The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Automatically, Victoria queried the web, but it was completely involved with its own reconstruction.

  “I’m going to the explorer,” Victoria said. “That’s where I’m supposed to be, and that’s where I’m going. She felt near to screaming with frustration. “J.D. knows where it is — maybe she’ll meet us there.”

  They crossed the fields to return to the axis and the explorer dock. Zev tagged along. Victoria walked on one side of Stephen Thomas and Satoshi on the other, just in case.

  “I really am okay, “ Stephen Thomas said. “But I’m going home for a few minutes.” He turned toward Victoria, defensive, expecting her to object. “We’re all a mess — ”

  “You’re right,” she said. They all looked a wreck, particularly Stephen Thomas. Victoria grinned. “We can’t go exploring like this. Remember what your mother always told you about clean underwear.”

  Stephen Thomas said, “No, what?”

  “What is underwear?” Zev asked.

  The mini-horses pounded past, running, as horses run, in response to fright, their ears back, slick with sweat. Victoria smelled their fear.

  On a hillock near the path, Kolya Cherenkov raised himself out of an access tunnel and climbed to ground level. He reached down and gave a hand to Infinity Mendez, then to J.D., and finally to the accountant from the GAO.

  Zev ran toward J.D. and hugged her and swung around with her. She gathered him in and kissed his hair, his cheek, his lips, murmuring to him, telling him what had happened.

  For a few minutes it seemed as if everyone tried to talk at the same time, explaining, questioning. Only Griffith stood apart. Victoria did not quite turn her back on him — she distrusted him too much for that — but she would not look directly at him; she could neither meet his gaze nor bring herself to speak to him.

  “We had a plan to stop the takeover, Griffith and I,” Kolya said. “A very foolhardy plan... it might have worked. But then the missile hit, and things became more complicated. Then we entered transition.”

  “You saw it? What did you see? Tell me!”

  Kolya expression sobered. “I... I cannot describe it. I am sorry.”

  Envious and jealous and angry, Victoria looked for Griffith. She did not know what she wanted to say to him. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps she only wanted to glare.

  “I didn’t see it at all,” he said. He turned around and strode away.

  “He has... things to think about,” Kolya said apologetically.

  “No kidding,” Victoria said.

  o0o

  As soon as she and her partners had cleaned up, Victoria led the way up the hill to Starfarer’s axis, where the team’s explorer waited in its dock on the hub.

  “Victoria!” J.D. sounded breathless. “Touch the web. The explorer — ”

  It took Victoria a moment to make her way through the reconnecting pathways.

  Her steps faltered.

  “Holy shit,” Stephen Thomas said. Satoshi looked stunned. Zev reacted with a smile.

  The explorer was receiving a transmission: a strong, regular signal of precise frequency. From outside Starfarer. From within the Tau Ceti system.

  “Let’s go!”

  Victoria broke into a run. She leaped through the gravity gradient, skimmed across the microgravity, and entered the zero-g core.

  The team members sailed weightless through the hallways. They had to pass the transport to reach the next dock, where their explorer waited. Victoria glanced through the transparent partition into the transport’s waiting room.

  Though the transport passengers had disembarked, most of them remained at the starship’s axis, as if they had been delayed by some minor mechanical glitch and would soon return to their places and fly home. Alzena, in her black clothes, huddled in a corner staring at the wall.

  Gerald Hemminge saw Victoria. He launched himself toward the doorway, grabbed the doorframe to change his vector, and plunged down the hallway after her.

  “Victoria!”

  “I can’t talk to you now.” She kept going.

  “But we’ve still a chance to recover from this awful mistake.”

  “Did your boss send you out to tell us that?” She was too excited to be bitter, but not too distracted for a little sarcasm. “I didn’t see him — does he have his own private waiting room?”

  “The chancellor wasn’t on the transport,” Gerald said. “He accepted the leadership of this expedition, and he determined to remain.”

  “Nobody cares now, Gerald,” Satoshi said. “Leave us alone.”

  Gerald saw Stephen Thomas. As the paramedic promised, he was developing a spectacular black eye.

  “Good god! What happened to you?”

  “We nearly got squashed when your damned missile — ”

  “My missile! It belonged to your government — ”

  Stephen Thomas lunged awkwardly toward Gerald and grabbed him by the leg. Both men tumbled, bouncing from one wall to the other.

  “Let go!”

  Ignoring Gerald’s protest, and his kicking, Stephen Thomas climbed up him until they were face to face.

  “As far as I’m concerned, that fucking missile belongs to all the jerks who wanted to stop the expedition, and you’re one of them!” He shouted, furious; he shoved Gerald away. The reaction knocked Stephen Thomas against a wall. He had to scramble to get his balance. Gerald, more experienced in weightlessness, caught himself with his feet and pushed off again, still following Victoria.

  “Victoria!”

  “I told you I can’t talk to you now. Gerald — we’ve got a signal. From the Tau Ceti system.”

  “But — that’s wonderful!”

  Victoria reached the explorer’s hatch.

  “I’m glad you understand. Now let us get to work, eh?”

  “I do understand! This changes everything. If we go home now, with this evidence, we can start with a clean slate. Repairs, provisions, all our personnel — and then we can come back...”

  His voice trailed off. All four members of the alien contact team stared at him, unbelieving. Victoria felt completely unable to come up with a sufficient response to what he had said.

  When Zev followed J.D. into the explorer, Victoria neither objected nor tried to stop him. The alternative was to leave him out in the hall with Gerald.

  Victoria headed for her couch. Before she relaxed into it, before the safety straps eased around her, she had already begun the explorer’s system checks.

  As the systems signaled green and ready, the sensory overload of the last few chaotic hours flowed away, leaving Victoria physically drained but mentally hyper-sensitive.

  Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and J.D. settled into their places in the circle. Zev drew himself into one of the places reserved for auxiliary, temporary members of the alien contact team, a place next to J.D.

  Victoria glanced at each of her teammates in turn.

  “Ready?”

  “Let’s go.”

  At Victoria’s signal, the observation ports cleared and the explorer moved smoothly out of its dock. Starfarer fell away, its sail illuminated and filled by the new starlight.

  They all gazed at their first close-up view of an alien star system.

  A display formed, mimicking the system but exaggerating the planets so they would appear larger than pinpoints. Victoria compared the display to the system before them and showed her teammates the tiny disks of the planets, one half-full, and the other, closer one a slender crescent accompanied by the smaller crescent of its satellite.

  “Christ on a unicorn,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “I’m recording now,” Victoria said, “and transmitting back to Starfarer. We have not one but two terrestrial worlds — the second and third planets of the system — orbiting Tau Ceti. Starfarer entered the system midway between the two orbits. A large moon, approaching lunar proportions, circles the inner terrestrial planet. The signal we are receiving emanates from that inner planet.”

  “From its moon,” J.D.
said hesitantly.

  “You’re right,” Victoria said, surprised.

  Arachne’s web remained unstable, inconsistent. Victoria created a display and routed the signal into it. A holographic image formed at the center of their circle.

  “This beacon wasn’t meant to reach outside the system,” Victoria said. “It’s too weak. It was waiting. Waiting for us.”

  J.D. suddenly giggled. “Look at that.”

  Acting as a two-dimensional screen, the hologram laid out the transmission a single picture element at a time, in a Sagan frame one prime number of pixels wide by a second, different prime number of pixels high. A handsbreadth of the image was already visible, some structure already detectable.

  “This is incredible,” Victoria said. “We’re getting it right the first time.”

  “It’ll be a map,” Satoshi said with a smile.

  “Genetic structure,” Stephen Thomas said, joining in the game they had often played, of trying to decide how one alien intelligence would attempt its first communication with another.

  “Uh-uh,” Victoria said. “Electron orbitals.”

  “It won’t be any of those things,” J.D. said. “I don’t know what it will be, but it will be something different.”

  “How will you reply?” Satoshi asked.

  “Good question,” Stephen Thomas said. “We’ve got a little explaining to do.”

  They watched as the beacon built up another scan-line of black-or-white dots. Victoria began to think she could make out the pattern that was forming to greet her.

  “What can you say to an alien being,” she said, “after you’ve announced yourself with a thermonuclear explosion?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Joy and excitement filled J.D.’s voice. “I guess I’ll just have to wing it.”

  The End

  Dedication

  To Michael, Holly, Terry, Leroy, Sue, for believing in the starship before it existed;

  To Ryan for the video and Steve for the t-shirts;

  and, of course,

  To Majel and Gene for encouragement at the airport.

  The Starfarers Quartet

  Starfarers

  Transition

  Metaphase

  Nautilus

  Acknowledgments

  Starfarer is based on the work of Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, the founder of the Space Studies Institute. His speculations on the ways human beings might live and work and thrive in space added immeasurably to the background of my novel and to the structure of Starfarer.

  Dr. John G. Cramer, nuclear physicist and sf novelist in his own right, the author of Twistor and Einstein’s Bridge, once again offered his expertise and advice. I’m grateful for his help with Starfarer’s propulsion systems, among other things, and glad that he is still willing to speak to me despite my fascination with faster-than-light starship drives.

  A conversation with Howard Davidson gave me the idea for sensory artists.

  The organizers of Orycon, Portland’s sf convention, gave Starfarers programming time for several years running, until the members of the starship’s alien contact department took over and demanded that I write their story.

  Only I can be held responsible for the wilder social, political, or biological speculations of Starfarer.

  Publication Information

  Starfarers

  First published by Ace Books, 1989

  Bantam Books reprint 1994

  Copyright © 1989 Vonda N. McIntyre

  Book View Café eBook 2009

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  “Gold Wire”

  Cover art by Robert Brandt

  http://texbrandt.com/

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  Transition

  Vonda N. McIntyre

  Chapter 1

  J.D. Sauvage, the alien contact specialist, drifted in zero g and waited for a message from an unknown civilization.

  She floated alone in the observer’s circle. The circle’s transparent chamber, projecting from one edge of the explorer spacecraft Chi, offered a two-hundred-seventy degree view of the Milky Way, of the star Tau Ceti’s second planet, and of Tau Ceti II’s satellite. When J.D. oriented herself with Chi at her back, she could imagine herself to be completely surrounded by silent space. The galaxy extended from one edge of her peripheral vision to the other, a great dense spangled disk of light stretching before her, extending behind her.

  She had too much to look at. She wanted to laugh and shout with excitement. She was an alien contact specialist: she had spent her life studying for a job that, until today, did not exist. Until today, she had no way of being sure her job ever would exist.

  A computer-generated image formed in the center of the observer’s circle, drawing her attention from the sights outside. She watched, rapt, as a new shiver of shadow and light intensified the image and added to its density.

  The alien message hovered, forming slowly between J.D. and the stars. Each bit of information strengthened the image as a whole. Tense with anticipation, J.D. urged it on, as if the force of her will could speed the transmission. As yet, she could not be sure of a pattern within it; she could extract no information.

  Chi plunged toward the source of the message. J.D. felt tempted to accelerate, to expend fuel recklessly, to reach the destination a few minutes or a few hours sooner. She restrained the urge. It was unnecessary, unwise.

  The on-board computer processed another block of data and added it to the message from alien beings. The image grew denser, but no more detailed.

  J.D. kept thinking she could detect a pattern, but the pattern she thought she saw kept changing. Her mind was trying to impose organization on the iridescent gray blur.

  Be patient, she told herself. It will have structure, like the first frame. Maybe the meaning of the second frame will be clearer.

  She touched the on-board computer via her link, asking it to place the first frame of the alien communication side by side with the second.

  A complex symbol formed before her. The first section of the alien message was as complicated as the second, so far, was simple. The maze looked like a curtain, a tapestry, intricately beautiful, beautifully complex. Paths led across its surface, disappeared within and beneath each other, widened and split like the streams of a river delta, narrowed and disappeared. Chi’s computer had traced a single unobstructed path leading from the design’s edge to its center. The path lay in gold light, a meander of fractal complexity. It touched every part of the surface. Yet it never crossed itself. It twisted and turned and backtracked, but never knotted or tangled.

  Chi’s computer, and all four members of the alien contact department, and all the several hundred people back on board the starship Starfarer, had tried and failed to make sense of the pattern. Perhaps its esoteric form required more computer power that Starfarer’s crippled systems could offer right now, or more ingenuity than the members of the deep space expedition had been able to apply. Perhaps it was so alien that human minds and human machines could not comprehend it. Or perhaps, as J.D. preferred to believe, it possessed no inherent meaning except what its observer brought to it. J.D. believed it was art, an esthetic expression so important to the alien beings that they used it as an introduction.

  J.D. wished that Arachne, Starfarer’s fundamental bioelectronic computer, would complete its healing. She wondered what Arachne would make of the alien message. Besides, she missed Arachne’s information web as much as she would have missed her hands or her eyes.

  On Starfarer and on Chi, many ma
chines were artificial intelligences, and most possessed at least the level of competence referred to as artificial stupidity. J.D. had access to the physical and analytical services of a myriad of auxiliary computers, ASes and AIs alike. Nevertheless, she preferred her connection to Arachne. Without it, she felt detached and lonely. She was impatient for the computer web to finish reconstructing itself. The backups were flavorless, boring, and nearly as involved with Arachne’s restoration as Arachne itself.

  The second frame of the alien message shivered again, intensifying by another shade. Still J.D. could detect no structure.

  She left the second image in the center of the observers’ circle, but pushed the labyrinth behind her. When it was in sight it distracted her, constantly pulling at her vision. Now she could look at it, if she liked, by glancing over her shoulder. The translucent pattern hovered, obscuring the entryway between the observer’s circle and Chi’s main body.

  J.D. let her attention expand beyond the observers’ circle, into the alien star system. The most striking feature within her view was the system’s second planet. The Earthlike world revolved around Tau Ceti, the G8-type star that lay out of J.D.’s sight, obscured by the flank of Chi. Around the planet revolved a large satellite, airless and dead as Earth’s moon.

  But Tau Ceti II was alive, clearly and lushly alive. Weather and seas and continents patterned its surface. Already the alien contact team, and their colleagues on the starship, had mapped forests and plains, deserts and tundra and icecaps, river systems and ocean currents, great herds of beasts.

  The third planet of Tau Ceti also possessed life, and an environment habitable by human beings. But Tau Ceti III was on the far side of its star, in relation to Tau Ceti II, so far away that from Chi’s vantage point it was no more than a tiny disk of light.

  J.D. considered the implications of finding, in the first star system human beings had ever visited, two worlds possessing life. Her excitement rose toward exultation. Life was not unique to Earth. It was not even rare.