The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  She wished working in a vacuum were as easy as working underwater. The suit did not weigh much here, but it did not disappear from her perception like the artificial lung. The suit surrounded her with its new smell, and with the faint low rustles and creaks and hums of its workings. Her stomach growled. The organic sound startled her, and reminded her that she had been too nervous to eat breakfast.

  A drop of sweat rolled down her temple, making her take notice of the increasing warmth. Only a little distance farther, if the corridor were passable, and she would no longer be able to tolerate the temperature. So far, she had seen nothing but the empty maze.

  She paused, watching, waiting, wondering if something would try to stop her, or send her back, or lose her. But she saw nothing to frighten her, nothing she could perceive as a threat.

  J.D. thought that perhaps she ought to narrate her exploration for the benefit of her teammates and for the people watching back on Starfarer. When she tried to think of something to say, she realized she would only be describing the tunnels. Anyone watching the video feed could see them as well as she. She did not want to describe her feelings about them.

  “J.D. —”

  She started at Victoria’s voice, then relaxed.

  “ — we’re getting some interference. The signal strength is falling.”

  “How strange...” The signal fed through the safety line, a hard connection back to the Chi. “But so far, I think it’s safe in here. It’s warmer. Not too uncomfortable yet. I’m going to go a bit deeper. Don’t worry.”

  “I’ll try not to,” Victoria said. “But if your position’s mapping correctly, you only have twenty meters before you hit the red zone.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  She moved forward again. She supposed she should reply to Victoria in EarthSpace jargon, for the record: “Understood.” “I copy that.” But she had no experience with it; it would be like speaking a foreign language badly to people who expected fluency.

  The tunnel twisted again and opened out into a chamber.

  The smooth, unmarred surface of the tunnel ended.

  J.D. stood in her pool of light, shining the lamp-beam here and there, picking out crumpled, twisted forms.

  “Victoria?” Her voice caught.

  No reply.

  She tugged once on the strand to let Victoria know she was all right, but she tugged gently: if the safely line had broken, she wanted it to lie on the floor with the broken ends next to each other. She wanted to be able to follow it out of here.

  She was unwilling to backtrack quite yet. She slid one foot forward onto the wavery floor, aware that it might collapse.

  The chamber was full of destruction.

  At first she feared she might find the burned bodies of alien beings. Her heart pounded, making her pulse throb in her throat. After a few minutes, though, she realized that nothing she would recognize as alive had remained here to be killed by the heat and the radiation.

  After she had walked farther into the chamber, and inspected the heaps of debris with her headlamp, and scraped some samples from the melted slag, she decided that nothing alive had been here even if she would not immediately recognize it as alive. The chamber did not feel right as a living or working area. The devastation had destroyed everything, but it had left the remnants more or less in place. The placement was careful, and patterned, and devoid of any feeling of life or habitation.

  Though it was possible that the alien beings were inorganic creatures, or artificial creations of their own imaginations, or energy beings (possible, even an esthetically pleasing idea, but not, J.D. thought, particularly likely), J.D. still did not think anything of the sort had been here in a long time. She did not think anything had ever lived here. The chamber reminded her of the bare, clean lunar plain surrounding the dome, unmarked by the clutter and debris of builders or inhabitants.

  You might just be reacting to what Stephen Thomas said about the dome, she said to herself. Accepting his assumption without any real evidence.

  The warmth of the chamber oppressed her. Her suit’s cooler labored. J.D. knelt beside one melted heap. It had begun to resolidify into something that resembled obsidian.

  She thought she knew what the dome had been.

  The alien beings had prepared for their interstellar visitors. This structure had contained a museum, or a library, or a database. Perhaps it was all those things: some kind of repository, whether or not its exact form had been familiar to human beings. This reception chamber had been a display of...

  J.D. crouched on the floor of the chamber, unable to rise, weak and sick with despair. She would never know what she had been meant to see. It was all gone, all destroyed by the beings who perceived that their interstellar visitors had violent, barbarous intentions.

  The alien beings had fled, and they had burned their archives behind them to leave nothing for their enemies.

  She felt uncomfortably warm. Sweat trickled down her sides, itchy against her skin.

  J.D. pushed herself to her feet and flashed the headlamp around again. The size of the chamber was difficult to estimate with only the lamp, but it was larger than she had first thought. Half of it had collapsed. Its lines were so different from what she was used to that it had taken her a few minutes to understand what she was looking at.

  J.D. hoped the archaeology department could excavate the dome and make something of what was left. But she doubted it. The alien beings had prepared their offering well. It had destroyed itself in a manner that would not endanger whoever was nearby, but would get its message across quite clearly:

  You are not welcome. Not here, not out among the stars where we were waiting.

  J.D. squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to cry.

  It’s so hard to see through a fogged-up faceplate, she told herself.

  Tears ran down her cheeks.

  The safety line tugged insistently at her hip. She realized it had been pulling at her for quite a while. She grabbed it, thankful to know it remained intact, and yanked it once, to reassure Victoria.

  Reluctantly but at the same time gratefully, J.D. turned back toward the tunnel. The safety line rewound itself into its reel.

  J.D. passed a cluster of melted pedestals. As she crossed behind them, putting them between her and the direction of the worst of the heat, her toe touched something that caught the light as it spun across the floor. She almost did not notice it, because of course it made no sound. She just barely saw it out of the corner of her eye, a strange little chunk spinning silently on the translucently deep floor.

  Instead of reaching down to pick it up, she waited till it had stopped spinning. She was reluctant to look at another featureless bit of slag any sooner than she had to.

  But when it stopped, it maintained shape and texture and solidity. She bent down and picked it up.

  It looked like granite, not like malleable rock foam. It was sculpted into the shape of a lithe little animal, so sinuous that at first she thought it might be a serpent. Then she saw its legs, back legs holding it upright on dainty feet, the front legs held in close, the front paws precisely crossed over its belly. Its tail curled out behind it. The line from the tip of its tail to the tip of its ears described a small spiral rising into a streak.

  The stone creature stood in the palm of her glove, no longer than her thumb, peering at her with two eyes in a pointy, intelligent face.

  The safety-line tugged at her, three times quickly. If she did not come out immediately, Victoria was going to come in after her. J.D. tugged once, closed her hand around the stone creature, and hurried toward the tunnel.

  o0o

  The magnified image of the stone creature grew to ten times its real size, then hovered in the center of the observers’ circle. The creature itself was in the lab, in a sample case. The Chi had begun to test it. J.D. wanted to touch it with her bare hands, to trace the jaunty curve of its back and its tail, but the safety of the team and of Starfarer required alien samples to be quarantin
ed and tested.

  J.D. believed that the products of two separate evolutions would have no chance at all of biologically interacting with each other to the detriment of either. She did not believe alien microbes would cause disease in humans. She begrudged the time the stone creature would be in the sample case.

  For the stone creature, J.D. had overridden all tests that were even minimally, microscopically destructive. She had picked up plenty of other samples that the Chi could pulverize to its code’s content. It could examine them for organic matter, alien viruses, toxic materials.

  “I hate to say it,” Satoshi said, “but it looks like a weasel.”

  “Nothing wrong with weasels,” Victoria said, “unless you happen to be raising chickens.”

  “It looks like a meerkat,” Stephen Thomas said. “Weasel isn’t too far off.”

  “I think it looks like a sea otter,” Victoria said. “Don’t you, Zev?”

  “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

  “It does to me. Why not?”

  He regarded the stone creature gravely. “Sea otters don’t stand like that. They’re bigger. I mean, more muscular. Different proportions. But mostly, it doesn’t look like a sea otter at all, because it’s cute. Sea otters aren’t cute.”

  “I always thought they were.”

  “Maybe you didn’t have the chance to watch them closely,” he said. His careful courtesy amused J.D., because she recognized it as something she might say herself. “Sea otters are playful, and they’re curious. But they’re powerful, too. They are predators. They wouldn’t look for a fight with a human or a diver, but if they found one... they have claws.” He flexed his toes, and his own semi-retractile claws scraped gently against the deck. “And they have webbed feet. Not little paws like the stone creature.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it looks like,” Stephen Thomas said. “It isn’t anything we’ve been talking about. It’s obviously something that lives on Tau Ceti II. What else could it be?”

  “It could be some other animal from some other world,” J.D. said. “It might even be a meerkat. It might have been part of a display to let us know the people here had visited Earth. But your supposition is as good as any, until we find out what the creature really is.”

  “Unless we find out,” Satoshi said.

  “Let’s go look,” Stephen Thomas said. “Let’s get off this rock. We can’t do anything here till Starfarer arrives with equipment and some trained excavators. In the meantime, we can go down to Tau Ceti II — Shit! We need a name for this place, I’m sick of saying ‘Tau Ceti II.’ What shall we call it? Something with fewer than four syllables.”

  “It isn’t up to us to name it,” Victoria said.

  “Don’t be such a stickler,” Stephen Thomas said. “I don’t mean anything formal, just something to call it. Shorthand.”

  “You should call it ‘Sea,’” Zev said.

  “‘C,’ as in A, B, C? Then it ought to be ‘B,’ if that was the way planets get named, which it isn’t.”

  “Sea as in ocean,” Zev said to Stephen Thomas. “Because you call the world we lived on Earth. So you should have a sea. Besides, it is in the constellation Cetus, the whale. A whale needs an ocean to swim in.”

  “In this case the sea would be swimming in the whale,” Satoshi said. “Maybe we ought to call the planet ‘Jonah.’”

  Victoria laughed.

  “Whatever we start calling it is probably what it will keep on being called,” J.D. said. “No matter what its formal name is. I wonder if we shouldn’t be careful about making biblical references?”

  “I was just kidding,” Satoshi said.

  J.D. felt herself blush. Being embarrassed about being embarrassed only made it worse.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Sea works for me,” Stephen Thomas said. “It’s even got the right number of syllables.”

  The hard link signaled. Victoria accepted the communication from Starfarer.

  “Not much to show for a voyage of twelve light-years,” Gerald Hemminge said.

  J.D. felt as if her nerves were on top of her skin, and the assistant chancellor had just rubbed a nettle across them. She knew she should have some answer, but she did not.

  “Is that what you called to say, Gerald?” Victoria asked, her voice cold.

  “No, I have a message,” Gerald said. “From Chancellor Blades.”

  Stephen Thomas glanced at Satoshi with an “I told you so” look. J.D. could not help but feel glad that Stephen Thomas was to be vindicated. She for one would welcome a word of encouragement, sympathy, commiseration from the chancellor, even if he was in most ways a figurehead.

  “You’re to return immediately to Starfarer,” Gerald said.

  J.D. flinched at the message, and the satisfaction in the assistant chancellor’s voice distressed her even more. Stephen Thomas glanced up sharply, and Victoria bristled. Satoshi, frowning, kept his silence.

  “I’m sure the chancellor knows he’s exceeding his authority in issuing such an order,” Victoria said.

  “He has the authority in extraordinary circumstances,” Gerald said. “You must agree these are extreme circumstances.”

  “Don’t get in an argument with him,” Stephen Thomas muttered. “Gerald thinks arguing is the world’s most civilized sport.”

  J.D. had noticed that Stephen Thomas was all too easy to provoke into arguments, and that he took them both seriously and personally. On the other hand, she could not recall having seen Satoshi lured into a dispute. Victoria seldom allowed herself to lose her temper, but when she did argue, she argued with passion.

  “I don’t agree that Chancellor Blades has the authority to recall us,” Victoria said.

  “His signature validates the order,” Gerald said. “You have no choice but to return to Starfarer. The expedition has no choice but to turn around and return to Earth.”

  “Who’s trying to make these decisions?” Victoria said. “This isn’t the way we work!”

  “We should have returned immediately upon receiving the first alien transmission,” Gerald said. “That way, we could have had something resembling success. It’s pointless to proceed deeper into failure.”

  “Hey, Gerald,” Stephen Thomas said, “when did you decide to grow a beard? It’s —”

  Gerald jerked one hand to his chin, jerked it away again, and suddenly his image blinked away to gray fuzz.

  “ — going to look just fine,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “I shall have to get back to you,” Gerald said quickly. “There’s... er... a bit of a crisis.”

  “What’s the matter?” J.D. said. “Is Starfarer—? Arachne—?”

  “No. No, excuse me, I exaggerated. Nothing to be alarmed about.”

  The connection ended.

  “Stephen Thomas,” Satoshi said, “that was mean.”

  “I thought I was performing a public service,” Stephen Thomas said. “For him and for us.”

  J.D. glanced around, perplexed. “Would someone explain to me what just happened?”

  “Gerald has this problem,” Stephen Thomas said. “When he’s under stress, he loses all his biocontrol techniques. You can always tell, because he gets five o’clock shadow.”

  “Oh.” J.D. felt herself blushing. She was sorry she had asked such a personal question, even inadvertently.

  Victoria tried to keep from laughing. “You didn’t have to point it out in public.”

  “If I’d wanted it to be public, I’d’ve waited till we were talking on an open channel.”

  “That wouldn’t have been mean,” Satoshi said. “That would have been cruel.”

  “What do you want me to do? Let him walk around with all his controls down till he makes somebody pregnant?”

  “I’m sure he must use some kind of contraceptive backup,” J.D. said. The discussion made her uncomfortable. How terrible not to be able to trust one’s own body, and the body of one’s lover. For the first time, she felt some sympathy for Gerald Hemminge
. No wonder it was so important to him to be in charge and in control, to appear to be perfect.

  “He’d have to sleep with somebody who had the same problem at the same time,” Satoshi said. “Not very likely.”

  Stephen Thomas shrugged. “Murphy’s law,” he said.

  o0o

  Infinity trudged up the path toward his house. His mind kept repeating the image of the alien dome, collapsing into entropy.

  At least he knew that Starfarer would be all right. It would be stronger, in the wounded spot, than it had been originally.

  He felt slightly disoriented. The light of Tau Ceti was perceptibly different from the light of the sun. Most of the plants covering the inside of Starfarer had been chosen for their adaptability, though no one knew for sure how they would react to the light of an alien star. For the garden around and over his house, Infinity had chosen some rarer, more delicate plants. He kept one patch quite dry; there, desert vegetation flourished. Intuition helped him believe that the plants would survive the change, but no one had ever tested anything from the desert. He would have to wait, and watch.

  It was always high noon on Starfarer. Infinity welcomed the cool dusk of his front room, after the brightness of his garden and the peripheral dazzle of his spacewalk. He brushed his fingertips through the corn meal in the pot on the shelf by the door.

  Someone else was in his house.

  “Florrie?” he said.

  But he knew as soon as he spoke that the stranger was not Floris Brown, the first member of the Grandparents in Space program. Perhaps it was Griffith, the government man, intruding into his home. Griffith despised him. Infinity had feared him, at first. But it was hard for Infinity to be scared of someone he had released from a survival sack. Griffith had spent the duration of the missile attack zipped up and helpless. He was so mad when Infinity found him and let him out that he had appeared ridiculous.

  Infinity grinned at the memory, even as he took a step toward the corner of the room where someone hunched on his couch. He squinted, wishing his eyes would adjust.

  The screen of the hard-link in the corner played the dome collapse. The recording ended, and began again.