Victoria smelled something burning. Something burning? Stephen Thomas’s incense — ? She hurried into the hallway. She stopped short. The smell of food, cooking, filled the apartment.
None of the three surviving members of the partnership was much of a cook. Merit had known how to cook. These days Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas ordered meals from the central kitchen when they had time to eat together.
Victoria drew a deep breath. Getting upset because someone had decided to make breakfast was silly. It was just that the homey smell brought back memories.
Satoshi was the best cook among them, but Victoria knew from long acquaintance that Satoshi was not cooking breakfast. If he was even out of bed she would be surprised. That left Stephen Thomas.
“He can burn water” had always been a metaphorical phrase to Victoria, until Stephen Thomas once put water on for coffee, forgot about it, and melted a kettle all over the heating element.
The breakfast smelled much better than burning water or melting kettles. Stephen Thomas was always trying new things; maybe cooking lessons were his newest enthusiasm.
Victoria headed to the main room. At the stove, Feral Korzybski glanced over his shoulder.
“Morning,” he said. “I wanted to make myself useful.” He gestured to the set table, the skillet. “You folks sure don’t have much equipment.”
“We don’t cook here very much,” she said. “No time.”
“It’s a hobby of mine,” he said. “I think this will be edible.” He poked the edges of the big omelet, letting the uncooked egg run underneath to sizzle against the hot pan. “Are you ready for tea?”
“Sure.”
He poured boiling water into her teapot.
“I talked to the database — ”
“Arachne,” Victoria said.
“Right, thanks. I talked to Arachne about what was available for people to cook. Strange selection.”
“Not if you consider how and where it’s produced. We’re beginning to grow things ourselves. But a lot of fresh stuff, and most everything that’s processed, is from one of the colonies.”
Stephen Thomas sauntered barefoot into the main room. He wore orange satin running shorts and a yellow silk tank top. Victoria tried to imagine the combination on anyone else, and failed.
“What’s for breakfast?” he said.
Feral dumped the filling into the omelet and folded it expertly. “Let me see if I can remember everything I put in it. The eggs were fresh — that surprised me.”
“We grow those here.”
“With or without chickens?”
“With.” Victoria laughed. “We aren’t that high-tech.”
“The mushrooms are reconstituted but the green onions and the tomatoes were fresh. I was hoping I could get micrograv vegetables, but Arachne didn’t offer them. I’ve seen them in magazines — perfectly round tomatoes, and spherical carrots, and beans in corkscrews — but I don’t know anyone who can afford to cook with them.”
“We don’t get any of those out here. The colonies export them all to Earth. There are problems with growing plants in quantity in micrograv, so whatever you get is labor-intensive. Especially those corkscrew beans.”
“I can see where they would be. That’s it — except for the cheese. The package said. ‘Tillamook Heights.’“
“That’s from a colony. The people who run one of the dairies there emigrated from someplace called Tillamook — ”
“It’s on the west coast of the United States,” Stephen Thomas said to Victoria. “A few hundred kilometers south of Vancouver.” He liked to tease her about her Canadian chauvinism, about the way she sometimes pretended to know less about the United States than she really did. He could get away with it.
“ — and they wanted to name the dairy after their original place. But ‘Tillamook East’ or ‘Tillamook South’ didn’t sound right, so: Tillamook Heights.”
“I like it.” Feral rubbed his upper lip and gazed blankly at the omelet, filing the information away, thinking of how to use it in a story.
“Your omelet’s about to burn,” Victoria said.
He snatched the pan off the single-burner stove.
“Damn!” He lifted the edge of the omelet. “Just in time. Where’s Satoshi?”
“Still asleep, probably.”
“Damn,” he said again. “I thought you were all up. This is no good cold. I’ll go get him.”
“Don’t, if you value your life,” Stephen Thomas said. “Trust me, he’d much rather eat your omelet cold than have you wake him up. You would, too.”
“All right,” Feral said, doubtful and disappointed.
The omelet tasted wonderful.
“The coffee’s great,” Stephen Thomas said. “What did you do to it?”
Victoria took his cup and tried a sip. It was much stronger than she was used to, but tasted less bitter, almost the way coffee smelled.
“I’ll show you. It’s not hard, but if you boil it you might as well throw it out and start over. That’s what I did with what you had in the pot.”
Feral ate part of his omelet, occasionally glancing with some irritation at the warmer where he had left Satoshi’s share.
“It isn’t the same warmed over,” he said. He got up, poured coffee from the thermos into a mug, and disappeared down the corridor.
Victoria and Stephen Thomas looked at each other. Stephen Thomas shrugged.
“It’s his hide,” he said.
Feral returned unscathed. He got the last quarter of the omelet out of the warmer and put it at Satoshi’s place. A minute later Satoshi himself appeared, wearing Victoria’s hapi coat, carrying the coffeecup, and apparently wide awake. He joined them at the table.
“Nice morning, isn’t it?” He sipped his coffee. “That’s very good,” he said. He put it down and started eating his omelet.
Victoria watched him, amazed.
“Do you want a job?” Stephen Thomas said to Feral.
“No, thanks. I’m self-employed.”
o0o
J.D. woke very early in the morning, too early, she thought, to call the other members of the alien contact team. Feeling restless, she went for a walk. She suspected that on board Starfarer she would have trouble getting enough exercise, here where she would have neither opportunity nor time to swim several hours each day.
A stream trickled past her house. She followed it. Soon a second stream joined it, and the combined watercourse cut down through the hill. J.D. found herself walking between sheer cliffs.
The cliff must be designed, J.D. thought. There had been no time for the stream to cut it. Starfarer’s interior topography was carefully sculpted. Striped with stone colors, this sculpture looked like a water-eroded cliffside of sedimentary rock.
J.D. rounded a bend and stopped in surprise.
Beside the stream, someone scraped at the bank, probing with a slender trowel. A blanket lay on the ground, covered with bones.
“Hi, good morning,” J.D. said. “What are you doing?”
The young digger glanced at her and stood up, stretching her back and her arms. She was small and slight, with a sweat-band tied around her forehead. It rumpled her short straight black hair.
“Digging for fossils,” she said.
J.D. looked at her askance. “It seems to me,” she said, “that if you’d found fossils in lunar rock, the news would be all over the web by now.”
“Not digging to take them out,” she said. “Digging to put them in.”
“You’re making a fossil bed?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you think we deserve some prehistory, too?”
J.D. leaned over the blanket. The relics resembled the exoskeletons of huge insects more than any mammalian bones.
“Whose prehistory is this?” she asked.
“Whoever came before.”
“Whoever came before didn’t look much like us.”
“Of course not.”
/>
“What department are you in?”
“Archaeology.”
“But — ” J.D. stopped. “I think I’m being had.”
“I’m Crimson Ng. Art department.”
“J.D. Sauvage. Alien contact — ”
“You’re the new AC specialist! Welcome on board.” She stuck out her grubby hand. J.D. shook it.
“But why are you burying fossils of a different species?”
“I’m just one of those crazy artists,” Crimson said.
“Come on,” J.D. said.
Crimson opened up to J.D.’s interest.
“Every time the argument about evolution comes along again, I start wondering what would happen if it were true that god invented fossils to fool us with. What if god’s got a sense of humor? If I were god, I’d plant a few fossils that wouldn’t fit into the scheme, just for fun.”
“And that’s what these are? Does that mean you’re playing god?”
“Artists always play god,” Crimson said.
“Don’t you believe in evolution?”
“That’s a tough word, ‘believe.’ Believing, and knowing what the truth is — you’re talking about two different things. Human beings are perfectly capable of believing one thing metaphorically, and accepting evidence for a completely different hypothesis. That’s the simplest definition of faith that I know. It’s the people who don’t have any faith, who can’t tell the difference between metaphor and reality, who want to force you to believe one thing only.”
“I can’t figure out who you’re making fun of,” J.D. said.
“That’s the point,” the artist said with perfect seriousness. “Everybody needs to be made fun of once in a while.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” J.D. said. “I can get along without being made fun of for two or three days at a time without permanent damage.”
Crimson glanced at her quizzically, then picked up one of the artifacts. The long and delicate claw nestled in her hand. J.D. could imagine an intelligent being with those claws instead of hands, a being as dexterous and precise as any human.
“What happens if everybody forgets you’ve put these things here,” J.D. said, “and then somebody comes along and digs them up?”
“My god, that would be wonderful.”
“What will people think?”
“Depends on who they are. And how smart they are. I’m trying to create a consistent prehistory, one that doesn’t lead to us. Maybe future archaeologists will figure it out. Maybe they’ll realize it’s fiction. Maybe they won’t. And maybe they’ll think it was god playing a joke, and they’ll laugh.”
“And then they’ll figure out that you made the bones.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Crimson said. “I grew them very carefully. You shouldn’t be able to tell them from real. And I cooked the isotopes, so the dating will be consistent.” She grinned. “Got to get back to work.”
She returned to her fossil bed.
J.D. watched her for a few minutes, then continued on beside the stream. She smiled to herself. She wished she could tell Zev and the whales about this. They would, she thought, find it very funny.
o0o
Though she was curious how J.D. had liked her first night on the starship, though she was eager to get out to the sailhouse for the first full test of Starfarer’s solar sail, and though she was anxious to get over to the physics department and get back to work, Victoria also wanted to give Satoshi and Stephen Thomas the presents she had brought from Earth. But she wanted to do it when they were alone. As she was thinking up a polite way to ask Feral to leave for a while, Stephen Thomas put one hand on the reporter’s shoulder.
“Feral,” he said, smiling, “thank you for breakfast. Why don’t you go look around, and we’ll see you in the sailhouse later.”
“Huh? Oh. Okay.” He drained his coffeecup. “I’d like to visit the alien contact department,” he said to Victoria. “Would that be all right?”
“Sure. This afternoon.”
“Thanks.” He sauntered cheerfully out of the house.
“How do you get away with that?” Victoria asked.
Stephen Thomas looked at her quizzically. “Get away with what?”
“Never mind.” She picked up the carrying net and opened it flat on the table.
“This is for the household,” she said. She pulled out a package of smoked salmon.
“We should save this for sometime special,” Satoshi said. “Maybe even after we leave.”
One thing habitat designers had not figured out was a way to grow anadromous fish in a space colony. The salt marshes, so important to the ecosystem, could not support deep-water fish.
Victoria handed Stephen Thomas a rectangular gold box. He took it carefully and hefted it gently.
“I know what this is,” he said.
“I had my fingers crossed at liftoff,” Victoria said. “It survived.”
Stephen Thomas grinned, opened the box, and drew out a bottle of French champagne.
“Victoria, this is great, thank you.”
She had known he would like it. And she knew why he liked it. Before Stephen Thomas joined the partnership, she had never drunk good champagne. By now she had tasted it several times. Saying that she had drunk it hardly seemed accurate, for each sip flowed over the tongue and vanished in a tickly barrage of minuscule bubbles.
“Something else for a special occasion,” Stephen Thomas said. He was never stingy with his things. Whenever he managed to get good champagne to Starfarer, he shared it with his partners.
“I bought it in a fit of enlightened self-interest,” Victoria said.
She handed Satoshi one of his presents. “Not quite on the same scale, but...”
He smiled, carefully unfolding the tissue paper from the package of chili paste. Victoria and Stephen Thomas always brought back chili paste for him. Victoria could not stand the stuff herself. Sometimes she wondered if, in fifty years, Satoshi would confess that forty years before, he had developed a loathing for chili paste, but wanted to spare the feelings of his partners.
“We’ll have to get something good to drink with it,” he said.
“Oh, no, not my champagne,” their younger partner said. “If you’re going to blast your taste buds, you can do it with local beer.”
Victoria gave Stephen Thomas his second package. This one was as light as the first had been heavy. He untied the scarf that wrapped it. Victoria never wrapped his presents in paper, because wrapping paper was hard to come by in the starship and he always tore it.
She had brought him two of the loose silk shirts he liked. The ones he had now he had worn almost to rags. He still wore them. He lifted the new turquoise one, and saw the bright red one beneath it.
“Victoria, these are incredible!” He put on the turquoise shirt. It intensified the clear blue of his eyes. He stroked the smooth fabric. “How does it look?”
“How do you think?” She put one hand on his shoulder and let her fingers slide down his back. The silk felt soft; his muscles, hard. He met her gaze and reached out, letting his arm match the curve of hers.
“It looks terrific, kid,” Satoshi said. “Don’t wear it into any dark bars — we’ll have to wade in and rescue you.”
They all laughed. Victoria wished it were evening; she wished they were sitting around the dinner table getting silly on champagne. She handed Satoshi his second present.
He unfolded the wrapping, smoothed it, set it aside, and opened the plain white box.
He pushed aside the cushioning and lifted out the white bowl. The sunlight touched it and turned the graceful rounded shape translucent. Satoshi caught his breath.
“It’s absolutely beautiful.”
“It rings,” she said.
He tapped it with his fingernail. The porcelain gave off a soft, clear tone. Satoshi looked at her. The smile-lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled.
“Thank you.”
“When I saw it...” Victoria said, “you know, i
f anyone had told me I’d be moved nearly to tears by a porcelain dish, I’d’ve told them they were nuts.”
Last she gave him the stones she had picked up on the beach after her first meeting with J.D.
“These... they aren’t really anything, just something I found. I thought you might like them.”
They were gnarled and smooth, like wind-blasted trees; some had holes bored straight through them. A few carried holes bored partway through, with the shell of the creature that had made the hole left behind, stuck inside after it bored its way in, and grew. One stone was a mass of holes, till nothing was left but a lacework of edges.
“I kept hoping nobody would pick up my allowance and say, ‘What have you got in here, rocks?’ If I admitted I was carrying plain rocks out of the gravity well, no telling what Distler would do with that.”
Satoshi chuckled. “These aren’t just plain rocks.” He held one in his hand, rubbing it with his thumb. Victoria recognized it as the one she had kept in her pocket all the way back home; rubbing it had given it a slightly darker color.
Victoria found herself in a mood more suitable for the end of Christmas morning: glad her partners liked what she had brought for them, but sorry that the occasion had ended.
They spent a few minutes tidying up, giving the dirty dishes to the house AS, then left to meet J.D. and go out to the sailhouse to watch the solar sail’s first full deployment.
As Victoria left the house, she saw Satoshi’s porcelain bowl in the center of the table. The gnarled sea-worn stones lay artlessly, precisely placed within its smooth white concavity. Victoria gazed at the stones, at the bowl. The arrangement’s effect was calming, yet it was also arousing, and in a definitely sexual way. Victoria wondered how Satoshi had managed that.
o0o
Griffith woke at the silent arrival of an AS with his breakfast from the communal kitchen. He had slept as he always slept, soundly but responsive to his surroundings, waking once just before dawn when a bird startled him by singing outside his window.
Only one of the other guests had slept in the guest house. The other had yet to make an appearance; Griffith would have heard if anyone had come in during the night. No one had taken any notice of Griffith, and his things remained undisturbed.
The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus Page 12