The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  He blushed at her exclamation. “I just read your interview,” he said, “and I wanted to tell you how much I admire your straight-forwardness. I wonder... would you like to expand on what you said? I thought your comments made the beginning of a provocative piece.”

  Despite his name, he looked quite domesticated. Victoria regarded him. He was not at all the way she would have imagined from his name and his articles. He had curly red-brown hair cut all the same length. In weightlessness it fluffed out around his head. His eyes were a gentle brown. His chin was round, his lips mobile and expressive.

  “It wasn’t exactly an interview, and I think I’ve said as much as I need to... or want to.” Victoria smiled to take the sting out of turning him down. “I mean... I said what I meant. If I start explaining myself, it would sound like weaseling.”

  “When I interview somebody,” he said, “they only sound like they’re weaseling if they really are weaseling.”

  “I don’t have anything more to say right now. Maybe the opportunity will come up while you’re visiting Starfarer, eh? I’m sure you’ll find most people happy to talk to you.”

  Feral Korzybski wrote about the space program. He had resisted jumping on the new U.S. president’s anti-tech bandwagon. As far as Victoria knew, all his articles appeared in public-access, not in sponsored news or feature information services.

  “I really would like to talk to both of you about the alien contact team.”

  “Have you been in space before?” Victoria said, changing the subject without much subtlety.

  “No, first trip. First time I could afford it.”

  “You’ve got a sponsor, then. Congratulations.”

  “Sponsors are nothing but untitled censors!” he said with startling vehemence. “When you read sponsored stuff, you’re paying extra for the privilege of reading work that’s been gutted to make it acceptable. If I can’t make my name as an independent, I don’t want to do it at all.”

  “How’d you get up here?”

  “By saving for a ticket, like any other tourist.”

  “But tourists can’t come onto Starfarer anymore. We’re too close to final maneuvers.”

  “That took a lot of persuasion and a lot of calling in obligations. Including a few nobody owed me yet.” He looked away, obviously embarrassed by the admission of any flaw in his independence.

  “If I can help you find your way around,” Victoria said, “I’d be glad to.”

  He smiled shyly from beneath his heavy eyebrows. “I’d appreciate that. A lot. Will you talk to me off the record? ‘Deep background,’ we call it in the trade.”

  “Of course I’ll talk to you,” Victoria said. “I just like to be warned when somebody’s about to start quoting me. All right?”

  “Sure. What do you think about the Senate bill to transform Starfarer into a military base with remote sensing capabilities?”

  “You don’t ease into anything, do you?”

  “No,” he said cheerfully. “The argument is that we need more information about the Mideast Sweep, and more defenses against it.”

  “I understand the argument, but the proposal has already damaged the expedition. You know about the recalls, I’m sure.”

  He nodded. “It’s the last century’s space station all over again.”

  “That’s right. We lost a couple of decades’ worth of original research and intercultural cooperation right there. Now, as soon as we start to recover, as soon as there’s hope for peaceful applications, your country is making the same damned mistake. You contributed more than half the funding and more than half the personnel, so your president thinks he can get away with this bullying.”

  “He’s not my president. I didn’t vote for him.”

  Victoria quirked her lips in a sardonic smile. “Nobody did, it seems like. Nevertheless, he is your president and he is bullying us. He’s violating several treaties. Unfortunately, your country is still sufficiently powerful that you can tell everybody else to take a high dive if we don’t like your plans.”

  “What about the Mideast Sweep?”

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t you want to keep an eye on them?”

  “From here? You can do remote sensing from very high orbits, but why would you want to? You might as well use the moon. You don’t need something the size of Starfarer for spying. You don’t even need it for a military base powerful enough to blow the whole world to a cinder. Starfarer as a military base — even as a suspected military base — becomes vulnerable. I hope it won’t come to that. Look, Feral, your country is trying to make itself so powerful that it’s becoming paralyzed. When you rely solely on your weapons, you lose the art of compromise that created the U.S. in the first place. Soon your only choice will be between staying in the corner you’ve backed into, doing nothing... or blasting the whole building down.”

  “Do you think we can talk the Mideast Sweep around to a reasonable position?”

  Victoria had no fondness for the Mideast Sweep. To begin with, there was the sexual and racial discrimination they practiced. If she lived under its domination she would subsist at a level so low that it would barely count as human.

  “I don’t know how much can be achieved with talk. But I hope — I have to believe — that the United States is a country too ethical to destroy a whole population because it lives under the control of an antagonistic hierarchy.”

  “Does everybody else on the crew agree with you?”

  Victoria chuckled. “Getting everybody to agree on anything is one of our biggest problems. One thing we do agree on, though, is that we aren’t ‘crew.’“

  “What, then?”

  “Starfarer isn’t a military ship — not yet, anyway, and not ever if most of us on board have anything to say about it. It’s only a ship in the sense that it can move under its own power. There’s a hierarchy of sorts, but it isn’t based on a military structure. There’s faculty and staff and technical support. It’s more like a university. Or a university town. Most of the decisions about how things are run, we try to decide by consensus.”

  “That sounds awkward,” Feral said.

  “Only if you hate five-hour meetings,” Victoria said, straight-faced.

  “Don’t you have to be able to react fast out here? If there’s an emergency and there’s nobody to give the order to do something about it, doesn’t that put everyone at risk?”

  “Starfarer has redundancies of its redundancies. With most emergencies you have plenty of time. As for the others... everyone who lives there takes an orientation course that includes possible emergencies and what to do about them. You have to pass it if you expect to stay. That’s how fast you’d have to react to an acute emergency — you wouldn’t have time to call some general and ask for permission.”

  “What about sabotage?”

  “There’s much more reason to sabotage a military installation than a civilian one. And a lot more explosive-type stuff sitting around to use to sabotage it with.” Victoria laughed. “Besides, in a group run by consensus, all a saboteur would have to do is come to meetings and block every proposal. That wouldn’t stop us cold, but it would slow everything down and drain a lot of energy.” She sighed. “Sometimes I think we already have a few saboteurs aboard.”

  “How would you respond to an attack?”

  “We have no response to attack. We’re unarmed. We had to fight to remain unarmed, but it’s an important part of the philosophy of the mission.”

  “I meant response to an attack from Earth, or on Earth. If you were armed — suppose somebody attacked the U.S. or Canada. What could you do?”

  “Not much. Even if we were armed, Starfarer’s in a lousy strategic orbit. It’s too far from Earth to be of use as a defensive or offensive outpost. Any of the O’Neill colonies would be more effective. And nobody is talking about making them into military bases.”

  “Yet,” Feral said.

  “Yeah,” Victoria said. “Yet.”

  “You’
re pretty emphatic about Starfarer in relation to solving Earth’s problems. Or not solving them.”

  Victoria frowned. “I hoped you were on our side.”

  “I’m not on anybody’s side! It’s my job to ask questions.”

  “All right. People want the expedition to promise to go out and find easy, quick solutions. We can’t.”

  “Promise it, or do it?”

  “Either. We already know how to solve a lot of our problems. Take food. I don’t know the exact numbers — my partner Satoshi could tell you — but if we stopped the expansion of a couple of deserts for one year, we’d gain more arable land than ten Starfarers. If the U.S. hadn’t opposed family planning in the 1990s — ”

  “There’s not much we can do about that,” Feral said. “After all.”

  “But don’t you see? We act in stupid and short-sighted ways and then we behave as if we didn’t have any responsibility for those actions. Somehow that justifies our continuing to behave in the same short-sighted ways. Instead of trying to change, we hope it works better this time.”

  “Do you see the expedition as a change?”

  “Yes. I hope it is.”

  “You use the word ‘hope’ a lot,” Feral said.

  “I guess I do.”

  “What do you hope for the expedition?”

  “I’m the head of the alien contact department,” Victoria said. “That should give you an idea of what I hope for.”

  Chapter 3

  Nearby, a nondescript passenger listened to the unguarded conversation. Griffith, of the Government Accountability Office, had hidden himself so deeply within his objectivity that he would not permit the comments of Victoria MacKenzie to anger him. He filed them away, along with the opinions of the journalist, for future reference and use.

  He wished he had the observation room to himself, so he could look at the stars in silence and solitude. He envied the early space explorers, who had put their lives on the line. He wished he had been one of the Apollo astronauts. Not the ones who landed on the lunar surface: the one who remained in the capsule, orbiting all alone, completely cut off from every other human being, from every other life form, out of contact even by radio during the transit behind the moon.

  But those times were long over. Nowadays, traveling into space meant a few minutes of discomforting acceleration and a few hours or days of weightlessness. He had already heard several people complaining about the trip: complaining of boredom! The journey from low Earth orbit to Starfarer’s libration point took too much time for them; they were bored and restless and a few even complained about the lack of gravity.

  They’ve seen too many movies, Griffith thought. They don’t understand anything about the way things work. Why did they come up here? If they wanted Earth-normal gravity, they should have stayed on Earth. These are the people who think they know how to use space. Researchers. An old woman. A writer. An alien contact specialist, for God’s sake!

  In disgust, he left the observation room and floated through the cramped corridors of the transport. If he had anything to say about it, this would be the last transport taking civilian personnel to Starfarer.

  He wished he had pulled some rank and seniority in order to demand a larger private compartment. But that would have been as suspicious as getting into an argument with MacKenzie and the journalist about the proper function of Starfarer. Griffith of the Government Accountability Office could reasonably expect only the same sleeping closet as any regular passenger.

  He made another circuit of the transport’s corridors. Though he tried returning to the observation room, all the conversations he heard angered him with the self-centered short-sightedness of their participants.

  Having failed to tire himself, he sought out his cubicle, wrapped himself in the restraint blanket, and made himself fall immediately asleep. He would keep himself asleep until the transport reached the starship.

  oOo

  J.D. sailed slowly through the corridor, trying to keep herself an even distance from all four walls. In some ways free-fall was easier than diving; in some ways more difficult. Everything happened faster, so her reactions needed some retraining.

  She passed one of the other passengers, going the other direction.

  “Hello,” she said.

  He passed her without speaking, without acknowledging her presence. The second time they passed, she respected his privacy. After that, he disappeared.

  J.D. had begun to reaccustom herself to what she thought of as the real world. She felt both more crowded and lonelier. Since returning from the wilderness, she had touched no one more closely than a handshake. Several times she had to remind herself not to hug someone, or stroke their arm, or pat their shoulder. In this world such behavior was unacceptable. With the divers it was expected. Perhaps it was necessary.

  The wilderness had begun to feel like a dream, yet a dream of such intensity that she could bring it back in vivid memory.

  Three orcas breached, one after the other, bursting free, turning, splashing hard and disappearing beneath the slate-blue water. A moment later they leaped again, heading the opposite direction. The white spring sunlight glazed their black flanks and the stark white patches on their sides.

  Walking down the path to her cabin, J.D. watched the beautiful, elegant creatures, and wondered how she could even consider leaving them.

  The three half-grown orcas swam to the mouth of the harbor, cutting the choppy surface with their sharp dorsal fins. They joined a larger group of whales. Without her binoculars, J.D. could no longer tell which three had leaped and played. The whole pod swam toward shore. Five or six divers, sleek in the water, swam with them.

  J.D. expected Zev to clamber out and greet her, but orcas and divers alike swam to where the beach shelved off into deeper water. There, they stopped. One of the divers — she thought it might be Zev — waved and gestured to her.

  She sent a signal to her metabolic enhancer and scrambled down the bank. A rush of heat radiated from beneath the small scar on her side. The enhancer kicked her metabolism into high gear. Stripping off her clothes, she left them in a pile on the rocks and waded into the frigid water. She gasped when the water reached the level of her nipples. She hesitated, shivering, then plunged underwater.

  When she surfaced, Zev bobbed in front of her. A wave slapped her face, reminding her that she was in an alien element. She sputtered and moved past Zev so she could turn her back to the swells.

  “We came to talk to you,” he said. “Will you come?”

  “Of course,” she said. “But I have to get my lung.”

  He swam with her to the anchored platform. The orcas and the other divers accompanied them. The dorsal fins all around reminded her of the trunks of the trees in the center of the forest, primordial and eternal, multiple yet individual. The water transmitted the pressure of the orcas’ passing, and the vibrations of the first level of their speech. She could hear them with her body as well as her ears.

  At the platform she put on her swim fins and let the artificial lung slide onto her back. Warm, a little slimy, it spread itself across her shoulders. She slipped her mask on. By the time she had cleared it, it had connected with the lung. She breathed in the musky, warm, highly oxygenated air.

  J.D. sank beneath the choppy waves. The peacefulness of the sea enfolded her, and the alienness and fear vanished. Here she was at home.

  She wondered if space would have surrounded her with the same experience. She supposed she would never find out. She had decided to choose the ocean over space, the divers over the starship.

  Zev dove with her. His sleek body and pale hair collected light and bounced it back. Even under the gray surface, he glowed.

  J.D. swam farther from shore, till the surf rolling onto the beach faded to a sound like the wind in new spring leaves. The whales encircled her, each great ebony body a shadow in the wavery light, the white patches glowing like Zev. The young diver accompanied her like a puppy, dashing ahead, spiraling around
her, falling behind and speeding past.

  The change in the current, the drop in water temperature told her they had left the inlet.

  They traveled for a long way. Except for Zev, the other divers formed an outer circle beyond her range of vision.

  J.D. swam much more slowly than Zev, never mind the orcas. They moved at quarter-speed to accommodate her. Squeaks and clicks flowed through the water and through her body. She recognized the phrases of encouragement to very young whales. She managed to smile. But if she really were a young orca, an adult would be swimming close beside her, drawing her along within the pressure-wave formed by its body in the water.

  She struggled onward, resolute. Her legs began to ache. She breast-stroked for a moment. That slowed her even farther. She kicked in the metabolic enhancer again, knowing she would pay for it tomorrow.

  She wondered how far they had come, and where they were. Drifting upward, she broke the surface. The offshore fog bank, a pretty white curtain, had moved in with a vengeance. It flowed over the water like a second sea. J.D. could see nothing of the island, nothing but a few meters of ocean, no longer choppy but glassy calm. Even the dorsal fins were dim, imagined shadows in a distance impossible to estimate. A smooth wake of tiny parallel ripples angled across her. One of the orcas swam past, and out of sight.

  She trod water. Uneasily, she circled. The view was the same in all directions: flat water, dense fog.

  Surfacing had not restored her link with the information web. The contact, which diving always interfered with, refused to reform. Reflexively she looked up, as if she could see the electromagnetic radiation pouring out of the sky, somehow misdirected, and could call it to her. But the web remained silent.

  One of the orcas surfaced beside her and blew, exhaling explosively and drawing in a deep breath. Its dorsal fin cut the fog in swirls. The whale raised its head above water and looked at her. Unlike ordinary humans, the orcas — and the divers — could see equally well in water and in air. It spoke to her in phrases beyond her vocabulary. She could recognize the tone. If she had been a young orca, or a diver child, the tone would have been patient. But she was an outsider, she was an adult, and she was tediously slow.