The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Crimson is a very talented,” J.D. said. “She invented all the beings as well as sculpting their fossils.”

  “Yes, of course,” Orchestra said, amused.

  J.D. sighed to herself. Orchestra, too, believed the story that the fossils were real. Her comment about the other ones would have been a complete non-sequitur in response to a piece of performance art; it only made sense in context of real fossils that might point the way to an extinct civilization.

  “Are all you humans such talented performers?”

  “I’m not a performer at all,” J.D. said.

  “I believe your moon is lifeless and waterless,” Orchestra said.

  “Yes.”

  “And always has been.”

  “As far as we know.”

  “How did the bones become fossilized?”

  “Crimson made them,” J.D. said. “She put them there.”

  Orchestra considered. Her eyes blinked, one, then another. The boat bobbed gently in the shelter of the volcano. Another of Largernearer’s huge waves hit the far side of the island, and another cloud of steam burst into the air.

  “How does Crimson think the fossils got to your moon?” Orchestra asked.

  “She thinks —” J.D. stopped, amazed at herself; for a moment she too had spoken of the fossils as if they were real. “She designed it as a burial site. The grave of ancient travelers.”

  She touched the boat with her link and asked it to play the music she had chosen through the underwater speakers.

  “I brought another recording with me,” she said. “I chose it because of your name. Would you like to hear what an orchestra does, back on Earth?”

  “Certainly.”

  The first few bars of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the introduction which sounds like the instruments still tuning up, floated through the water.

  J.D. held her breath. Europa had expressed doubts about this gift. To J.D.’s astonishment, the Minoan had never offered Earth’s symphonic music to Civilization. To Europa, music made by a hundred instruments playing simultaneously sounded odd and ugly. J.D. was taking a risk that Orchestra would have a different reaction.

  Orchestra drowsed, a mountainous phantom island in the green sea. The whale-eel lay very quiet and still, neither rising nor falling in the water. She pulsed slowly, to draw cooling water into her body. Now and then one or a few of her eyes flicked backwards, disappearing and reappearing, never for long, never all at once. The long fins at the sides of her back stiffened, then relaxed.

  J.D. searched Orchestra’s body for a land biome. But every creature on Orchestra’s back had hidden itself, or closed up, wrapped itself in the fronds of seaweed, covered itself with a foam of bubbles. The sea was their natural habitat.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas surfaced to breathe. For a moment he rested at the border between air and water. Though Orchestra floated at quite a distance, she loomed above him. Being near her was like being at the foot of a mountain. He let his gaze travel up her side, tracing out the zones of life. He wanted to do what would be the equivalent of tearing threads from another person’s clothes, or pulling out strands of hair. He wanted samples of the organisms that covered Orchestra. The glass boat would collect samples of the ocean water, of whatever this world used for plankton and krill. But he planned to get as many different types of organisms as he could.

  He teased the silver worm free, caught his hair back with one hand, and let the mutualist twine through it again. He floated for a moment, gazing into the clear water.

  Above the dark depths, Zev swam with the water harp.

  The symphony J.D. was playing sounded fuzzy. An echo of it bounced from Orchestra’s body. The water changed the frequencies. Stephen Thomas would rather have heard it in the air.

  The diver called to Stephen Thomas in true speech.

  The visual language formed an image in his mind. He could hear the shapes. Stephen Thomas understood what he said: Come hold the vanes.

  Stephen Thomas replied in inexperienced true speech, the equivalent of a child’s stick-figure drawing.

  Stephen Thomas dove and rejoined Zev. The resonating bulb acted as a sea anchor, slowing the water harp’s drift, holding the harp nearly steady above the deeper, faster current. It was a hollow sphere of rock foam, made to Zev’s order by a silver slug.

  The strangest fish Stephen Thomas had ever seen undulated past him, stranger than any of Nemo’s creatures, stranger than anything living around a deep-sea vent back on earth. The mutated eel-shape had projecting gills, multiple quartets of protuberances all along its length. Each gill opened and closed, snapping tiny teeth.

  The multimouthed eel disappeared into the murk of distance and gathering darkness.

  Jesus Christ, Stephen Thomas thought. There’s thousands of meters of water underneath me, I don’t know a fucking thing about what lives in it, I wouldn’t know a predator if one swam up and bit off my toe. I’d probably give it a stomach ache, but the guys with the big teeth wouldn’t know it until too late.

  I’m swimming naked in an alien sea.

  He started to laugh. He tried to stop, but that only made him laugh harder. He inhaled a mouthful of bitter alien saltwater. He kicked for the surface, coughing bubbles from his mouth and nose. He burst out into the air, coughed again, and gasped a breath of the cool bitter alien air. He flopped backwards and floated till the fit of laughter passed.

  Zev shot out of the water, splashed down, and swam over to him.

  “What happened?” Zev asked.

  “Sharks,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Sharks!” Zev said quizzically. “Sharks?”

  “Yeah, sharks, or whatever the hell passes for sharks around here. Tubular piranha. Garden hoses with teeth. Whatever.”

  “They’re funny?”

  “It occurred to me — I’m fucking glad my cock and my balls don’t hang out anymore.”

  Zev regarded him curiously. “You’ve finished changing,” he said.

  “Mostly.” The last time Zev had seen him naked, he had been caught between ordinary human and diver, his penis raw and sore, his balls aching and constricted, half in and half out of his body. Now, finally, he had completed the external changes, and the new neural pathways responded more naturally every time he used them.

  “Now you see why we made ourselves be this way.”

  “Sharks,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Yes. Sharks.”

  Zev paddled beside him. “Can you extend and retract now?”

  Stephen Thomas floated on his back and let his toes break the surface of the water. He contracted small new muscles. Right in front of Zev’s face, his shiny sharp claws extended.

  “That isn’t what I meant.” Zev grinned.

  “I know.” Stephen Thomas let his hips sink. He trod water again.

  “There’s nothing very big around us right now,” Zev said. “Except Orchestra, I mean. She’s enough predator to scare me.”

  Stephen Thomas had not even thought of Orchestra as a predator, but of course she must be, with those teeth.

  “All that crap on her back must slow her down,” he said. “I wonder what’s big enough to feed her, and dumb enough to catch?”

  “She probably doesn’t chase,” Zev said. “She probably gardens her body so she’s hidden to her prey. She’s made herself look like those islands we passed. Probably some of them were beings like her.”

  Stephen Thomas had not made the connection, nor had the other members of alien contact. But it made good sense.

  “Maybe she even gardens her own food,” Zev said.

  “On her body?”

  “Sure. She probably needs to eat a lot.”

  The idea made Stephen Thomas queasy. He tried to shrug away the feeling. He thought, J.D. wouldn’t turn a hair at the thought.

  o0o

  The Representative of Smallerfarther drowsed. He wanted to return to his safe, silent hibernation; he wanted to preserve his body and his time for the future. He wa
s very old. He was vital. He had lived this long by careful preservation, waiting for an opportunity of sufficient magnitude to make exertion worth his while.

  He drowsed, and thought, using up his precious minutes. He relived the meeting with the human representative.

  Was this his opportunity?

  The Representative’s representative, his proxy, could not function in his place. Not this time. The proxy had been trained to obey him, to anticipate his wishes, and to act in his place for day-to-day matters both trivial and important. But he had not been trained to take advantage of unique opportunities. That ability might come to the proxy’s grandchildren, if the Representative deigned to allow it.

  o0o

  The Ode to Joy, the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, exploded to its end. Orchestra opened her eyes.

  “Again, please,” she said.

  o0o

  The water harp hovered ten meters below the surface. Its resonating bulb doubled as a float, pumping water in and out to hold the harp steady.

  Stephen Thomas was tired. Working underwater was tough. One of the harp’s vanes slipped from his hand as he transferred it from its buoy to the resonating bulb. He and Zev plunged after it and caught it before it disappeared into the dark depths.

  After the Beethoven symphony finished playing through — the second time — Stephen Thomas unfolded the vanes of the harp to their full length. Slender, dense rock-foam strips slipped one by one into a deep current of warmer, saltier water that flexed like a vein through the body of the sea.

  The hum of vibrating stone surrounded Stephen Thomas. A second note, a third, joined the first. The glassy harmonics combined, shivering through him. The vanes cut through the warm current. Each one produced a different note. The ambient music changed and rose and fell, varying with the stroke of the water and the relationship of the vanes.

  As Stephen Thomas rose to breathe, the water harp caressed his skin with its long, deep vibrations. He listened to the soft low music, back-floating so his ears were under water, then raising his head to hear the chords as they refracted into the air and danced and shivered around him.

  Another sound touched him, a sharp shock of clicks. He struggled upright.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  “Orchestra,” Zev said. “Looking at what we’ve done. And listening to it. Both.” He said a word in true speech, flat and uninflected in the air. “Looking, listening,” he said. “Sending out sound to see what’s around. Like a flashlight.”

  o0o

  61 Cygni, the Four Worlds’ sun, sank toward Largernearer’s horizon. The air cooled and the colors of the sea softened, leaving J.D.’s glass boat bobbing in silky gray light, dwarfed by Orchestra.

  “Zev and Stephen Thomas have finished the water harp,” J.D. said. She told the whale-eel the water harp’s commands: to extend the blades to start it, to retract them to make it fall silent, to engage its motor and move it when it drifted.

  The whale-eel set the harp to singing in the current. She fell silent while the random tones played around the boat.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas and Zev swam to the boat and climbed in. Stephen Thomas curried most of the water off his body, and pulled on his dry, sun-warmed shorts. A breeze blew across the water, flicking bits of spray into the air. Stephen Thomas wondered if Orchestra was so big that her body created its own tiny weather systems, onshore and offshore breezes in the mornings and evenings.

  He shivered, but he did not want to put on heavy clothes that would rub his pelt backwards. He smoothed the hair on his thigh. An image flashed: Satoshi touching him in the same place, feeling the fur, freezing in surprise, or dismay, or revulsion. Stephen Thomas let his hand fall to his side.

  J.D. watched the whale-eel, her face set with worry.

  “Orchestra?” she said.

  Through the link, J.D.’s voice sounded as pleasant and as ordinary as it always did. Stephen Thomas wondered again, as he had wondered a hundred times, why she had had the chance to make love with Feral while he had not. He liked J.D. as a friend. Friendship was important to Stephen Thomas; in his life he had had fewer close friends than lovers.

  J.D. was willing to throw herself, open and trusting, into the unknown. He admired her for that. But he was envious — admit it, jealous — of her relationship with Feral.

  “Orchestra?” J.D. said again. “Are you awake?”

  Orchestra’s voice replied after a time, faintly, an electronic whisper

  “On Earth, do you speak during music?”

  “No, it’s very rude to the performers —”

  “And to the music,” Orchestra said.

  “I should have told you this first thing,” J.D. said. “The water harp music has no beginning and no end. It isn’t a performance. It just is.”

  Orchestra considered J.D.’s comment. The water harp vibrated the hull of the glass boat until it sang like a crystal goblet. The music vibrated against the soles of Stephen Thomas’s feet. His toes curled, extending his semi-retractile claws. His claws shrieked atonally on the deck. He flinched and drew them in again.

  He imagined the harp underwater, sending out sound to reflect off everything in range, illuminating objects and creatures and variations in the water, shining beams of music on everything. He wanted to jump back in the water, to listen and learn to see.

  The harp’s music rose in pitch as the vanes drew into the bulb. At Orchestra’s command, the music ended.

  “It is charming,” the whale-eel said. “I will look forward to listening more later. To talk during pure music... I will have to consider that idea.”

  “Maybe we’d better go back to the island and come talk to you again tomorrow,” J.D. said. “It’s getting dark.”

  “I’d prefer you to stay,” Orchestra said. “I’m more alert during darkness. I have things to tell you that should be said at night.”

  Orchestra had been sinking as she listened. She had nearly submerged. Fronds of seaweed spread out tens of meters around her sides. The twilight glistened off the shells and skins of many creatures. Several flashed along the fronds, like liquid sparks. At the edge of the flower crown, where the water rose, the blossoms reopened.

  “Thank you for your gifts,” Orchestra said. “You’ve entertained me and you’ve enlightened me and you’ve even interested me in the other ones.”

  Stephen Thomas made himself keep a straight face.

  Satoshi, he thought, you’re a fucking genius.

  Tell everyone in Civilization the truth, Satoshi had said. And they still won’t believe it. Because they don’t want to.

  Satoshi was the quietest and the most reserved of the partnership, in public and in some ways in private. Some people — not Stephen Thomas — underestimated him. Whenever Stephen Thomas was near his partner, whenever he thought about him, whenever Satoshi touched him, he was excited all over again by Satoshi’s intelligence and humor.

  I bet I’ve screwed all that up now, he thought.

  Stephen Thomas shivered again. Feeling lonely, he put the thought of his partners, and their brittle conversation back on the beach, out of his mind.

  “I would like to tell you the story of the Four Worlds,” Orchestra said. “Come closer, swim onto my back. It’s warm there, you’ll be comfortable.”

  The last edge of 61 Cygni slipped beneath the horizon, highlighting the green-gray sea with fiery colors. The sunset was so like Earth’s that Stephen Thomas felt a quick, startling pang of homesickness.

  Everyone he loved — everyone he loved who was still alive — lived on Starfarer. Back at Tau Ceti, when it looked like their only choice was to return to Earth as failures, Stephen Thomas had voted for staying in the alien system and starting a new life.

  But, he thought, if I never saw Earth again... I’d miss it.

  Chapter 9

  “Look,” J.D. whispered.

  She gazed not at the fading sunset but in the opposite direction, where the huge full disk of Smallernearer loomed over L
argernearer’s horizon.

  Smallernearer was larger than Earth’s moon. Its face was nearly twice the moon’s diameter, the color of tarnished silver, old mother of pearl. Beautiful and ghostly, it cast an opalescent radiance across the sea.

  J.D. urged the glass boat forward. She approached Orchestra head on, avoiding the loops and whorls of seaweed that flanked the whale-eel with her own private Sargasso.

  Orchestra let her body sink. Her seaweed drifted and floated upright from her sides, feathering against her rippling back fins. Flowers grew up her snout, spread into a rolling field between the fins, and stretched toward her distant tail. The blossoms luminesced orange and yellow. Mist collected in the hollow of her back.

  One huge eye projected above the water, now and again blinking with its disconcerting backwards snap.

  J.D. slipped over the side of the boat. Zev dove in after her. They swam toward the whale-eel through phosphorescent plankton. A glowing arrow of ripples lit each wake.

  Zev turned over and looked back at Stephen Thomas.

  “Come on! Aren’t you coming?”

  Stephen Thomas vaulted over the boat’s rail, cannonballed into the water, and swam after Zev and J.D.

  o0o

  J.D. approached Orchestra’s snout. The seaweed fronds reached upward, tickling her toes and stroking her legs. Here, outside the harbor, the sea was wilder. Echoes of the long planetary swells passed by, creating a pattern of surf against the island of Orchestra’s body. On her sheltered side, a bay formed against her flank. On the seaward side, whitecaps piled against her, trailing spumes of spray.

  Trying to keep her mind off the huge mouth and the sharp teeth just below her, J.D. wondered if one type of plant and animal grew on the lee side of Orchestra’s body, different types on the exposed side. Did the alien, when she was on the surface, habitually place her body in the same orientation to the waves?

  “Go onto my back, where you can rest,” Orchestra said.

  J.D. reached the cleft where Orchestra’s back fins swept forward and disappeared against the side of her snout. J.D. touched the whale-eel for the first time.

  Orchestra’s body radiated heat; J.D. felt the warmth like a pressure through a handsbreadth of water. The warm layer covered a profusion of creatures, plant and animal — or plant and animal, or some type of life never found or imagined on Earth — that lived in symbiosis with the whale-eel.