The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “What happened to the silver threads in your fur?” J.D. asked.

  Quickercatcher flicked the forefingers of his left hand rapidly across the nest bedding.

  A multitude of thin silver strands wriggled over the edge of the nest and onto the back of Quickercatcher’s hand. The silver worms crept into the fur of his wrist and disappeared. As J.D. watched, fascinated and dismayed, the worms reappeared in their usual places, slithering out through the fur of his shoulders to sketch the suggestion of a decorative collar.

  J.D. forced herself not to move, not to shudder, not to shove herself out of the resting nest and brush frantically at her clothes. She imagined the worms had crawled up under her pants legs —

  She set her jaw.

  It’s no creepier than the artificial lung, she told herself firmly. It’s no worse than eating the birdlets.

  “Are they —” She cleared her throat, disguising her question. She had almost asked about parasites. “What are they?”

  On her other side, Longestlooker scratched in a different rhythm, and another set of worms glided from the nest and into her shiny black fur.

  Maybe Sharphearer and Fasterdigger will take theirs back, too, J.D. thought. Soon. Then I won’t have to worry that some of those things are crawling on me.

  “They’re my biters.” Quickercatcher said. “My mutualists.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They keep my fur clean. And the bedding.” Quickercatcher teased one loose and wrapped it around his finger, where it clung. “See? It has those long biting jaws, it can eat crawly things, and also hold on tight to my fur when I’m carrying it around.”

  J.D. felt queasy, though the solution made perfect sense for a person with a heavy coat.

  How long would it take, every day, to wash your hair and comb it and dry it, if you had as much fur as Quickercatcher?

  “And if there are any dangerous parasites around,” Fasterdigger said, “the biters kill them.”

  The Largerfarthings’ mutualists functioned like Nemo’s attendants. The attendants had not bothered J.D. at all. She had thought them fascinating and beautiful.

  Why do the mutualists faze me? she wondered. She answered her own question: Nemo was so different, and the Largerfarthings are so similar. This is one of those times I have to remind myself that we’re aliens to each other.

  Quickercatcher teased the biter, loosening it from his finger.

  “Would you like some?” Sharphearer asked.

  “No,” J.D. said. “I don’t think so. Thank you.”

  “J.D. couldn’t use ours.” Quickercatcher guided the biter into his fur. “They wouldn’t like living on her, and they couldn’t eat anything in her environment.”

  “Europa might give you some of hers,” Fasterdigger said.

  “I’m sure she would,” Sharphearer said. She flicked her fingers lightly against the resting nest. Her biters crawled out and rejoined her.

  All along, J.D. thought, I’ve been thinking that the silver in Europa’s hair moves like something alive. It was a prettier image when it was metaphorical.

  “I’ll think about asking her,” J.D. said, to be polite.

  “You said you have questions for us,” Longestlooker said.

  “So many I hardly know where to start.” J.D. was glad to change the subject. “Why did you call human beings your clients?”

  All four members of the quartet answered her question at once.

  “Because we’re your sponsors —

  “— We first explored your system —”

  “— As far as we know, we’re the first. The first from Civilization.”

  “If the Fighters had ever visited Earth, they probably would have changed it —”

  “Destroyed it!” said Sharphearer.

  “So much that human people would never have evolved.”

  “Who are the Fighters?” J.D. asked.

  “We’ve found the remains of civilizations, old ones —”

  “— the remains of people who destroyed each other, people who tried to take over living worlds.”

  “But it never worked!” Sharphearer said.

  Quickercatcher agreed. “Star travellers wiped out tribes-people. But the Fighters died. They couldn’t thrive on their conquests.”

  “They withdrew,” Longestlooker said.

  “Leaving ruined worlds,” Sharphearer said sadly.

  “How much uniqueness was lost,” Fasterdigger said in the same tone.

  “But you survived,” J.D. said. “Civilization exists!”

  “Before Civilization existed, the cosmic string withdrew.”

  “From everywhere — Every living world that we know of.”

  “We found records... The isolation lasted a long time.”

  “When it ended, new intelligences had arisen, on worlds that would have been destroyed.”

  “The people of the Four Worlds,” Sharphearer said.

  “And the people from Earth,” said Fasterdigger.

  “And many other people,” Longestlooker said.

  Quickercatcher’s nose described a figure eight of agreement. “If the Fighters survived, we’ve never met them. Only their ruins. And...”

  J.D. waited.

  “A few stars... should possess amenable worlds. We should be able to visit them.”

  “But they’re empty of cosmic string, so even if we could reach them, we could never return.”

  J.D. realized what Quickercatcher was explaining. “You think Fighters live there. Permanently isolated.”

  Quickercatcher hesitated.

  “Tell me, Quickercatcher,” J.D. said.

  “Open your link. Just a little.”

  J.D. complied, for a split second —

  An endless shriek, inarticulate and low-pitched, insinuated itself into her mind. If it contained words, she could not understand them, but the meaning pierced her to the center.

  The upper harmonics cried of isolation, of exile and loneliness, begging forgiveness and compassion.

  But the lower harmonics reverberated with a dirge of hatred, enmity, and threat.

  — J.D. cried out and snapped her link shut, just as Quickercatcher cut off the transmission. She wrapped herself in fetal position, fighting to steady her rapid, shallow breathing.

  “J.D., J.D., I said just a little bit —” Quickercatcher rubbed against her, soft fur sliding on her cheek and neck, urging her to relax her body from its distress.

  Without thinking, J.D. flung her arms around Quickercatcher, hugging herself to the powerful body, the comforting fur. Quickercatcher’s warm nose snuffled at her hair. His front feet hooked over her shoulders; his arms wrapped around her waist. The sensation was so strange that J.D. came back to herself. She drew away, scrubbing her eyes on her sleeve. Quickercatcher released her, watching with concern.

  “I — I thought I did open the link only a little,” J.D. said, embarrassed. “I enhanced it a few days ago, so I could communicate with Nemo, with the knowledge surface — with Nemo’s starship. My starship. I’m not used to it yet.” She drew a deep breath. “I’m all right now. That sound... was it a sound? What was it?”

  “It is an electronic transmission from a system that should have hospitable worlds.”

  “Do you know anything about its people?” she asked.

  “We don’t even know for sure that people are sending the transmission.”

  “No one has ever translated it,” Longestlooker said.

  “If it carries within it the means for its own translation,” Quickercatcher said, “we aren’t clever enough to figure it out.”

  “It felt... It felt real,” J.D. said. “It felt like it came from someone crying to get out. But I think I’d be too afraid of the person to help them.” She shivered, remembering the low, angry harmonics.

  “We have a similar reaction to it,” said Sharphearer.

  “As far as we know,” Fasterdigger said, “no one has ever tried to respond to the transmission.”

>   “What many of us believe,” Longestlooker said, “is that those isolated systems do harbor sentient beings.”

  “The beings who chose to destroy other people for their own gain,” said Sharphearer.

  “The Fighters,” said Fasterdigger. “They’re cut off.”

  Quickercatcher made a figure-eight of agreement. “Maybe the string, and whatever controls it, will never reach out to them again.”

  J.D. thought of being isolated forever, trapped in one small spot... a star system would feel very small to people who had visited other systems, who knew that other worlds existed but lay forever out of their reach.

  “You can’t be sure... maybe it’s just an artifact of the star. A magnetic field and a stellar wind... “

  “Perhaps,” Quickercatcher said doubtfully.

  “A banshee,” J.D. said, trying to smile.

  “Banshee?” Quickercatcher jerked his chin upwards, then ducked his head.

  “We don’t know that word.” Longestlooker sounded surprised.

  “A mythical being. Outside your house, at night, it cries. Like the wind screaming through the trees.”

  “Like the wind,” Quickercatcher said. “Yes.”

  “That describes what we hear very well,” Sharphearer said.

  “A banshee,” said Fasterdigger.

  “You’re lucky that the Fighters never visited Earth,” Quickercatcher said.

  “We think,” Longestlooker said, “that the other ones controlled the cosmic string.”

  “Set it up to guard us from the Fighters!” Sharphearer said.

  “But it’s far too restrictive,” Longestlooker said. “We don’t need to be protected so much anymore.”

  Quickercatcher said, “So if we can learn more about the other ones —”

  “— how they controlled access to transition.”

  “By looking at Starfarer’s fossils —”

  “The fossils are performance art,” J.D. said.

  Longestlooker’s eyes closed in amusement, while at the same time she traced a figure eight of agreement.

  “Your joke about the fossils is funny.” Longestlooker’s tone was agreeable, even condescending. “It’s good to joke about serious things.”

  J.D. did not know what to say. Gerald Hemminge, the assistant chancellor, wanted her to lie about the fossils, the sculptures, but she could not bring herself to do so.

  It probably doesn’t matter, J.D. thought. Whatever I say, no one in Civilization will believe the fossils are fakes. Crimson is right. Everybody wants to believe they’re real.

  “We will have to come to some arrangement over the fossils,” Quickercatcher said.

  “But they have nothing to do with your question,” Longestlooker said.

  “If the fossils mean the other ones visited Earth,” Fasterdigger said, “that was a long long time ago.”

  “Before Earth had human people,” said Sharphearer.

  “So we were the first to visit human people,” Longestlooker said, looping the explanation back to the beginning of its long and irregular path.

  Late stopped grazing. The spines on his back stiffened and raised.

  “You should know,” he said, “that by ‘we,’ my friends mean all of us, all the Four Worlds. Their people, and mine, and Largernearer’s...” Late’s voice trailed off.

  “What about Smallernearer’s inhabitants?” J.D. asked.

  “There is only one.”

  J.D. gave Late a questioning glance.

  “Look.”

  In the center of the resting room, an image glowed into existence: the Nearers, eerily like Earth and the Moon. Atmosphere, clouds, and water covered Largernearer’s surface with a gauze of blue and white. From Starfarer’s position, the disk of Largernearer was half full. Smallernearer’s surface was barren, nearly dark, a uniform silver gray.

  But that was impossible. It had to be in the same phase as Largernearer.

  “Can I look at Smallernearer more closely?” J.D. asked.

  At her request, the image enlarged.

  Smallernearer contained no craters, no volcanic plains. Its featureless surface was the uniform color of ash.

  Where 61 Cygni illuminated it, it glowed a soft gray, with very little albedo. It was a shadow against the stars.

  “It supports life?” she said. “A being inhabits it?”

  “You see that it’s strange,” Quickercatcher said with approval.

  “Satoshi noticed it was strange. I didn’t realize how strange.”

  The image expanded.

  The featureless surface looked as unpromising for the evolution of life as the surface of Earth’s moon. And yet J.D. knew from Satoshi’s observations that the world was a major source of electronic transmissions.

  “Do they — does it — live underground?” Perhaps the inhabitant was like Nemo, living a solitary life in interior chambers, the only being on its planet. “Is it a squidmoth?”

  “Certainly not,” Longestlooker said.

  J.D. had learned to expect that curt, dismissive tone when anyone from Civilization discussed the squidmoths.

  “Then where is it? What is it?”

  The image expanded again, and the point of view dropped closer to the surface of the small world.

  The image folded itself around J.D., reaching from the center of the chamber to the wall. She found herself surrounded by a nearly invisible mist, a frail network of branching hair-thin fibers. It was so fine that she could see through it for hundreds of meters.

  “This is it,” Quickercatcher said.

  “It’s an aerogel!” Victoria whispered in the back of J.D.’s mind. “Its density is just this side of vacuum. It’s a substance that doesn’t occur spontaneously — we thought.”

  Once Victoria had named it, J.D. remembered reading about the material. Unpromising as a substrate for intelligence.

  And then she thought, It’s a network — a web. If it’s made of something that conducts electricity, or light...

  She saw — or imagined she saw — a flicker of illumination in the far distance, nearly obscured by the gauzy substance.

  “How did it evolve?” J.D. asked. “How did it form?”

  “An excellent question,” Longestlooker said. “The Smallernearer doesn’t know. It has no memories for the first several million years of its existence.”

  “We think the other ones might have made it,” Quickercatcher said. “Invented it, created it, given it life, allowed it the time to become aware.”

  “But we have no proof,” Longestlooker said.

  “No one’s ever found another being like it,” said Fasterdigger. “Or any antecedents.”

  “Can’t you investigate?” J.D. asked. “Search for remnants of the other ones?” She grinned; she could not help it. “For fossils?”

  “Smallernearer says no evidence of the other ones remains.”

  “Are you sure?” J.D. asked.

  The quartet fell silent. Sharphearer nuzzled the underside of Longestlooker’s chin, pushing her head deep against her neck, till Sharphearer’s eyes were covered and her ears fluttered against the side of Longestlooker’s jaw.

  Quickercatcher scratched roughly with one hand beneath one forward leg. Scratching his armpit? J.D. wondered. His legpit?

  “What’s the matter?” J.D. asked.

  “You know, of course...” Longestlooker said carefully, “like you, we are transmitting this meeting. To all the Four Worlds. To Smallernearer.”

  And I just called the Smallernearer a liar, or as good as, J.D. thought.

  She struggled to control her instant, furious blush. She was good at other forms of biocontrol: suppressing her fertility, directing her metabolic enhancer with the touch of a thought, adapting to her expanded link within a few days. But she always blushed furiously whenever she was embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, quickly. “I apologize. I didn’t — I only wondered if you had helped look.”

  “Where would we land?” Longestlo
oker asked.

  The image of Smallernearer receded rapidly, leaving J.D. giddy. When the dizziness faded, Smallernearer, the planet, covered with the Smallernearer, its inhabitant, spun before her. No point on the surface of the small world was free of the kilometers-deep layer of wispy aerogel.

  A spark of light raced across the surface of the world, following a complex and recursive path.

  “No one has ever landed there,” Quickercatcher said.

  “Not since the beginning of Civilization,” Longestlooker said gravely.

  “If anyone did land,” Quickercatcher said, “the damage would be terrible.”

  “We can’t visit Smallernearer,” Sharphearer said sadly.

  “Can you visit Starfarer?” J.D. asked. “Will you? Would you like to?”

  Longestlooker spiraled out of the resting nest.

  “You’ve visited us. We’ll visit you, if you like.”

  Chapter 3

  J.D. followed the quartet through the tangled tunnels of the Four Worlds ship, letting them guide her through the maze. They passed hundreds of tiny dioramas tucked into the walls. J.D. still had not had the chance to inspect one closely. Now and again a colorful bat-bird winged past.

  At the entrance to the connecting tunnel, Smallerfarthings and Largerfarthings waited to see them off, bringing with them baggage and equipment and food, all the supplies their colleagues would need while visiting Starfarer, an alien ship.

  In the connecting tunnel, J.D. led the way toward the Chi, feeling like the leader of a caravan on the silk road. The contents of the Farthings’ baggage, no matter how ordinary to them, would be as strange and wonderful as any cargo of rare spices.

  o0o

  Victoria unfastened the safety straps of her couch and let herself float free in the observers’ circle.

  “Let’s go,” she said eagerly. “Let’s go meet the Four Worlds people.”

  “And their parasites,” Satoshi said. He grimaced. “Ugh.”

  “Their mutualists,” Europa said. “Not parasites at all.”

  “Whatever you say,” Satoshi said.