The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “And then Crimson digs it out, of course,” Longestlooker said.

  “The star’s prerogative,” Stephen Thomas said. “Enjoying the performance?”

  Quickercatcher nudged Stephen Thomas’s arm with his soft, warm nose.

  That’s one reason why they look so benign, Stephen Thomas thought. Their noses are more like... like a horse’s, I guess, covered with fur. Instead of like a dog’s, or a lion’s. They look less like a carnivore. Despite the teeth.

  “You’re all so funny,” Quickercatcher said. “I do like human beings. I’ve always liked human beings.” He glanced fondly at Androgeos, who knelt on the gravel beach in his pleated silken kilt, one arm thrown around Fasterdigger’s forward shoulders.

  They both watched, rapt, as Crimson brushed gently at the projecting fossil fang.

  “Are you finding anything else there?” Androgeos asked.

  “The rest of the jaw, I think,” Crimson said.

  “I mean — artifacts.”

  “They’re all artifacts,” Stephen Thomas said. “And Crimson only works in organic forms.”

  Androgeos ignored him, refusing to listen to the Earth humans’ deception.

  Crimson sat back on her heels. “Look, look here, Quickercatcher. Let’s get an LTM to probe this, I think your fang is still attached to the jawbone.”

  Quickercatcher snaked forward and arched his neck to look over Crimson’s shoulder. An LTM scuttled to the work surface and crouched over it.

  An enlarged holographic image appeared nearby. A bit of fang projected. A sound trace outlined the jaw beneath it, with a proposed reconstruction in false color that progressed from blue to red as the probability of its accuracy decreased. The missing bits were mostly blue, with a few tantalizing sections of bright scarlet.

  Androgeos and the other Largerfarthings gazed at the image, then craned their necks to see the real fossil tooth. Even Late exerted himself to orient toward the image.

  Crimson smiled at Quickercatcher. “This is a good find.”

  Quickercatcher nuzzled Crimson’s shoulder, for all the world like an embarrassed kid. Crimson stroked Quickercatcher’s angora fur.

  “I imagine,” Androgeos said, “a starship, one of the other ones’ starships. It’s so long abandoned that its inhabitants have died.”

  Fasterdigger’s double-thumbed hand draped over Androgeos’s shoulder, now and then twirling a curl of the Minoan’s glossy black hair between forethumb and forefinger, or hindthumb and hindfinger. Androgeos’s usual sulky look had vanished, to be replaced by curiosity and eagerness.

  “Their bodies have turned to stone. The starship crashes on Earth’s moon. Molten lava covers it over, and there the remnants wait. For us.” He paused in his myth-making.

  Shit, Stephen Thomas thought cynically, he just hopes we’ll lead him to the other ones. But it’s a nice change to see him looking like an ordinary human being with ordinary human feelings, instead of...

  “Then your mass driver chews it into pieces and flings it into space. It becomes Starfarer. Starship, to starship.”

  When Androgeos demanded Victoria’s algorithm, the Minoan had looked like an arrogant demi-god, questing and rapacious, concerned only with his own perquisites and desires. More Achaian than the ideas Stephen Thomas had of ancient Minoans. But then, of course, one had to balance the kindly-looking snake goddess with the Labyrinth and the minotaur.

  “That isn’t how it happened,” Crimson said. “There’s no evidence of a crash. There’s no gravitational anomaly, so where’s the starship? The strata aren’t disturbed. The bones aren’t broken. And I haven’t found any of their technology. Nor any inscriptions.”

  “You will. You must.”

  “I don’t think so.” She sighed. “It’s too bad. We won’t have suitable markers for them, when we lay them to rest again.”

  “When you — what?”

  “When we go back to Earth. We’ll re-inter them, of course. It’s the only respectful thing to do.”

  “You’d do better to leave them in Civilization. Where we can learn more about them.”

  “Of course that’s impossible,” Crimson said without hesitating.

  “We’ll see,” Androgeos said, more like his usual self.

  “On Earth, we learned a long time ago to respect people’s remains.”

  “There’s too much to learn from them!”

  “Tell that to the folks who grew these fangs.” Crimson traced the curve of the fang in the hologram.

  “But they’re extinct.”

  “Are you sure?” Crimson asked. “Are you certain they are who you think they are?”

  She turned to Stephen Thomas. “Want to help?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “Some other time.”

  “You always say that.”

  He smiled. “I’d rather watch than perform.”

  Pebbles, falling, clicked across the gravel beach. Stephen Thomas glanced over his shoulder toward the bridge and the footpath. Chandra, the sensory artist, climbed down the trail.

  “Hi,” Chandra said.

  “Haven’t seen much of you lately,” Crimson said.

  She shrugged. “Nothing to do. Starfarer is boring.”

  Stephen Thomas would have laughed at her if he had not known she was desperately serious.

  Her eyes were silver gray, a uniform color over the whole exposed eyeball. Her unfocused gaze was as acute as normal vision, and she could save and store everything she saw. Her face and hands and her bare arms pulsed with gnarled nerve clusters.

  The sensory artist sought unique experiences. She made no secret that she wanted J.D.’s job. She would never get it. She barely got along — barely communicated — with human people. She was open to sensation, but only her own. J.D. had succeeded with Nemo, with the quartet, Stephen Thomas thought, because she was so open to others.

  That’s probably why she and Feral —

  Stephen Thomas cut off the thought. It was too painful.

  Sharphearer approached Chandra cautiously. The Largerfarthing passed Stephen Thomas, her ears swiveled forward, her muscles so taut she was walking on tiptoe.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “You’re different. You’re almost as different as Stephen Thomas and Zev.”

  “I’m more different,” Chandra said. “And I can do more things.”

  She moved forward. She and Sharphearer regarded each other warily.

  “Sharphearer, this is Chandra,” Stephen Thomas said. “She’s an artist, back on earth.”

  “I’m famous,” Chandra said. “I’m more famous than Crimson.”

  Crimson sat back on her heels and scrubbed her sweaty forehead with her sleeve.

  “Artists are always more famous than scientists,” she said.

  “It’s only fair, though,” Longestlooker said reasonably. “Scientists have only to imagine what’s already there, and discover it. Artists...” Longestlooker’s voice took on a note of awe, and she spoke completely without irony. “Artists have to invent what they discover.”

  Chandra held her hand out to Sharphearer. Sharphearer stretched her long arm past her forward shoulder till her double-thumbed hand rested on Chandra’s palm. She placed her fingers on the nerve clusters.

  When Sharphearer touched her, Chandra froze. Her strange eyes widened. The nerve clusters, activating, darkened and pulsed.

  Sharphearer gazed into Chandra’s strange eyes as if she were recording every detail of Chandra’s being as Chandra was recording Sharphearer’s. She extended her other arm; her wide hand approached the gnarled nerve cluster on Chandra’s forehead. She touched it. Chandra leaned into the pressure, closing her eyes. Her expression relaxed into pleasure and happiness.

  Sharphearer trilled, a soft sweet purring growl.

  With an incoherent shout, Chandra leaped back out of reach, her eyes wide open, shocked. Sharphearer, startled, leaped two meters backwards. Stephen Thomas jumped out of the way, and even so Sharphearer’s powerful tail whipped against his
leg.

  Chandra stumbled around and fled, scrambling up the rocky path to the top of the river canyon. Stones clattered down and scattered across the river beach, vanishing among the gravel.

  Sharphearer stood on tiptoe, all five toes on each foot extended, her ears clasping her skull, and her hair flattened close to her sides. Instead of resembling an electrified powder-puff, she looked as sleek and muscular and dangerous as Longestlooker.

  Crimson, Androgeos, and Sharphearer’s siblings clattered toward them. Pebbles scraped together and splashed into the river. Chandra vanished over the riverbank. Stopping beside Stephen Thomas, Crimson frowned after her.

  “What did I do wrong?” Sharphearer said.

  Stephen Thomas hurried to her, limping. His leg stung.

  “What happened?” Longestlooker asked. “Did you frighten her?”

  Sharphearer raised her head and lifted her chin. Her goatee fanned out.

  “Not on purpose,” she said.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have touched her without her permission,” Androgeos said.

  “It’s all right,” Stephen Thomas said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. She wouldn’t have held out her hand if she hadn’t expected you to touch it.”

  “It is all right,” Longestlooker said.

  Sharphearer lowered her head and relaxed onto the pads of her feet. Her ears swiveled up and forward. She shook herself. Her particolored day-glow fur puffed out again.

  “Why did she run away like that?”

  “She’s an artist,” Quickercatcher said.

  “You probably did something she liked,” Crimson muttered.

  Not hearing what Crimson said, or finding it too alien to respond to, Androgeos and the quartet grouped together, soothing Sharphearer, fluffing her fur. Androgeos was as solicitous and gentle as any of the siblings. Even Late raised his forward edge and wriggled his spines in sympathy.

  Crimson stood apart from them. She glanced up the trail, where Chandra had disappeared. Stephen Thomas stood beside her.

  “What did you mean by that?” Stephen Thomas asked.

  “She’s so damn strange.” Crimson shrugged. “Have you used her recordings? She never does anything that’s fun or pleasant. It’s always uncomfortable, or painful —” She fell silent.

  Crimson was right. Chandra’s sensory recordings struck him as being morbid. Her walk through the natural cathedral of a Northwest forest ended with the freezing pain of a devil’s club thorn. She had gone out into Starfarer’s anomalous snowstorm and taken off her clothes; she probably would have died of hypothermia if Satoshi had not found her and brought her inside. Stephen Thomas was still aggravated at her for that escapade, because Satoshi had damn near ended up with hypothermia himself.

  Crimson’s eyes filled with tears. Stephen Thomas had a brief, uncharitable, inexcusable urge to flee before she started to cry.

  “I just thought...” Crimson said, “I tried... Oh, shit, I’m lonely and — Why would I want to get involved with an artist?” She dashed the tears from her eyes and grinned at him sardonically. “And what would a famous artist want with a paleontologist? Dirt under her nails...”

  “Her loss,” Stephen Thomas said.

  He smiled sympathetically. He had gotten to know her when she and Satoshi were seeing each other. He liked her. He liked her temper and the way she could get lost in whatever she was doing. Most of all he liked the glow she had brought back to the light of Satoshi’s spirit, that had faded when Merry died.

  “You did okay with a geographer,” he said.

  Crimson smiled. “True. It was... a surprise. It was nice.”

  “For Satoshi, too.”

  “But it was temporary. You take good care of him, huh?”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said. Then, more certainly, “Yes.”

  On the other side of the fossil dig, Longestlooker stroked Sharphearer’s neck one final time. Androgeos held the Largerfarthing behind her forward shoulders. Her calm had returned. The group broke apart and rejoined Crimson and Stephen Thomas.

  “Should we go after Chandra?” Longestlooker asked Stephen Thomas and Crimson.

  “I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Crimson said. “Give her a chance to simmer down.”

  “We can keep digging?” Sharphearer said hopefully.

  “Sure.”

  Crimson led them toward the fossil bed. She glanced over her shoulder at Stephen Thomas.

  “See you.”

  He raised one hand in acknowledgement — and quickly folded his fingers into a loose fist when he felt the tension of the swimming webs. Crimson made nothing of the changes in him, but Stephen Thomas still experienced abrupt shocks of alienness.

  He climbed the path to the top of the riverbank.

  He had planned to go straight to the lab and disappear in his work, but his conversation with Crimson had changed his mind. He and Satoshi and Victoria had to talk. He owed them explanations for the way he had been behaving, for the reasons he was afraid to come home.

  And he could not keep his suspicions about why Feral had died to himself anymore. It was too dangerous. He owed his partners a warning.

  o0o

  Victoria lay wakeful in her dim bedroom. Outside, beyond the shadows of the porch, the sun tubes brightened to morning. Satoshi slept soundly, his head pillowed between her shoulder and her breast, one arm flung across her waist. She opened her hand and brushed her fingertips against his smooth black hair.

  Victoria clenched her fist and opened it again. Her hand prickled uncomfortably. Her arm had gone to sleep.

  If I could just go to sleep, she said to herself. She had lain awake all night.

  Maybe I should give up, she thought. Get up and go over to my office.

  She stayed where she was, with the warmth of Satoshi’s body pressed against her.

  Light lay like gold on the wild garden beyond the deep front porch. A breeze whispered through the open French doors, carrying the scent of carnations and the tang of the distant sea. Most of Victoria’s flowers had wilted and died after the snowstorm; a miniature delta of Starfarer’s thin topsoil washed across the path, carried by the snowmelt. The horseshoe-shaped hill that covered the house and enclosed the yard had protected one slope of carnations. Their buds opened like popcorn, releasing their spicy scent.

  That was a hopeful sign. No one yet knew how much damage the snowstorm had caused. The campus was littered with broken branches and snow-burned seedlings. In the orange grove, the fruit fell, brown and rotting, and the blossoms shriveled. Starfarer would have few oranges this season, and probably none at all next year.

  Stephen Thomas appeared at the French doors. He hesitated, backlighted, his face in darkness. Victoria could see only the familiar shape of his body, changed now by the gilt aura of his pelt on his arms and legs.

  Stephen Thomas always claimed he could see auras — though he had said recently that he had decided auras were bullshit. Not that he could no longer see them... just that he no longer wanted to look.

  “Hi,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Hi.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yes!” she said so quickly he flinched. Out of long habit they both fell silent and glanced at Satoshi, wondering if they had awakened him. He was never at his best when awakened from a deep sleep. Then they exchanged a look of understanding and rueful amusement. They should wake Satoshi; it was important for all three of them to talk.

  “Of course you can come in,” Victoria said, whispering. “Please do. Satoshi, wake up —”

  “Wait,” Stephen Thomas said. “I want to talk to you for a minute. Then both of you.”

  He stepped over the threshold. He crossed to her wide bed, and sat at its foot. Victoria untangled herself from Satoshi and joined Stephen Thomas, sitting crosslegged beside him.

  “I miss you,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “I miss you, too. So does Satoshi. You looked so handsome last night.”

  “I got tired of Gerald givi
ng me a hard time about my clothes.” He smiled wryly. “I thought I’d show him up for a change. I couldn’t wear my shoes. Spoiled the effect.”

  Victoria smiled back. “But why did you leave so soon?”

  He did not answer her directly. “All my life,” he said. “I thought I’d have fun. I thought I’d have sex. But I thought I’d be alone. I thought nothing would last.”

  “You can’t turn us into something like that!”

  “I know it! I’m not trying to, I don’t want to.”

  “I don’t understand what you do want,” Victoria said. “If you’d tell me, I’d try to give it to you.”

  “I never thought I’d feel about anyone the way I feel about our family,” Stephen Thomas said.

  His dark hands, with their amber webs, lay on his knees. Victoria and Stephen Thomas had been dark and fair; now they were two shades of dark: café au lait, and mahogany.

  His body radiated heat that caressed her like warm silk.

  When’s the last time we touched? she wondered. When we all went down to the sea and tried to make love? He petted me with his swimming webs... But then Satoshi and I saw some of the changes Stephen Thomas is going through... and he saw some of them for the first time himself.

  He had on loose running shorts and a sleeveless silk t-shirt, the same kind of clothes he usually wore. She had not seen him naked since the disastrous encounter in the sea, when the skin of his penis was sloughing off and his genitals were drawing into his body. Victoria shivered at the memory.

  At her start, Stephen Thomas jerked his head up and drew away. Victoria took his hand and held it tight.

  “No,” she said, “no, please, I was just remembering... Are you — ?”

  “I’m done changing,” Stephen Thomas said. “You saw me in the middle. I’ll show you. Later. I was a mess, I didn’t know any of that would happen. Neither did Zev. I mean, he knows what diver men are like, but he didn’t know what ordinary men are like. He didn’t know to warn me.”

  “Oh, love,” Victoria said. “You must have been so uncomfortable.”

  “I’m okay now. I wish...”

  “What?”