The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “The ecosystem would be replaced. As it was for me, when they gave me the ship. The larger animals, the rarer creatures and plants, they have a niche on Tau Ceti II.”

  “But we aren’t banished,” Victoria said, “and we aren’t accepted.”

  “True.”

  Victoria thought, Europa is about to lose her home — and her freedom. But she doesn’t know how and she doesn’t know when. And it’s our fault.

  “What will happen to you?” Victoria asked.

  “I don’t know,” Europa said, so softly Victoria almost could not hear her. Her black eyes were very bright. “I don’t know.”

  o0o

  Crimson Ng breathed the river’s cool deep scent. The water flowed green and quiet in its channel, bubbling into soft white rapids over a tumble of boulders.

  The weather of Starfarer had stabilized; no one yet knew how precarious the balance might be. The starship had to stop moving from one type of star to another. It had chased the alien humans from Tau Ceti to Sirius to 61 Cygni. It was Sirius that caused most of the trouble. Starfarer had never been designed to spend time around a star like Sirius, a star so different from the sun. In trying to compensate for the campus’s heat wave, Arachne had created a blizzard.

  The snow had melted, saturating the ground. Crimson’s waterproof boots sank into cold mud and left deep footprints. She leaned over the edge of the steep bank. Ten meters below, the river had crept back to its channel, exposing its rocky beach. From above, Crimson could not tell how much damage the flood had caused.

  During the flood, the river had roiled just below where she was standing now. Its force had pushed boulders along the channel; the rolling rocks thundered. In front of Europa and Gerald and the others, Crimson had feigned detachment. But late last night she had returned to the riverbank. She had stood in the faint starlight reflected by the light tubes. In a fury, she flung cold wet stones into the center of the river.

  She felt calmer now, in daylight, still nervous about what she would find on the river beach, but not so nearly in danger of losing control.

  Crimson took a deep breath, jumped to her feet, and scrambled down the steep trail in the cliff.

  Even between the walls of the river canyon the light was bright; all Starfarer’s illumination came from straight overhead. When she dug at the fossil site, she put up a canopy when she wanted shade. The canopy poles had been washed away without a trace; at a river bend, downstream, a branch trailed a bit of tattered blue canvas.

  The trail was half as wide as it had been the last time she visited the site. The flood had broken the edges and washed out a long stride of the pathway. Crimson jumped over it, scraped against the wall to catch herself on the other side, and continued to the edge of the water.

  The river growled softly. Its contours had changed; it felt strange, and new. A jagged rock cut the surface, catching the flow and spraying it into a fountain. Crimson let the fine droplets fall across her face and shoulders. The scent of icy water and ozone-charged air surrounded her.

  She walked down the beach. She had been afraid it would be scoured down to the original unworked moon rock, but the river had only rearranged the gravel and sand and carefully rounded rocks.

  At her site, she stopped.

  Some of the anomalous stratum had been washed away, but not nearly as much as she had feared. Some of the surrounding volcanic layers had broken away, above and below, and left the shelf of sedimentary stone projecting outward. Fossils rose in organic shapes from the water-sculpted surface. Crimson touched the flow of mineralized bone, recreating the motions of her hands as she had formed the contours.

  A scatter of pebbles rattled down the path and across the beach.

  Gerald Hemminge, Starfarer’s assistant chancellor — acting chancellor, he called himself, since Chancellor Blades’ banishment — stood above her on the riverbank.

  He said nothing, but stepped down onto the trail and made his way toward her with precise, sure steps. A good deal taller than Crimson, he strode easily over the broken spot in the path.

  Crimson scowled at her fossils. She did not want to talk to Gerald about them. She disliked his condescending courtesy.

  “Hullo, Crimson,” he said.

  “Gerald.”

  “The site took some damage, I see.”

  “Some.”

  “Can you repair it?”

  “Repair it?”

  “Fix it. Put the fossils back. Replace the ones that washed away.”

  “Salt the site?” She tsked. “Very bad technique.”

  “Look here,” Gerald said. “I admire your ability to keep up your act. Performance art is very fashionable. But we must talk seriously.”

  “I’m always serious,” Crimson said.

  “Your art project — your fossil bed — is a major factor in our being allowed to remain in Civilization. It intrigues Europa.”

  Crimson had been amazed and delighted when the alien humans stole one of her fossils. Europa was amused by Gerald’s transparent efforts to persuade her that the site was an art project. Europa had dated the fossilized bone and returned to Starfarer, anxious to investigate.

  When Gerald realized it made a difference to Europa that the fossils were real, he had quickly changed his tune.

  “Yes,” Crimson said. “She’ll be glad it didn’t all wash away.”

  “You haven’t excavated any more — have you? You promised Europa —”

  “I didn’t promise her anything!” Crimson said. “She ordered me not to dig the site alone —”

  “And you’ll follow her order,” Gerald said.

  “— And I’m not turning it over to any amateur! This is an important site.”

  “Why must you always be so bloody contrary?”

  “I’m not,” she said.

  His lack of any sense of humor was a constant source of wonder to her, but all too often she let him provoke her past teasing to anger.

  “We must come to an arrangement,” Gerald said. “We must maintain the fiction that the fossils are real.”

  “What fiction?” Crimson asked.

  Gerald smiled. “Good. Then we’re agreed.”

  “I don’t think,” Crimson said, “that we’re agreed on much of anything.”

  She walked away from him, down the river beach.

  Arrogant prig, she thought. Wonder how he’d like it if I told him how to do his job? I could tell him to let Androgeos be the chancellor.

  Gerald’s irritation bored into her back. After a length of angry silence, he tramped up the trail, kicking shards of stone down onto the beach.

  She was glad he had gone. His new enthusiasm for her performance made her perversely uncertain that she should continue it.

  Crimson focused her attention on the shore.

  Within a few minutes, she had forgotten Gerald. She searched the beach pebbles for fossil-bearing shards. She did not hope to find very much; the rest of the deposit was probably at the bottom of the river.

  Maybe Infinity Mendez will let me borrow a silver slug to look along the channel, she thought. The slugs must be finished fixing the place where the missile crashed. They’ve even made a pretty good start at rebuilding the genetics department. And Esther has some of the inside artificials back with their brains regrown already. They’ll be able to take over some of the slug work...

  A shadow darkened the river canyon, filling it with a sudden coolness. The river’s icy green changed to a threatening gray. Crimson glanced up, scared for a moment. The cloud that passed between her and the sun tube was white and puffy. She relaxed again. None of the clouds around the sun tube, near-overhead or far-overhead, were heavy and dark with rain. The river was not in danger of flooding again; the fossils that remained were safe for a while.

  Crimson wished Alzena were still on board. Infinity did the best he could, but as he kept having to point out, he was not an ecologist. He was not an ecosystems analyst. Alzena had designed Starfarer’s weather systems. She might be
the only person who could tell if the patterns were in danger of being driven to a fatal new balance.

  Wait a minute, Crimson thought. Alzena went with Europa. It isn’t as if she’s dead or anything. She’s probably still on board Europa’s starship.

  The alien human’s terraformed planetoid followed Starfarer toward the Nearer worlds, keeping its distance so it would not perturb Starfarer’s orbit around Nautilus, tagging along with Europa like a friendly puppy.

  Victoria sent a tentative message out along her link, asking Arachne to broadcast it toward the alien humans’ terraformed planetoid. The computer obeyed.

  Alzena? Crimson thought into her link. Are you there? Can you hear me? Please talk to me. Please.

  She thought she felt a response a few seconds later, a quick shiver of surprise and dismay. But Alzena did not answer.

  I guess I can’t blame her, Crimson said to herself. If my family told me I had no soul, I might go nuts too.

  Crimson stooped to pick up a fragment of anomalous rock, pale against the darker pebbles of worked moon-rock. A large sharp tooth projected from the matrix. She recognized the species, a two-meter bipedal carnivore, large-brained and dexterous.

  One skeleton of this species lay in the museum, completely excavated except for narrow pillars of stone that held it in place above the matrix that had fossilized it. It had been preserved in a position unlikely to have occurred naturally. The body had been laid out, as in a burial.

  Other fossilized bodies lay deeper within the riverbank.

  The fossils’ stratum of rock contained no tools, no jewelry, no incomprehensible electronics, no midden heap. No proof that the beings had been starfaring aliens. But... how else could they have become entombed on the moon, in a layer of rock that could not exist naturally on Earth’s satellite? They had died light-years from their unknown home, and they had been buried by their comrades and left behind.

  It was too bad, of course, that the automated mass-driver had chewed into the deposit and flung the pieces of stone into space, to be formed into Starfarer’s two cylinders. The fossils would have yielded up much more information if they had been discovered in place. But there was no help for it now.

  By good luck, the anomalous stratum was still sandwiched between original volcanic flows, cemented to the lower flow by the formation of stone from alien sand and clay, to the upper flow by the heat of flowing lava.

  Every test dated the sedimentary stratum at two billion years, plus or minus a hundred million.

  The excavated skeleton was magnificent in its size and authority and loneliness. Crimson regretted the existence of the other skeletons, but finding only one would have been too perfect.

  She put the fang in her pocket and continued on along the river beach.

  o0o

  Satoshi sprawled in a couch in the geography theater. One of his three-dimensional analyses hovered above him, the only light in the large domed room. The analysis moved and changed without his attention or control. He had work to do, observations of all of the Four Worlds that he should look at. He had come to the theater to spend a few hours working, before the welcoming party for the Four Worlds representatives. He was not looking forward to the party. He wanted time alone to talk with Victoria and Stephen Thomas. Since Stephen Thomas was not talking, it did not look as if Satoshi would get what he wanted.

  I could do some work, but what’s the point? he thought. Anything you can figure out, Longestlooker is probably willing to tell you; anything you can think of to ask, the question has already been answered by Civilization.

  You don’t believe that, Satoshi told himself. So the Four Worlds have had space travel longer than Earth has. So what? They aren’t all inherently smarter than human beings, or morally superior. If they were, the other ones would never have instituted the rules of the cosmic string. They never would have isolated the Fighters.

  If they were all smarter than us, they wouldn’t want Victoria’s algorithm so badly.

  And they wouldn’t think Crimson’s fossils were real, instead of an art form.

  That thought cheered him, but it also made him think: I’m a lot more depressed than I thought I was.

  He idly scanned Europa’s planetoid.

  J.D.’s going to want Nautilus to look like this, he thought. I wonder if it’s possible. There’s no air, the gravity’s so much less...

  In a valley near the south pole of Europa’s starship, a small, fur-covered elephant wrapped its trunk around the tender tip of a tree branch, stripped off the leaves, and shoves them into its mouth.

  In astonishment, Satoshi expanded the focus. The valley contained a whole herd of dwarf mammoths.

  When the starship rotated the valley away from him, he explored the records Arachne had made. He found other prehistoric mammals living on Europa’s world: three-toed horses, saber-toothed cats, no-humped camels, a rhinoceros-sized wombat, and of course the aurochs that had chased J.D.

  I shouldn’t be surprised, Satoshi thought. Europa told us her starship sheltered extinct creatures. I guess I had in mind dodos or passenger pigeons, something more recent.

  The dwarf mammoth strolled across the meadow. Three young ones trotted after it. One hung back, exploring a huge clump of grass, and came face to face with a giant ground sloth. The baby mammoth leaped sideways, raising its trunk — Satoshi imagined its shrill trumpet of surprise — then hurried after its mother.

  Charmed, Satoshi explored the mammoths’ valley. He set Arachne to capture more images each time the planetoid rotated to face Starfarer. For a little while, his worries dissolved in delight and amazement.

  Finally he broke away from the mesmerizing images. He rubbed his face with both hands, blocking off the kaleidoscope of light shining from the images. He rubbed his temples with his thumbs. He longed for the touch of his younger partner’s hands on his neck, on his shoulders, on his body, and yet he did not know how he would react if Stephen Thomas sat down beside him at this moment.

  Not that it was very likely.

  The seat beside him creaked. Satoshi jumped.

  Beside him, Crimson Ng jumped, too.

  “Sorry —” they both said at once.

  “You startled me,” Satoshi said.

  “Same here,” Crimson said. “I thought you heard me.”

  He shifted to face her. It had been some time since they had talked. Last winter — winter in the campus cylinder — their brief hot fling had surprised them both. Crimson’s attachments usually were with women; Satoshi’s were usually with people he had known for a while.

  I’m glad we’re still friends, Satoshi said to himself. But there’s an awful lot more distance between us than there was a few months ago.

  Crimson stared at her hands. The moving light accentuated, then concealed, the shadows of exhaustion in her face.

  “Is something wrong?” Satoshi asked. “Are you okay?”

  She sat forward on the theater seat, as nervous as a sparrow. Satoshi was afraid she would jump up and leave. He lifted his hand to touch her, to soothe her or to keep her from going, then thought better of it and let his hand fall again.

  She drew in a sudden deep breath and exhaled fast and hard.

  “There’s lots wrong,” Crimson said. “Do you have time to talk?”

  “Always,” he said.

  “It’s the fossils.”

  “I thought it might be.”

  “The provenance is such a mess, the rock’s upside-down, compared to the way it was on the moon. So the younger lava flow is on the bottom, and the older one is on top, with the fossil layer in between...”

  Satoshi wondered what she was getting at, and whether she would be willing to talk about the fossils as part of a performance rather than as something real.

  “No one is going to think Starfarer is a natural formation,” he said. “Finding the fossils in Starfarer’s shell is like finding Archaeopterix in limestone building blocks, or trilobites in a pile of coal in a train. Not much to be learned from the
provenance.”

  “But it’s embarrassing,” Crimson said, “to tell people we dug through a unique archaeological site without even noticing it was there.”

  She had more to say; he left a silence open for her words.

  “There’s plenty of room for questions!” Crimson said. “But nobody’s questioning!”

  “They want to believe it,” Satoshi said.

  “I always thought it’d be great if some aliens came along and found the fossils. But now that the alien people have done just what I hoped... I’m not so sure.”

  “You are a paleontologist,” Satoshi said.

  She sighed. “I was.” She kicked the back of the seat in front of her, making it rock.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know!” Fists clenched, Crimson punched the air above her head. She let her arms drop and her fingers open.

  Satoshi smiled. The whole time he had known her, her fingernails had never been clean. Ground-in clay outlined them at the cuticle and beneath the short, broken tips. He felt, in memory, the demanding, rough touch of her calloused hands. He shivered. If Crimson noticed, she said nothing.

  “I worked so hard on the deposit, it’s funny, sometimes when I’m digging the fossils up, I forget I already know what I’ll find.” She sighed again. “Now Gerald’s pushing my version, he thinks it’s one of the reasons we’re allowed to stay.”

  “He may have a point.”

  “Yeah. But it’s harder having him on my side than it was to have him call me a liar.”

  “He did a pretty quick about face.”

  “That’s what made me reconsider,” Crimson said.

  Satoshi sat back, reminded of her temper by the edge in her voice.

  “He had nothing but contempt for the work — for the whole art department — till he thought the fossils might have some value to Europa. Till he thought he’d be able to manipulate her. And Civilization. And me.”

  “Have you talked to him about it?”

  “He’s talked at me about it. He ordered me to keep up the performance. Ordered me!”

  “Gerald sometimes just doesn’t get it.” Satoshi tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “I thought I got through to him...”