The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “‘Intellectually,’” J.D. said. One of the most difficult questions for the starship’s planners had been whether Starfarer should or should not be armed.

  “The truth is, it frightens me that we’re unarmed. That you’re unarmed.” He laughed, but the tone was self-deprecating. “I’m sorry. I’ve called you to tell you my fears. To worry you, at best. To tell you to be careful.”

  She was genuinely touched. “Thank you, Kolya,” she said. “I will be careful.”

  After Kolya Cherenkov had signed off, Stephen Thomas whistled softly.

  “He’s been through experiences none of us will ever come close to. We ought to listen to his perceptions.”

  J.D. glanced at the labyrinth and at the half-completed message. Despite Kolya’s fears, she could find nothing ominous within the maze. Within the second message, she could find nothing at all.

  “Can you see anything there, Zev?” she asked. “Any pattern?”

  “Only waves,” Zev said.

  “Yes.” It was like seeing animals and faces in clouds. The mind looked for familiar patterns. What more familiar pattern could Zev see, than waves?

  J.D. yawned. She glanced over at Zev. He was wide awake, interested, alert. She envied him his energy and his youth.

  “When will we get there?” he said. “Will we be able to swim?”

  “We probably aren’t going to the planet,” J.D. said. “Not this trip. Maybe when Starfarer arrives with more support. For now we’re just going to the planet’s moon.”

  “Oh,” Zev said, disappointed.

  J.D. glanced back at the transmission. For a moment she thought it had resumed, but like the patterns in the clouds, in the waves, the perception was a trick of her mind. The image remained steady, unchanging.

  “Zev...” J.D. said. “If you were swimming with your family, and somebody you didn’t know came toward you making a lot of unpleasant noise, what would the divers do? What would the orcas do?”

  Zev looked at her curiously. “We would all swim away,” he said. “Of course.”

  Chapter 2

  A few hours later, the Chi slipped into orbit around Tau Ceti II’s satellite. The intelligence systems guided it, sending it on a course that took the Chi over the source of the alien transmission.

  As the barren lava plains of Tau Ceti II’s moon passed above the transparent ceiling of the observers’ circle, an image formed in the centre of the chamber.

  J.D. gazed at the first alien construction humans had ever seen. Her pulse raced. She wanted to jump up and cry out: We’re here! Answer us, come out and meet us! We’re here!

  “Not much to look at, is it?” Stephen Thomas said.

  J.D. tried to think of a way to express her awe at the sight of the low, nondescript dome, but words failed her. She thought she might be able to write about it.

  “Neither are you, Stephen Thomas, just now,” Victoria said mildly.

  His bruises had begun to fade, at the edges, to a livid purple. He looked like he was wearing lopsided horror-movie makeup.

  “What did you expect?” Victoria asked. “Crystal towers? Golden palaces? The plains of Nazca?”

  “I would have settled for any of those over a gray pimple,” he said. “I’d even settle for a gray pimple, if I thought there was anybody inside it.”

  “It’s very practical,” J.D. said. “Looks like it’s made of native rock. It could have been there for a long time. Maybe even millennia.”

  Satoshi glanced at the image of the plain gray teardrop-shaped dome, then returned his attention to the image of Tau Ceti II itself.

  “That’s probably true,” he said. “Especially the last.”

  “What are you finding?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing!” Stephen Thomas exclaimed. “Nothing? Nothing but two living worlds!”

  “All I meant was —”

  “—that you can’t find any roads. Big deal.”

  “Or any other kind of transportation network, or cities, or lights.”

  “Or rampant environmental destruction.”

  Satoshi gestured with his chin toward the dome. “So who built that?”

  “People who do a better job of cohabiting with their environment than we do with ours.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Satoshi said.

  “We’re overlooking entire worlds on account of a bunch of radio impulses coming from a sterile satellite.”

  “We’re all anxious to visit the planets,” Victoria said to Stephen Thomas. “But the transmission had to take precedence. Don’t you agree?”

  “Maybe it would have been bad manners to come flying in here and ignore it,” he said. “But we didn’t. We tried to answer it. We pretty much assumed it would be automated, and we were right. Nobody’s home.”

  “We’ve got time,” Victoria said. “Plenty of time to investigate the dome and plenty of time to visit Tau Ceti II and III.”

  “I know how Stephen Thomas feels,” J.D. said. “What I want to do is explode in a thousand pieces and send each one off exploring.”

  “Please.” Victoria’s smile looked rather forced. “We’ve had enough explosions for one trip already.”

  J.D. chuckled, relieved that Victoria could make a joke. She hoped they were all finding their equilibrium again. But Stephen Thomas gazed at the low gray dome, kneading his hands together and radiating his disinclination to stop anywhere but on the surface of the planet.

  J.D. understood his impatience. While Victoria and Satoshi had plenty to do, neither J.D. nor Stephen Thomas could begin their jobs until the next phase of exploration. A lifeless world was of very little interest to a geneticist. For J.D., an uninhabited alien habitation might be a tremendous discovery, yet it was an incredible anticlimax for an alien contact specialist.

  She tried to look at it from a hopeful standpoint. “Stephen Thomas, there may be living beings in the dome.”

  “There aren’t,” he said.

  “Oh,” J.D. said, keeping her voice carefully neutral.

  J.D. felt both Victoria and Satoshi stiffen up, their skepticism evident; she saw Zev glance curiously at Stephen Thomas, then at her, then at Victoria and Satoshi. He must be wondering what parts of the conversation he was missing, how ordinary humans expressed what the divers and the orcas expressed in sounds that enfolded the whole body. J.D. wondered what nuances she was missing because Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas knew each other intimately and she could not enter their triangle.

  “Hey, it’s too bad if that isn’t something you want to hear,” Stephen Thomas said. “But nobody’s down there.”

  “You’ll forgive us if we double-check your messages from beyond, my dear,” Victoria said dryly.

  “Sure,” Stephen Thomas said. “It isn’t as if I’m not used to it.”

  J.D. realized — startling herself with the realization — that she accepted Stephen Thomas’s assertion. She believed the dome would be empty, though she had only his intuition and the ending of the transmission as evidence.

  “There’s no activity around it,” J.D. said. “Nothing that looks like a ship. No broadcast activity on the frequencies you expect people to be using. Maybe it’s just set up to signal to us when we arrived. And when we signaled back, its job was over.”

  “That dome is a hundred meters across,” Satoshi said. “You don’t need an entire base to transmit a short range signal. You can do that with a beacon, what, this big?” He opened his arms, shaping the antenna with his hands.

  “I know, but...”

  Victoria pushed herself back against the cushions of her lounge. Her long graceful fingers clenched around the open safety straps, tight with tension.

  “It’s too bad we didn’t have our six months in Earth orbit,” Victoria said. “We needed that time, for us to learn to work as a team and for Starfarer to become a community. We didn’t have it. So now we have to do the best we can. I think we should land on the satellite. Satoshi?”

  “Yes,”
he said. “The satellite.”

  “Stephen Thomas?”

  “The planet.”

  “J.D.?”

  She hesitated, irrationally tempted to side with Stephen Thomas.

  “The satellite,” she said. “The dome.”

  Victoria glanced back to Stephen Thomas.

  “I wish you’d just outvote me, clean and simple,” he said. “But I won’t break consensus. The moon.”

  “The satellite it is. On the next orbit.”

  “But this orientation is making me dizzy,” Stephen Thomas said. “I feel like we’re flying upside-down.”

  “That I can fix,” Victoria said. The Chi rotated one hundred eighty degrees. Now, in relation to the observers’ couches, the surface of the satellite lay “below,” instead of “above.”

  “Don’t I get a vote?” Zev asked.

  “No, Zev,” Victoria said. “You don’t get a vote.”

  Looking down through the transparent floor of the observer’s circle, they passed over craters and flat, unscarred plains.

  The Chi sped past the terminator and entered night. Tau Ceti’s light winked out as the upper curve of the star passed beneath the satellite’s horizon. The faint gray luminescence of the holographic image illuminated the observers’ circle.

  The Chi sailed on through darkness.

  o0o

  Infinity Mendez felt bone-tired. Unwilling to rest without one last inspection of the damage to the starship, he clambered along the cables strung around the ship. Starfarer loomed above him. Its motion spun him over the stars.

  Starfarer’s two huge hollow cylinders revolved to produce the effect of about seven-tenths of one gravity on their inner surfaces. All the people lived in one half the ship, in the pleasant, pastoral campus cylinder. The wild cylinder existed as a backup, an ecological storehouse, a safety net. People visited the wild side; they camped out in it. But no one lived there.

  The bulk of each cylinder consisted of moon rock, flung into space and fused together with rock foam. The thick skin protected the living areas from the extremes of space: radiation, hard vacuum, intolerable temperature fluctuations. The outer surface looked unfinished, rubbly in some places and smooth in others. Inspection cables traced a network all around the outside. Beneath the surface, service corridors and storage compartments and utility tunnels and the water system snaked through, like veins and bones and nerves in an organic body.

  Only a few people were left on board who knew the body from the outer skin on in, who had helped to build it. Infinity Mendez was one of those people.

  Since the missile attack, he had needed his space construction experience. Though he had not used it in several years, it came back fast in time of necessity. The damage control team had come out here as soon as the radiation fell to a safe level. Infinity had been working for hours, sparing a small part of his attention, now and again, to listen in on the reports of the alien contact department.

  He reached the crater where the missile had hit. He sat on a cable with his feet dangling above the stars, where he could lean back and look up at the damage. To his satisfaction, a layer of silver covered the jumbled interior. The crater looked as if it were filled with mercury, its surface set visibly trembling by imperceptible vibrations.

  The crater had begun to heal. Infinity and the other members of the emergency committee had worked constantly since the starship left transition, checking out the damage, double-checking the reports of the ASes and AIs, and swearing at their lack of access to Arachne. Infinity could have used the powerful intelligence of the computer to help put the repair plan into action.

  The missile’s crater was like a wound in Starfarer’s side. The missile had slammed into the starship, penetrating the skin. Most of the damage occurred deeper, not from the missile itself but from the shock wave of its impact. At the focus of the shock wave, on the inner surface of the ship, the genetics building lay in ruins.

  Had the warhead detonated while it was still stuck in Starfarer’s skin, the damage would have been much greater.

  I was practically right over it, he thought. He shivered, then laughed at himself for his retroactive fear. If the missile had detonated while Infinity had been looking for the cause of the shock wave, he would have been one of the lucky ones. Vaporized, probably, along with Kolya Cherenkov and J.D. Sauvage and the visitor, Griffith, who said he was from the Government Accountability Office. Infinity did not know who Griffith really was, but he was not from the GAO.

  This was the second time in his life that Infinity had narrowly missed being at ground zero of a nuclear explosion. The first time he was too young to worry about it. He had never seen the results; the government allowed no one into the southwest who did not have a high security clearance. Infinity Mendez did not qualify. He suspected that Griffith did.

  The story held the status of a myth, a destruction myth, in the heart of anyone who had been from the Southwest. Infinity sometimes thought he had come into space in search of a creation myth, to balance his soul.

  Infinity did not want to think about ground zero back on Earth or aboard Starfarer. He did not want to consider the explosive decompression that would have hit the rest of the cylinder if the skin had been breached. People would have died of asphyxiation, of heat and pressure, of trauma. If the ship had survived at all, most of the people left alive would have died of radiation poisoning.

  Starfarer owed its existence to J.D. Sauvage and Kolya Cherenkov. Infinity wondered if anyone had thought to thank them. He knew where J.D. was. He was not so sure about Kolya.

  The ship was lucky. The isolation doors had worked, sealing themselves around the wound, keeping the loss of air and water to a tolerable level. Now the repair had begun. Exterior ASes congregated at the damage site, their amorphous silver bodies covering the broken surface. Some of the silver slugs dissolved debris, some reformed it into the proper patterns. Wherever Infinity could see rock between conglomerations of slugs, the surface looked smoother. The slugs extruded rock foam to ooze between the cracks and seal them. Scar tissue had begun to form.

  And there is going to be a scar, Infinity thought. No help for it.

  Starfarer should have been safe from impact damage. The skin of the starship could easily resist hits from space junk. Arachne tracked larger pieces of rock or trash, warned against them, and gave the starship time to avoid the rare asteroid that might approach. Everyone knew about, and accepted, the one point of real, if minuscule, danger: leaving transition blind, re-emerging into space with no absolute knowledge of what lay in Starfarer’s path.

  Starfarer had never been designed to withstand the attack of a nuclear missile.

  But the ship was healing, and Infinity felt that he could rest.

  Despite his exhaustion, he gave himself the gift of a moment looking down at the stars.

  Below him, beyond the inspection web, constellations spun past. They were as recognizable as if he were still in the solar system. The distance between the sun and Tau Ceti, so unimaginably far for human comprehension, meant nothing to the patterns of the stars.

  o0o

  Starlight touched the edges of dark craters, and the Chi moved through night.

  Stephen Thomas scanned Satoshi’s data from the surface of Tau Ceti II, pointing out, at J.D.’s request, what a geneticist could learn from the raw chemical makeup of the atmosphere, the seas, the land surface, from the polarization of light and the colors of the vegetation.

  Though they needed no complicated mechanisms to detect life on the world — it was obvious to the naked eye from quite a distance — the more detailed information hinted that Tau Ceti II might be astonishingly compatible with Earthly evolution. Attractive as that sounded, it troubled J.D.

  “It ought to be more different,” Stephen Thomas said. His current interest centered around speculative biochemistry. He wanted to look at alien inheritance; he expected, and hoped, to find information-carrying molecules made up of something other than nucleic acids.

/>   “Why haven’t they colonized?” Satoshi muttered.

  “Hmm?” Victoria said, intent on the dome. It grew slowly; in a minute or two the image would fade, because they would be able to see the structure itself through the observation port.

  “Tau Ceti II is temperate,” he said. “It has an oxidizing atmosphere, liquid water, dry land, and life forms evolutionarily well in advance of whatever passes here for blue-green algae. But there’s no evidence of the kind of technology that’s necessary to support building a base. Or a transmitter. So: where are the people who built it? Where did they come from, where did they go, and why didn’t they stick around to live on this pretty little world?”

  “I read a story once,” Zev said. “The people breathed methane and lived in a sea of liquid nitrogen. Maybe the beings didn’t like this world.”

  J.D. knew the story he was talking about. He had read it in a book from her library. It had been written in the early days of science fiction, when the principles of speculation had more to do with imagination than scientific plausibility.

  “I don’t think I believe in methane-breathers,” Victoria said. “Or aliens with superconductors for nerve fibers. But you could be right in essence. For some reason, they didn’t like it. They couldn’t find a part of it hot enough, or cold enough, for their tastes.”

  “They’ve got a big range to choose from,” Satoshi said. “They’d have to need it way below freezing or practically at a simmer, not to find anywhere they’d want to live.”

  “Or dry or wet or dark or light — they just didn’t like it.”

  “More likely the biological molecules are all the opposite isomers of what they need,” Stephen Thomas said. “Right-handed instead of left-handed, or vice-versa. So whatever grows here is completely incompatible with their systems, and they can’t grow anything of their own. We could have the same problem.”

  “Maybe they left it for us,” J.D. said.

  Victoria’s brow furrowed. “That’s an interesting speculation.”