The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Infinity?”

  “Esther. Hi.”

  The transport pilot straightened up from where she lay, staring at the hard link. She ran her fingers through her short wavy hair, fluffing it out, scratching her head with both hands, stretching.

  “Is it okay if I stay with you?” she said.

  “Permanently?”

  “Till we figure out what’s going on,” she said. She gestured toward the link. The recording cycled. Infinity froze it before the destruction began again.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Thanks for the enthusiasm.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean you weren’t welcome. It’s just that nobody’s ever stayed here longer than overnight. Not even you.”

  “I’m never on board more than overnight,” she said. “Till now. I’d a lot rather sleep with you than by myself at the guest house.”

  “Once in a while you might have to,” he said, without apology.

  She shrugged. “That’s okay. I hate to be stuck in one place, too.”

  She meant more, Infinity knew, than being stuck in one single sleeping arrangement. She liked to be flying any vehicle she rode on; she hated being a passenger. Infinity managed to smile, at the idea that she could be on board Starfarer and still think of herself as being stuck in one place.

  He sat beside her. She put her arm over his shoulders. He was glad of her presence, her comfort.

  “That’s better,” she said. “You smell good.”

  “I smell like sweat,” he said.

  “Right.” She cuddled him. “Reminds me of the old days, building this rock. Before it all got complicated.”

  They held each other. He liked the way her full body fit against his, the resilient pressure of her breasts against his chest, the softness of her arms, and the strength of the deeper muscles, when he slid his hands from her elbows to her shoulders. Esther caressed him from shoulder blades to waist, slipped her fingers beneath his shirt, stroked the small of his back.

  “I think I’d better take a shower,” he said.

  “Cold or hot?”

  “That depends on whether I’m alone or with company,” he said.

  A few minutes later, in the shower, Infinity soaped Esther’s shoulders and back and buttocks.

  Esther began to tremble. Infinity put down the soap and slid his arms around her, holding her close in the warm shower-spray. He said nothing, waiting for her to speak if she wanted to talk about what was wrong.

  “I was so damned scared,” she said. “I couldn’t show it... I was mad, too, and that I could show. What the hell happened, Infinity? How could they do that to you guys? How could they do it to me?”

  He had asked himself the same question, over and over again during his whole life, and he still did not know the answer. Why did people with power so often abuse it?

  “They wanted Starfarer,” he said. “They thought they had a better use for it than letting people live on it and work on it. Just like they thought they had a better use for the southwest. They didn’t care if they hurt us, and they didn’t care if they hurt you.”

  “But I see those guys all the time. The pilot of the carrier — I’ve slept with her. And the carrier’s voice, I know him, we go out drinking together. But I hardly recognized him, he sounded so cold and hard. I didn’t think they were like that.”

  “Maybe they aren’t. In real life. But they had their orders. They had to follow their orders.”

  “Why? You didn’t.”

  She leaned back against him, trying to relax. He stroked her arms and massaged the knots of tension in her neck. He was a head taller than Esther; when he bent down, his long hair streaked over her shoulders in straight dark strands. Water flowed along his hair into streams, over her collarbones, and across her breasts.

  The shower was behind Infinity, so he was shielding Esther’s face from the spray. But two smaller rivulets slipped down her cheeks.

  “They didn’t have to follow orders. But they did it anyway. I didn’t have to follow their orders, but I did it anyway. So now my passengers are stuck here, and you’re stuck with them. And me.” She started to laugh, her voice strangled, tears still flowing down her cheeks.

  Infinity had never seen her cry before; he had never even seen her upset. She was always calm, matter-of-fact, phlegmatic. That was the accepted style for pilots, but she had been that way back when she was a space construction worker. He felt both flattered and discomforted, that she would let him see her in such distress.

  “I didn’t believe Starfarer would go through with transition and I didn’t believe the carrier would shoot,” Esther said. “So now, if none of my passengers kills me — if nobody on Starfarer does — I’ll probably be up to my eyebrows in lawsuits for the rest of my life. If I ever get home.”

  “We’ll get home,” Infinity said. “But it might be a while. A couple of years, anyway.”

  “Oh, boy,” she said.

  “More complications?”

  “Sort of. Or maybe not. My personal life will be a lot simpler when I get back.”

  “They won’t wait for you?”

  “Why should they? I wouldn’t.” She shrugged and turned to face him, and suddenly she was herself again. “It’s just as well. I want to think about something else for a while. I want to think about you.”

  They made love in the shower, they made love in his bed.

  Esther leaned down and kissed him, playing with him with her whole body.

  “Let’s go out in the garden,” she said.

  “It’s broad daylight,” Infinity said, a little shocked.

  “I know it.” Her voice challenged him.

  “No,” he said.

  “What’s that nice soft patch of grass for, then?” she asked. “You don’t even like to plant lawn grass. You said it was boring.”

  “Maybe tonight.”

  “Spoilsport,” she said. She slid down beside him in the bed and kicked off the sheets.

  Lying naked and uncovered on his bed in front of the open full-length windows made Infinity uncomfortable, but the cool air caressed his hot body, and he felt as if he were lying in a small whirlpool of the clean, intense, musky scent of his lover.

  He dozed.

  Esther fell asleep beside him, her fingers twined in his as she held his hand lightly against her breast.

  A knock on Infinity’s door brought him fully awake. He reached down and pulled the sheet over himself and Esther.

  Outside, Kolya Petrovich stood at his front door, politely not looking through the windows. It was still bright outside, dim inside.

  “Come in!” Infinity said.

  Kolya opened the unlocked door — as far as Infinity knew, no one ever locked their house doors on Starfarer — and came inside.

  Before his eyes could have adjusted to the darkness, and before Infinity could speak, Kolya glanced toward him. The cosmonaut used all his senses, not just vision, particularly in the dark.

  I guess he’d be dead if he couldn’t do that, Infinity thought.

  It made Infinity uncomfortable to know so much about Kolya Petrovich’s background. He knew things the former guerrilla fighter had not told him personally, things that he had no real right to know. He wondered what it felt like to have one’s life so public. No wonder Kolya had spent so much of the past decade being a hermit. He existed at the periphery of the starship’s society, seldom participating until the final meeting that set their path, and perhaps their fate.

  “Ah,” Kolya said, stepping back over the threshold to the outside. “I’ll come back some other time.”

  “No,” Esther said. Infinity had not even felt her wake up. “It’s all right, please.” She pulled the sheet a bit higher.

  “Come in,” Infinity said again. “Sorry, I’ve never had time to make any chairs.”

  Kolya approached. He glanced once, for an instant, at the frozen hard-link, the alien dome a moment before its destruction.

  “I feared... something like that would
happen,” Kolya said. “We’re lucky J.D. was not in it when it fell.”

  He folded his long legs and sat on the edge of the futon, his back to the display. Infinity joined Kolya and Esther in a tacit agreement not to discuss the dome any more.

  Infinity wished he did have some chairs, a proper place to offer Kolya to sit. The futon lay on the floor. Infinity always rolled it up when he rose in the morning. That was the traditional way. So he had never built a frame for it.

  “Would you toss me my shirt?” Esther said to Kolya. Though her voice sounded steady, Infinity could feel her tremble.

  Kolya picked up the garment that lay crumpled on the floor. As an informal uniform, the transport pilots had adopted a lurid fluorescent green baseball jacket. Kolya leaned across the bed and handed it to Esther. She slipped it on over her head, then sat up beside Infinity, crosslegged, elbows on her knees. The soft warm skin of her knee slid along Infinity’s thigh.

  “This is my friend Esther Klein,” Infinity said. “Esther, this is Kolya Petrovich.”

  “I’m honored to meet you,” Esther said.

  “I’m glad to meet a fellow pilot,” Kolya said.

  They shook hands gingerly, Kolya obviously embarrassed to have walked in on them in bed, but trying not to show it. What Esther felt, but was trying not to show, Infinity could not figure out at all.

  “I’m on my way outside,” Kolya said. “Shall I check anything in particular? Besides the crater?”

  “I... Why are you asking me?”

  “Because you have the most experience,” Kolya said. “If you aren’t in charge of the damage control team, you should be.”

  “I’m not,” Infinity said. “Nobody is. We’re a community.”

  “We’re a group of inexperienced amateurs,” Kolya said gently. “I think it is no longer possible to work as we’d planned, without a leader.”

  Infinity could see the reasoning behind Kolya’s assumptions. That did not make him like it, and it did not make him agree.

  “What I was planning to do,” he said, “in a little while, was look around beyond the crater’s range. The crater’s halfway repaired already, and just about every working sensor we have left is pointed straight at the reconstruction. It might be a good thing if somebody who knew the cylinder made sure there isn’t any secondary damage.”

  Kolya lowered his head thoughtfully. “I will do that.” He sounded relieved. “I was not... looking forward to returning to the crater.”

  “It isn’t that bad now,” Infinity said. “Kolya, are you all right? Did anybody even think to thank you and J.D.?”

  “Someone has now,” Kolya said. “And I will be all right. I am all right. A bit sore, but that’s nothing unusual.”

  “I give very good back rubs,” Esther said. “If you’d like one.”

  “That’s a tempting offer,” Kolya said. “May I take you up on it after I come back inside?”

  “Sure.”

  He rose, moving more slowly than usual.

  “Thank you,” he said, and disappeared into the sunlight. The door closed, leaving Infinity’s house in shadows again.

  Esther blew out her breath

  “Are you okay?” Infinity asked.

  “Yes. Sure. Why?”

  “I never saw you worry about wearing a shirt before.” He turned to face her, propped on one elbow, and laid his hand gently on the bright satin of the ugly shirt, just below her breastbone. “And, you were shaking. You still are.”

  “God!” she said. “You are so matter-of-fact about everything! ‘Esther, this is Kolya Petrovich,’ like it’s no big deal to introduce him informally!”

  “I guess it did look like that,” he said. “But once you’ve talked to him, he can make you feel easy. Besides, you talked to him and you made sense. The first time I met him, I babbled like an idiot.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said. “Okay, then.” She put her hand on his, and slid his fingers beneath the ugly fluorescent shirt. The satin had a cool smoothness, Esther’s skin a warm smoothness. “And as for my shirt, I didn’t exactly see you jumping up and running around stark naked. Not in front of him.”

  Infinity chuckled.

  o0o

  Gerald Hemminge had not yet called back. The delay made Victoria anxious and impatient. If he persuaded the other expedition members to turn back, the Chi would have to return to the starship. She had no evidence that Gerald was agitating for the change. But she had known him for a long time; it was something he would do.

  To pass the time, Victoria gave her transition algorithm and several sets of variables to the Chi’s AI and put it to work on the problems. She was curious to know what transition paths lay open from Tau Ceti.

  Even with her improved algorithm, the solution proceeded slowly when Arachne could not work on it. Victoria tried to console herself with the knowledge that the web would soon be healed. But the Chi’s AI was still awfully slow. She sighed.

  “Problems?”

  Victoria glanced across the observer’s circle at Satoshi, who sprawled morosely on his couch, the distorted bluish shadow of Tau Ceti II, of Sea, rotating slowly before him.

  “Not problems,” she said. “Just speed. I want Arachne, dammit! When we go back to Earth, I’m going to find out who crashed the web, and I’m going to...”

  “Go on,” Satoshi said. “You were just getting interesting.”

  “I can’t think of anything bad enough that I’d still be willing to do with my own hands,” Victoria said. “Never mind. I’ve got plenty of time to think of something suitable.”

  “I’d like to hear whatever it is you decide to do,” Satoshi said. “And the fate you plan for whoever fired the missile at us.”

  Victoria hesitated, startled. “How strange,” she said. “I’d hardly even thought about the missile. I’m much angrier about Arachne. It’s as if the missile attack was so alien that I can’t even grasp it. Maybe when it sinks in I’ll be as mad as I am about the web. About how badly they hurt Iphigenie.”

  “What if it isn’t somebody back on Earth?”

  “What?”

  “There’s no proof that somebody back on Earth, or in the carrier, is responsible for the crash. There isn’t even any evidence.”

  “It had to be somebody from outside.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But none of us —” Victoria realized how naive she sounded, to defend everyone on board Starfarer from suspicion of contemptible behavior.

  “See what I mean?” Satoshi said.

  “There isn’t any evidence that it was anybody on campus, either!” Victoria said. “Besides, who would do it, who had the motive?”

  Satoshi shrugged. “I’m just saying it’s possible. We may not be as independent out here as we thought we were. And if the person who crashed the web once is still on board, they could crash it again.”

  Victoria shivered: a contraction of memory clutched at her spine. The crash had affected her like amputation without anesthetic. She did not want to experience that perception again.

  “It’s a complicated system,” Satoshi said, “It’s unique. Maybe nobody crashed it. Maybe it just... crashed.”

  “An inherent weakness?” Victoria said. “I’d rather believe the security systems are as infallible as the Titanic was unsinkable.”

  Satoshi chuckled.

  “I didn’t mean it as a joke.”

  “I know,” Satoshi said. “But sometimes there’s nothing left to do but laugh.”

  “If somebody can open Arachne’s security... it could be anybody. Anybody who has the key.”

  “Anybody whose real reason for being on board was to stop the expedition.”

  “Florrie’s narc?”

  “I’m not ready to throw around any accusations,” Satoshi said. “But Griffith is a prime candidate as far as I’m concerned.”

  “He’s kind of obvious, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. Is he? We hardly even noticed him till Florrie said he was a narc.”
/>
  “I noticed him,” Stephen Thomas said from the doorway. He came in and sat between his partners. “I told you he was weird from the beginning.”

  “You said he was weird after Florrie said he was spying on us,” Victoria said. “What you actually said was that he doesn’t have an aura. As far as I’m concerned, nobody has an aura, so on that score Griffith is no different from the rest of us.”

  “He’s different, all right,” Stephen Thomas said stubbornly.

  “Being different doesn’t make him the person who crashed the web,” Satoshi said. “I think he’s the best candidate... but not because he doesn’t have something that only you can see.”

  “You guys are too damned skeptical for your own good.”

  “We agreed not to argue about auras anymore,” Victoria said. “I hope nobody on board crashed the web. But let’s face it. It could be anybody. Somebody from the carrier. Or somebody new, sent up here on purpose to do it. Or somebody established.”

  “Let’s not look for trouble,” Satoshi said. “If we all start getting suspicious of everybody back on campus...”

  “Not everybody,” Stephen Thomas said. “Just a few prime suspects. Griffith. Gerald —”

  “Come on!” Satoshi said. “He disagrees with you. He’s a snob. But he’s not malevolent. Might as well accuse Feral because he just got here.”

  “Feral! Just a fucking minute —”

  “I didn’t accuse him,” Satoshi said. “I only —”

  “Stop it,” Victoria said. “Please, stop it. I knew I should have buried myself in my work.”

  She let the computer graph a projection of her transition algorithm around her.

  “Sorry,” Satoshi said.

  Victoria did not reply. The complexity of lines and surfaces, the musical tones sketching in unseen dimensions, shielded her from her partners.

  “Never mind,” Stephen Thomas said. “But, Feral? Christ on a computer node, what a dumb suggestion.”

  Satoshi whistled softly. “Victoria, that’s beautiful.”

  Victoria grinned despite herself. After a moment, she let the display drift so it no longer completely concealed her.

  “It is pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “I’m ridiculously pleased with myself. It’s about the only thing that’s gone right lately.” She would have been pleased with her algorithm if only for its esthetic value or for the speed and efficiency with which it worked. But it also found better solutions for the approach of Starfarer to cosmic string. It had given the starship the option of leaving the solar system six months early: a few hours, or minutes, ahead of the military carrier sent to stop them. It had saved the expedition.