The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “You’ve only just come on board!” Victoria said. “Why did you join in the first place, if you want to abandon the expedition when we’ve barely gotten started?”

  Chandra shrugged. “Space is boring,” she said. “I didn’t know it would be boring.”

  “Boring!” Kolya Petrovich, breaking his silence for the first time, reacted with horrified incomprehension.

  “Yeah. Boring. There’s nothing at all out there, and there’s nothing much in here. It’s like living in the suburbs. I could have moved to a second-rate college town if I wanted this atmosphere.” She gestured with both arms, taking in the amphitheater, the faculty and staff, the whole ship.

  “Thank you for your opinion,” Thanthavong said dryly. “We like to think we’re at least a first-rate college town.”

  Chandra shrugged, oblivious to the sarcasm. “Whatever. Look, we’ve got to quit pretending that nothing’s changed from our original plans.”

  “I agree with Chandra and Alzena.” Floris Brown spoke without standing up, then remembered the conventions and rose to her feet, slowly, solidly. Like Alzena, she dressed in black, but where Alzena’s clothing was intended to make her invisible, Florrie’s was designed to draw attention. She also wore black eye makeup, applied today in a style reminiscent of Cleopatra. The three long locks of her hair, one natural white, one pink, one green, draped over her shoulders, heavy with bright beads.

  “Florrie Brown,” she said, waited, and continued. “I want to stay, too. I’d go along to the new world, if they’ll have an old woman .”

  “But you joined the expedition!” Victoria said.

  “No. I came to a new home. Tau Ceti II looks more permanent to me than this starship.” She sat down.

  Griffith stood up. “My name is Marion Griffith,” he said. “I’m not a member of your expedition. Can I say something anyway?”

  “You, Mister Narc!”

  J.D. jumped at Florrie’s shout. She had never heard the elderly woman speak so forcefully, even at her welcoming party when she grew cross with Victoria and snapped at her.

  Griffith turned toward Florrie, equally startled.

  “You, Mister Narc,” Florrie said again. “Where do you get off, coming up to Starfarer and trying to ruin everything? We’re not talking about what you want right now, we’re not talking about packing up and going home!”

  “Let him talk, Ms. Brown,” Victoria said. “Everybody has a right to speak their piece.”

  “You’re sillier than I thought, young lady, if you want to let him talk.”

  Victoria stiffened, angry and insulted.

  “He’ll just try to make us go home,” Florrie said, “like he tried to make us stay.” She glared at Griffith. “You narc.”

  “I’m trying to agree with you,” he said.

  “You... what?”

  “I want to go with you. I have skills you’d find useful.”

  “I — I don’t care! We don’t want you! We don’t trust you!”

  “You nearly killed me,” Iphigenie said. “Go into space, and good riddance to you. Go without a spacesuit!”

  “I didn’t crash the web!” Griffith said. “I did a lot of things to stop this expedition. I was wrong, and I knew it before the web crashed. There’s no way to convince you of that. But I didn’t do it.” He turned toward Kolya Petrovich, silently asking for support, trying and failing to hide how much he hoped to get it.

  Kolya leaned against the terrace behind him and regarded Griffith with grave concern, his arms folded on his chest.

  “I believe him,” he said.

  “Why, Kolya?” Florrie said. “They pay him to lie.”

  “And so they paid me, when I was his age, and had a job and a mission like he had,” Kolya said. “But I changed. He has changed. I believe him.”

  “Someone did it,” Iphigenie said. “Someone infested Arachne with hibernating moles, and planted a trigger to tell them when it was spring, or sent Arachne a Trojan horse and opened it. He’s the most likely person.”

  “Maybe I am, but I didn’t do it,” Griffith said. “And I’ll tell you this — if anybody had asked my advice when this starship was being planned, I’d have told them to make backups of whatever they used to crash the web. That stuff would still be in it. I’d watch it, if I were you.”

  Iphigenie stared at him as if he had directly threatened her life. Griffith faced her, and the whole meeting, with his fists clenched at his sides and his shoulders hunched, defensive and angry.

  “Never mind the narc,” Florrie said. “Who else will go? If there are enough of us they’ll have to let us. It doesn’t matter about him. If he dares to come along...” She left unsaid whatever fate she might imagine for Marion Griffith.

  Florrie rose. She turned toward Esther. “You could fly us down in your transport, couldn’t you, my dear?”

  “I could, but —”

  Infinity turned sharply toward her, shocked, but Florrie interrupted Esther and looked for more allies.

  “Good. Kolya, won’t you come, too?”

  “It’s very tempting,” Kolya said. “It’s very tempting to think of touching a planet’s surface again. To live on a world where I don’t have to worry if each person I meet might be the one sent to kill me. But... I want to stay with the expedition, Florrie. I want the expedition to continue.”

  Next to J.D., Zev shifted in his place. She felt him gather himself. She glanced at him, quickly, shocked.

  “Zev, you wouldn’t leave!”

  For a moment he remained motionless, not meeting her eyes. Then he reached out and took her hand and enfolded it between both his own, covering her fingers with the warm amber silk of his swimming webs.

  “No,” he said. “I’d like to swim there. But I won’t leave. I won’t leave you.”

  Chandra stood up. She nudged Crimson Ng, who shook her head. Alzena wearily pushed herself to her feet. Griffith remained standing. Satoshi’s underage graduate student, trapped on Starfarer by her own plan rather than by accident, slid off the edge of her seat and stood in a sort of crouch.

  “Fox, what are you doing?” Florrie asked.

  “I want to stay with the expedition,” Fox said. “But I want to stay here with you, Aunt Florrie, if Starfarer goes back to Earth.”

  Satoshi lowered his head and covered his eyes with one hand.

  “Good lord!” Derjaguin said, when he saw Fox. “You’re —”

  “No, I’m not!” Fox exclaimed.

  “Not only have you people kidnapped two United States senators, you’ve kidnapped President Distler’s —”

  “I’m not, I’m not, I just look like her, everybody says so!”

  “ — niece.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Fox said, with feeling. She looked around the amphitheater. “I’d divorce my whole family, if I could,” she said to her colleagues. “They wouldn’t have let me stay with the expedition even if I had been twenty-one. You didn’t kidnap me, I stayed on purpose.”

  J.D. could see how that would go over in court; she could hear the prosecuting attorney making reference to the Stockholm syndrome and claiming that Fox had identified with her kidnapers in order to protect herself.

  Fox sat down. A few others stood up.

  Only a dozen people chose secession; a dozen too many.

  “We don’t care about the risks,” Florrie said. “We want to stay.”

  “That’s quite enough,” Professor Thanthavong said. Contrary to custom, she remained seated, unwilling to take any action that resembled support for the new movement. “The risks are immaterial. You’re wasting our time. Starfarer is a scientific expedition, not a colony ship. This is not a wagon train. Whatever we decide, no one is staying behind.”

  “I must stay here.” Alzena’s voice quavered; she was near tears.

  “I’m sorry,” Thanthavong said. She crossed the center stage and sat down next to the ecologist. She took her hand. “I do know what you’re facing, and I’m sorry. But no one can stay behind.”<
br />
  Without replying, Alzena drew her hand from Thanthavong’s. She rose, climbed to the exit tunnel, and disappeared into its mouth. Her dark shape vanished in the darkness.

  J.D. wanted to go after her, but she had no idea what she could say to Alzena, no way to ease her despair. And J.D. could not, would not, leave the meeting.

  “Who appointed you the leader all of a sudden?” Florrie said to Thanthavong.

  “No one,” the professor replied. “Nor am I taking on that responsibility. I’m only pointing out what we all know. You should know it, too. You signed the same agreement as the rest of us.”

  “What if I did? Everything’s changed.”

  “Things have changed. But they will not change as much as you propose.”

  Iphigenie rose to her feet. “Iphigenie DuPre.”

  Reluctant and grudging, the members of the secession resumed their seats.

  “We have to decide now,” Iphigenie said. “I have to make the course changes soon, I have to pick the proper transition point. What’s it to be? Back to Earth, the expedition ended? Or farther into space, to try to catch the alien ship?”

  “Farther into space,” J.D. said immediately, and rose to her feet.

  “Farther,” Zev said. He stood beside J.D.

  “Yes!” Fox jumped up a fraction ahead of Satoshi and Victoria, Stephen Thomas and Feral. Almost everyone else rose with them.

  Even Florrie and Chandra and Griffith supported continuing, over going home. In the end, fewer people supported a return to Earth than had supported the secession.

  “This is illegal and an outrage!” Derjaguin shouted.

  “I block the decision,” Gerald said.

  “Please, Gerald,” Victoria said. “Don’t.”

  “You aren’t going to let me, are you?”

  “Let you send the ship into suicide?”

  “We can’t let you block us from making a choice,” Iphigenie said. “We have to pick one or the other. If we don’t choose, we keep moving through the Tau Ceti system at subluminal speed. We go nowhere, we lose our chance of going anywhere, when the cosmic string vibrates out of our reach.”

  “At least stand aside,” Victoria said.

  “No,” Gerald said. “I want it on the record that the first time your ideals came to the test, they failed.”

  “Then you have your wish,” Thanthavong said.

  “I’ll set the sail,” Iphigenie said, and hurried from the theater.

  “You can’t do this,” Derjaguin said. “At least — at least give us the transport and let us go home!”

  “They can’t, Jag.” Orazio’s voice was flat with dismay.

  “You can’t reach transition potential without a lot of mass. The transport is far too small. Starfarer itself is near the lower limit of what you need.” Victoria spoke much more sympathetically than she had before. “I’m sorry, senator. It’s impossible.”

  o0o

  No one spoke to Griffith after the meeting. He was prepared for abuse, for threats. He was not prepared simply to be shunned. Even Floris Brown, on the arm of the transport pilot, walked past without a look. The only acknowledgement of his presence was silence: conversations faded away as people passed, and started up again when he was out of earshot.

  No matter how the personnel of the expedition felt about him, he found himself admiring them. He had spent the greater part of the past two years devising ways to undermine their morale. Even though a number of his suggestions had been put into practice, even though some of his suggestions had worked, the faculty and staff was somehow managing to hold things together.

  I guess I’d feel pretty good, too, Griffith thought, if I’d taken an unarmed ship against a missile carrier... and won.

  He wiped his forehead on his sleeve, blotting up the sweat; he rested his elbows on his knees and slumped forward, staring at the ground between his feet. The heat in the amphitheater had climbed beyond body temperature; it must be at least forty-five degrees Celsius.

  What am I going to do now? he wondered. A new world. A new start, and the expedition would have been rid of me. It would have been perfect for all of us.

  Someone sat down beside him.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with the sun-tubes, either,” he said without looking up. “I wish whoever turned them up would turn them down, too.”

  “I believe you,” Kolya Petrovich said.

  Griffith jerked upright.

  The cosmonaut rested his chin on his fist and gazed at Griffith curiously.

  “I believe you,” Kolya said, “but you confuse me.”

  “Nobody else believes me. They don’t believe you, either. Not when it comes to me. Why do I confuse you?”

  “I can understand why you might wish to continue with the expedition. After all, you took great risks to help us escape.”

  “For all the good that did,” Griffith said.

  “And I can understand why you might wish to return to earth. Until you spoke, no one else knew you had changed your loyalties.”

  “No one but you.”

  “I have long practice at keeping my mouth shut,” Kolya Petrovich said.

  “And you think I’d let you all go home and go to jail, while I pretended to be a returning hero or a prisoner of war?”

  “Nothing quite so melodramatic. I felt it was your decision to make, not mine.”

  “I’m not a hypocrite. I may be a...” He stopped. This was the first time he had had to say, out loud, or even voice to himself, the word they would use for him back on Earth. He thought of himself as an honorable person, resolute and constant. He had never behaved this way before in his life. “Oh, god,” he said, and buried his face in his hands.

  Kolya Petrovich patted him on the shoulder. “You said you were to be married next month. You are thinking of your fiancée.”

  “She won’t be my fiancée when she finds out what’s happened,” Griffith said. “If you thought I was gung-ho... She won’t understand why you’re right and we were wrong. There’s no way I’ll be able to explain it to her. She’ll think... I’m a traitor.” His voice broke on the last word.

  “It’s difficult,” Kolya Petrovich said, with sympathy.

  “I wish we could send the transport back,” Griffith said.

  “You would go? Turn yourself in?”

  “I’d send word that she shouldn’t wait for me. That she’s free.”

  Chapter 8

  J.D. could hardly believe it.

  “We won,” she said to Zev.

  Victoria sprinted up the terrace and joined her.

  “We won,” J.D. said again.

  “We sure did.”

  Satoshi joined them, and they walked around the curve toward Stephen Thomas.

  “It’s almost morning,” Satoshi said. “By the clock, anyway. Why don’t we all have breakfast together? Maybe we can even get Feral to cook.”

  Victoria hurried toward the group of graduate students standing around Stephen Thomas. Concerned, Satoshi jogged after her.

  Stephen Thomas sat leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, his head drooping, his hair falling down loose around his face. Feral had his arm around his shoulders.

  “Take it easy,” Feral said.

  “Stephen Thomas —” Victoria said. She sat on his other side.

  “It hit me all of a sudden,” Stephen Thomas said. “Maybe it’s just the heat.”

  He straightened up, taking a deep breath; he wrapped his arms across his chest and squeezed his eyes closed.

  “Turn off the damned lights, okay?”

  Whoever was controlling the sun tubes paid him no attention.

  J.D. stood nearby, feeling helpless. Zev passed her and moved toward Stephen Thomas, watching him closely.

  Stephen Thomas opened his eyes again and looked straight at Zev.

  “Zev,” he said, “why do you keep looking at me like that? What do you want?”

  The diver drew back, startled, scared.

  “Take it easy,
Stephen Thomas,” Victoria said. “Come on, let’s get you home.”

  o0o

  Infinity sprinted across the field, ignoring the path, feeling the grass and the ground yield beneath his feet. Exultation overcame apprehension: the expedition would continue. No matter what, the expedition would continue.

  Sweat poured down his face and his sides. It was years since he had spent time in a tropical zone; he was accustomed to the temperate climate of Starfarer. At the moment it was not temperate. In the middle of the night, light blazed down and the temperature continued to increase.

  The windows of Alzena’s house were shut and curtained, the door closed.

  Infinity crossed the porch and knocked on the door. He received no answer.

  “Alzena!”

  He was worried. He was worried about Starfarer and he was worried about Alzena, too. He tried the doorknob.

  It opened. He hesitated on the threshold, squinting into the darkness. The brightness outside could not penetrate the shelter of the wide porch roof.

  “Lights.”

  Nothing happened. The house was not set to his voice. He fumbled for the manual control.

  One light glowed in the corner, as if all the others had been taken out or broken. Infinity could barely see.

  “Alzena, are you in here?” Finally he made out that she was hunched in the window-seat, huddled up against the dark curtain.

  “Did you change the sun tubes? You’ve got to put them back to normal. I can’t get through.”

  She remained motionless, never looking at him, never answering. He sat on his heels beside her.

  “The whole place is going to be cooked if you don’t do something,” he said.

  “I did nothing before,” she said. “I’ll do nothing now.”

  Infinity stood. Alzena flinched away, as if she expected him to hit her, then straightened again as if acceding to any violence he might do her. He backed up, too appalled by her reaction to be insulted.

  Alzena had been the last ecologist on board, when she entered the transport to return to Earth. The ecology department should never have been allowed to become so depopulated.