The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Feral tried again, as he did every few minutes, to hook in with Arachne. It rebuffed him, but he could feel the increase in its awareness and complexity. It was healing. But it would not, or could not, give him enough of its capabilities to be of any use to him. He would be last in line to get Arachne’s attention and a place in the web; since he was not a member of the expedition, he had only the limited access of a guest.

  He had his suspicions about who had crashed the web. Almost everyone on board Starfarer believed it must have been someone on the carrier that had chased Starfarer to transition. Feral understood wanting to believe no expedition member could be responsible for the malevolent attack. He wanted to believe it himself. But he thought the desire led to easy answers. Easy, wrong answers.

  He had some ideas about finding the right answer.

  Since he could not be on board Chi, he was in his favorite spot, so far, in Starfarer. The sailhouse was a small, completely transparent cylinder suspended between the starship and the stellar sail, attached to Starfarer only by an access tunnel. In the sailhouse, in zero g, Feral had experienced transition.

  At the far curve of the sailhouse, Iphigenie DuPre hunched quiet and concentrated over a hard link.

  She would have direct access to Arachne if anyone did. In normal space, Iphigenie and the computer navigated the starship. Even if she could not yet connect with Arachne, Iphigenie could link directly with any number of auxiliary computers. Nevertheless, she was using the relatively slow and awkward hard link to control the stellar sail. The ship had come barreling out of transition, faster than they ever intended, arriving blind in the Tau Ceti system. Iphigenie had to put Starfarer on the proper path.

  The musical readouts of the sensors whispered and sang. They spoke a language Feral did not know, and without Arachne neither could he translate it. The notes created chords, harmonies, melodies. Every so often he heard a sour note, a minor triad. He knew that was not right. But there was nothing he could do but watch and remember, and keep trying to talk to Arachne to record his words and insights.

  From the sailhouse, Feral could see the enormous sail stretched out across space like a flat silver parachute, slowing the starship’s headlong plunge through the system. In the other direction lay the two huge cylinders that made up Starfarer: the campus and the wild side. He could see the mirrors that conveyed sunlight or starlight to the interior. Beyond it all hung Tau Ceti II and its satellite: a blue-green three-quarter disk, and a smaller, beaten-silver oval.

  He could not see Tau Ceti, the star, itself. No nearby star would ever be visible from inside the sailhouse. Starfarer, in its present orientation, shadowed the sailhouse. Had it not, the transparent wall would have darkened to hide the blazing disk of the sun. In shadow, the whole sailhouse remained transparent. It responded to radiation, visible or otherwise, by darkening and shielding the inhabitants. Feral was extremely grateful for the shielding properties of the sailhouse, and glad they were much more powerful than they needed to be to protect him from sunlight. If they had not been, he and Iphigenie would both have been fried by the radiation of the nuclear explosion.

  Feral pushed off gently and floated toward Iphigenie.

  Strange that the sailhouse had remained transparent all during transition. Feral recalled that brief experience.

  Disorientation overtook him, unexpectedly, powerfully. Without thinking, he reached for any handhold. Instead, he sent himself tumbling. He brushed past Iphigenie, bumping her with enough force to push her away from the hard link.

  “What — ?”

  Feral bounced off the side of the sailhouse. He managed to damp some of his spin, then had to wait, tumbling foolishly, until the air slowed and stopped him. Iphigenie had already brought herself back to stillness. She watched him, puzzled.

  “Are you still here? What is the matter?”

  “I was trying to think of a way to describe... what we experienced during transition.”

  “Oh,” she said. She hesitated. “I think that isn’t a good idea.”

  “You can’t do it, either?”

  “I was very busy,” she said defensively.

  “No, you weren’t,” Feral said. “The sail was furled. Your work was finished. You drifted here right beside me and stared out at —”

  “Stop it,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “You have to understand,” Iphigenie said. “When Arachne crashed, I went from complete sensory load to nothing, to emptiness. What we saw, felt, experienced, what I felt during transition... That was like being hooked in deep to Arachne, but a hundred times over, and with my body as well as my mind. Now that’s gone, too. I’m isolated. Disconnected from reality. And I don’t know if...”

  Her voice trailed off.

  Feral drifted closer, reached out tentatively, touched Iphigenie’s hand. She was shivering. He put his arms around her and held her, hoping he was doing the right thing, hoping that human contact was what she needed to repair her connections to reality. He stroked the smooth tight braids of her hair and rubbed the back of her neck, the sensitive concavities where the skull joins the spine, till she stopped trembling.

  “Maybe once through transition was enough?” Feral asked gently.

  “May be,” Iphigenie said. “It may be.” She drew away from him, patting his hand.

  “I understand,” Feral said. And he did, though he did not agree. He looked forward to experiencing transition again.

  But he could not think of words to describe it. This troubled and annoyed him. It was his job to think of words to describe it.

  Feral was the only reporter on board Starfarer. Other writers with more experience and better connections might have gone out with the expedition, if it had departed on schedule. It had not: it had departed early and in confusion, to keep the military from taking over the ship.

  Feral was supposed to have gone back to Earth, but he had never even boarded the transport. He felt embarrassed for his selfishness, but he was glad things had gone wrong. If they had gone right, he would never have been able to stay.

  For a journalist three years out of school, he had decent connections. But it took better than decent connections to pull EarthSpace strings. He was free-lance, surviving on royalties from the global communications web. When people read his work, he got paid. The money had increased, this past year, as his stories gained more notice. Enough money to live on and enough money to travel freely off Earth were two very different things. He had no sponsors; “sponsored independence” was, as far as Feral was concerned, an oxymoron. He had bought his own ticket into space, like any tourist, and he had pulled in nearly all the obligations anyone had ever owed him to get on board the starship.

  But it was worth it. It was certainly worth it.

  o0o

  Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov lay on the floor in the main room of his house, stretched out on a small threadbare rug in a patch of alien sunlight. He watched the hard link, focusing on the image of the alien transmission.

  On board the starship, arguments, confusion, and perplexity all hung suspended while the faculty and staff and even the transport passengers watched the communication. Like the members of the alien contact team, they, too, tried to make sense of it.

  It disturbed Kolya. Why should it arrive at such a leisurely pace? Perhaps the aliens lived at a rate entirely different from that of human beings. Or perhaps they thought travelers to their system might function very slowly.

  The cosmonaut tried to persuade himself that one of those possibilities was true, but he found that he believed neither.

  You’re just feeling more paranoid that usual, he told himself. Exhaustion and pain will do that to you. You are much too old to wrestle with nuclear warheads.

  He wondered how J.D. was, whether she ached, as he did, from their struggle with the nuclear missile.

  I should be grateful I’m not a handful of radioactive dust, Kolya thought, rather than bemoaning my aged muscles. Still, I ache.

  He fo
und that he badly wanted to talk to J.D. Sauvage about the alien message.

  He put his cigarette to his lips and drew hard on it before he remembered he had not lit it. He never lit a cigarette inside; the smoke detector was too sensitive.

  He spat out a shred of tobacco. He was trying to quit. He had been trying to quit for decades. He was probably the only human being left alive who still smoked.

  And he was, finally, running out of the cigarettes he had begged, borrowed, and bribed people to smuggle into space for him. It was years since he had even found a source, and the few remaining packages had acquired a strange off taste. Freezing in liquid nitrogen was supposed to preserve things indefinitely, but as far as Kolya Petrovich was concerned, liquid nitrogen imparted its own unpleasant flavor.

  Kolya was not a scientist. He had been a test pilot, a cosmonaut, a guerrilla fighter. Now he was a man under sentence of death in what had been his homeland. Only off Earth could he be safe.

  Safe. His smile was ironic. Not for the first time, he thought: I’m probably the only person in the universe who’s safer on board Starfarer than I would be back on Earth.

  He put the unlit cigarette back in his cigarette case and slipped the case into his pocket.

  I must quit, he told himself. I am witness to the first message from alien beings, and I am thinking about nicotine.

  The hard link’s focus changed from the alien message to Victoria Fraser MacKenzie.

  “The transmission has stopped,” she said.

  Kolya forgot about nicotine. Staring into the frozen image on the hard link in his parlor, he rose, fumbling for the audio controls. Tangled voices spilled out as people on Starfarer reacted to her announcement.

  Kolya listened, but no one suggested a good reason for the termination of the message. His unease increased.

  “It must be Arachne.” Kolya recognized the voice of Gerald Hemminge, the upper-class British administrator who was assistant chancellor of Starfarer. The duties of Gerald’s position included acting as liaison between the starship and the Chi. He must be feeling ambivalent about the job, for he had been among those who argued for allowing the United States military to recommission Starfarer. He had opposed the decision to keep going. He had tried to go home.

  Gerald had been on the transport that Starfarer dragged along with it to the Tau Ceti system.

  “It must be the crash of the web,” Gerald said. “The message could still be coming, but...”

  Arachne had taken months to create itself and its communications web. It had begun to evolve with the superstructure of the starship, and had taken as long to form as the starship had to build. Perhaps it would take months to reform, after its inexplicable crash. No doubt the accident would change it. But, then, it grew and evolved and changed all the time.

  “Could be, but I don’t think we’re getting anything at the antenna. What about you, Victoria?”

  Kolya did not recognize the second voice. Though he had been living on board the starship since it was barely habitable, he had not gone out of his way to make friends here. He had lived the life of a hermit, letting his fame, or infamy, form a wall between him and the other people on board. He wished he had not isolated himself quite so efficiently.

  Victoria MacKenzie’s voice reached Starfarer after a second or two of transmission delay.

  “But our image is the one that’s frozen,” she said. “It has nothing to do with Arachne. The antenna is working fine. I don’t have any more ideas, Avvaiyar. We’ll continue to broadcast our own message, and we’ll keep on going toward the alien source.”

  Kolya reached out to Arachne, wanting to send a message to J.D. But Arachne still was not ready to reply to a human being. Though the web had begun to restore its most important function, its control over the starship, it still lacked the attention to spare to handle trivial things like personal messages.

  Who crashed the web? Kolya wondered, for the thousandth time since the shocking failure of the starship’s control systems. Who would do such a thing?

  People remained in the health center, recovering from the effects of being involved with the system when it failed. Other people had gone back to work who probably should still be recovering. Deliberately crashing the system was a criminal act. It could have been murder. Only by sheer good luck had no one been killed.

  Kolya hoped the deed had been done by someone outside Starfarer, someone on board the warship that had chased them to the point of transition.

  Crashing the web from outside should not have been possible. Crashing it from inside should not have been possible, either. Yet the system had crashed.

  Kolya did not belong to the support group backing the alien contact team; he held no claim to the ship’s strained communications resources. If he wanted to talk to J.D. about the transmission, he would have to go to the liaison office and ask to call her directly.

  He wanted to talk to her; he wished he were on board the Chi, but he was not a member of the alien contact team.

  On the other hand, neither was Zev.

  Kolya tried to suppress his resentment of the young diver. He failed. The diver had no space experience, no training: he had no right to be on the explorer. Kolya envied him bitterly.

  But perhaps he belongs there, Kolya thought. Alone among us, he has lived with a non-human sentient species. Perhaps he does deserve to be there, after all.

  o0o

  The image of the alien transmission remained unchanged.

  Victoria reached out a query to the Chi’s computer and tested it again. It responded properly, innocent of locking up. Nor had the antenna drifted.

  “The moon’s rotating, isn’t it?” Stephen Thomas said hopefully. “Maybe the transmitter’s gone over the horizon.”

  “It’s got relays,” Victoria said. “The signal didn’t waver from the time we picked it up to the time we lost it. It didn’t drift. It didn’t fade. It just stopped.” Stephen Thomas could look at the same information and see the abrupt blink from full signal to nothing.

  “I still think it’s saving battery power,” Stephen Thomas said. “Or maybe—”

  “What’s the point in speculating?” Satoshi said. “If you make up reasons all day, we’ll be no closer to knowing the answer than we were when you started.”

  Stephen Thomas fell silent, his expression hurt.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Satoshi said. “I just—”

  “Never mind. You’re right. You don’t have to apologize when you’re right.”

  “Aren’t we,” J.D. said hesitantly, “transmitting to Starfarer?” Her voice was soft, as if the microphones might not pick up her words if she spoke quietly enough.

  Stephen Thomas muttered a curse. Victoria hoped the microphones could not pick up what he had said.

  “You are transmitting, you know.”

  Gerald Hemminge must have spoken at the same moment as J.D., but his voice had taken a couple of seconds to cross the distance from Starfarer.

  “I’ve interrupted the relay to public address,” he said. His tone was not nearly so mild as J.D.’s. “You may tell me when you’re finished arguing... unless you have some particular purpose in doing it in public.”

  Satoshi’s rueful chuckle earned him a glare from Stephen Thomas.

  “Immortalized forever,” Satoshi said. “A historic moment. Warts and all.”

  “Thank you, Gerald,” Victoria said. Though Satoshi got along with the assistant chancellor, Victoria did not, and Stephen Thomas disliked him intensely. Gerald had no obligation to protect them from themselves. “We’re exhausted, and this new development has thrown us all. But we’re finished arguing, I think.”

  She glanced at Stephen Thomas, who glowered back as if to say, “Who, me? I never argue.”

  “The day hasn’t been easy for me, either, you know,” Gerald said. “I have no computer support and several eminent passengers demanding to go home. A demand with which I concur, not that you are likely to listen to me now any more than you did befo
re we left.”

  Victoria did not rise to the argument. “If you’ll put me back on public address,” she said, “I’ll sign us off and shut down the voice transmission for a while.”

  Several seconds passed.

  “Very well,” Gerald said.

  “I’m locking Channel One onto the image of the alien message,” Victoria said for the benefit of the observers on board the starship. “Unless the broadcast starts up again, there’s not much we can do till we arrive at the point of origin. At least I can’t think of anything else to do. I’m open to suggestions. Channel Two is the view in our direction of travel. We’ll begin transmitting as we approach orbital insertion. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie out.”

  “The public audio’s off,” Gerald said a moment later.

  “Thank you, Gerald,” Victoria said. “Avvaiyar, don’t hesitate to call me if you learn anything new.”

  “Victoria, my friend,” the astronomer said, “I couldn’t tell you everything new I was learning in less than three days. But if anything new comes up that relates to the alien message, I’ll call immediately.”

  Avvaiyar’s interests focused at the rarefied point where physics and cosmology intersected. When it came to their professional disciplines, only when she and Victoria discussed cosmic string did either have any idea what the other was talking about.

  “Good,” Victoria said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  She shut down all the audio channels and rubbed her eyes. She could not remember when she had felt so tired.

  Victoria glanced at her teammates. J.D. was still embarrassed, her fair skin flushed. Satoshi was amused. Stephen Thomas hated to look silly; he was sulking, but his natural good humor would reassert itself soon.

  She could probably tease him out of his mood. Victoria tried to summon up enough energy to tease him. She failed.