The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “I didn’t notice,” Victoria said lightly, and then, in response to the skeptical glances of both her partners, she protested. “No, really. J.D. wanted to talk and Zev went on ahead. Then we were in the water. He liked... being touched quickly. You couldn’t hold him, he’d slip away.” She paused, thinking. “I never got a good look at him, eh? I certainly didn’t say, ‘Stand there while I look at you, Zev, and see how you measure up to my partners.’“

  They waded toward shore. Stephen Thomas was anxious to get out of the salt water. He hoped that then the stinging would stop.

  “Good lord!” Satoshi exclaimed. “What happened — did you go face forward in the sand? You’re all scraped —”

  “No, I never hit bottom.” Stephen Thomas looked down.

  The blood drained out of his face.

  The darkening skin on his penis had sloughed off, fading from its new deep tan to a sickly gray, hanging in flimsy strips, leaving the shaft angry-red, ugly.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas knocked hard on J.D.’s door. No one answered. He banged his fist on the dense rock foam.

  “Hey! Zev!”

  He was about to be very rude and look through the open French windows when Zev opened the door. He saw Stephen Thomas and grinned.

  “Hi —”

  “Why didn’t you reply to my message?”

  “I’m sorry, I was busy.”

  “Busy!”

  “Yes, J.D. and I were making love.” Zev joined Stephen Thomas on the porch and closed the door. “Don’t shout, she’s sleeping.”

  “I need to talk to you!”

  “Shh. Let’s go for a walk.”

  He led Stephen Thomas through the wild garden, away from the house and the open windows of J.D.’s bedroom.

  “Are your claws growing yet?” Zev looked at Stephen Thomas’s feet. Because of the bruising, it was hard to see what was happening to his toes.

  “Yes, and they hurt like hell.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing! You’re always apologizing to me.”

  “But what’s happening to you, it’s my fault.”

  “It’s done. Stop feeling guilty, and tell me what I should expect.”

  Zev glanced over at him, curious, troubled.

  “But you know what. You’re turning into a diver.”

  “I want to know what’s normal and what isn’t.” He turned to Zev, shouting again. “Is it supposed to hurt this bad? Is my skin supposed to peel off?”

  Zev took a step away from him. “I’m sorry —”

  Stephen Thomas flung up his hands in exasperation.

  “ — but I don’t know all those answers,” Zev said. “Your... your skin is peeling? That doesn’t sound right. Did you get sunburned?”

  Zev’s distress scared Stephen Thomas.

  “You don’t know?”

  “If J.D. had accepted our invitation and come to live with the divers, Lykos would have been with her. My mother knows all about how the changes happen. But I don’t. I was born this way.”

  “Great,” Stephen Thomas said, disgusted.

  “I’m... never mind.”

  “Victoria and Satoshi and I went swimming this morning. We tried to make love in the water. But we couldn’t because it hurt her. It didn’t with you. Why not?”

  Zev thought for a moment. “Maybe ordinary human men are bigger than diver men?” he asked.

  “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours,” Stephen Thomas muttered.

  “What?”

  Stephen Thomas shrugged. “Nothing. Forget it.”

  He strode angrily along the path beside the river. A ghost of pain grew behind his pelvic bone, as if a knife were tickling him, teasing him with the threat of the fatal stab. He slowed down and tried to stay calm, hoping to stave off the pain with caution. Zev caught up to him.

  “Can I look at you, Zev? I don’t even know what I’m going to look like when this is over.”

  “You’ll look like Stephen Thomas, you won’t look like me.”

  “I mean naked.”

  “You can look at me if you want. Can I look at you? I never saw —”

  The pain hit Stephen Thomas. For no reason, and with too much warning, the pain flamed through his pelvis, along his backbone.

  He gave up. He sank to the path, drawing his knees to his chest and wrapping himself in his arms. The hair stood out straight all over his body. He shivered, and groaned.

  “Dammit, Zev, what’s happening to me?”

  Zev sat on his heels beside him, upset and helpless.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wish you’d quit saying that!”

  “I better call Victoria.”

  “No!” He grabbed Zev’s arm. Moving made the pain shoot through him again; his fingers clenched harder than he meant them to.

  The young diver flinched but stayed where he was, balancing on his toes, scared for Stephen Thomas but not scared of him. Stephen Thomas had the feeling that Zev could break his hold in a second if he chose. He let go.

  “Please don’t call Victoria, or Satoshi, or anybody. Just give me a minute.”

  “You’ll feel better in the water. Can you stand up?”

  “Yeah.” The stabbing pain diminished to a throbbing ache. He stayed where he was. “But I can’t walk all the way to the other end of campus. Not right now.”

  “You don’t have to. Come swim in the river.”

  “Is that all you ever —” Stephen Thomas heard himself complaining to Zev about Zev’s obsession with water the way Victoria complained to him about his being able to see auras. It did not matter that he no longer saw them. Now he knew how Victoria felt.

  Except that it would feel good to be in the water. A warm bath, a cold swim — anything to ease the throbbing ache in the center of his pelvic girdle, and the itch that was turning sore and hot.

  He lurched to his feet. “Okay.”

  They tramped through a meadow of wildflowers, a carpet of color like the pastel reflection of a rainbow. Stephen Thomas followed Zev down the riverbank to a beach of small rounded rocks, designed to look water-worn, ancient. They were of course no such thing. They were moon rock, reshaped and carefully placed during Starfarer’s construction.

  The river curved, cutting into the stratified bank, exposing one of Crimson’s fossil beds. The water rippled and softly splashed. Downstream, the channel narrowed; the river roughened and raced with a hollow roar.

  Stephen Thomas took off his shirt, hesitated, and slipped out of his shorts. He moved gingerly.

  Zev watched him, worried that he might collapse again.

  “Is it swollen?” he said, when he saw Stephen Thomas naked. “Does it hurt?”

  “It isn’t swollen. It’s sore.”

  “Then I don’t blame you for leaving it out.” The river rocks rattled hollowly as Zev crossed them. He tossed off his clothes and picked his way over the treacherous footing to the river. Stephen Thomas followed slowly.

  Zev threw himself into the mid-stream current, let himself be carried fifty meters through the rapids, then vanished beneath roiling white water.

  “Zev!”

  Upstream from the rapids, halfway back to Stephen Thomas, Zev reappeared. He waved and beckoned.

  It looked like fun, but Stephen Thomas lowered himself into the cold eddy near shore. Today, a sitz-bath was about his speed.

  The water did feel good, easing the soreness, massaging away bits of dead skin.

  Zev splashed toward him.

  Stephen Thomas got a close look at an adult male diver for the first time.

  Struggling to stay calm, he patted the water. He slapped harder than he meant to, sending an angry splash toward Zev.

  “Sit down.”

  “Does your penis hang out like that all the time?” Zev asked suddenly.

  Stephen Thomas shifted on the uncomfortable rocks. He was trembling.

  Instead of replying, instead of asking all his own questions, Stephen Thoma
s started to laugh. Hysteria tinged his laughter, but this really was funny. He thought Zev looked strange, and Zev thought Stephen Thomas looked just as alien.

  Zev smiled uncertainly.

  “Yeah,” Stephen Thomas said. “It hangs out like that all the time. But I guess... it won’t for long. Does it...” He took a deep breath. “I guess you don’t know if it falls off, or withers away, or...” He stopped, confused. “But Victoria said —”

  “It won’t do either,” Zev said. “I don’t think it will. It will just go inside.”

  Though Zev had no idea what stages Stephen Thomas would have to go through to become a diver, he knew — he was an example of — the result. He explained to Stephen Thomas about internal genitals, and then he showed him.

  “It’s more streamlined,” he said. “All aquatic mammals are like this.”

  “So are a lot of terrestrial mammals,” Stephen Thomas said. “But not ordinary humans. It never occurred to me...”

  Now, at least, some of the pain made sense. If his body was creating a place for internal genitals...

  “You’re a lot different than I thought,” Zev said. “I knew you kept your scrotum outside — that’s so silly, you have to work so hard not to be fertile — but I didn’t know you kept everything outside.” He shrugged cheerfully. “I didn’t know men humans looked so different from women humans. Divers don’t.”

  Stephen Thomas let himself slide into the water until it covered him completely. He wondered how long he could stay submerged. He wondered if he could breathe underwater yet. He tried to take a breath.

  He jerked upright, choking and coughing and gasping for air, just like last time.

  Zev watched him, bemused.

  “What are you doing?”

  Stephen Thomas flung his wet hair out of his face. “Trying to breathe underwater.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if I could. Maybe I don’t want to come up.”

  “You shouldn’t breathe underwater unless you have to,” Zev said.

  “Why not?”

  “Your lungs get full of water. It’s hard work, and it isn’t very good for you. It’s just to save your life if you get stuck. You get enough oxygen to keep your brain from dying till somebody finds you. You can get pneumonia if you’re not careful.”

  “Great.” He coughed and snorted and got rid of the rest of the water.

  “Anyway,” Zev said, “you should stick your penis out when you want to pee. Especially if you’re living on land, otherwise you’ll get all itchy.”

  “What about sex?”

  “Then it sticks out by itself,” Zev said solemnly. “Of course.”

  “Right. Of course.” God, Stephen Thomas thought, I’m blushing. “Why did it hurt Victoria when we tried to make love in the water?”

  “I don’t —” Zev cut off what he was going to say, and thought for a minute instead. “Did you try too soon? Were you ready?”

  “Of course she was ready,” Stephen Thomas said, irritated. “What kind of a jerk do you think I am?” It annoyed him to have to ask for advice in the first place, but to have Zev act like a teen-age sex therapist —

  “Were you ready?”

  “Obviously,” Stephen Thomas said sarcastically. But then he went back in his mind and listened to what Zev had just said. “What do you mean by ‘ready’?”

  “She —”

  “Not for Victoria. For me. How would you know if you were ready?”

  “I’d be slick, of course,” Zev said.

  “Oh,” Stephen Thomas said. “Oh.”

  “That doesn’t happen to men humans?”

  “No.”

  “And it didn’t happen for you?”

  “Not as of this morning.”

  “You’re still changing,” Zev said. He patted Stephen Thomas on the arm. “It’ll be better when you’re done.” He cocked his head, thoughtfully. “You’ll have to learn how to retract and extend. I never thought of that.” He jumped up and stood knee-deep in the water. “Come on. Come swimming.”

  Stephen Thomas pushed himself to his feet. “I can’t right now, Zev.”

  Zev glanced over his shoulder, wistfully, down the river. “Are you okay? Can you get where you’re going by yourself?”

  “Sure.”

  Zev grinned and waved and pushed off backwards. The current caught him. He vanished into the tumble of white water.

  Stephen Thomas waded out onto the dry rocks. They were uncomfortably hot. He slid his feet quickly into his sandals and shook himself off. Droplets scattered from his body. In the bright light, his pelt was white-gold against his darkening skin.

  He eased into his shorts, tempted to return to the cool solace of the river. He needed time to think and reflect... or he needed to be distracted from too much thinking and reflecting.

  As he climbed the path, Crimson Ng strode down it, pulling a wheelbarrow.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. Current project?”

  “A new one.” Crimson let him look into the wheelbarrow. He expected to see the bones of one of her heavy-boned, long-fanged predators.

  The rough slab of stone contained alien shapes, the fossilized soft bodies of creatures never in any vertebrate line. Tentacles writhed and tangled. Eons ago, some violent accident had crushed the feathered legs.

  “It looks like —”

  “I devolved Nemo,” she said. “And invented the rest of the ecosystem.” She gazed past Stephen Thomas to the riverbank, barely aware of his presence. “It’s ready to go in the ground. Want to help?”

  “No,” he said, aware that she was offering him a courtesy. “Thanks. I have to stop by the lab, and then I promised Esther a stint with the ASes.”

  “Yeah,” Crimson said. “Right. I should do that, too.” She grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and hurried past, instantly oblivious to everything but her work.

  o0o

  The cells from Nemo’s ship thrived in growth medium. Stephen Thomas set to work parceling cultures out for the other departments.

  Stephen Thomas tried not to worry about the weird changes in his body; he tried not to dwell on them. It was hard, when what felt like the world’s worst sunburn was peeling and itching in his crotch. He could not forget the raw red flesh. Zev’s explanation helped, but not much.

  He kept imagining that his genitals had drawn up inside his body.

  Imagining, hell! he thought.

  He knew if he scratched himself, it would just start hurting.

  I’d rather have the pain than the damned itching, he thought. But when he remembered the pain, he changed his mind.

  He surrounded himself with images: Nemo’s chamber, a recording of the cell growth, a micrograph of the huge dendritic molecules. He brought the cell growth image closer, and speeded up its replay.

  The cells grew in a snowflake-shaped colony, stretched out in a network of interconnecting processes. The pattern was clearer in two dimensions than in three. In three, the concentric layers obscured and confused the lacy structure.

  He let the cell colony recede and studied the strange three-dimensional polymers that he suspected of being the alien cell’s genetic material.

  He could not figure them out. The magical beauty of DNA was that its structure implied its means of replication: simple, elegant, self-evident. The double-stranded molecule split; the dividing cell recreated the missing half of each strand, using the strand itself as a map for its mirror image.

  Dendritic molecules, though, were both more complicated and, ordinarily, simpler: structurally more complicated, but with less room for variation within the structure. He could figure out how they could form. But he could not figure out how they replicated. If they replicated. And he could not yet see a straightforward way of getting genetic information into or out of them.

  You have plenty of time, he said to himself. What do you have to show for visits to two alien ships? One ordinary bit of living bunch-grass, and a couple of species of alien bacteria. Shit, al
l you have is time. You can afford to dissect a sample atom by atom, if that looks promising.

  Stephen Thomas composed a note telling his colleagues that their alien cells were ready. He closed his eyes and linked with Arachne.

  The computer opened up to him, serene and limitless, apparently unscarred and undaunted by the system crashes that had crippled it. Arachne’s confidence could mislead him into believing nothing had changed. The truth was that the crashes had left invisible pockets of emptiness, as undetectable and as treacherous as snow-covered crevasses in a glacier.

  Stephen Thomas sent out his message, then, on impulse, asked Arachne to show him Feral’s files.

  Feral had specialized in reporting on the space program. Both Victoria and Satoshi held him in high regard as a writer, but Stephen Thomas had read few of his articles. Stephen Thomas had liked Feral for himself.

  Feral had left a lot of work on the system. A collection of his finished pieces, written back on Earth. Some slice of life reportage. A long series he called “Life Log.” The last installment reported Feral’s trip from Earth to the transport to Starfarer. It ended with the communications cutoff before the missile attack. After that, his work lay unfinished, stored in private files.

  Someone should put it together and publish it for him, Stephen Thomas thought. If we can get to it.

  The names of the files were intriguing. His final “Life Log.” “Resonances: Starfarer.” “Stephen Thomas.”

  Stephen Thomas asked Arachne to let him into the files. Receiving a polite refusal, he shrugged. He had not expected it to be that easy.

  Feral had recorded no will, no next of kin, which could mean that the files were locked forever. But Stephen Thomas was not ready to give up.

  He tried the obvious sorts of passwords: Feral’s name, his birthdate. Stephen Thomas even tried his own name.

  Nothing worked.

  I’ll figure it out, Feral, Stephen Thomas thought.

  Reluctantly, he put the locked files away and withdrew from Arachne. He had promised some time to Esther Klein and the artificials. He had better get going.

  Mitch sauntered in, looking ridiculously happy.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said cheerfully and without a shred of regret. He dragged a chair up beside Stephen Thomas and straddled it.