The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Is that what the chancellor said?”

  “I... haven’t put it to him directly. But I’m certain nonetheless. I very much regret the journalist’s death. By all reports he was a talented young man.”

  “Yes. And a nice guy. He was closest to J.D. and to Stephen Thomas.”

  Satoshi was not about to tell Gerald that Stephen Thomas had buried Feral’s body on the wild side.

  “You could probably make them both feel better,” Satoshi said, “if you told them what you just told me.”

  “Oh, indeed,” Gerald said, disgusted. “And have your partner attempt to knock out all my teeth again. No thank you.”

  “When you say stuff like that,” Satoshi said mildly, “I can kind of understand his urge.”

  “What would you have me do?” Gerald shouted. “I’m responsible for Starfarer, for all of you —”

  “Bullshit,” Satoshi said.

  “ — and I’m completely losing control... I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re not Sir Francis Drake, for god’s sake. You don’t have life and death responsibility and you don’t have life and death power. You aren’t losing control.”

  “Perhaps I’ve maintained that appearance.”

  “You never had control of the expedition,” Satoshi said gently. “How could you lose it?”

  Gerald opened his mouth, then closed it again. His shoulders stiffened.

  “I had to take over the chancellor’s duties. I had no choice.”

  “That isn’t the point. You can’t control the expedition. There are a couple of people who could, if they wanted.”

  “Such as who?” Gerald asked belligerently. “Do you mean the spy? I suppose he could, with enough blackmail and extortion.”

  “Griffith? No.”

  It surprised Satoshi that Gerald confabulated power with force. Satoshi had been thinking of ethical power, a quality Griffith lacked almost entirely. Professor Thanthavong possessed it, and so did Kolya Cherenkov. Either one could take over the expedition in a second. Satoshi thought they had that power because they did not want it.

  “You’re trying to get people to do what you think they should be doing,” Satoshi said. “Then you want us all to do it the way you think it ought to be done. Why’s that important to you?”

  “Someone has to be sure the work gets done.”

  “But the work is getting done.”

  “It isn’t getting done right.”

  Satoshi did not say anything about Gerald’s current score at getting work done right; he did not want to rub the assistant chancellor’s nose in what Infinity had just pointed out.

  To his credit, Gerald got the idea.

  “I’m doing my best,” he said, stiff but sincere. “If you have suggestions, I’d be most happy to hear them.”

  “Okay. People think you’re conspiring with Blades. That isn’t doing you any good.”

  “Conspiring!”

  “You, and Derjaguin, and even Orazio.”

  “Just because we’re the only ones who’ll speak to the man? I still consider him my superior.”

  “That’s not likely to win you any points,” Satoshi said dryly.

  “And I have the same sympathy I’d have for any other victim of unjust political imprisonment.”

  “Unjust — !”

  “And don’t cite your partner’s spurious evidence anymore! He found it in Arachne, and Arachne was severely damaged. Besides, Stephen Thomas had a motive to find the chancellor guilty.”

  “Stephen Thomas liked Blades,” Satoshi said.

  “He liked Feral better.”

  Satoshi had to concede that point. “The chancellor’s safe, thanks to Infinity.”

  “Safe? He’s in solitary confinement! I have no intention of abandoning him to go mad in that cave.”

  o0o

  Nemo’s ship continued to pace Starfarer, but Nemo remained silent. The LTMs watched the squidmoth, and J.D. watched the LTM transmissions. Beneath the mother of pearl chrysalis, the structure of Nemo’s body dissolved. Only the single exposed tentacle remained.

  Every so often, one of the attendants crawled in, staggering, burrowed into the chrysalis, and disappeared. Luminous white pearl closed the burrows, sealing the attendants inside. Once they touched Nemo’s amorphous shape, their forms, too, dissolved.

  In the window seat of her house, J.D. sat back from the holographic projection of Nemo’s central chamber. Her back twinged and her shoulders ached fiercely. She tried to massage her trapezius muscles, but aside from the difficulty of giving oneself a massage, her bicepses and tricepses hurt as well.

  Zev looked up from the book he was reading.

  “Is it time to go to Victoria’s house?”

  “Just about,” J.D. said. “If I can get up.”

  “What’s wrong?” He jumped to his feet and came over to her, leaving the book open and face-down on the floor. J.D. was glad she collected books for the words and not their physical value.

  “I didn’t realize picking oranges was such hard work,” J.D. said ruefully. She did not think she could jump to her feet if her life depended on it. She reminded herself that she was more than twice Zev’s age. “I thought I was in pretty good condition, but I hurt all over.”

  “I thought it was fun,” Zev said. “Easier than picking mussels.”

  He urged her forward, knelt behind her, and rubbed her shoulders. She leaned back against his hands with a groan of pleasure and relief.

  “That feels so good, Zev.”

  He moved his hands down her spine, and massaged low in the small of her back.

  “You picked more oranges than I did,” he said.

  She chuckled.

  “I guess I did. But you moved them farther than I did.”

  “Faster, anyway.”

  The fragrance of oranges and the faint sick-sweet scent of fermented juice still embraced him. He put his arms around her. J.D. stroked his arms, the softness of his fine pelt, the hardness of his muscles.

  “You like Victoria, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “This morning was fun.”

  “It was.”

  “Almost like being back home.”

  He bent down to nuzzle her neck, to rub his cheek against her short brown hair, still damp from the shower.

  “You like her, too.”

  “Very much.”

  “Will she go swimming with us again?”

  “I think so. She might even come over and spend the night.”

  He sat back on his heels away from her.

  J.D. turned around. “Wouldn’t you like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Zev said slowly, sounding surprised by his own reaction. “Would she come to stay with you?”

  “With both of us.”

  “I like... sleeping just with you. Making love just with you. At first it was strange. All land manners are strange at first. But I like being able to think just about you. About what you want. What you need.”

  She kissed him. His lips parted over his sharp, dangerous teeth. She wondered if he felt jealous, but dismissed the absurd idea of a jealous diver.

  “I like that, too,” she said to Zev. “We won’t give it up. But we can include Victoria sometimes, too.”

  “Okay.”

  He bit her earlobe gently. “I’m hungry!”

  She laughed. “Me too.”

  “But I don’t want to eat oranges!”

  o0o

  In the main room of the partnership’s house, Stephen Thomas slouched on one chair with his feet up on another. He had thrown a towel over his toes to hide the bruises, the loose nails. The bento box containing his half-eaten dinner sat open on his lap.

  Victoria wanted things back to normal. Stephen Thomas could not blame her. Tonight was the normal night for the regular potluck for their grad students.

  Stephen Thomas wished she and Satoshi had asked him before they scheduled the dinner. He was trying to make the best of it.

  As usual, other peo
ple came besides the students. Stephen Thomas had invited Florrie Brown, without considering his motives for doing so. He liked her. Unfortunately, Victoria did not, and the feeling was mutual. Florrie thought Victoria was stuck up, and Victoria thought Florrie was condescending. Both of them were right. Victoria could be stuck up, and Florrie could be condescending. But Stephen Thomas thought they would like each other if they could ever get over their first encounters. That did not look like it would happen tonight.

  He shrugged. Give them time.

  Nearby, Lehua and Bay bent over a display of the new cells. Mitch, on the other hand, stood in the shadows gazing mournfully at Fox.

  Even Fox had come to dinner. Stephen Thomas was glad; it must mean she had no hard feelings because he had turned her down. He was glad she accepted his point of view. She had not talked to him, but that was understandable. She stayed on the opposite side of the room; about all he had seen of her tonight was her back. Sometimes he had the feeling she had just turned away.

  Stephen Thomas poked through the remains of his dinner with a pair of chopsticks, searching each small compartment of the bento box for something he felt like eating.

  Maybe I ought to try catching a fish and eating it raw, like Zev, he thought.

  J.D. had brought him an orange. “The great hunter offers you the spoils of her kill,” she said when she handed it to him.

  And we thought we’d opted for the intellectual life when we came up here, he thought.

  She had not mentioned Gerald’s altercation with Infinity, but Stephen Thomas knew about it. Everyone on campus knew about it. Infinity had not come to the potluck.

  Did we ever invite him? Stephen Thomas asked himself with a shock. To any of them? Fuck, I don’t think we did. Stephen Thomas made a note to himself to ask Infinity to the next one.

  All that was left of his orange was torn rind. He could get himself another piece of fruit, but his feet hurt.

  He hoped the potluck would not last too long. If it did go on forever, that would be partly his fault. He had stayed up talking till all hours with almost every guest here, often after Victoria and Satoshi had given up and gone to bed.

  It was already getting on toward midnight, and nobody showed any sign of leaving. Most of the kids clustered around J.D. and Zev, asking questions about Nemo, like children anxious to hear an old story told again. The room glimmered with multiple copies of the LTM transmissions, floating like bubbles in free-fall, all different sizes.

  On the other side of the room, Florrie Brown and Fox sat with their heads together, talking seriously. Stephen Thomas pushed away a twinge of discomfort. He had no reason but egotism to assume they were talking about him. They spent a lot of time together. Fox had been at Florrie’s almost every time Stephen Thomas had stopped by to see if Florrie needed anything.

  Fox gave Florrie a quick hug and a grateful smile. She went over to the table and poured a couple of glasses of beer.

  Great, Stephen Thomas thought. With everything else that’s happened, now somebody will tell our honorable senators that we’re giving drugs to the President’s underage niece, and that’s what we’ll get thrown in jail for when we get home.

  Oh, fuck it, he thought. A little beer won’t hurt her. Didn’t hurt me when I was her age, swilling home brew in the basement of the biology department.

  On the porch just outside, Victoria and Satoshi stood face to face, framed by the open French window, talking and laughing softly. Just watching them together shot a ray of happiness through his depression, like light probing a thick curtain that cut Stephen Thomas off from the world. Victoria stroked the back of her hand down Satoshi’s cheek, a gesture so loving, so erotic, that Stephen Thomas’s eyes filled with tears.

  His body responded to his sexual impulse with a stab of pain so sharp he nearly fainted. He caught his breath and froze. His left hand clenched. The chopsticks snapped, ramming splinters into the new web between his thumb and forefinger. His right hand gripped the arm of the bamboo chair, his nails bending against the hard wood.

  He breathed cautiously and shallowly for several minutes. When he finally chanced a deeper breath, the pain had faded. He sighed shakily, with relief, put the broken chopsticks into the bento box, and released his death grip on the chair arm. As far as he could tell, no one had noticed his distress, no one knew or cared that he felt disoriented and dizzy. He picked chopstick splinters from his hand.

  “I’m disappointed in you, Stephen Thomas.”

  He looked up.

  Florrie Brown glared at him. Her feathery voice had an edge like a paper cut, invisible and shocking.

  “Disappointed?”

  “I didn’t think you were a tease,” she said.

  Oh, fuck, he thought. What did Fox tell her?

  He decided to take no chances on his answer.

  “Florrie, what are you talking about?”

  “I think you know.”

  Up till now, he had found her coquettish way of dancing around a subject to be old-fashioned and charming. Up till now.

  “No.”

  “You make promises, but you never intend to keep them.”

  “Promises?” What had Fox told her. “What promises?”

  “For one thing, you promised me a tea ceremony.”

  Thank god, they weren’t talking about Fox after all.

  “Jesus, the tea ceremony? Florrie, that takes a whole day. You can’t just do it, you have to prepare for it. When have I had a whole day free since your welcome party?” Her welcome party seemed like months ago. He had promised her a tea ceremony, and the truth was he had not thought about it since. He still intended to do it, but he still had to finish learning the damned thing. Not that he was about to admit it to Florrie.

  She pressed on, insistent. “You shouldn’t make a promise you don’t intend to keep.”

  “I do intend to keep it,” he said. “I just haven’t kept it yet. There was this rebellion, remember? And then some aliens — it complicated my schedule.”

  “And you flirt with people without any intention of carrying through.”

  He laughed. He could not help it. Victoria and Satoshi teased him — even Merry had teased him, and Merry was hardly one to talk — about carrying through all too often.

  Florrie brought her hand down fast and slapped his forearm, surprisingly hard.

  “Ow — !”

  “Don’t you laugh at me!”

  “What’d you do that for? And I wasn’t laughing at you, I was just —”

  “Don’t change the subject!”

  “What is the subject?”

  “You toyed with Fox’s affections and then you broke her heart.”

  “Now wait a minute —”

  “You counseled her —”

  “Counseled her! Christ on a couch, I listened to her bitch about her family!”

  “And you let her sit in on your seminars —”

  Stephen Thomas tried to think of a seminar Fox had sat in on. The impromptu discussion on the hillside? Not that it made any difference.

  “I let anybody sit in on my seminars. That’s what seminars are for. You sit in on my seminars.”

  “Don’t patronize me!”

  She raised her hand.

  Stephen Thomas lifted both arms to ward off the blow he expected.

  “Don’t hit me again!”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Florrie clenched her fragile fist. “Because you’re too good for anybody to touch you?”

  “Because it hurts!”

  The rest of the company had tried hard to pretend nothing unpleasant was going on. This was too much; they had to notice. When the hush fell, Victoria glanced inside. A moment later she and Satoshi were hurrying across the room.

  “Florrie, stop it!” Satoshi said. He got between her and Stephen Thomas without actually shouldering the old woman aside.

  “Aunt Florrie, what are you doing?” Fox was still carrying the two glasses of beer, but her hands shook. Foam dribbled down the sides of the g
lasses and splatted on the floor.

  “I’m giving Mister Stephen Thomas Gregory a piece of my mind, that’s what.”

  “You’re making a spectacle of yourself, Ms. Brown.” Victoria’s calm voice held the coolness that meant fury.

  “Florrie, how could you?” Fox cried. “I told you what I told you because... because...”

  “I thought you wanted my help!”

  “I only wanted you to listen. What could you do to help? He already said no!”

  “Sometimes...” Florrie’s voice faltered for the first time. “Sometimes people say it and don’t mean it.”

  “I don’t say it unless I do mean it,” Stephen Thomas said. “Fox, I thought you understood that you shouldn’t take it personally —”

  “Personally? Why should I take it personally? All you did was tell me to fuck off and die!”

  “I told you I don’t sleep with graduate students.”

  “And now I’m being humiliated in public —”

  “Not by me!”

  Tears streamed down her face. She looked around, distraught, at her fellow students, and her major professor, and her professor’s partners, one of whom she loved.

  Lehua tried to change the subject. “About time to pack this party in,” she said. People began to edge toward the door.

  “Don’t anybody leave on my account,” Fox said.

  As Fox turned to flee, Florrie snatched at her arm.

  “Fox, my dear, let me —”

  Fox turned back angrily, trying to speak. The beer sloshed out of the glass in her free hand and splashed down the front of Florrie’s black tunic. Florrie gasped and stepped away. The glass slipped out of Fox’s hand and shattered on the floor, gouging the smooth rock foam. Droplets spattered on Stephen Thomas’s bare calf.

  Fox looked at Florrie, looked at the broken glass, looked at the full glass in her other hand. It was as if nothing she could do could possibly make things any worse. Stephen Thomas saw it coming, and did not move.

  Fox splashed the second glass of beer in his face, flung the mug on the floor, and fled to the explosion of shattering glass.

  “Are just going to let her run out of here?”

  Florrie sounded so mad that Stephen Thomas had no idea whether she meant someone should go after Fox to comfort her, or go after her to berate her for bad manners.