The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  J.D. laughed aloud. Easy! Human beings had taken an order of magnitude more time to develop starfaring technology. The Four Worlds had first communicated with each other five thousand years ago, when the first civilizations of Earth had barely begun. Their ships had rescued Europa and Androgeos little more than a thousand years later, during Earth’s second millennium B.C.E.

  “That is quite an advantage,” J.D. said. “To know about other beings, to communicate with other intelligences...”

  “Yes,” Orchestra said. “Now our communication spectrum no longer requires darkness, and we use visible light only on ceremonial occasions.”

  “Do you fight?” Stephen Thomas asked.

  “Fight?”

  “Do you have wars?”

  “What would we war about?”

  “Territory. Resources. Xenophobia. Difference of opinion. We’ve always found some damned thing.”

  “Your wars made us wait for you even longer! We have no wars. We all have our own territory. If we want more, an ecosystems analyst can bring a barren world to life more quickly — and more coherently, and much less wastefully — than alien life could overwhelm a naturally evolved ecosystem. We can mine the outer worlds for resources, if we need more than we have. We treat our differences in philosophy as a sport.”

  “Sounds Utopian,” Stephen Thomas said.

  J.D. hoped the skepticism in his tone was not as obvious to Orchestra, to all the people listening throughout the Four Worlds, as it was to her and probably to all the human beings from Starfarer. It did sound Utopian. J.D. suspected Orchestra of smoothing out the rough spots. But she also believed the whale-eel’s tale was true in broad outline.

  “Have you colonized other worlds?” J.D. asked.

  “We have not, from Largernearer. You understand that you’re allowed to claim only barren worlds, to make of them what you will? You may not trouble worlds that might evolve.”

  “Yes,” J.D. said. “We understand that.”

  “The Largerfarthings have found one world to their taste, but it will not be finished for another generation. The Smallerfarthings are aggressive in their exploration —”

  “Aggressive?” J.D. almost laughed, then reconsidered, and not only because of politeness. Representative’s Representative Late was the least likely example of aggression she could think of... but his boss, the Representative of Smallerfarther, had intimidated her thoroughly. J.D. could well imagine him sailing into a star system, waking long enough to look at the projection and indicate a barren world to be changed and seeded and brought to life, then falling asleep for fifty years — or a thousand — until the work was finished and he could reap its benefits.

  “And we all collaborated in creating Tau Ceti III for humans,” Orchestra said. “It’s a shame you couldn’t visit it.”

  “We saw it,” J.D. said. “It’s extraordinarily beautiful. We were rushed when we left Tau Ceti. We wanted to explain to Europa why we’d behaved so rudely.”

  And a good thing, too, she said to herself. Orchestra isn’t mentioning the built-in booby trap. But if we’d landed after the cosmic string started to withdraw, Tau Ceti III’s whole biosphere would have collapsed as completely as the alien museum. The string didn’t accept us, so the planet wouldn’t, either.

  Now, she hoped, they would have a second chance.

  “Maybe we’ll get to go back soon,” J.D. said. “And appreciate your handiwork.”

  “I hope so,” Orchestra said. “The ocean design would amuse you all, I think.”

  “Can you send Smallernearer a greeting from us?” Zev asked.

  “Of course... but you may speak directly, as you do to me.”

  “I know...” Zev grinned. “But I’d like to see it in lights. I’d like to see the ceremony.”

  A sense of amusement radiated through Orchestra’s connection with J.D., with them all.

  Centered around her immense body, circles of bluegreen light expanded, moving across the water like ripples. The circles wavered where they crossed the ocean’s swells, and disappeared over the horizon. Streaks of light, straight golden lines, radiated through the circles. The cut-grass storm scent intensified.

  Overhead, a similar pattern replied from the surface of Smallernearer.

  J.D. gazed around her, watching two worlds resonate with welcome. Stephen Thomas knelt nearby in the shallow warm water, staring upward, the colored light washing over his pelt. All down his neck and back, the fine pale hair stood on end.

  Zev stood knee-deep in Orchestra’s pond, his arms raised to the sky, his face wild with joy and amazement.

  o0o

  The glass boat moved silently away from Orchestra. The whale-eel rode low in the water, flooded and then revealed by the long slow swells that piled up against her side and broke into surf over the waveward dorsal fin.

  At the stern of the boat, J.D. and Zev waved farewell. Stephen Thomas stood on the fantail, gazing at the huge alien.

  “We’ll come back soon!” Zev called to Orchestra, using his link and his voice as well. He put his arm around J.D.’s shoulders.

  “I will wait,” Orchestra replied.

  “I’d be all right, if I stayed,” Zev said, gazing wistfully back at Orchestra.

  “I know you would,” J.D. said. “But I’d miss you.”

  He grinned, tightened his arm around her, and leaned his head on her shoulder. “Me, too.”

  As the boat drew away, the LTM they had left behind transmitted an image of the whale-eel closing her frontal eyes and sinking deeper into the water.

  The flowers garlanding her back floated in calm water. When she had sunk so they lay at sea level, with new water eddying into the central pond, a school of large four-fins swam and wriggled their way into the meadow, mowing paths through the blossoms as they grazed. When they had all entered the pond, she raised herself a few meters, cutting the pond off from the sea.

  “Orchestra’s hunting!” Zev said.

  “She entertained us in her pantry,” Stephen Thomas said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “I wonder if she has an extra mouth up there on top of her back,” Zev said, “like she has eyes.”

  “You guys,” J.D. said. “We’re not sitting around a campfire telling scary stories!”

  “It was only an observation,” Stephen Thomas said. “Zev said she must hunt from concealment — I can’t think of a better disguise. Predator as living room.”

  “I didn’t mean she’d eat us,” Zev said, and grinned.

  Suddenly Orchestra tilted forward. The water rushed from her back over her head, carrying the school of four-fins with it. Like a huge vacuum cleaner, she sucked up the four-fins. They swirled into her mouth. Her teeth snicked closed.

  “Holy shit,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “She must be hungry,” Zev said. “She’s so big, she must eat a lot, but she’s been talking to us all day and all night.”

  The stealthy hunter settled into the sea again, disguised within her garden and her encrustations, waiting for more prey to come within her reach.

  J.D. shivered. Her metabolic enhancer pumped out its last energy and faded into recovery.

  Zev was warm against her side, but the wind touched her. Though her skin was nearly dry, her hair was damp, and she was still naked. Out of the water, in plain sight of the LTMs and Stephen Thomas, she felt body-conscious as well as cold.

  “I’m freezing,” she said. “I’ve got to go in.”

  She put the artificial lung into its tank and hurried into the deckhouse, grateful that the interior bulkheads had been built of translucent rather than transparent glass. In the privacy of the glass boat’s cramped head, J.D. stepped into the shower and soaped off the alien salt. She rinsed herself quickly. The warmth felt good, but she was sick of being wet. Her fingers and toes were wrinkled.

  The boat’s hydrophone picked up the ambient music of the water harp. The music swooped and shivered, stopped abruptly and burst out even louder, moved and halted, as Orchestra exper
imented with the controls of her gift.

  Damp but warm, J.D. slipped across the hall and went into one of the glass boat’s tiny cabins.

  “Shower’s free!” she called.

  “Thanks.” Stephen Thomas’s voice carried through the translucent corridor of the boat’s superstructure.

  J.D. left the cabin illumination off. The boat’s running lights shone through the wall, blinking rhythmically, forming strange shadows. J.D. picked up her shirt. It slipped from her fingers. The sea had wrinkled her skin so badly that touching anything sent shivers up her spine. She wished she had brought some hand lotion. She had meant to, but in the excitement of meeting Orchestra, she had forgotten.

  She stared stupidly at the floor, at her crumpled shirt. Still naked, she sank down exhausted on the edge of the narrow bunk.

  Zev opened the door and came in. He sat beside her and without a word put his arm around her shoulders. Grateful, J.D. leaned against him, then held him. He stroked her short damp hair, speaking calmness in soothing soft whistles of true speech. His warmth soaked into her and surrounded her.

  Easing her to the bunk, Zev pulled the soft blanket up around her and tucked it in, but drew her hand from beneath the covers. He reached into the pocket of his running shorts and brought out her tube of hand lotion.

  “I like pockets,” he said. “Pockets are the only good thing about clothes.” He warmed some of the lotion between his palms and rubbed the soothing ointment into her puckered fingers.

  Comforted by Zev’s touch, by his voice, J.D. fell asleep.

  o0o

  The Representative made a decision. Waking fully for the first time in many years, he vibrated his leg tendons. The organic connections tore, freeing his leg-tips from the tender growing points against the chamber walls. Fibers of precious stone, not yet crystallized solidly into the tips of his leg-spikes, sparked with light and floated free. His nutrition and elimination channels snapped. The openings clotted and sealed with the organic crystals of his growing enzymes.

  He flexed again. The long amethyst and emerald and ruby, turquoise and ebony and diamond spines of his walking legs touched the wall of his chamber, moving his inner body a short length this way, a short length that. As he exerted himself, damage occurred in his muscles, in his joints. He would always carry the damage with him, and his life would be shorter for the strain.

  He initiated a metamorphosis.

  o0o

  Victoria waited anxiously for the glass boat to return. She sat in the observers’ circle of the Chi, her couch turned outward. Starlight shimmered on the quiet harbor. Smallernearer loomed overhead, a shadowed ghost.

  LTM transmissions floated at either side of Victoria’s chair. The water harp sang softly, now and again changing its harmonics as Orchestra played with its vanes, its depth, its position. On Orchestra’s brow, the eye in the pond flash-blinked and continued to gaze at the LTM the whale-eel had invited J.D. to leave.

  A wave splashed over the LTM. It quivered on small clutching feet. Water washed around it, over it.

  Orchestra submerged into the dark sea.

  The signal from the LTM on Orchestra’s back vanished when it sank beneath the surface, but the floating LTM continued to transmit. The holographic image changed; the LTM picked up ambient sound and created its surroundings from the reflections. In the water below, shapes turned transparent, translucent. A school of four-fins miraged past, squirting water jets as visible as their bodies. Sea flowers swayed and twisted.

  In the distance, a wide flat shape pulsed forward, stopped, pulsed again.

  Orchestra lay very still. The sea flowers drifted easily. The distant creature pulsed nearer. It possessed the same basic four-finned, jet-propelled anatomy as so many of Largernearer’s creatures, but the dorsal fins had shrunk to delicate crests; the ventral fins had widened and stiffened and angled outward. The creature sailed through the water like a flying saucer.

  The UFO creature sidled closer to Orchestra, then paused, opening its mouth and taking in water.

  Smelling the flowers? Victoria wondered.

  The creature pulsed the water behind itself. The propulsion brought it to the edge of Orchestra’s flower garden. It sank, and delicately nipped off one of the scarlet blossoms.

  The UFO creature vanished, swept with a rush of water into Orchestra’s mouth.

  On the surface, the sea roiled. The LTM crouched and clutched its moorings.

  Orchestra chewed, slowly, luxuriously.

  Victoria whistled softly.

  I wonder, Victoria thought, which of the floating islands we saw were whale-eels, and which were really islands?

  Satoshi strode into the observers’ chamber and flung himself into his couch, spinning it around so it faced outward.

  “Did you see that?” he said. “Did you see it?”

  “Pretty amazing, eh?”

  Satoshi chuckled. “You know what Orchestra reminds me of? The ideal philosopher of the Greeks. A creature who can figure things out just by thinking about them.”

  Victoria smiled back. “I expect Orchestra’s people did some experimenting, alongside their mythology-creation.”

  “I wish I could visit the Smallernearer,” Satoshi said. His eyelids flickered as he touched his link and sent a message out into space. “Do you hear me, Smallernearer? I wish we could visit you. Do you ever get lonely?”

  A moment later, light spattered across the surface of Smallernearer. Victoria opened her link and listened.

  “I hear,” the Smallernearer said. “I wish. My thoughts are more complex than my form. I offer you my complexity.”

  “Thank you,” Satoshi said, in awe. “We offer you our friendship.”

  “You have found my creators,” the Smallernearer said. “If you find their home, you might discover others like me.”

  “Your creators — ? Oh,” Satoshi said. He glanced ruefully at Victoria. “You mean the other ones. Smallernearer, truly, the fossils are a performance. An art form. I don’t think we’ll find others like you, I think you’re unique.”

  “I am unique in Civilization,” the Smallernearer said. “So far. But soon I won’t be alone. On another world, in another system, another structure like me has the potential to become aware.”

  “Maybe it will have some idea where the creators came from,” Satoshi said.

  “It will know its creator,” the Smallernearer said. “I am its creator.”

  o0o

  As the Representative moved, as he prepared himself to enter a gravity field for the first time in half his life, he sealed his chamber and floated it free of its dock in the hull of the Four Worlds ship.

  He steadied himself, using his jewel-spine legs as springs against the slow acceleration. His space-boat shuddered; its disused steering rockets channeled fuel, gentling him away from the huge spaceship. When it had moved a safe distance from the Four World’s ship, the Representative applied power to the thrusting rockets.

  His spaceboat moved toward Nautilus.

  o0o

  J.D. stood at the stern of the glass boat, gazing out over the high, long swells of Largernearer’s ocean. She thought she could see Orchestra’s bright flower topknot, but she could not be certain. She felt refreshed after her nap. Zev still dozed in the bunk, and Stephen Thomas must be asleep in his cabin.

  The low thunder of breakers on the far side of the island rolled across the silent morning sea. The boat approached the lagoon. This evening, J.D. could take Victoria and Satoshi to meet Orchestra.

  She closed her eyes and touched the knowledge surface of Nautilus. As her link took over her perceptions, her knees went weak. She willed her distant body to sit on the deck, not fall, an offhand thought. She had already become part of Nautilus.

  The star Sirius expanded brilliant and blue-white in her vision. Astonished, she gazed at it in wonder, able to look directly at its white-hot surface.

  I did it! she thought. I reached something in Nemo’s memory that isn’t autonomic reactions!<
br />
  The Sirius memory was enormous. It stretched around her to the limit of her vision, in more directions than she knew how to name. Nemo must have lived in the system for many years, for centuries. But as she widened her vision, she perceived echoes of other stars, other planets.

  Now your shell is here, Nemo, she thought. Did you ever see this system before? Did you think one of your children might become a youth at 61 Cygni, among the Four Worlds?

  She stretched, opening her sight to the whole system.

  And she saw the Four Worlds’ space boat powering toward her starship.

  o0o

  Arachne’s alarm propelled Griffith out of sleep.

  He woke with a great gasp and a shudder, wet with sudden sweat. His room was hot and stuffy and bright with the light of the projected image.

  Staring at the image, he wiped his sweaty face on the sheet.

  As he had feared, feared and expected, the Four Worlds ship was staging an assault on Nautilus. A tiny, awkward space boat floated from the alien ship’s ornate flank. The engines powered on gently, pushing the boat into a curving path. Arachne projected the boat’s path, the path of Nautilus: in a few hours, they intersected.

  Keeping his gaze on the image, Griffith got out of bed and opened the window. Everyone else on board slept with their windows wide open, but Griffith thought the habit stupid and dangerous. The night breeze skimmed his body. The air was cool and heavy with midnight rain.

  He sent an emergency message through Arachne to General Cherenkov, to Petrovich. Griffith still thought of the cosmonaut as General Cherenkov. Griffith had trouble with familiarity.

  The pause lengthened.

  Maybe they sent another boat — maybe I didn’t see the first one, and Nautilus is already taken over, Griffith thought. Maybe this boat is just reinforcements. Maybe the aliens have already overwhelmed Petrovich, taken him prisoner... killed him.

  Griffith’s pulse raced.

  I should have made them let me go along! he thought. J.D. Sauvage is a naive fool. I could have...