Dwarf fruit trees lined the approach to the house. Because of her trip, Victoria had missed the peak of Starfarer’s first real spring. The cherry blossoms had already fallen. The petals lay in pink and white drifts across the path.
The hillside that covered Victoria’s house stretched one long low ridge in a semicircle to form a courtyard in front of the main windows. Victoria and Satoshi rounded the tip of the ridge. They were home.
Victoria stopped. Scattered patches of flowers covered the inner slope of the ridge. In the fading light, the blue-gray foliage lost most of its color, but the petals glowed a brilliant, luminous white.
“They bloomed!”
Satoshi smiled. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
When Victoria left for Earth, the pinks she had planted had been nothing but hard gray buds. Now they spotted the slope with color and spiced the air with their scent.
Victoria bent down, cupped one of the pinks between her hands, and breathed its carnation fragrance. She left it unplucked, though there must be a thousand flowers on the hillside, white ones, pink ones, white with bright red veining. When they spread and grew together, they would cover the bank with dusty-blue ensiform leaves.
The house was still dark — Stephen Thomas must not be home yet. As Victoria and Satoshi approached, the inside lights came on, casting bright patches across the courtyard. French windows formed the entire exterior wall of the house. They were, as usual, wide open. Only Stephen Thomas insisted on using the front door, which he had chosen. It was solid and opaque, a tall rock-foam slab with a rounded top. Stephen Thomas was an unregenerate fan of J.R.R. Tolkien. Victoria liked to tease him that he was far too tall to live in a hobbit-house. He must be of elven stock. Sometimes she wondered.
The British countryside had influenced Victoria, too. The grass on the roof grew so long that it drooped, and occasionally Victoria trimmed the edges to resemble the thatched roof of an ancient Devon cottage. The thick shaggy grass made the house look as if it had eyebrows.
Victoria and Satoshi stepped through the open French windows. As Victoria kicked off her shoes, she noticed the contraption of glass and metal tubes that hunkered on the floor.
“I give up,” Victoria said. “What is it?”
“It’s a still. Stephen Thomas was going to find someplace else to put it. I guess he didn’t get around to it.”
“What’s it for?”
“He says that when his vines are established, and after he learns to make wine, he’ll be able to distill brandy.”
“What happened to the champagne he was going to make?”
Satoshi chuckled.
They circumnavigated the still.
The main room was plainly furnished. Woven mats covered the solar-fired tiles on the floor; the furniture was of rattan and bamboo. Alzena promised that soon a few trees could be harvested, but for now everyone who wanted furniture made of organic materials had to make do with members of the grass family, fast-growing annuals.
Victoria wanted a rug, but in order to get one she might have to persuade Alzena to approve growing a couple of sheep — it was probably too late to import any from the O’Neills — then raise them and learn to shear and spin and weave the wool herself. Victoria barely had time for her garden, not to mention the problem of persuading Alzena that sheep would not denude the hillsides. As indeed they might: one more factor Victoria would have to research if she proposed the project.
Victoria signaled the interior illumination to dim. As the last sunlight faded and the sun-tubes began reflecting starlight, the wall of windows and the skylights filled the room with a soft silver illumination.
“Stephen Thomas?”
No one answered.
“He better come home soon,” Victoria said. She let the carrying net slip from her shoulder to the floor, and flung herself onto the folded futon they used for a couch.
Satoshi joined her. Their shoulders touched, and their thighs. Satoshi’s kiss left his taste on Victoria’s lips.
Victoria heard Stephen Thomas’s voice, low and light and cheerful, unmistakable even at a distance. A second voice replied.
Stephen Thomas strode up the path and opened the front door. Kicking off his thongs, he took two long strides and flung himself onto the couch beside his partners.
“Let’s go to bed and screw like weasels,” he said.
Feral Korzybski, carrying a net bag, followed him into the house.
Completely unembarrassed, Stephen Thomas kissed Victoria and Satoshi and sprawled on the lounge beside them, one arm around Satoshi’s shoulders, fingertips brushing the back of Victoria’s neck. Of the members of the partnership, he was — at least in public — the most physically demonstrative.
“Uh, hello, Feral,” Victoria said. “Was the guest house full?”
Victoria felt glad that her dark complexion hid the blush that crept up her face. Stephen Thomas was only voicing the thought all three partners had. One of the things that first attracted Victoria to him was his ability to say exactly what he thought under most circumstances; and his ability to get himself out of the trouble that sometimes caused him. She reached up and touched his cool slender fingers where they rested against the back of her neck.
“There’s hardly anybody at the guest house,” Stephen Thomas said. “Feral checked in, but it’s kind of creepy over there. So I invited him to stay with us.”
Victoria looked at Stephen Thomas, surprised and unbelieving.
“I really appreciate the hospitality,” Feral said. “I don’t think I’d get a good feel for what it’s like to live here if I had to stay in the hotel.”
“But — “ Victoria stopped, not wanting to hurt Feral’s feelings.
“Let me show you to the spare room,” Satoshi said quickly. He got up.
Sometimes his good manners were too good to be believed. This was one of those times.
He took Feral into the back hallway. Stephen Thomas followed.
Disgruntled, Victoria sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists. After a moment she got up and went unwillingly down the hall.
The corridor was almost dark. Lit only by daylight or starlight shining through roof windows, it ran behind the main room and the bedrooms. The rough rock foam remained unfinished. No one had taken the time to pretty it up. She passed Satoshi’s room and Stephen Thomas’s room and her own room.
She hesitated outside the fourth bedroom, the room that should have been Merit’s. Then she berated herself silently. She would have an excuse for her feelings if anyone had ever used this room, if it had real memories in it. But the accident occurred before they ever even moved here. Overcoming her reluctance to go in, she followed her partners. Overcoming her reluctance to let a stranger use it would be more difficult.
The partnership used the room for nothing, not even storage. Victoria had seldom gone into it. The AS kept it spotless. It remained as impersonal as a hotel, with a futon folded in one corner and no other free-standing furniture, only the built-ins. Stephen Thomas stood just inside the door, suddenly uneasy, and Satoshi stood by the closed window, looking out into the front yard.
“We weren’t expecting company,” Victoria said.
Feral tossed his duffelbag on the floor.
“No, this is great. I don’t need much, and I promise not to get in the way. This will really help. Isolation is no good for getting decent stories.”
o0o
J.D.’s house was very quiet. The thick rock foam walls cushioned sound. Woven mats, gifts from co-workers as yet unmet, softened the floor. A futon lay in her bedroom. Victoria had apologized for the sparseness of the furnishings, but after the beach cabin this house of three rooms felt perfectly luxurious.
Still, a lot of work remained before her new place would feel like home.
She ought to try to sleep, but she was still wide awake. The season on Starfarer was spring, and the days were lengthening. It lacked at least an hour till darkness.
Her equipment — her b
ooks — had not yet arrived from the transport. She could ask Arachne for something to read. Instead, she curled up on her futon and dug her notebook out of the net bag.
She worked for a while on her new novel. She tried to write a little every day, even when she was busy with other projects. Writing helped her to imagine what it could be like if... when, she told herself... the expedition met other intelligent beings.
Her first novel had enjoyed less than magnificent success. Critics complained that it made them feel off-balance and confused. Only a few had realized that it was supposed to make them feel off-balance and confused; of those, all but one had objected to the experience. That one reviewer had done her the courtesy of assuming she had achieved exactly what she intended, and she valued the comments.
She knew that nothing she could imagine could approach the strangeness of the expedition’s first contact with non-Terrestrial beings. She could not predict what would happen. It was the sense of immersing herself in strangeness that she sought, knowing she would have to meet the reality with equanimity, and wing it from there.
Her library contained a number of novels and stories about first meetings of humanity and alien beings. Those she reread most, her favorites, embodied that sense of strangeness. But it troubled her considerably to find so many fictions ending in misjudgment, incomprehension, intolerance; in violence and disaster.
J.D.’s stories never ended like that.
She put the novel away, got up, and opened the floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside lay a long, narrow terrace, bright green with a mixture of new grass and wildflowers.
Victoria had said she could do whatever she liked with the terrace — whatever she could find the time to do. J.D. recognized some of the meadow flowers from the wilderness, but she had never done any gardening. She had no idea where to start. She liked the big rock over at one edge. Barefoot, she walked across the delicate new grass and sat on the heat-polished stone. It had been blasted to slag sometime during the creation of Starfarer. The melted curves sank gently into the earth. The rock was warm from the heat of the day, but J.D. imagined it remained hot from the blast that had shattered it from its lunar matrix. She imagined heat continuing to radiate from it for eons.
The starship had no sunsets, only a long twilight. Darkness fell, softened by starlight shining on the overhead mirrors. Rectangles of light, other people’s uncurtained windows and open doorways, lay scattered across the hillsides. The air quickly cooled, but J.D. remained in her garden, thinking about so suddenly finding herself a member of the alien contact department.
J.D. liked Victoria. She felt grateful that the expedition’s original rejection of her application, and her brief rejection of their subsequent invitation, had not destroyed the possibility of friendship. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas she did not know well enough to assess.
J.D. shivered. She thought about kicking in the metabolic enhancer, but decided against it. The rush would remind her of the sea, and the whales, and the divers, and Zev.
She might as well let the artificial gland atrophy. She would probably never need it again.
She rose and went inside.
The interior of her house was as cool as the terrace. She had not yet told Arachne her preferences for temperature and humidity and light-level and background sounds. If she took off the outer doors and the curtains, as Victoria suggested, to open her house to the artificial outdoors, most of that programming would be superfluous. J.D. thought she would leave the doors and the curtains as they were. After the damp, cold mornings of the cabin, the idea of stepping out of bed onto a warm floor appealed to her.
Flicking her eyelids closed, she scanned the web for mail. Nothing important, nothing personal.
Nothing from Zev.
She could send him a message. But it would be easier for both of them if she left him alone. Best for all concerned if she and Zev never talked again. Her eyes burned. She blinked hard.
She took off her clothes, crawled into bed, ordered the lights off, ordered the curtains open, and lay on her futon gazing into the darkness.
A quick blink of light startled her. She thought it was a flaw in her vision until it happened again, and again. Short, cool, yellow flashes the size of a matchhead decorated her terrace.
They were fireflies. She had not seen one for a long time. They did not exist on the west coast. They were even becoming rare in the east, in their home territories, because of the size and effects of the enormous coastal cities. Here they must be part of the ecosystem.
The ecosystem fascinated her. If it contained fireflies, lightning bugs, did it contain other insects? She would like bees — bees must be essential. But what about ladybugs? Surely one could not import ladybugs without importing aphids as well. No one in their right mind would introduce aphids into a closed environment intended to be agriculturally self-sufficient. If no noxious insects existed, but the ecologists were trying to establish songbirds, what did the songbirds eat? Did anything eat the songbirds?
J.D. drifted off into complexity, and sleep.
o0o
Victoria tapped lightly on Stephen Thomas’s door.
“Come in.”
The scent of sandalwood surrounded her. Stephen Thomas often brought incense to campus in his allowance. The incense stick glowed, a speck of pink light moving downward through the darkness. The sliding doors stood open to the courtyard, letting in the breeze and mixing the sandalwood with the spice of carnation. The pale white wash of reflected starlight silvered Stephen Thomas’s gold hair and his face in quarter profile. He turned toward her.
“Your hair sparkles,” he said.
“And yours glows.” She let her kimono fall from her shoulders and slid into bed beside him. He wore nothing but the crystal at his throat, as black as obsidian. He rolled onto his side. The crystal slipped along the line of his collarbone, glinting in scarlet and azure.
“Where’s Satoshi?” Stephen Thomas asked. “You guys aren’t mad at me, are you? Feral looked so downcast when he saw he’d be practically alone in the guest house...”
Victoria felt Stephen Thomas shrug in the darkness, beneath her hands.
“Satoshi’s in the shower,” she said. “He’ll be here in a minute. I’m not mad at you, exactly, but, god, Stephen Thomas, your timing is lousy.”
She brushed her fingertips down his side and stroked the hard muscles of his thigh and wished Satoshi would hurry up.
Stephen Thomas drew her closer. His soft breath tickled her shoulder.
“I think it’s damned nice of us,” Victoria said, “to use your room tonight so we don’t keep Feral Korzybski awake till morning!”
“What’s the matter with my room?” Stephen Thomas said plaintively. His room was a joke among the partnership. He collected stuff the way a magnet collects steel shavings. Victoria’s room was almost as Spartan as the fourth bedroom, and Satoshi’s works-in-progress were always organized. Stephen Thomas kept a desk full of bits of equipment and printouts, a corner full of potted plants, and he never picked up his clothes until just before he did his laundry.
“Nothing,” Victoria said. “I enjoy sleeping in a midden heap. But my room is right next to our guest, and we’ve never tested the soundproofing.”
Satoshi came in, toweling his hair. He launched himself across the room and came down flat on the bed beside Victoria. He smelled of fresh water and mint soap. A few droplets flicked off the ends of his hair and fell across Victoria’s face. His skin was cool and just barely damp from the shower.
He leaned over her and kissed her. The cool droplets of water disappeared in the warmth of his lips and his tongue. Satoshi reached past her and took Stephen Thomas’s hand. Their fingers intertwined, gold and silver in the dim light. Victoria reached up and joined her hand to theirs, adding ebony to the pattern. She hooked her leg over Satoshi’s thighs, and as she turned toward him drew Stephen Thomas with her, closer against her back and side. His breath quickened and his long silky hair slipped across her shoulder. Mi
nt and carnation and sandalwood and arousal surrounded them with a dizzying mix. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas surrendered themselves to it, and to each other.
Chapter 6
Victoria woke when the sun-tube spilled light through the open wall of Stephen Thomas’s bedroom. Stephen Thomas lay on the far side of the bed, stretched on his side, his hair curling down across his neck and shoulder, one hand draped across Satoshi’s back. Satoshi sprawled in the middle of the bed, face down, arms and legs flung every which way, his hair kinked in a wing from being slept on wet. Victoria watched her partners sleeping, wishing they could stay in bed all morning, in the midst of the comfortable clutter. The scent of sandalwood lingered.
Stephen Thomas yawned and turned over, stretching. He rubbed his eyes and blinked and yawned again, propped himself on his elbow, and looked at her across Satoshi. Satoshi snored softly.
“Good morning,” Stephen Thomas whispered.
“Good morning.” Victoria, too, kept her voice soft. “Is that how weasels screw?”
He laughed.
“Shh, you’ll wake Satoshi.”
They got up, creeping quietly away so Satoshi could wake up at his own pace. Stephen Thomas grabbed some clean clothes from the pile in the corner. Victoria had no idea how he always managed to look so good. When she referred to his room as a midden heap, she was only half joking.
o0o
After a shower, Victoria smoothed the new clothes in her closet but resisted the urge to wear them. They were party clothes, inappropriate for work. She put on her usual jeans and shirt and sandals, reflecting that back on Earth, on almost any other campus, what she had on would be considered inappropriate for a professor.
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