way of knowing if we’re still alive,” Victoria said. “She’ll be so worried... And Satoshi’s parents. They’re wonderful. They’ll stand up for us. But they’ll be scared for us, too.”

  “What about Stephen Thomas? Doesn’t he have family back home, too?”

  “Just his dad. I mean, I guess he could find his mom if he really wanted to, but he never has. And Greg is... kind of self-centered. He knows all the right buttons to push.” She sighed. “I try to like him, I really do. But it’s hard to get worked up over worrying about him.”

  J.D. squeezed Victoria’s hand.

  “And I miss my cat!” Victoria said suddenly. “No matter what I said to Alzena, I couldn’t persuade her to let me bring Halley along.” Sometimes she dreamed of petting the sleek black cat; she would wake remembering the soft vibration of Halley’s silent purr. Victoria laughed. “Isn’t that ridiculous? Everything that’s happened, and I think about missing my cat!”

  “It’s all right,” J.D. said. “It’s understandable.”

  “You don’t need to hear all this!” Victoria said. “I meant to come and see how you’re feeling, not to whine all over you.” She let go of J.D.’s hand and pulled herself back, hugging her knees. In a moment she would leave. She would leave J.D. and Zev alone.

  “J.D. and I are going swimming in the morning,” Zev said. “In the ocean.”

  Victoria glanced up again. At first she thought Zev’s comment was a complete non sequitur. But J.D. and Zev were looking at each other with understanding, with happiness.

  “Would you like to come with us?” J.D. said.

  “I’d love to,” Victoria said, surprised and pleased by the invitation.

  “We’ll stop by for you. Five a.m.”

  “Five!” Victoria said.

  J.D. grinned. “Second thoughts?”

  “Not at all. If you’re sure you want company — ?”

  “I’m sure,” J.D. said.

  o0o

  Alone in the dark basement of the administration building, Esther Klein put a box of probes and regenerators on the floor and tossed her lime-green baseball jacket beside it. The hot afternoon had even penetrated to the basement. Repair supplies and the dead artificials surrounded her. Over the dank scent of the basement lay the hint of mycelial growth, and ozone, and decay.

  “I’m going to kill Infinity,” she muttered. “I’m going to kill him.”

  Esther could have — should have — been out on the surface of the cylinders, in space, checking damage and making sure the silver slugs were properly maintaining the starship. Instead, she was stuck down here nursing sick artificials. It was all Infinity’s fault. He was the only person on board who knew she had worked as an artificials tech.

  But somebody had to do it, and she was the only person here with any experience. How the administration could let all the techs get recalled and not replace them... Esther supposed that was part of Blades’ plan. It was convenient for him to let the techs go unreplaced. If they had remained on Starfarer, he would have chosen some other subsystem to disable. Esther remained with the expedition only because she had been piloting the transport that was trapped in the dock when Starfarer plunged into transition.

  Fixing the artificials is the least I can do, I guess, she thought. Considering how much trouble I made by following orders. Following orders! I’m lucky Gerald or one of the senators hasn’t punched me out for dragging them along on the expedition.

  On the other hand, if I had undocked, I wouldn’t be along on this trip, and I’d probably be in jail.

  She rubbed her hands down the seat of her pants, rummaged for a probe in her toolbox, and set to work on the first artificial stupid.

  She cracked the seal on its brain pan. Nothing. Blowing out her breath in relief, she opened the bioelectronic brain the rest of the way. Not too bad. Desiccated, like a crust of algae on a mudflat. If all the artificials were like this, she could resuscitate them in short order. She hooked up a rehydration tube and watched for a few minutes. The rumpled surface engorged with saline and fructose and salicylic acid, responding to the rich mix of hormones and growth factors. The fissures deepened.

  Esther patted the artificial.

  “You’re going to remember everything, aren’t you?” she asked it hopefully. “Arachne isn’t going to be much help, so I’d appreciate it if you’d come out of this with your memories intact. You aren’t gonna be much use to me as a stupid vegetable.”

  She went on to the next artificial and broached its seal.

  The brain case hissed and burst open. Esther jumped back. Putrid bits of bioelectronic conductor sprayed her chest. Esther gagged and stripped off her shirt. It fell with a soggy thud. Bioelectronics rotted with all the worst qualities of animal, vegetable, and fungal matter: the sweet and nauseating smell of decomposing meat and the slimy deterioration of plant cells, all held together in a yeasty matrix.

  First she hosed herself down, then her shirt, and finally the artificial, sluicing the spoiled brain tissue into the waste digester. The smell hung thick around her. It was not very toxic, but it sure was nasty.

  She was soaking wet. Now she was glad of the day’s warmth. If she had been working in her jacket, the unofficial uniform of transport pilots, it would be ruined.

  I bet Starfarer’s storeroom doesn’t have any fluorescent chartreuse baseball jackets, she thought.

  Esther set to the laborious task of cleaning the brain case. She sterilized it, seeded and sealed it, and hooked it to a feeder tube. That one would be a week regrowing. Then someone would have to retrain it.

  She had Arachne display the transmission from Nemo’s chamber next to the AS brain schematics. It had not changed since the chrysalis hardened; Esther had practically memorized it. She asked for some music. Trash rock. At least the recent music archives had not been wiped out in the system crash.

  She set to work on another brain. />
  After eight hours, she was cursing Infinity under her breath. The first artificial had been a stroke of cruel good luck. Of the five open ASes, only the first had survived with any usable brain at all. Eighty percent complete destruction rate. Hands on her hips, she gazed around at the hundreds of robots that waited for her attention.

  She felt like a cross between Dr. Frankenstein and an AS housekeeper. Or, maybe, considering the spatters of gunk on her clothes, she was more like Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant Igor. She wiped a smudge off her wrist, thinking, The doctor never got brains all over his nice white lab coat.

  “I need some help here, guys,” she said to the deaf and blind and mindless robots.

  She could hardly ask Infinity for help. He had more than enough to do. But Esther knew almost no one else on board. Except Kolya Cherenkov, and she was not going to ask the cosmonaut to do this job.

  She only got over to Starfarer once a month or so. Most of Esther’s piloting had been between O’Neill colonies. She always accepted the Starfarer run with pleasure.

  Esther travelled a lot, she seldom stayed long in one place, and she did not like to sleep alone. Whenever she boarded Starfarer, all she wanted to do was take Infinity Kenjiro Yanagihara y Mendoza to bed with her. He was one of her favorite lovers.

  But that had not left her much time for making other friends on board the starship.

  She asked Arachne to send out a general request for help for tomorrow morning. She cleaned off her tools and put them away. She let the brain schematic fade, and took one last glance at Nemo’s chamber. In all the time she had been working, the squidmoth’s chrysalis had not changed.

  Her shirt lay in a scummy puddle. She had hosed off most of the crud, but doubted she would ever want to wear it again.

  Esther shrugged, grabbed her jacket, and left the shirt where it was. Outside the basement, the evening would still be hot. Too hot for her jacket, and she would not even need her shirt.

  She ran up the basement stairs, eager to get outside. She was tired and hungry.

  She emerged into air so cool it surprised her.

  The chill felt wonderful on her bare shoulders and breasts. It had been too hot lately. She set off for Infinity’s house with a spring in her step.

  A cold breeze hit her. The skin on her arms turned all gooseflesh, and her nipples hardened. Even then she resisted putting on her jacket.

  Don’t be a jerk, she said to herself. It’s dumb to feel so cold just because it was so hot earlier. She slipped into the lurid green satin.

  Arachne must be fixing the weather, she thought. Glad to hear it.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas returned home, dirty and sore. It was very late — or very early — and he guessed Victoria and Satoshi had already gone to bed.

  Instead of taking a shower, he told the house to fill the bathtub. As he watched the water rise along the sides of the cerulean tub, he tried to remember when the last time was that he had taken a bath. He usually showered, preferably with one or both of his partners. Sometimes they sat together and soaked afterwards, lounging in clean hot water.

  He dropped his shorts and shirt on the floor and stepped into the big blue tub.

  The mud swirled away from his dirty feet.

  Oh, shit, he thought, I should have at least rinsed off...

  But the hot water felt so good, rising around his hips, sliding up his back and belly and chest as he lay down, that he could not bring himself to start over again. He stretched out and let himself relax.

  He spread his hands out on the surface; the translucent webs between his fingers nearly disappeared. Today his skin was the color of strong tea. He pulled his hand through the water, feeling the new power of his swimming stroke.

  Like his hands and his skin, his lungs were changing. Soon he would be able to store more oxygen, and hold his breath much longer than normal. If “normal” meant anything anymore, in relation to Stephen Thomas.

  When the changes were complete, he would possess an ability unique among aquatic mammals: he would be able to extract oxygen directly from the water. In an emergency, breathing like a fish would support the life of a mammal for a little while,

  Stephen Thomas halfway expected to be possessed by an overwhelming urge to return to the primordial sea, but that had not happened.

  Except, he thought, I’m taking a bath.

  “The call of the sea,” he muttered sarcastically. “Maybe I ought to add some salt.”

  Zev talked about swimming all the time, but the talk was habit, and homesickness. Staying dry did not harm his health; he had no gills that had to stay wet.

  Air bubbles caught beneath the fine new hairs on Stephen Thomas’s arms and legs. They tickled. As they escaped and rose to the water’s surface, they made a faint, cheerful crinkling noise. Stephen Thomas rubbed his hands down his legs, down his arms, down his belly, currying the bubbles away.

  His skin did not itch so badly, now that his transparent gold pelt had finished growing. His joints had stopped aching, though his shoulders hurt from digging Feral’s grave.

  He was beginning to wonder if the pains inside his body were all from his encounter with the silver slug. They should be fading. Instead, they had intensified. His pubic bone hurt with a sharp, hot stab and even his penis felt sore. Would he grow fur there, too? That would be too weird.

  He knew as much about divers, or as little, as any average ordinary human being. He had never been fascinated with them, as J.D. was, and none of his work as a geneticist had included Changelings. No one worked on Changelings anymore. First it became impossible to get grants for the research, and then the changes themselves became illegal in the United States.

  Stephen Thomas told the house to warm the bath. Warm water gushed from the faucet onto his feet.

  His toes shot pain up his leg. He snatched his foot away, thinking the tub had burned him. But the water was only comfortably hot. He sat up in the tub and raised his foot to look at it.

  Dark bruises arced across the base of each toenail, and the nails felt loose. Stephen Thomas wiggled the nail of his big toe. He grimaced.

  It hurt, but it hurt in a way he remembered from his childhood. It was the itchy pain of a loose baby tooth.

  Zev’s feet had sharp semi-retractile claws that curved over the ends of his toes, recessed into the flesh. Stephen Thomas had not thought much about how his nails would turn to claws, and he found that he did not want to think much about it now. He stopped wiggling his toenail and let his foot sink back into the heat.

  The idea of being able to breathe underwater intrigued him. He wondered how far the changes had gone. He lay back in the bath, letting the water rise around his head. His hair fanned out, tickling his neck, drifting between his shoulder blades. Warm water crept up his face, covered his lips, covered his eyes. He could hardly tell the water from the steamy, humid air.

  Stephen Thomas plunged his head the rest of the way underwater and took a fast, deep breath.

  The water filled his throat and gushed into his lungs, choking him. He erupted from the bath, gasping. He leaned over the side of the tub, coughing water onto the floor. He nearly threw up.

  Finally he collected himself, and hunched in the cooling bath. His chest and his throat hurt. The ache travelled downward and lodged in his belly.

  I guess I’m not a diver yet, he thought.

  He opened the drain, stood up, and splashed out of the tub. Droplets of water sparkled all down his body, trapped by the gold pelt. He curried off the water as he had curried away the air bubbles. He needed a sweat-scraper, the kind grooms used on horses or on Bronze Age athletes.

  Rubbing himself with a towel, he went down the hall to his room. But in the doorway, he hesitated. He turned away from his comfortable, familiar mess and went to the end of the hall, to the room that would have been Merry’s, to the room Feral had slept in. The partnership had never used it before Feral came to visit.

  The futon was made up; the shelf doors were closed. I
t was as if no one had ever stayed here. As if Feral had never existed.

  Stephen Thomas slid open the door to the built-in shelves. Feral’s few extra clothes lay in a neat stack.

  Stephen Thomas closed the shelf door again. He hung his towel carefully on the rack, got into Feral’s bed, curled up around the deep pain of his pelvic bone, and fell asleep.

  Chapter 8

  Like the strokes of a brush painting, beach grass covered the soft dunes. Beyond the dunes lay Starfarer’s ocean.

  J.D. walked along a path too narrow to have been made by human feet. She wondered who or what had formed the path — and saw a tiny hoofprint, a small pile of horse droppings. The tough, sharp-edged grass would be little temptation for the miniature horses, but they might like the salt, and the flat freedom of the beach.

  J.D. climbed the gentle rise of the dune. At the top, she paused to look across the shore.

  The ocean circled the park end of Starfarer’s campus cylinder. It was the pulse of the starship’s ecosystem, and the breath of its weather. The smell of salt sparkled in the onshore breeze, and the dry grains of sand hissed as they spun past J.D.’s feet. Open ocean created long crescents of white beach, separated by headlands and smoothed by the surf. Far-overhead, on the shore beyond the sun tube, opposite this point on the cylinder, barrier islands protected salt marshes. The lowlands buffered the air and the water and offered shelter and spawning grounds to many of Starfarer’s creatures.

  The hill that formed the cap of the cylinder rose from the far edge of the ocean, at the rim. The hill supported an ice field on one slope, hot springs on another. Their cold and warm currents circulated the seawater and helped drive the weather.

  Zev stopped beside her, staring out at the ocean. He glanced at J.D., his face glowing.

  “You go on ahead,” she said softly. “I want to talk to Victoria for a minute.”

  He hesitated, then whooped in excitement and took out for the sea. He skidded down the face of the dune and dropped the beach blanket. Racing across the narrow crescent beach, kicking up bright showers of dry sand, he flung off his shirt; he hopped on one foot, then the other, while he stripped off his shorts.