The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

He relaxed suddenly: she was afraid he had fainted.

  “Are you all right? Stephen Thomas!”

  “Yes, what? What’s the matter? Lights, low.”

  He sounded awake. In response to his voice command, the lights faded on and stopped at dusk. Stephen Thomas’s blue eyes had dilated to black.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, sure. Why do you keep saying that?”

  He always woke up quickly, smoothly, with a languorous stretch. This awakening was different, discomforting.

  “Because I was worried, eh?” she said. “You were in here floating around loose in the dark —”

  “Was I?” He glanced toward the open sleeping net. “I guess I was. I had a dream, I was floating, and I got trapped...”

  “Of course you did. You’re supposed to be trapped, and stay trapped, when you’re sleeping.” She put her hand to his forehead. Now he felt cold and clammy.

  He flinched when she inadvertently touched the half-healed cut. He pushed her hand away.

  “It’s still kind of sore, you know?”

  “Let’s get you in some covers.”

  “Okay.”

  Stephen Thomas had a mild tendency toward hypochondria, and he enjoyed being fussed over. As long as he had nothing better to do, he never minded taking advantage of being ill. Satoshi had the opposite habit: on the rare occasions that he became ill, he invariably denied being sick.

  “We don’t have time for you to catch cold,” Victoria said.

  “I know it. But I haven’t finished my perfect cure yet.”

  It annoyed Stephen Thomas, as it annoyed most geneticists, that they still could not cure common minor viral diseases. Thanthavong’s viral depolymerase had defeated most of the formerly fatal viruses, but the cure was unwieldy and unpleasant, involving as it did a deliberate infection with an artificial virus, and a couple of weeks of being very sick. For life-threatening diseases, the cure was worth it. But for the minor scourges of humankind, a depolymerase cure was worse than the illness.

  Stephen Thomas shivered. Once he started, he could not stop.

  Victoria towed him to his sleeping net and positioned him within it.

  His patchwork quilt, a wedding present from Merry’s family, had floated free. Victoria retrieved it, fastened the quilt to the inner surface of the net, and tucked her partner in.

  “Somebody must have brought a new strain of cold germ up on the last transport,” Victoria said. “Damn! I hope we don’t all get it.”

  “My germs are thine,” Stephen Thomas said. “Thanks for the sympathy.” He really did look miserable, but that was partly because of the bruises. They had gone from black to livid purple, fading to sickly green at the edges.

  “I’ll get you some flu-away,” Victoria said. “And some tea. You rest. Maybe you can fight it off, or maybe it’s a twelve-hour variety.”

  Stephen Thomas pulled the quilt closer under his chin. “I hope so,” he said. “I’m not staying inside the Chi, that’s for sure.”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  But Stephen Thomas never responded very well to symptom-treating drugs like flu-away.

  Victoria thought: Stephen Thomas will be awfully uncomfortable in his safe suit, where you can’t even blow your nose.

  She left his room and went to get the medical kit.

  “I’ll bet it’s Zev who’s got the flu,” she muttered irritably, uncharitably. “Probably some weird whale germ, and we’ll all catch it.”

  She took a couple of medical patches back to Stephen Thomas: thermometer and flu-away.

  He was already half asleep. Victoria stuck the thermometer to his skin, trying not to wake him, and watched with concern as the central numerals changed and the patch’s color intensified. Nearly forty degrees C.: much too high. She peeled the backing off the drug patch, pushed Stephen Thomas’s hair aside, and applied the patch behind his ear.

  He winced, the bruised skin around his eyes tightening.

  “I can taste it,” he said, sounding groggy. “Awful.”

  “Let it work,” she said. “You’ll feel better in a while.”

  She kissed him.

  As she left him alone to sleep, she realized she had not told him about the string. She glanced back, but decided that the news would have to wait.

  Chapter 5

  J.D. lounged in the kitchen area, drinking cocoa. She drifted with her hips and her knees flexed, as if she were floating down a wide quiet river in an inner tube. The room was comfortably warm and the lights remained dim. The brightest source of illumination was the system map hovering nearby.

  Everyone on the alien contact team was supposed to be getting a few hours’ rest before the Chi entered its orbit around Sea. Though the idea made good sense, J.D. was not yet ready to sleep.

  Every so often, J.D. glanced at the map. Avvaiyar’s survey was progressing rapidly, updating itself with a quiver of light every quarter hour. Each interval brought new strands of cosmic string to the map.

  The implications were incredible. J.D. had to restrain her excitement, hold it in and tame it.

  Back home, a single strand of cosmic string had vibrated over the solar system, tantalizingly near, near enough to reach from Earth. Starfarer had used the unlimited power and the strange space-time properties of the string to make the transition from Earth’s sun to Tau Ceti.

  Some people believed that the string was a lifeline, thrown to humans by an advanced technology. Some people believed it was an invitation to join an interstellar civilization.

  Sometimes, late at night, when her critical facilities and her scepticism were at their lowest ebbs, J.D. found the idea powerfully attractive.

  And it’s late at night again, J.D. thought. Maybe my critical facilities have fallen all the way into negative numbers. There are so many possible explanations for that pattern, explanations that don’t require the intervention of consciousness. But it’s tempting to imagine a deliberate, knowing force, the way people used to see the mosaic courtyards of Atlantis in columnar basalt, or control by gods in the path and existence of life. I want to believe in a conscious force guiding that string.

  She reached out to Arachne to find out what her colleagues back on the starship were thinking.

  No one — no human being — knew enough to do a proper statistical analysis of Avvaiyar’s discovery. Or, rather, no one knew enough to do anything but guess at the values of the variables. Several people had made the guesses and done the statistical analysis and posted the answers within Arachne’s web. The results varied by several orders of magnitude. One hypothesis proposed that alien control was the simplest, rather than the most complicated, explanation for the concentration of cosmic string.

  Victoria grabbed the edges of the entryway and pulled herself into the kitchen. The blue glow of the system map glistened on her shiny dark hair.

  “Hi, Victoria,” J.D. said.

  “Oh — hi. I didn’t know anybody else was up.”

  J.D. smiled. “Just me, disobeying orders.”

  “Hm?” Victoria said, sounding distracted.

  “You did say, Let’s all get some rest.”

  Victoria extended the straw from a packet of fruit juice and sipped from it.

  “Issuing orders isn’t my best ability. Can’t even follow them myself, eh?” She scowled at the fruit juice. “What I really want is tea, never mind whether it’s got vitamin C in it or not. Would you like some?”

  “I’ve still got some cocoa, thanks.”

  Victoria began the moderately complicated routine of making tea in zero gravity. Tea-bag and covered cup bobbed in the air before her, gently moved by random air currents. She heated some water.

  “How’s Stephen Thomas?” J.D. asked.

  “He’s got a bad case of the flu. This is terrible timing.”

  “How about you and Satoshi?”

  “We’re okay so far. You?”

  “So far.”

  “And Zev? Is he asleep?”

 
“He’s resting. Divers don’t sleep the way ordinary humans do, they sleep like cetaceans.”

  “How? Underwater?” She grinned. “In the shower?”

  “He’ll nap for a while, wake up and breathe for a while, then go back to sleep.”

  “I thought divers could breathe underwater, like fish.”

  “They can. But it isn’t very efficient. Just for emergencies.”

  Victoria sipped her tea gingerly. She made it, as she said, right, with the water at the boil instead of tepid.

  “That’ll do,” Victoria said. “Not too bad for a tea-bag.”

  Neither J.D. nor Victoria spoke for a few minutes. J.D. felt suddenly awkward and shy. She wondered whether Victoria were keeping a companionable silence, or whether she were wondering when — if — J.D. would bring up a question that lay between them. It had troubled J.D. for several days.

  She drew a deep breath. In the silence of the spacecraft, in the silence of the dim light, Victoria heard the sigh, and glanced over at her.

  “Why did you kiss me?” J.D. said.

  Victoria turned away; or perhaps one of those random air currents had touched her.

  “In the waiting room,” J.D. said. “When I was about to get on the transport and leave.”

  “I remember,” Victoria said. “I’m just trying to figure out how to answer you. I’m not sure I know all the answers myself.”

  “If you don’t want to talk about it...” J.D. said, then stopped. It was too late to pretend she had never mentioned what had happened, too late to pretend she assumed it all meant nothing.

  Victoria sipped from her tea mug, then let it drift at her side.

  “When you said you had to leave, to find Zev and help him, I realized how much I’d miss you. We haven’t known each other very long, but it’s wonderful to have you with us. I love Satoshi and Stephen Thomas. And we work well together. But until you joined the department, I hadn’t realized how much I wished it included another woman.”

  “It was an awfully personal response to a professional connection.”

  “That response didn’t have much to do with our professional connection.”

  J.D. sipped her cocoa, watching Victoria curiously.

  “I didn’t know how you’d feel about that,” Victoria said.

  J.D. finally replied. “I don’t know how I feel about it, either. You kissed me when I was about to go back to Earth to find Zev. When you thought I was leaving, and probably not coming back. Since I didn’t go after all...” She shrugged. “Confusing. Difficult.”

  “I kissed you on impulse, J.D. I didn’t want you to go. Maybe I hoped you’d change your mind and stay. I wouldn’t blame you if you thought that was unfair. You did make it clear to me why you thought you had to leave.”

  “What if I had stayed?”

  “You did stay!”

  “I came back. There’s a big difference. I left, but when I realized Zev had arrived with the transport I was just about to take off on, I came back.”

  “My opinion of you didn’t change when you got on the transport.”

  “I still don’t know what your opinion of me is!” J.D. said. “Is it just that you’re glad to have another woman, any woman, in the alien contact department? Did I just happen to be in the right place at the right time?”

  “I’m glad to have you as a colleague. You. Not just anybody.”

  J.D. could not gaze into her mug, seeking dregs of cocoa to read, like tea leaves. The mug was closed. Even Victoria’s tea leaves were folded up in a package. Instead, J.D. stared into the system map. The framework of cosmic string nearly enclosed the Tau Ceti system; Avvaiyar had nearly finished her survey.

  “I hope-”

  “I’m not ready to hear more right now,” J.D. said softly, and Victoria stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” Victoria said.

  “Don’t apologize,” J.D. said. “I did ask you. I thought I had to. I guess I thought you’d say, Oh, it didn’t mean anything, I kiss everybody.”

  “I don’t kiss everybody,” Victoria said with a smile. “That answer would have made things simpler, eh?”

  J.D. chuckled, though she did not feel very happy. “I was risking the probability that things would become simpler, against the possibility that they’d become more complicated.” She glanced around the kitchen. “This is complicated,” she said,

  “I know,” Victoria said.

  “The team is complicated. So is your family. And then there’s Zev.”

  “Is he your lover? Would he be jealous if-”

  “Jealous?” J.D. giggled; she could not help it.

  “Some people are.”

  “Divers are about the least jealous and most — I guess the only word we have is promiscuous, but it isn’t quite right — most sexually active human beings, ordinary or changed, that you can find. Divers are very sexual. A lot of their play is sex. A lot of their sex is play. Victoria, I don’t know how to answer the question, ‘Is Zev your lover?’ It doesn’t mean anything in the sea, and Zev hasn’t been with Starfarer long enough for me to know the answer to it here.”

  “He must be feeling some culture shock.”

  “Yes. And worry.” J.D. tried to relax the tight muscles of her neck and shoulders. “I haven’t even had the time to talk to him about leaving home, leaving his family...” She took a deep breath. “What about Satoshi and Stephen Thomas?”

  “What about them?”

  “You asked me if Zev would be jealous. I’m asking you if your partners would be.”

  “No.”

  “But —” J.D. stopped. The details of Victoria’s partnership were none of her business, and she felt awkward about asking.

  Victoria’s eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled.

  “We are a confusing bunch, aren’t we? Everybody wonders the same thing. Especially since Stephen Thomas falls in love with someone new about every other week.”

  J.D. felt a quick pang, not of jealousy but of envy, followed quickly by embarrassment. She felt herself starting to blush as she tried not to remember her first reaction, of stupefied speechlessness, to Stephen Thomas.

  “You noticed him and Feral eyeing each other, eh?” Victoria said, mistaking the blush.

  “Feral... mentioned an interest,” J.D. said. She was surprised that her own feeling of attraction had continued so strongly. Stephen Thomas could be very aggravating.

  “We’d none of us be in the partnership if we were particularly monogamous,” Victoria said. “Stephen Thomas isn’t the only one who gets involved with other people. He just does it more often.” She giggled. “When Merry brought Stephen Thomas home the first time, Satoshi and I thought he was one of Merry’s passing fancies.”

  She fell silent. Her expression was serene, wistful, thoughtful.

  “Victoria?” J.D. asked after several moments.

  “That’s the first time I’ve been able to think of Merry... without feeling sad. Without only feeling sad, I mean. The first time I’ve been able to think about the fun we had, too.”

  J.D. wanted to hug Victoria, to offer comfort for the loss of her eldest partner. But she hesitated too long, and then felt too self-conscious.

  “I’m glad you can remember the good times,” she said.

  “When Merry died, people kept saying, After a while, you’ll forget. I could never understand how they thought it would help to try to forget someone you loved. Then all you’d have left would be the grief.”

  “People get clumsy when they want to help but don’t know what to say. They mean well.”

  They gazed at each other in silence.

  “What do you want to do?” Victoria asked.

  J.D. suddenly felt wilted, as if she’d been picked from her roots and left out in the sun.

  “I want to try to get some sleep.”

  “All right.” Victoria had drifted closer. She reached out slowly, as if she were afraid J.D. would flinch away. J.D. did not move. Victoria clasped her hand and pressed it.


  The system map hung before them. As J.D. watched, the survey’s last connections formed, and the star and its planets spun within and among a tenuous pattern of luminous blue lines. J.D. tried to imagine the system within the larger framework of the galaxy, of the universe, moving swiftly away from the centre, the point of genesis of everything now existing, the primordial Big Bang; and the cosmic string moving along with it in perfect synchrony.

  A tiny silver point indicated the position of Starfarer; a tiny gold point placed the Chi almost halfway to Tau Ceti II, in transit from its satellite.

  Beyond the kitchen viewport, the system showed no visible evidence of the tangles and patterns of cosmic string. It looked perfectly empty. But it was not.

  “It’s incredible,” Victoria said.

  “It is.” J.D. slipped her fingers free. She put her hand to Victoria’s cheek and looked into her face, into her dark brown eyes.

  “Good night,” J.D. said.

  o0o

  J.D. returned to her cabin with too much to think about.

  The fabric door between her cabin and Zev’s stood ajar the width of a finger. Afraid her lights would wake Zev, J.D. stopped at the door to close it. She paused to listen to her young friend, wondering if he was awake or asleep. When she could not hear him breathing she felt frightened for a moment, then laughed at herself. Habits were hard to break. Back in the wilderness, when she swam with the divers and the orcas, it never bothered her when the divers stopped breathing to nap. Here, on land — or at any rate out of the water — it startled her not to hear the soft regular breathing of a sleeping youth.

  You just finished explaining to Victoria what normal behaviour it was, J.D. said to herself.

  She undressed, pushed her clothing into a storage bag, and wrapped herself in a thin quilt — another habit hard to break; she could easily turn up the heat in her cabin and sleep completely bare if she wanted, but the blanket was necessary, somehow comforting. Besides, on the transport she had once tried sleeping with only the net against her skin, and she ended up with a diamond pattern impressed temporarily into her back and her butt.

  She fastened the net across the quilt and tried to relax, expecting to have trouble sleeping. She had not sorted out any of the things that had concerned her when she went to the kitchen for cocoa, and she had walked straight into having even more complicated subjects to consider.