The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  With Quickercatcher’s fur soft and comforting against her, Ruth fell sound asleep.

  o0o

  Esther Klein entered a hexagonal underground chamber deep beneath the surface of the starship Nautilus. As soon as J.D. settled down to rest with the Four Worlds representatives, Esther had ventured eagerly out of the expedition tent, to explore.

  Esther flashed her light around, tracing the rock shapes. Three pointed archways alternated with three round archways. The pointed arches led into large alcoves; the round archways opened into tunnels. She had come in through one of the tunnels. She thought she recognized where she was.

  Entering one of the alcoves, she rubbed her glove against the pitted stone of the back wall. The rock crumbled. A chunk fell away. Esther jumped back as steam clouded out from the wall. Water exploded into vapor on exposure to hard vacuum. Most dissipated; some scattered to the floor as ice crystals that glittered for a moment, then sublimated. Water continued to seep from the wall and vaporize, a strange spring. Slowly the surface crusted over.

  This is where Satoshi saw Nemo’s air being made, Esther said to herself. I’m sure of it. There’s nothing left of the critters who produced the atmosphere except a few hairs, a few scales. They must have processed the water to make air. Hydrolysis, maybe an enzymatic reaction...

  While Nemo was still alive, the silken inner tunnels had held oxygen, nitrogen, traces of hydrocarbons. When the squidmoth died and the tunnels disintegrated, the air escaped. J.D. planned to terraform the planetoid she had named Nautilus. Eventually it would be a tiny world in itself, like Europa’s ship, with lakes and streams, forests and fields. First it would need an atmosphere and water. If Nautilus contained a large deposit of water, that would solve several of J.D.’s problems at once.

  Esther sent an LTM out to explore and probe. She put the broken chunk of rock in her sample pouch.

  I wonder, Esther thought, if J.D.’s going to need a backup pilot...

  She had no idea how to move the starship. But J.D. knew. Maybe she would be willing to teach someone else. Europa and Androgeos knew how to take Nautilus over and put it under controls developed by Civilization. Esther was pretty sure J.D. would never allow that. Why should she put herself in their debt, when she did not need to?

  I know J.D. trusts me, Esther thought. After all, it was me and Kolya she asked to come here and keep watch while she went to meet the Four Worlds ship.

  Griffith had referred to what they were doing as “maintaining a presence” while he tried to persuade J.D. — to bully her, was the truth — to let him go with Kolya.

  For such a mild person, J.D. was awfully hard to bully.

  I guess she didn’t want somebody to maintain a presence, Esther said to herself. I guess she wanted somebody to house-sit.

  She grinned.

  Let’s see, she thought. I spent five years doing space construction. Piloting transports, eight. I’ll never fly another EarthSpace transport. Even if they’d let me work for them — damned if I want to. So... how does mining oxygen or transporting water grab you, Klein?

  Esther wished she had a spaceship. But the alien contact department needed the Chi, and Esther’s transport had never been designed to land or lift off, only to dock with other spacecraft.

  I could land the transport here, she thought. And get off again. I’m sure. Pretty sure. The gravity’s low enough. But the transport would get pretty beat up if I tried.

  She still wished she had a ship.

  Esther laughed to herself. You’re on a ship, the neatest starship you’ll ever see.

  She climbed toward the surface. Nautilus was dark and cold, stripped of Nemo’s luminous cables and translucent silk. The tunnel opened into a large, deep crater, one of the pits from which Nemo’s offspring had launched their silken balloons.

  Esther loped easily up the crater’s side. Her boots barely touched the rock before she pushed off again. In five long leaps she reached the surface of the strange little world. The horizon was so close that she could see its curvature.

  She paused to gaze into the black sky, the multicolored stars. The constellations nearly matched the familiar patterns of Earth. In interstellar terms, an infinitesimal distance separated 61 Cygni and the sun. The only difference was the small bright spark of Earth’s sun. Esther gazed at it for a few minutes, wondering when — if — she would return home.

  Here, beyond any atmosphere, more visible stars cluttered the ancient patterns. Esther was used to seeing stars from space, to recognizing familiar patterns against the wash of light of the galaxy. Back home she spent half her life in space. On the deep space expedition, she was... what? A fugitive, a stowaway, an inadvertent kidnap victim? Her sympathies were and always had been with the people who would be accused of kidnapping her.

  Esther shrugged. She would be in a complicated position when the faculty decided to take Starfarer back to Earth. In the meantime, she would do what she could to help the expedition. The consequences be damned.

  o0o

  Bright, hard lights made a spoked wheel of J.D.’s shadow. She hurried through the rough tunnel in Starfarer’s thick stone skin. The gravity was higher than on the inner living surface, though still less than one full g.

  J.D. glanced at the ceiling, at the harsh artificial glow. Higher above her, deeper inside the starship’s second cylinder, lay Starfarer’s wild side. J.D. had not yet had the chance to explore it, even to visit it. In calmer times, members of the faculty and staff used the uninhabited cylinder as a recreational wilderness, a place to hike and camp and fish. A touch of curiosity to Arachne answered her query: Yes, the ecosystem could support a certain amount of hunting, though no one had yet applied for a permit. Since Starfarer had fled Earth before the ecology department established predators, someone would eventually have to hunt to control the herbivore population. J.D. had caught salmon with the divers, but she had never hunted a mammal... except when she and Stephen Thomas tracked Chancellor Blades through Arachne’s web.

  J.D. reached the airlock and put on her spacesuit, comfortable with the equipment but apprehensive about going out onto Starfarer’s skin for the first time since the missile attack. Her helmet sealed. She stepped into the elevator and descended to the outside. The airlock pressure fell to zero; the hatch opened. J.D. looked out.

  Stars spun beneath her. Starfarer loomed above her. At her feet, the inspection web fastened to the lower edge of the elevator shaft. The web stretched all the way around Starfarer, a tracery of cables held in place by support struts bristling outward from the cylinder’s surface.

  Rotation took her over the immense silver canopy of the stellar sail. The stars reappeared, and then the spin plunged J.D. into the shadowed valley between the campus cylinder and the wild side. The campus cylinder, counter-spinning at the same rate so the distant stone surface paced her, gave her a momentary sensation of stillness. Then she burst out over the starfield again. Multicolored points and streamers of light streaked past.

  J.D. fastened her lifeline to a safety link and slid one foot cautiously onto the cable of the inspection web.

  “It’s easier if you don’t look down.”

  Infinity Mendez was waiting for her. J.D. grinned, though he could not see her expression past her gilded faceplate, as she could not see his.

  “That’s easier said than done,” she said.

  “True.” He balanced easily on the web’s tightrope.

  “Too bad we’re not bats,” J.D. said.

  “Bats?”

  She stretched up and brushed the outer skin of Starfarer, the looming stone ceiling.

  “We could hang by our feet and swing along.”

  He chuckled.

  “Interesting engineering problem — spacesuit boots for bats.”

  J.D. laughed.

  Infinity spent a lot of time on the outside of Starfarer’s skin, especially since the missile attack. He was a staff gardener, but he was also one of the few people on board with space construction experience.
Before joining the deep space expedition, he had been on the crew that built the starship.

  “Over there, the —” Infinity hesitated. “What should I call it?”

  “I don’t know,” J.D. said. “I thought of them as eggs. Egg cases.” She reached back to Nautilus and touched Nemo’s knowledge surface, but she could not translate her perception of Nemo’s offspring into ordinary English words. She could not even translate it into something she could hold in her own mind. Trying made her as giddy as looking at the stars beneath her feet. She drew away.

  “This egg hasn’t even hatched, but it’s growing already,” Infinity said. “That isn’t any egg I ever ran into.”

  “No. We’ll have to talk to a taxonomist... or ask Nemo’s child what it wants to be called.”

  “Can you talk to it?” he asked, surprised.

  “I don’t know that, either.” She sighed. I wish there was another squidmoth to ask. I know the information is all in Nemo’s knowledge surface, somewhere, but I can’t get it out in a way I can understand it. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know whether to try to be a parent, or...” She shrugged unhappily.

  “Let’s ask Nemo’s kid,” Infinity said.

  The crossed the strands of the inspection web. Now and then they passed silver slugs, upside-down, flattened to hold themselves fast, performing the constant maintenance that Starfarer required. They often worked in pairs: A lithoclast, its color a smooth solid silver, eating away at weakened adhesive rock foam and preparing cracks to be filled; a lithoblast, patterned with moiré rainbows, spewing out new rock foam to re-anchor the moonrock and fill the cracks.

  J.D. picked her way across the inspection web. Her safety line followed in its track. She traversed the curve of the wild cylinder’s flank. The cylinder’s spin pushed her down toward the stars.

  61 Cygni shone below, bright and familiar in its similarity to the sun. It fell to Starfarer’s horizon and disappeared. J.D. and Infinity plunged into night, and into the valley between the two cylinders.

  Infinity ducked under a cluster of large silver slugs.

  “Here,” he said softly.

  Beyond the slugs, a gluey pseudopod hugged Starfarer’s side.

  It was the color of skim milk, blue-white and translucent, nothing like the iridescent silk that Nemo had produced. J.D. touched it gently.

  The gelatinous living plasma cringed away from the contact. The blue-white skin flattened against Starfarer. The skin stuck to the rock, turning dry and papery.

  J.D. caught her breath with dismay.

  “Touchy critter,” Infinity said.

  “I wish I hadn’t done that,” J.D. said. “I thought it would be like Nemo.” Nemo, a solitary creature, had enjoyed the presence of another being, sought out J.D.’s touch, rippled and purred in response to Zev’s petting.

  “Maybe when it grows up.”

  They followed the pseudopod toward the egg nest’s center. Above them, it widened and joined others. Like the arms of a starfish, the projections led inward to a central bulge. The organism’s appendages spread from it asymmetrically, stretching wide along the circumference of Starfarer, gripping tight against the centrifugal force, extending for a shorter distance parallel to the starship’s axis.

  “It’s big,” J.D. said. “Bigger than what you could see of Nemo. Without the structure.”

  Beneath the taut surface of the skin, soft swellings pressed out, then receded. Now and again a sharper shape outlined itself, and disappeared again.

  J.D. let her helmet project Starfarer’s interior image of Nemo’s offspring. Sensors saturated the hull of the starship; they outlined the extent of the larva’s penetration. It had dug a pit two meters deep for its body; its arms tendrilled deeper.

  “It’s living on rock and starlight,” J.D. said. “Is it dangerous? Risky to the cylinder?”

  “A breach in the hull is dangerous,” Infinity said. “How big is it going to get?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea.”

  Infinity folded his arms and stared up at the squidmoth larva. J.D. was glad she could not see his expression.

  He helped build the ship, she thought. It must hurt him to see it damaged like this. But he doesn’t act scared...

  That gave her hope.

  “It’s using water,” Infinity said. He sent her a magnification of part of the sensor report. Several of the pseudopods twined around one of Starfarer’s water mains. Microscopic tendrils penetrated the pipe.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last couple hours.”

  “How much is it using?”

  “Not enough to make much difference —”

  “That’s good,” J.D. said.

  “— yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t suppose you know how much it will need.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Listen, this is going to spook people. It’s spooking me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t blame you. Maybe... I can persuade it to move.”

  She was glad she had left the LTMs behind. She had looked forward to the respite, to spending a few hours out of range of recorders. Now privacy was more than a moment’s indulgence. Maybe the LTMs’ absence would give her time to figure out what to do.

  She leaned against a support of the inspection web and gazed up into the center of Nemo’s last offspring.

  “I was so glad when I saw that one of Nemo’s egg cases had come along with us through transition,” she said. “But now I wish it had stayed behind at Sirius. Where it’d be safe.”

  “Sirius is an empty system now,” Infinity said. “Whatever — whoever — we left behind, they’re stuck there. Who knows for how long?”

  J.D. sighed. Nemo’s children were stranded, because of Starfarer.

  The cosmic string moved in and out of star systems in obedience to rules that Civilization had learned through experience and observation and error. The cosmic string had receded from Sirius because Starfarer, tainted by the missile blast, had entered the system. The string would return, J.D. hoped, now that Starfarer had left. She had no idea how long the return would take... but squidmoths lived for a million years.

  “That crater Nemo lived in,” Infinity said. “If this guy hollows out something that size, it’ll go all the way through the wild side’s skin.”

  “I’ll try to find out.”

  Infinity’s gilded faceplate obscured his expression, but the language of his body was skeptical.

  “Is there an ‘it’ inside there to communicate with?”

  “Good question.”

  She touched Nemo’s knowledge surface, searching for information on squidmoth ontology. But she skidded off the smooth shiny curves.

  “Damn,” she muttered. “I can’t find anything I want to know.”

  As soon as she said it, she had to admit it was not true. A great deal remained accessible to her on the knowledge surface, particularly the ability to control Nautilus.

  But she wished the surface would tell her how old a squidmoth had to be before it reached the age of reason. A few days? A few centuries? Older than all human civilization?

  She wished she knew if it could listen to her, or if it would react to the touch of communication the way it had reacted to the touch of her hand.

  Take it easy, J.D. said to herself. The larva is bathed in electromagnetic energy. Heat and light, gamma waves and cosmic rays. It isn’t going to disintegrate at the touch of a new radio frequency.

  She extended her attention through her link, speaking to Nemo’s offspring as she had spoken to Nemo. But Nemo had been an ancient, aware being. For all she knew, Nemo’s offspring was mostly a mass of undifferentiated cells.

  “Hello,” she said through her link. “Hello, I’m a friend of your adult parent. Can you hear me?”

  She waited.

  J.D. gazed up at the baby squidmoth till her neck cricked. She backed away a few steps. Leaning against a suspension strut, she rubbed her cramped muscles.
A massage through a space suit was completely unsatisfying.

  She sat on the inspection web beneath the pulsing mass of Nemo’s egg case. Infinity sat nearby, watching, waiting, interested and patient.

  Fifteen minutes passed. The cables of the inspection web pressed uncomfortably against J.D. leg.

  If she let her gaze stray from the baby squidmoth, the stars spinning beneath her feet and the change from light to darkness and back made her dizzy. She remembered what it had been like out here during transition, with the strange substance of another universe gathering around her like curious fog.

  She sent out another tentative query. Again she found no reply.

  Gingerly, she widened her link to its limit.

  Her surroundings disappeared and her perception of her body vanished. Even her perception of time faded.

  A tendril of curiosity touched her welcoming link. J.D. gasped — but held herself back from snatching at Nemo’s offspring.

  The baby squidmoth touched the knowledge surface. It slid along its sharp, multi-dimensional edge, seeking... something.

  Is it looking for its parent? J.D. wondered. But that’s impossible, that doesn’t make sense, because when a squidmoth reproduces, it doesn’t live to be a parent.

  The baby squidmoth scampered along J.D.’s knowledge surface. J.D. followed it, curious, hoping it might teach her more about Nemo’s strange memory. It possessed all of its parents’ memories, so Nemo’s surface should be familiar to it. Nemo’s offspring sank farther into the surface than J.D. had ever penetrated. She watched, hoping to discover new techniques.

  The baby squidmoth slid up one multi-dimensional curve and spun down a slope. Here the edges and surfaces were smooth and clean, polished by long use. In the distance, the jagged new peaks of Victoria’s transition algorithm rose like spires, like minarets, like ice castles.

  They were new; they were different from anything the baby squidmoth possessed. Nemo had supplied it with all the knowledge of the squidmoths, but Victoria had given the algorithm to J.D. after Nemo died.

  The algorithm’s unfamiliar pinnacles drew the baby squidmoth. It swerved its attention and streaked toward the algorithm.

  “Oh, shit!” J.D. exclaimed.