The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Victoria sat on the edge of the futon. Satoshi joined them, sitting crosslegged on the foot of the bed.

  “We didn’t have time,” Victoria said. “When did we have time?”

  “Yesterday,” Stephen Thomas said. “Last night. And not just us. Anybody could have looked for his will, the whole time we were gone. Nobody did.”

  “It’s awful that he died.” Victoria felt unfairly put on the defensive. “It’s a tragedy. In the classic sense of the word. If he’d done as I asked —”

  “He couldn’t! I knew he couldn’t. Why didn’t you?”

  “How could you know? You’re trying to beat me up with twenty-twenty hindsight.”

  “I’m not trying to beat you up at all. I’m trying to tell you where I was and what I was doing and why I was doing it.”

  “And why I’m responsible for Feral’s death.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m not blaming you. But I’m not letting you blame him, either. He knew the risks, he chose to take them, he couldn’t do anything else.”

  She said, again, doggedly, “If he’d done as I asked —”

  “We’d still be back at Tau Ceti,” Satoshi said.

  “But we could always take another run at the transition point.”

  “A hundred light-years behind Europa and Androgeos,” Stephen Thomas said. “We never would have caught them. We might even have gotten stranded back there.”

  “I thought you wanted to stay back there,” Victoria said. “To try to colonize the planet.”

  “What if I did? I didn’t block consensus. Feral was trying to help you do what you wanted. Uphold Starfarer’s charter. Catch the alien ship —”

  “And a lot of good it did us!”

  “Don’t try to tell me Feral died for nothing!” Stephen Thomas shouted. “I don’t want to hear that Feral died for nothing!”

  He threw off the blankets and lunged out of bed, sleek and lithe as an otter. Victoria stood up, unwilling to let him flee the discussion.

  “Ow! Shit!” Stephen Thomas yelped in pain and sat down hard.

  He grabbed his toes and rocked back and forth, his teeth clenched. Victoria stared at him. Satoshi hurried to his side, reached toward him, hesitated, then put one arm around his shoulders.

  “What — ?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all,” Stephen Thomas said. “It’s just that all my fucking toenails are falling out.”

  His little toenail had disappeared; the next largest hung by a thread of connective tissue. His toes were as bruised as if he had dropped a rock on his feet. He wiggled his big toenail, and the next two in turn, each successively looser. Victoria felt a little sick. Stephen Thomas took the hanging toenail between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Don’t —” Satoshi said.

  Stephen Thomas pulled the toenail off.

  Stephen Thomas put the toenail, shiny with the transparent polish he used, on the narrow shelf at the headboard of the futon frame. Then he bent over his bruised toe and poked at it, oblivious to Satoshi, who sat back away from him, and to Victoria. She felt ill and angry at the same time. He was so good at deflecting arguments — not defusing them, as Satoshi did, but deflecting anger away from himself and setting up a situation where anger was no longer appropriate, no longer acceptable, and the argument could never be resolved.

  Beneath the toenail, the bruised end of his toe had begun to form a valley, a cavity, where a claw would grow. It would interest her, in an intellectual way, if the foot the claw was growing on belonged to a body with which Victoria was less intimately familiar.

  Even angry with Stephen Thomas, Victoria felt the attraction of his powerful sexuality.

  “Are you done grieving now?” She forced her voice to remain so neutral that her tone came out cold, and hard.

  Stephen Thomas’s shoulders stiffened. He stared at his foot, then glanced at Satoshi, then turned to Victoria.

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think I am.”

  “I know you liked him! But you barely knew him. I knew him better than you did —”

  “You knew him longer than I did. Not better.”

  “Next I suppose you’ll say the same thing about Merry.”

  Stephen Thomas looked confused. “What does Merry have to do with this?”

  “Nothing. Except that Merry was our partner and Feral was our acquaintance, and it seems to me that you’re grieving a lot harder for Feral.”

  Stephen Thomas stood up slowly, gingerly, balancing precariously on his abused feet, and walked out of the room.

  Victoria wanted to scream, or apologize, or cry — what she really wanted was for Stephen Thomas never to have received the changing virus, and for Feral and Merry never to have died.

  She followed Stephen Thomas as far as the doorway. He was halfway down the hall to his room. In the dim light the new gold pelt was invisible, but it made his outline fuzzy.

  He disappeared into his room.

  Victoria glanced back at Satoshi, expecting him to tell her what she deserved to hear: that she had been far too hard on Stephen Thomas.

  “I shouldn’t criticize him for his feelings,” she said, before Satoshi could speak. “Your feelings are your feelings. He can’t help being so open...”

  “I hate what’s happening to him,” Satoshi said abruptly.

  “I — what?”

  “I loved him the way he was,” Satoshi said. “God, I don’t want to think of myself as changing my feelings for someone because of the way they look...”

  “He hasn’t changed that much,” Victoria said, because that was how it seemed to her. “Not physically...”

  “He’s changed a lot,” Satoshi said. “And he’s going to change more. I hardly even know him now... I can’t stand to say it.”

  He folded his arms across his knees and buried his face against them. Victoria sat beside him and hugged him, trying to reassure him, trying to comfort him, not doing a very good job of it. She was used to Stephen Thomas being the most emotionally demonstrative of them all, to Satoshi being the most reserved and calm, to taking the middle ground herself. Satoshi’s shoulders began to shake. Victoria could not remember — Yes. At Merry’s funeral, Satoshi had cried. So had Victoria. Stephen Thomas, dry eyed, held them both. At the time she had been grateful that one of the partnership could maintain some equilibrium. She had not considered how strange it was that the calm one was Stephen Thomas.

  Satoshi straightened up, drawing in a deep, harsh breath. He flung himself back on the rumpled bed and scrubbed his bare arm across his eyes. He tried to smile.

  “This is so weird,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “I’m upset with him because he’s doing something so different I can’t even understand it... and you’re upset with him because he’s behaving exactly the way he always does.”

  o0o

  As he dressed, Stephen Thomas gradually dissociated himself from the fight with Victoria, from the aches in his bones and the pain in his feet, from everything he had lost in the last week. In the last year.

  He usually wore running shoes to the lab. Shoes, today, would make the pain impossible to ignore. He tried his sandals, but even sandals hurt. He shoved them into his pack. Professor Thanthavong would take off the rest of his toenails one by one if he worked barefoot in the lab — she would do it in private; she might even do it metaphorically. But she would do it. So he would have to wear the sandals part of the day.

  He did not know what to do about the fight with Victoria. He could not answer any of her questions any better than he already had. She wanted more from him, but he was damned if he knew what. He would give it to her if he could. He had made himself stay in control after the accident that took Merry, because the partnership needed someone who could still function. And right after Feral died... Victoria honestly thought she had put Feral in a position where he would be safe. Stephen Thomas smiled, fondly, sadly. Trust a reporter to get out to the front, even if nobody could figure out where the war w
as being fought or whether there was a war at all.

  Walking cautiously — no point to limping, since both feet hurt — he went out through the French windows of his room.

  o0o

  Despite everything, the hour was still early when he got to the lab. Neither Mitch nor Bay had arrived yet, and Lehua Aki sprawled sleeping on the couch in the biochem lounge. A small image of Nemo’s chamber hovered above her.

  By the evidence of their work, his students had all stayed very late last night. The isolation chambers held several racks’ worth of growing alien cells.

  He was proud of them for getting so much accomplished when he had been useless to them for the past day. They were working under another handicap, too, camping out in the biochem labs while the silver slugs tried to rebuild Genetics Hill.

  Worse than losing their lab space, the geneticists had lost their equipment, the probes and genetic subroutines that everyone developed over time. All the work in progress was destroyed. The missile had stolen a year of Stephen Thomas’s professional life.

  He checked the preparation he had started the day before. At least one thing was going right today. He had plenty of material for another series of experiments.

  Ordinarily, this kind of preparation would be safe by this stage. No matter how virulent the original cells, they were now dead, dismembered, each cell separated into parts. Cell walls. Mitochondria. DNA. But these cells were alien; he had no proof — not even any evidence — that they could no longer replicate once he vibrated them apart with ultrasound and centrifuged them into layers.

  He was not particularly worried about infecting Starfarer with some alien illness that would attack animals or people or plants. It would make more sense to worry that tobacco mosaic virus might infect a human being. Those pathogens were from the same evolutionary scheme. But he had cultured an autotroph, a free-living cell, from Nemo’s web. A microbe that could get by on light and water and simple molecular nutrients could grow independently in the starship.

  This was something Stephen Thomas preferred to avoid.

  He got Arachne to project an image of the squidmoth in its chrysalis.

  “Why wouldn’t you give me another sample?” he muttered.

  He suspected that, eventually, Earth’s biosphere would have to co-exist and cope with alien autotrophs, but he did not intend to be responsible for the first uncontrolled contact. Among other things, Professor Thanthavong would not just have his toenails, she would have his lungs as well. In all her decades of research, it had taken a missile attack to contaminate her lab for the first time.

  “Damn!” he said suddenly. He had forgotten to set up the DNA sequencing of the soil bacteria from Europa’s ship. A complete sequence would give him a detailed picture of the microbe, rather than the more general view of DNA and protein fingerprints. He set up the analysis with a couple of controls and left it running.

  “Hi, Stephen Thomas.”

  Satoshi’s young graduate student Fox stood uncertainly in the doorway of the lab. With her forefinger, she nervously twisted a lock of her flyaway black hair into a curl.

  “Hello, Fox,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Anything I can do?”

  “Why? Thinking of changing departments?”

  Her expression brightened. “Can I?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t you have some geography to do?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She stepped back into the hall and he thought she had left.

  He went back to work, forgetting, after a moment, that she had ever been there. He pressed his hands into the manipulator gloves that gave him access to the isolation chamber and his new preparation.

  “I could wash some glassware —”

  “Jesus!” Stephen Thomas exclaimed.

  “...or something,” Fox whispered.

  “I nearly dropped this,” Stephen Thomas said. “Don’t sneak up on people like that.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “There’s nothing you can do here. We don’t wash the glassware, we recycle it. Easier to get rid of the contaminants. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to spend all day up to your elbows in cell guts.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “There’s still nothing you can do.”

  “I can’t go back to geography.”

  “I keep telling you, Satoshi isn’t mad.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “The subject never came up. But if he were mad, he’d mention it. Fox: Satoshi doesn’t get mad. He’ll talk to you. It sounds to me like you need to talk to him.”

  “He ought to be mad. So should you.”

  Watching the holographic image from the safety chamber, Stephen Thomas put the prep carefully back on its stand and disengaged his hands from the manipulator gloves. The swimming webs itched slightly; the gloves had pressed the webs back between his fingers farther than they would ordinarily go.

  He crossed his arms and faced Fox, leaning back against the lab table.

  “I don’t blame you for what happened to me. But if you really want to know, I think you made more trouble for yourself and for us than any of us need. You should have been on the transport.”

  “A lot of difference that would have made! I’d still be here!”

  “It’ll make a lot of difference. The folks who were on it will be legally free and clear. Maybe even entitled to reparations. Gerald and the senators and Esther Klein... hm, I’m not sure about Esther. Doesn’t matter. You and Zev, though — you’re in as much trouble as the rest of us. Maybe more.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “And the president might not be able to —”

  “I wouldn’t ask him to!”

  “You wouldn’t have to.”

  “Stephen Thomas, I just want to be part of the expedition. I just want to help.” Her smile strained as she fought tears.

  “You are part of it,” Stephen Thomas said gently. “And the way to prove you deserved to come with us is to work your ass off. In your own department.”

  “Are you sure —”

  “I don’t —” He stopped. There was no reason to involve Fox in the partnership’s problems. No reason, and no excuse. What good would it do to tell her that he had not talked to Satoshi about her, or about much of anything else either, for the past several days?

  “Satoshi is the most reasonable and sympathetic human being alive. He lives with me, after all.” He smiled at her, reassuring. “Okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She smiled back. “Thanks.”

  “Good. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  He unfolded his arms and turned back to the manipulator gloves, spreading his fingers, stretching the webs. He heard Fox’s quick intake of breath. Probably she had just realized how much about him had changed, and the changes spooked her. He must look pretty fucking weird from outside, with the webs and the fine gold pelt covering his darkening skin, and his battered toes sticking out of the straps of his sandals.

  “I love you,” Fox said.

  Oh, god, no, not again, Stephen Thomas thought.

  For the third time, he faced her. He could not pretend not to have heard or not to understand.

  “That’s too bad,” he said.

  She did pretend not to hear or not to understand.

  “When Satoshi asked us all over to dinner, the first time I saw you —”

  “Fox. No.”

  “Won’t you even consider me? I know you’re not monogamous —”

  Flabbergasted by the comment, Stephen Thomas laughed.

  Fox blushed. “You know what I mean. Whatever the term is when you’ve got two legal partners and you still get involved with other people. What is it you don’t like about me?”

  “Nothing to take personally.”

  She laughed as sharply as he had a moment before. “That’s kind of hard.”

  “I don’t get involved with grad students.”

  “I’m not your grad student.”

&nbs
p; “Five minute ago you were standing here trying to be.”

  “I changed my mind, okay?”

  “I don’t get involved with any grad students.”

  “Why not?” she asked, honestly perplexed. She grinned. “We’re people, too — don’t you think? So why not?”

  “Why not...?” Stephen Thomas sighed. “Why not is because in school, every instructor I ever had hit on me.” Miensaem Thanthavong was the first superior he had ever had who had never tried to take him to bed.

  “How could they resist?” she said softly.

  “They should have.”

  “But this is different.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Sure it is. I’m not your student and you’re not my instructor.”

  He could see this deteriorating into “Is not!” “Is so!” He made himself keep a straight face.

  “It doesn’t matter whether it’s the same or not. The answer’s no.”

  “But —”

  “Please take the answer gracefully.”

  She did not take it gracefully, but she neither erupted into anger nor burst into tears. He never knew what to do when either happened in this particular situation. Anger was easier to defuse than tears. When it was someone crying over unrequited love for someone else, it helped to give them a friendly hug, a shoulder to cry on. Touching Fox now would only make things worse. Stephen Thomas found it very difficult not to respond to another person’s grief.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “If you change your mind —”

  “That just isn’t going to happen.”

  She went away, then, but as she disappeared down the hallway he heard what she was saying, as if to herself but in truth to Stephen Thomas.

  “Maybe I should have gone home after all.”

  Stephen Thomas let his irritation out in one quick snarl.

  “Oh, fuck!”

  He returned at last to his work, pushing away the anger from his past and the guilt Fox had just tried to hand him. She should have gone home, or tried to. If he had anything to do with her staying, it was not by design. And then he thought: she grew up around politicians. She knows how to turn coincidence to her own advantage.

  Mitch hurried in, his long gangly limbs all angles.