“Victoria?”
“I’m here. It’s amazing.” She looked closer, with a quick, startled laugh when she realized she had physically leaned forward, as if to bring herself closer to the internal screen. She would have thought she had far too much experience with the web to fall into that novice’s reaction.
The web interpreted her body language, and brought the image closer and larger in her mind.
“Does anything about it strike you as odd?” she asked Avvaiyar.
Avvaiyar laughed again, a low, hoarse chuckle. “Such as its being here at all?”
Victoria’s smile spun over the web to the astronomer.
“That, too,” she said. “But I mean, a pattern.”
Avvaiyar remained silent for several long seconds.
“I see what you’re saying,” she said. “But, Victoria... This is a very small part of the system. Let’s look at ten percent, at least, before...”
Avvaiyar’s voice trailed off; the link between them weakened. Victoria caught it and strengthened it with her own energy.
“...before we start speculating,” Avvaiyar said.
“All right.” Victoria did her best to keep her message calm, but excitement trembled along the edges of the link to Avvaiyar. “I’ll wait for at least ten percent before I start speculating that the alien beings put the string here... left it here, on purpose, for us to find.”
Avvaiyar’s presence gave the impression that she was drawing a deep breath, none too steady.
“Just in case, I’ll give the distribution to a statistician or several,” she said. “Can you apply your algorithm to some of the strands?”
“I need one more magnification of structural detail,” Victoria said. “Then, sure, if Arachne’s strong enough. I could put a couple of copies to work at once.”
“Do you want to pick the strands, or shall I grab some at random?”
Victoria brought the image even closer, and extended a probe into it.
“That one,” she said, choosing a straight streak of false color. “For simplicity’s sake. “And this one over here.” She touched two strings that intersected, tangling in a Gordian knot. “For the challenge. Then if Arachne can handle it, pick a couple more that look interesting to you. And the closest one.”
“I’ll send you the magnifications in an hour or so.”
“Thanks.”
After Avvaiyar’s presence faded from the link, Victoria sat silent and thoughtful, her subjective gaze directed at the radiant blue filaments.
o0o
Victoria sailed into the kitchen, grabbed a handhold, and swung herself to a stop.
“There you are!” she said to J.D.
“Here I am,” J.D. said. “I thought I’d make some dinner. Are you hungry?”
“No,” Victoria said. “Wait, yes, I am. I’m ravenous!” She giggled.
“Victoria, what happened?”
Victoria could not help acting silly. She felt immensely joyful.
What she wanted to tell J.D. burst from her like bubbles from champagne.
“J.D., we can go anywhere!”
J.D. listened in silence to Victoria’s description of Avvaiyar’s discovery. She worked methodically, steadily, finishing the preparations for dinner.
“This system is right in the middle of a concentration of cosmic string,” Victoria said. “As if someone were weaving a three-dimensional tapestry with it, using the orbits of the planets as the warp!”
The alien contact specialist appeared remarkably calm, almost indifferent, as she put sandwich filling inside pocket bread and squeezed the opening closed. Instead of spinning with excitement, she remained braced against the counter, her feet tucked into the steady-straps.
She looked up.
“It’s deliberate.” She began to smile.
Victoria moved: had she been standing, she would have drawn away. As it was, she started to rotate around her center of gravity. She reached out and stopped herself.
“I just meant we have a lot more possibilities. I’m not quite ready —” She stopped, surprised by her own reaction. “Yes, I am,” she said. “That’s just what I think. Avvaiyar doesn’t want to agree yet, but that’s what she thinks, too.”
J.D. gripped the edge of the counter. One of the pita sandwiches floated away. She grabbed for it, slipping her feet free of the steady-straps and diving into the air. When she turned toward Victoria, spiraling as if she were swimming underwater, she started to laugh. She skimmed past Victoria, caught herself easily against the wall, and stopped. She hugged Victoria, wrapping her strong heavy arms around Victoria’s shoulders.
“I was so afraid,” she said. “So afraid we only had one chance, and we ruined it...”
Victoria patted J.D.’s arm.
“We’re lucky,” she said.
J.D. snagged the sandwich out of the air without losing any of its filling. She handed it to Victoria with a zero-g mock bow: when she bent at the waist, her head moved toward her feet and her feet moved toward her head, as if she had dived again, in the pike position. She straightened, giggling.
“Have you told the others?” J.D. asked.
“Not yet. I don’t want to wake Stephen Thomas, but let’s go find Satoshi and Zev.”
“Okay.” J.D. wrapped the extra pita sandwiches into a packet and put them under a strap on the counter. “Those are ready whenever anyone wants them.”
“Stephen Thomas will probably be hungry when he wakes up. If Satoshi’s in the exercise room, he won’t want anything to eat for a few hours.”
“Zev’s always hungry,” J.D. said. “He used to visit me at my cabin and eat all the ice cream.”
Victoria bit into her sandwich, savoring the crisp vegetables. The hydroponics that cleaned and freshened the air and water of the Chi created a pleasant byproduct: fresh vegetables. Carrying her dinner, she headed out of the kitchen.
J.D., floating nearby, plucked an escaped leaf of spinach from the air, popped it into her mouth, and followed Victoria.
“I hope Stephen Thomas isn’t coming down with something,” Victoria said.
“That would be a shame.”
“Yes. But everybody always gets colds, every time a transport comes to Starfarer with some new bug. Once in a while a nasty strain of flu comes along as well.” She ate a bite of her sandwich. “J.D., how do divers interact immunologically with ordinary humans? What I mean is... is Zev in any danger from us? Could he catch a minor illness and get seriously ill from it?”
“I doubt it,” J.D. said. “The divers have evolved several of their organic systems. Their lungs. Their immune systems. Zev is less likely to catch anything from us than you are to catch it from any new group of people.”
“Good,” Victoria said, relieved. “I didn’t know. When it isn’t your own field, and you don’t know for sure, you worry.”
“Do you and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas have trouble talking about your specialties with each other?”
“Yes, it’s awful. Physics and geography and genetics are so far removed from each other. Once in a while our projects have weird little points of intersection. Some of the algorithmic work I do, for instance, and the work Stephen Thomas used to do with superconducting bioelectronics. He needed some multi-dimensional networking analogs —” She stopped, and grinned. “But you see what I mean, eh? I’m talking Old High Martian.”
“I don’t suppose it was intuitively obvious that the quickest-paths results and the electronics work would dovetail so gracefully.”
“No, it wasn’t... until after we did it.”
Victoria bounced off a wall, using the bounce to turn a corner and head toward the exercise room. Music filled the hallway, getting louder as she moved forward.
Trees sped past. Following the topography of a hilly road, they leaped upward, dropped downward, their leaves fluttering as if from the wind of their motion.
Satoshi, within the hologram, pedaled hard on the stationary bike. He wore nothing but shoes and a tight pair of
riding shorts. Toe-clips secured his feet so he could expend energy on the extending stroke and the contracting stroke alike. Sweat covered his body with a fine sheen. A droplet reached the limit of its surface tension, formed a sphere, detached itself, and floated, quivering, toward the ventilator intake.
A fast drum rhythm filled the room: several drums, steel and leather, very loud.
Zev sat on the other bike, outside the hologram. He watched Satoshi for a moment, pedaled furiously, then stopped and let himself float off the seat. He had rolled his trouser legs up to his knees, exposing his bare, clawed feet and his brown, gold-furred calves. When he saw J.D., he let himself slip free of the bike and glided past her, brushing her shoulder with his fingertips.
“Satoshi!” Victoria had to raise her voice to be heard over the noise. “Stop! It’s making me dizzy!”
Satoshi glanced around and saw her. His eyelids fluttered once. The music softened. The hologram faded away.
“Hi,” he said. He stretched. “That’s better. I was beginning to feel the calcium jump right out of my bones.” He grabbed a towel and wiped his face and his chest. “And I needed to think.”
“I’ll never understand how you can think through all that racket.” Victoria smiled. “And when your brain is deprived of oxygen, too.”
Satoshi always claimed that he got some of his best ideas while running plus-spin — the hard, “uphill” way — around the inside of the campus cylinder.
“I thought it was loud at first, too,” Zev said. “But Satoshi said, feel it through your skin. He’s right. It’s almost like being back in the water. Now I understand about loud music.”
J.D. handed Zev half her sandwich. He bit into it, floating beside her in reverse orientation.
“I have something to show you.” Victoria let Avvaiyar’s map form in the middle of the exercise room, then watched in pleasure as Satoshi realized the implications of the information.
o0o
Quite late, Feral returned to the partnership’s house. It was lonely and silent, with the family gone. The distillation apparatus that Stephen Thomas had liberated remained in the middle of the main room, waiting for Stephen Thomas to keep his promise to Victoria to put it away. In time he planned to use it in making brandy from the wine he planned to ferment from the grapes of the vines he intended to plant.
Feral requested the broadcast from the Chi. As it came on, Victoria locked the visuals onto the planet, bid Starfarer goodnight on behalf of the whole team, and shut down the audio feed.
Disappointed not to see Stephen Thomas, Feral requested a repeat of a broadcast the Chi had sent earlier in the day. Arachne complied.
On the audio, Stephen Thomas discussed the possibilities of what they might find when they landed. Life: that was certain. Life teemed, abundant and obvious, on the surface of Tau Ceti II.
The image formed, overlapping the mechanical jumble of the still. Tau Ceti II appeared, ghostlike, with the still’s condensing tube sticking out of its north pole.
Feral laughed, moved the image to a clear space, and shrank it a bit. While he watched, he set to work dismantling the still.
Now and again the image switched to the observer’s circle, to Stephen Thomas. Feral noticed his friend’s increasing comfort in zero g; he noticed that the bruises around his eyes had begun the multicolored process of fading, and he noticed that his hands still hurt. Every so often, as he spoke, Stephen Thomas rubbed the skin between the first knuckles of one hand with the thumb and forefinger of the other.
Feral liked to watch Stephen Thomas; he liked to listen to him.
The scene cut away. While it played in the background, Feral made contact with Arachne and did some snooping. He had a good deal of experience at gleaning information from public records. First he browsed through biographies. Gerald Hemminge: a straightforward, academic-administrator resumé. Good degrees from upper-class British schools. An idiosyncratic tinge here and there: a three-month Antarctica International Park fellowship.
“Lucky bastard,” muttered Feral, who had applied for the same fellowship, and been turned down.
If Gerald Hemminge’s bio was faked, the fake had been done by an expert.
He looked up Griffith: nothing. Since Griffith was a visitor, there was no reason for his curriculum vitae to be on file. Arachne knew his date of arrival, his guest house room number, the reason for his visit. GAO accountant. Feral snorted. He did not believe Griffith was a GAO accountant. Nobody believed Griffith was a GAO accountant. Unfortunately, that did not mean he had crashed the web.
Feral skimmed the bios of everyone on board, flashing through them, hoping some anomaly would leap out at him. Part of the problem was that most of the members of the deep space expedition had achieved recognition before they ever arrived on Starfarer. Their bios were long, complicated, and littered with hypertext links to papers, commentaries, articles, exhibits, competitions. Avvaiyar, Iphigenie DuPre, Chancellor Blades, Crimson Ng, Chandra.
“They really did all this stuff,” he muttered. “If I didn’t know it, I’d think they were snowing me with information overload.”
Even Fox had published several papers as an undergraduate.
Feral had a talent for turning the defensive tactic of information overload back on itself, pulling out details people never meant to reveal. Tonight, though, his talent failed him.
Before he ever came into space, Feral had read the biographies of the members of the alien contact team. Nothing then, or now, struck him as suspicious. But he could hardly pretend to be objective about the alien contact team.
He picked out the other people who were, in his mind, the least likely to be spies, and he spent extra time looking at their bios. Kolya Cherenkov, cosmonaut and hero of the Soviet Union. Miensam Thanthavong, Nobel Laureate. Florrie Brown. Infinity Mendez. And Iphigenie DuPre, solar sail designer, millionaire, and the person hurt most deeply by the web crash.
He found nothing.
Tired and dispirited, Feral disconnected from Arachne. He sat crosslegged on the floor and watched Stephen Thomas talk about Sea.
“I like too many people here,” Feral said out loud. “I don’t want anybody to be guilty. Not even Gerald, the arrogant sod. Stephen Thomas, what am I going to do?”
The image of Stephen Thomas, of course, did not answer.
Feral let the repeat cycle a second time.
An hour later, as the broadcast ended, Feral finished storing away the still.
It was the middle of the night, and Feral was tired. He was hungry, too, but cooking for just himself was too much trouble. He went to the fourth bedroom, the room he had begun to think of as his. It looked just the same as when the family offered it to him. Back on Earth, he never made much change in his physical surroundings. He traveled too much; he seldom stayed at home. Nevertheless, this room felt like his.
He took off his clothes. The air was cold, and so were the sheets. Tonight was the coldest the weather had been since his arrival. It was the middle of spring on board the starship. Feral supposed the temperature would bounce down the thermometer once in a while before summer came along.
Pulling the blankets around him, he closed his eyes and waited for sleep. But once he got in his cold bed, he felt wide awake. The air was more of a draft than a breeze. Feral made himself lie still for a quarter of an hour.
Just relax, he told himself. Any second you’ll fall asleep. You’ll wake up with sunlight, starlight, Tau Ceti’s light, reflecting into your room.
He remained awake. Though he was used to sleeping alone, and had been too busy getting his career started to do anything but sleep alone for a couple of years, he felt lonely.
He threw off the covers, got up, and pulled the window shut. Outside, on the bank surrounding the yard and the garden, white carnations glowed in starlight.
Turning away from the window, he found he did not want to lie down again on the cold futon. Instead, he went to Stephen Thomas’s room.
The windows were open, and th
e room was just as cold and just as silent as the rest of the house. But the scent of incense lingered on the air, and the clutter of projects and clothing, the earring tree, the rumpled bed, made the room comfortable and friendly.
Feeling a bit foolish, Feral straightened the sheets and slid between them. The bed smelled like Stephen Thomas, like the faint musky incense of his hair.
Feral had never fallen for anyone, man or woman, as fast and as hard as he had fallen for Stephen Thomas Gregory. It was more than his extraordinary physical beauty. There was much more to him than that, charm and strength and intelligence, and self-centered vulnerability. Feral wondered if Victoria and Satoshi took their youngest partner too much for granted.
No point to feeling jealous: the connection between the members of the partnership was strong and solid. But Feral thought Stephen Thomas needed something he was not getting. Something had hurt him, and the wound had never quite healed. It was Feral’s intention to heal it, if he could.
o0o
Victoria slid her fingers between the door frame and the folding fabric that closed off Stephen Thomas’s room. The door opened a crack. The room was dark except for filtered blue light from Tau Ceti II.
The net of the sleeping surface hung loose, and Stephen Thomas drifted free outside it, his whole body relaxed, arms and legs extended, uncoordinated, as if he were floating underwater.
He probably would not hurt himself, but it was not particularly safe to sleep while floating around unrestrained. Victoria pushed off, came to a stop at his side, and put her arm around him.
“Stephen Thomas —” The heat of his body startled and scared her. “Stephen Thomas!” she said again, urgent.
“Huh? What?” He came awake slowly, sluggishly, his body hot, his skin dry. “What’s wrong?”
She held him; he struggled against her, as if fighting in a dream.
The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus Page 42