The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Alert for an adverse reaction, she tasted the water. The salt was more dilute and more metallic. The underlying organic tang twisted her tongue with an odd bitterness. She spat out the water. She did not have the taste discrimination of a diver, but she could taste the alienness.

  The water contained nothing toxic to humans. Neither Europa nor Androgeos had ever experienced allergic reactions here, but allergies differed from person to person. Over time, J.D. or any of her colleagues might develop a reaction to some alien compound. That was a gamble of protein shapes, chance similarities. But allergic reactions increase in severity over time. With luck, the members of Alien Contact would have some warning.

  Zev cried out in true speech, exultant. J.D. could only perceive part of his comment. Stephen Thomas could probably, by now, hear all the frequencies of true speech. J.D. envied him the ability.

  She replied to Zev, knowing her accent was flat. He replied, caressing her body with his voice.

  The shallow water stretched to the mouth of the lagoon. With the sun hot on her back around the thick wet warmth of the artificial lung, J.D. kicked away from shore.

  J.D. swam on the surface, powered on her smooth strong long-distance stroke. Thanks to the artificial lung, she did not need to turn her head to breathe. Zev swam fifty meters ahead of her, delighted by the strangeness and the freedom. The water was very clear. At first the sand beneath her was bare, scoured clean by wave and tide. Gradually, bushy plants with tiny brilliant flowers grew more and more thickly until J.D. swam over an underwater veldt.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas wore running shorts, but in front of his partners he felt stripped to the skin. Satoshi self-consciously did not let his gaze fall below Stephen Thomas’s face. Victoria watched him speculatively, with edgy frankness.

  “I didn’t expect you to say goodbye to us,” she said.

  She was still angry and confused. He did not blame her.

  “You don’t know me as well as you thought,” he said, keeping his voice light, without accusation.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Satoshi said, gesturing toward the sea, the glass boat. J.D. and Zev splashed into the water.

  “No. Have to start sometime.”

  “Sometime when you have an idea what you’ll find!”

  “Come on!” Zev called.

  “It’ll be alien whether it’s this sea or Starfarer’s.” The sea drew his attention, distracting him from his partners.

  “Oh, bullshit,” Satoshi said with intensity.

  The profanity startled Stephen Thomas. Behind him, the glass boat slid down the ramp and splashed into the sea. Bright drops of alien salt water fell cool on his skin.

  “I’d better go.”

  “Why did you separate your node?” Victoria asked. “There’s a void where it ought to be, I keep falling into it —”

  “I had to, I told you. For your own good.”

  “Dammit — !”

  “I’ve got to go!”

  He left them behind, strode across the beach, waded into the blood-warm water, and struck out after J.D. and Zev.

  o0o

  J.D. surfaced and looked back at the beach. Leaving Victoria and Satoshi behind, Stephen Thomas waded into the water, pushed forward, and struck out toward her. He swam noisily. It startled her that he was not a very good swimmer.

  Silly, she thought. No reason why he should be. He’s only just turned into a diver, he doesn’t have Zev’s lifetime of practice, or my experience at sea races.

  J.D. back-stroked for a few meters, allowing Stephen Thomas to catch up. More important, swimming on her back kept the lung wet and allowed it to absorb more oxygen.

  J.D. made a connection to the glass boat. It responded, moving silently forward. J.D. waved to Victoria, who raised one hand and sent a wordless touch of good luck through her link to J.D.’s. She and Satoshi would stay with the Chi, taking samples and measurements on the island.

  The tide had just turned. The tides on Largernearer were even more complex than the tides of Earth. The world was closer to its star, its companion world bigger than the moon. Until the next high tide, getting the boat back onto the ramp would require moving the Chi.

  Calling the boat to follow, J.D. flipped and settled into her freestyle stroke. Zev swam beneath her. He grinned, brushed his webbed hand across her body, and dove deeper, arching backwards toward the sea bottom and the flower-bushes.

  J.D. would never mistake this alien ocean for home.

  A crowd of small creatures, their synchronized motion as jittery as old-fashioned film, glittered through the water where Zev swam. The diver spun among them, fearless and delighted. J.D. dove, scared.

  They might be like piranha, she thought. They might attack — how would they know he isn’t edible for them?

  They surrounded Zev like metallic confetti, passed him, and vanished into the distant blue haze of the clear water.

  Seeing J.D.’s distress, Zev joined her and pointed toward the surface. They rose together and broke the surface side by side.

  J.D. touched her link.

  Orchestra, she said, what predators should we watch out for?

  Nothing here will eat you, the whale-eel replied.

  No, J.D. said. But they might bite.

  You’re safe in the lagoon, Orchestra said.

  “These aren’t dangerous,” Zev said. “They hardly have teeth. Look.”

  He opened his hand.

  One of the silver-fins flopped against his hand, held tight with its fins folded by the web between Zev’s thumb and forefinger. Its sides moved as if it were breathing.

  The silver-fin was prettier from a distance. Up close its mouth gaped wide, surrounded by an irregular circle of shiny blue eyes. The fish had four long sharp fins running down its body. Its tail tapered to a blunt pucker.

  Zev regarded the silver-fin. He immersed it in the water. It gulped and clenched, taking water in through its mouth and squirting it out through the anus, trying to jet-propel itself to freedom. Its fins jerked convulsively. Zev held it fast.

  Zev ducked underwater. He brought the fish to his face and opened his mouth, letting the water flow across his tongue, tasting and smelling the creature. J.D. touched his shoulder quickly. He surfaced again, seawater splashing from his short pale hair, streaming down his face and neck.

  “It smells... weird,” he said. “There’s no word for it, not even in true speech.”

  “Don’t eat it,” J.D. said.

  “All right. But we ate Nemo’s food.”

  “Nemo invented that food for us,” J.D. said.

  Stephen Thomas caught up to them. He stopped, trod water beside them, leaned back to duck his head. He caught a few loose strands of his hair at the back of his neck; the mutualist took them in and coiled around them.

  Stephen Thomas was breathing heavily. He was a natural athlete, self-possessed and graceful on land, taking everything so easily that some people mistook the ease for languor. But long-distance swimming required a different kind of conditioning.

  “That’s an ugly little SOB,” he said.

  He poked at the silver-fin. It struggled and gulped and spit water and the sharp edge of its fin scratched his finger.

  “Shit!” Stephen Thomas jerked his hand away and stuck his finger in his mouth.

  “Let’s see,” J.D. said. “How bad is it?”

  He let her look at his finger. The blood had already clotted, sealing the cut.

  “You’re really a diver now,” Zev said. “Even your spit.” The extra clotting factor in the saliva of divers helped keep them from bleeding into the water. In the sea, even a minor cut could attract sharks.

  J.D. let go of Stephen Thomas’s hand. She seldom touched him. The people of Starfarer had a habit of hugging each other, a habit J.D. was growing to like. But she avoided hugging Stephen Thomas. She was afraid she would hold him an instant too long, remind him of her attraction to him, embarrass them both.

  At least he isn’t as
angry at me as he was when he first found out, J.D. thought. That was so strange... If I’d tried to predict how he’d react, I wouldn’t have predicted anger. She sighed. And I wouldn’t have predicted that he’d like it, either, so at least I was right on one score.

  She pulled herself back from her instant’s reverie and called the glass boat to them. It glided up silently on its magnetic water-jets, stopped, and settled.

  J.D. scrambled onto the swim-step and over the transom. Stephen Thomas and Zev followed. Water dripped onto the deck and drained away. The center of the deck was clear glass, the border roughened slightly so it would not be so slick. A profusion of plants and animals lay below.

  J.D. touched the boat through her link and sent it toward Orchestra.

  The boat surged forward, plunging through the green lagoon. Beneath them, intriguing shapes flashed away.

  The wind cooled J.D.’s wet skin. She put on her light jacket. Still cold, she nudged her metabolic enhancer into higher activity. It rewarded her with a wave of energy and warmth.

  Zev lounged on the port seat, using the edge of his hand to groom the salt water from his pelt, showing Stephen Thomas how to do it.

  The light of 61 Cygni, so much like the sun’s light, leaped off the sea’s irregularities. Dazzled, J.D. blinked.

  The boat reached the opening of the lagoon, where the old crater wall had broken and flooded the wide caldera. Beyond, the water deepened; the sea floor fell out of sight. The green of the sea below them soon turned midnight blue.

  They got their first good real-life view of Orchestra.

  “Christ on a mountaintop,” Stephen Thomas said softly.

  The whale-eel loomed before them, a floating island.

  J.D. considered turning on the boat’s sonar, but decided using it would be like entering someone’s living room and shouting at the top of her lungs. Ambient noise made a fuzzy picture of the world below them: deep, deep water, and the huge sonar shadow of Orchestra. The whale-eel was like an iceberg, mostly underwater. Her intermittent subsonics sent the sonar off the gauge.

  “Can you hear that?” J.D. asked.

  “Sure,” Zev said.

  “Yes,” Stephen Thomas said at the same time.

  “Orchestra’s been listening for us,” Zev said.

  Five hundred meters from the whale-eel, J.D. slowed the glass boat to a crawl.

  Orchestra rose higher, very slowly, very gently. Seawater cascaded down her sides. The glass boat pitched in the small fast waves.

  Shiny bare skin surrounded Orchestra’s huge toothed mouth and each bulging eye, like an iridescent black mask. A field of flowers crowned her, covering her back with a cape of gold and orange. On either side of her back, dorsal fins followed the line of her body.

  Horizontal bands of different colors, different textures, encrusted the whale-eel’s body. Her sides were like a hillside ecosystem, with a new niche at each level, within each fold and fissure. Some patches met at a sharp, distinct border, others overlapped and infiltrated each other. Long pale-green fronds in one striation tangled with the wiry blue-green branches that sprouted from the next lower ecological band.

  Orchestra in real life was quite different from Orchestra’s AI representative. J.D. wondered if the AI represented a different stage of Orchestra’s life cycle, or whether the intelligence had chosen its appearance itself, to be distinguishable from its creator.

  Orchestra’s wake reached them. The glass boat pitched. Even moving slowly, cautiously, the whale-eel roiled the sea.

  Zev stood in the spray and laughed wildly.

  “Welcome, Sauvage Earth,” Orchestra said through J.D.’s link. “And your friends.”

  “Thank you, Orchestra Largernearer. This is Zev, and this is Stephen Thomas.”

  As Zev and Stephen Thomas exchanged greetings with Orchestra, J.D. let her eyelids flicker and connected with her link on a wider band. She tapped into the transmissions of the LTMs and directed their fields of view to close-ups. With each magnification, Orchestra’s wilderness became more complex.

  What an amazing being, J.D. thought.

  Orchestra’s body above the water was several kilometers long and at least half a kilometer wide. She carried with her a hundred, a thousand, other species of organisms. The animated ones quivered against her sides, scuttling to hide from the air among fronds and leaves, rocky encrustations and flowers.

  “I brought you a guest gift,” Orchestra said.

  The trilling hum of Orchestra’s voice vibrated the glass boat. In response, the sea roiled and dappled. Thousands of finger-sized four-finned creatures leaped above the surface and plopped down again, like rain. They refracted the light like water droplets, creating a rainbow iridescence. Beneath the glass boat, a cloud of their rainbow colors flicked from one side of the boat’s bottom to the other, then back again. As J.D. bent to watch them through the window in the center of the deck, wishing she could see them better, several of the creatures leaped over the rail and fell flopping at her feet. She glanced at Orchestra, startled, wondering if the whale-eel had directed or herded the four-fins to her.

  Zev picked one up. J.D. grasped another one near the head and smoothed its fins backwards so it would not cut her if the edges were sharp. Stephen Thomas watched.

  The four-fin in J.D.’s hand wriggled once, then lay quiet. It was similar to the silver-fin that Zev had caught near shore, but its fins were softer, without edges, and the color of an oil-slick on water. Its sides carried a more vibrant rainbow of color. It was smaller than her little finger.

  Stephen Thomas abruptly grabbed one of the four-fins. He wrapped it in his hand and it lay quiet.

  “We bred the rainbow-fins for Europa and Androgeos,” Orchestra said. “For human people to eat while they visit. I brought them for you.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” J.D. said. “Are they eaten raw, or cooked?”

  “Europa says they cook well, but their proteins are quite delicate. We designed them to be edible as they are.”

  “May I eat one now?”

  “They are yours to do with as you please.”

  Stephen Thomas gave J.D. an incredulous look. She had never noticed that he was picky about his food, but this was asking quite a lot of him: to learn to eat like a diver and like an alien contact specialist: a raw fish, a raw alien fish, both at the same time.

  “You don’t have to,” J.D. said softly to Stephen Thomas, keeping her comment back from her link. “Honestly, it’s all right. That’s why I said ‘I.’”

  It had taken her a few days with the divers, back on Earth, to get over her squeamishness about eating live food. Now she was used to it — and she was beginning to wonder if human people were the only folks in Civilization who cooked.

  I can imagine what the Four Worlds people are all saying about us, she thought: “They denature their food by putting it in open flame, and they cover themselves with weird stuff called ‘clothing.’”

  J.D. popped the rainbow-fin into her mouth. She bit it and killed it, she hoped, quickly and painlessly.

  Unlike Nemo’s decorative food, which dissolved into intoxicating evanescence on her tongue, the rainbow-fin was substantial. Meat and potatoes food instead of Nemo’s designer drugs. It tasted like fresh halibut: firm and meaty without any strong flavor of fish or the ocean.

  Zev popped a rainbow-fin into his mouth, munched once, and swallowed.

  “It’s good,” he said. “Tastes kind of like chicken.”

  J.D. almost burst out laughing.

  Stephen Thomas looked doubtfully at his flopping rainbow-fin as Zev caught another and ate it contentedly.

  “It’s very good, Orchestra,” Zev said. “Thank you.”

  “I really asked for this, didn’t I?” Stephen Thomas muttered. He opened his hand and bit the rainbow-fin out of his palm before it could flip itself away. His teeth crunched through it and he chewed it.

  There’s not that much to chew, J.D. thought. The bones were so delicate that they
merely provided some texture to the flesh. The skin parted easily between the teeth. With a live fish, it was more aesthetically pleasing to eat it in one or two bites and swallow it quickly.

  Stephen Thomas kept chewing. J.D. thought with sympathy about the time she had eaten octopus. She remembered its tart raw-rubber crunchiness in her mouth, the texture of the suckers, the certainty that she would not be able to swallow it without throwing up. Like Stephen Thomas, she had kept chewing and chewing, certain she would gag. She had finally forced herself to swallow.

  She had never eaten octopus again. She liked the smart curious critters much better alive in the sea than on a sushi plate.

  She handed Stephen Thomas the water bottle. He uncorked it and drank, washing the rainbow-fin down with the mouthful of water.

  “Chicken!” he said after he had wiped his mouth. “Raw chicken, maybe.”

  “The rainbow-fin was delicious,” J.D. said to Orchestra. “We brought you guest gifts, too.”

  “Human people are thoughtful, Sauvage Earth,” Orchestra said.

  “And diving people, too,” J.D. said. “Zev brought an instrument that his people use to make music. If you like, he’ll put it together for you.”

  “I would like that.”

  Zev threw the buoyed bundle containing the pieces of the water-harp overboard, then fell backwards off the side of the boat and splashed into the water. Stephen Thomas dove in after him, cleaving the surface with barely a ripple.

  A moment later he surfaced and threw his shorts into the boat. They landed with a wet slap. He dove again and disappeared. J.D. picked up the shorts and hung them over the rail where they would dry.

  “You’re very generous, Sauvage Earth,” Orchestra said to J.D. “I observed the guest gift you presented on the Four Worlds ship.”

  “Did you enjoy Crimson’s performance?” J.D. asked.

  “It was quite provocative,” Orchestra said. “It’s moving, to observe discovery. Of course the other ones concern the Farther worlds more than the Nearer worlds. As we never travel, my people have little use for starships, either the ones we design or those the other ones left behind.”