The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  J.D. took a deep breath that turned into a sigh.

  Before she took another breath, she was soundly, deeply asleep.

  She dreamed she was swimming with the orcas. The cold water streamed past her body. Her powerful legs kicked hard, pressing her through the sea. Even so, she could not keep up with the orcas or the divers, and she fell far behind.

  J.D. woke. She felt hot and sweaty.

  Oh, no, she thought, I’ve caught the flu from Stephen Thomas.

  Her heart was pounding. The strange warmth of her metabolic enhancer created a physical pressure within her body. The artificial gland, implanted in her abdomen, pumped out extra adrenalin, endorphins, adenosine triphosphate. It raised her blood pressure, her heart rate. She could call on it to increase her endurance beyond her usual limits when she was swimming. When she first joined the alien contact team she had meant to let the gland atrophy, but had decided to keep it for the time being. The extra endurance had perhaps made the difference between her being able to hold onto the nuclear missile, and having the weapon slip out of her grasp too soon, and crash into the side of the wild cylinder.

  Not that she expected to have any more bare-handed wrestling matches with bombs.

  The enhancer had kicked in during her dream, in response to her memories of swimming. Strange: it had never done that back on Earth.

  I’m not getting enough exercise, J.D. thought.

  The exercise bicycle interested her not at all. She wanted to swim, and swimming would have to wait. Starfarer contained a couple of large lakes, wide shallow salt marshes, a pseudo-ocean. She wondered if any of those would provide a satisfying place to swim.

  The light from Sea moved across a free-floating shape. At first J.D. thought she must have failed to secure her clothes, or some other possession, then recognized a human form.

  “Zev?”

  He woke with a great, explosive exhalation and a gasping breath, much more startling here than in the sea, where all the orcas and the divers would come to the surface together, blow, inhale, and sink beneath the surface again.

  He touched one toe to the wall and drifted toward her. He looked sad, confused, a little frightened.

  “Zev, what’s the matter?” She could not remember ever having seen him frightened. She thought of him as completely fearless. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Did I do wrong to come into your room?”

  “No, of course not. Do you need something?”

  “I don’t know enough about the land world. You told me we shouldn’t touch each other the ways we touched each other in the sea. And on land, when ordinary humans sleep, they sleep each in a separate place. In my room, I woke up to breathe, and I listened for my brothers and sisters and cousins, I listened for Lykos and I listened for you. But none of you were there. I just wanted to be near you. I came in to sleep where I could hear you. J.D., I felt so... so...”

  “Lonely?”

  “I don’t know what that word means.”

  “I means... all by yourself, but wanting to be with other people.”

  “Yes. That’s how I feel. How do I make it stop?” He was crying, the tears forming small bright spheres that popped out into the air and spun away, quivering.

  J.D. fumbled at her sleeping net. “I should have thought, I should have realized —” This was the first time she had ever seen a diver cry.

  He had probably never spent as much time all by himself as he had spent in the few days since he had come on board Starfarer, and J.D. was responsible for his loneliness.

  She pushed herself from the sleeping surface and moved the short distance to him. She put her arms around him and stroked his hair. He cuddled gratefully against her. Victoria’s question came back to her: Is Zev your lover?

  “A lot of things are different on land than in the sea,” she said to him. “Most ordinary humans don’t sleep in groups.” She wondered how to explain her team-mates to him. She started to tell him that ordinary humans only slept with people they loved, but that would not help him understand, either. Love was exactly the relationship between and among the divers and the orcas.

  “Do they all sleep by themselves?”

  “No. Ordinary people sleep with each other when they want to make love.”

  His tears forgotten, even his loneliness forgotten for a moment, Zev laughed. He was startled and amused, perhaps even a bit shocked. The one time divers and orcas did not think of having sex with each other was when they slept.

  “That is very silly, J.D.”

  “I know it sounds silly, but...”

  “Why do they do that?”

  “It’s kind of more convenient.” This late at night, that was the simplest and truest explanation she could think of.

  “I understand,” Zev said. “It’s because of wearing clothes. It takes too long to get in and out of them. So ordinary humans just make love when they aren’t wearing anything anyway. Is that right?”

  “Not exactly,” J.D. said. “But it’s part of it.”

  His preternaturally warm body melded close to hers. He let his head rest between her heavy breasts. She liked the way his smooth cheek felt against her. The fine gold hair on his mahogany skin slid across her body like delicate, soft fur.

  “Would you like to sleep with me?” she said.

  “I want to make love with you,” Zev said. His dark eyes glistened in the faint light. She felt his penis extruding from his body, slick and resilient, very hot against her leg.

  She kissed him. She had never seen divers kiss each other on the lips. He did not know what to do.

  “Open your mouth a little,” she whispered. She moved his hand to her breast. The swimming webs caressed her nipple like silk. Zev opened his mouth. J.D. touched her tongue to his lips, to his teeth, to his tongue. His prominent canines pressed against the sides of her tongue. She moved her hands down his back and his sides and his legs, smoothing the soft gilt hair.

  He kissed her with his eyes open. J.D. took his tongue between her lips, between her teeth. He tasted salty, and sweet.

  In zero g, their bodies drifted apart as they kissed. J.D. drew Zev closer. His penis was fully extended, now, but not yet fully erect. She stroked him gently, then more firmly. He opened himself completely to her as he never had in the sea, releasing the muscles of his scrotum and letting it descend from the protection of his body, leaving himself entirely vulnerable in her hands.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “I haven’t chosen to be fertile. I only want you to touch me everywhere.”

  “Don’t worry,” J.D. said, replying to his politeness with courtesy of her own. “I haven’t chosen to be fertile either.”

  She was ready, as was he, but in zero g their eagerness created a complication. Zev started to enter her. Their motion pushed them apart. J.D. giggled, and Zev laughed against her chest, his warm breath tickling her breasts.

  “We are too slippery,” he said. “Like eels.”

  She burst out laughing, kissed his forehead, kissed his lips when he raised his head. She touched the tip of her tongue to the tip of one canine tooth, savouring the sharpness of it. To the eye his teeth were little different from anyone’s, but to her sensitive tongue they were sharp and dangerous.

  Zev slid his hands down her back, trying to hold her hips against his. In weightlessness, the angle was too awkward. J.D. did not want to stop long enough to get inside the sleeping net; she wanted the freedom of the whole room. It was as if they were in a quiet cove, lit by a blue-green moon.

  “Wait,” J.D. said. “Wait-”

  He groaned softly. She wrapped her legs around him, riding him, and held him to her. She sighed as he moved inside her. In the sea, the sexual play of divers and orcas was a long intermittent series of touches and caresses. People came together and parted, swam and played and enjoyed themselves and their companions. In zero g, Zev and J.D. teased each other, led each other farther and farther, and had only each other to concentrate on.

  o0o
<
br />   Stephen Thomas lay wide awake within his sleeping net. He wished he could see his own aura, but he had never been able to do that. He could see the auras of other people. Once he had looked for, and found, the aura of the starship.

  He knew he was just sick with the flu, but this did not feel like any illness he had ever contracted. His muscles ached and his body alternated between shivering and fever that never broke into sweat.

  He drew his consciousness away from his body for a moment, letting it drift at a distance, acute, observant, and indifferent to his physical discomfort. Though he did not wish illness on any of his team-mates, he was curious to know what he would see if he looked at the aura of someone who caught this particular bug.

  He was wide awake. Though it hurt to move, he unfastened the sleeping net and let himself free. Instead of dressing as he usually did, in running shorts and bright silk shirt, he dug out a pair of long pants and a sweatshirt. He put them on. He was glad of their warmth, though he wished he had something warm to wear other than regulation clothing.

  As soon as he got a chance, he would slash fluorescent orange paint across the EarthSpace half of the Starfarer insignia on the front of the sweatshirt and the thigh of the pants, and rip the clothes up a little. Roughing up the clothing was his reaction to having been ordered to dress according to “regulation,” when it looked like the ship would be taken over by the US military. He wished he still had the sweatshirt he had already edited, but he had thrown that one away after he bled all over it when he got hurt.

  Starfarer should not even have regulation clothing, as far as he was concerned. If the members of the deep space expedition had wanted to wear uniforms, they would have joined the Space Command.

  Not that anyone was still trying to enforce the order, but it was the principle of the thing.

  He felt dizzy, weak, distracted. He always felt uncomfortable in zero g, irritated and embarrassed at being the only member of the alien contact team, probably the only person on board Starfarer, who had never got the hang of weightlessness. Zev had picked it up instantaneously.

  For the moment, though, Stephen Thomas felt almost competent.

  Must be the fever, he thought. I’m probably hallucinating it all.

  He pushed off toward the door and moved into the corridor and drifted toward the observer’s circle with barely a hesitation.

  Everyone else slept on. The Chi projected itself toward Tau Ceti II. Stephen Thomas settled into his couch and created a link back to Starfarer. Arachne responded smoothly, normally, with only the brief delay caused by Starfarer’s distance.

  The alien contact team had remained on the same schedule as the starship: it was night back there, too. While the interior of the cylinder lay in darkness, the communications channels were nearly silent. Stephen Thomas side-stepped the link to the team’s liaison. No point in waking anyone up, not even Gerald.

  All the links to the genetics department were completely blown. Though that did not surprise him, it disappointed him. He had hoped the devastation was not as bad as he feared. He barely remembered Victoria and Satoshi dragging him out of the wrecked building, and after that he had only seen it from a distance.

  He put in a call for Professor Thanthavong. He did not expect a reply, so he made sure not to attach any intensifiers to the transmission. If she were asleep, like everyone else, her AI would not wake her.

  “Yes, Stephen Thomas?”

  Her image formed before him in the observer’s circle.

  “I’m glad to see you looking better,” she said.

  “I’m glad I look better than I feel.”

  “Are you ill?” She sat forward, startled.

  “I just picked up the usual transport flu,” he said.

  She relaxed. “I was... afraid you might have encountered a serious pathogen.”

  “No! Jesus Christ, is one loose?”

  Her safety standards had kept the collapse of the genetics building from turning into a complete disaster. She ran her department with a gentle hand, but made it exceedingly clear that she would put up with no safety risks. No one ever created a pathogen from DNA transcription without her permission and counsel. When the building fell, Thanthavong could say for certain that its labs held no illnesses that might contaminate the starship.

  “No. I think not. When I saw you, though-” She stopped. “No. Nothing virulent is loose. But I got the results of your test, and you have been exposed to sensitizing virus. Everyone else is clear of it.”

  Stephen Thomas shrugged. “It’s no big deal, then. It isn’t what’s making me sick, and it’ll die out in a couple of days at the same time I fight off this other bug.”

  “Nevertheless, be careful when you reach the surface of the planet. If it supports a biology compatible with ours — don’t object, I know your feeling on that — you could find yourself in serious trouble.”

  Some people believed DNA was the most likely carrier of genetic information all over the universe; some people believed no ecosystem that evolved on one world could have any points of compatibility with that of another. Until now, human beings had only one example to test. In a few hours, Stephen Thomas would be able to answer the question one way or the other.

  Stephen Thomas’s most recent project dealt with alternate chemical carriers of genetic information. He wanted Sea’s life to be based on something besides DNA. He wanted something new to study.

  “I’ll be careful,” he said. “I would anyway, but thanks for letting me know the test results. Professor, how much did we lose?”

  He still felt guilty about leaving her and his colleagues to face the destruction themselves, while he went off on the Chi. But this was his job; he could not have chosen to stay behind.

  “We lost... a great deal. Most of the equipment, almost every experiment in progress. Stephen Thomas, your lab was completely crushed.”

  “Shit,” he said. “Oh, sh-.” He stopped. He seldom cursed in front of Professor Thanthavong, even though cursing never bothered her as far as he could tell.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you,” Thanthavong said.

  “Back home,” he muttered, “they have a lot to answer for.”

  “Yes,” she said bitterly. “They do. But we may be sure they are inventing reasons why we should first have to answer for our actions.”

  “Yeah. At least we don’t have to worry about that for a while. The longer the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “And, Stephen Thomas...”

  He waited with trepidation, reacting to her ominous tone.

  “It isn’t only the experiments we lost. When the web crashed, we lost a great deal of basic information.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Yes. But it happened.”

  He pressed himself into his couch, appalled, stunned.

  “But we hit transition dead on! And Starfarer’s still running. What about the backups?”

  “Iphigenie was navigating with new information. A new course, impressed on hard copy.”

  “Victoria’s algorithm.”

  “Yes. Whoever crashed the web didn’t want to cripple the ship permanently. They wanted to keep us from transition. They wanted to demoralize us.”

  “We’re here,” Stephen Thomas said. “We’re going on.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Is everything okay back there? People aren’t talking about turning back?”

  “Of course some are. A few always were, but most were anxious to go ahead. The message, and the dome, though — that is causing distress.”

  “Here, too,” Stephen Thomas said. “Believe me. Can we keep going? Exactly what did we lose?”

  “The web crash acted like damage to the higher neural facilities. As if it attacked the cerebrum, but left the brain stem. Some restoration will be possible, but some of the backups are garbaged. Medical records. Environmental balances.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Stephen Thomas said. “What an ungodly mess.” He stared into space, thinking of h
is own six months’ work lost.

  “The students want you to bring back some samples for them,” Thanthavong said.

  “How are they holding up?”

  “Better today than yesterday.” She smiled affectionately. “They are young. Adaptable. Have you spoken to them?”

  “Uh, no,” he said, wishing he did not have to admit it. “We’ve been-”

  “You needn’t apologize to me, Stephen Thomas, I have no need of your attention.” Thanthavong left the rest unsaid.

  Stephen Thomas changed the subject. “Nobody’s figured out how the web crashed, or you’d’ve said so.”

  “True. No one knows how, no one knows who.”

  “Somebody on the carrier that was chasing us.”

  “I think not. Not directly. After all, they cut off most of our communications. There was hardly a channel they could hide in to send such a command.”

  “You can do a lot of damage with something that looks pretty simple,” Stephen Thomas said stubbornly.

  “Ah,” Thanthavong said. “I’ve upset you, too.”

  “I’m not upset! Why-” He stopped. He had raised his voice in both pitch and volume, and his pulse rate increased. “What do you mean, me, too?”

  “You aren’t the only one to resist the idea that someone within Starfarer did this deed. I’d like to prove someone outside our community did it, too. But I think the alternative is more plausible.”

  Stephen Thomas knew almost everyone on board. He hated the idea that one of his friends might be a government spy, sent out to ruin the deep space expedition and turn Starfarer into an orbiting military base.

  “It must have been Gerald,” he said. “That-”

  “Don’t throw around accusations for which you have no evidence,” Thanthavong said. “I know you don’t like him. That isn’t evidence.”

  “Who else could it have been?” Stephen Thomas said. “Except maybe that guy Griffith...” He paused. Griffith was an even better possibility than Gerald Hemminge. Stephen Thomas suddenly shivered.